SECURITY...

• Firefox fix plugs security holes - The open-source project released Firefox 1.0.1 to fix, among other bugs, a vulnerability in the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), a standard for handling special character sets in domain names that lets companies register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages. (->download 1.01)
• Bank of America loses a million customer records -  A "small" number of backup tapes with records detailing the financial information of government employees were lost in shipment to a backup center, Bank of America said on Friday. The tapes contained information on the customers and accounts of the U.S. government's SmartPay charge card program, which has more than 2.1 million members and annual transactions totaling more than $21 billion, according to the General Services Administration. Reports have pegged the number of cards affected at 1.2 million.
• Think Finds Flaw Revealing Up To 100,000 Social Security Numbers - Think Computer Corporation has released another security-related White Paper detailing how anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Social Security numbers may have been accessible to the public for several years. The discovery of the flaw is particularly timely given the recent controversy surrounding similar problems at ChoicePoint, Inc., as well as changes in California state law that require companies to notify California residents whose Social Security numbers may have been compromised.
• Limp Bizkit porn leak could lead to Hilton hacker - Late Tuesday night, an amateur porn video of Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst and an unknown woman hit the Internet. Schmidt, a Phoenix-based publicist who has made a business out of representing celebrities for the sale of nude photos, said that people describing themselves as hackers who stole the video from Durst's PC had approached him to cut a deal with the singer. The video appeared online after the purported hackers backed out of the talks, Schmidt said.

OFFTOPIC...

• Web lets parents spy on driving kids - One in eight cars in the US currently has some form of data recorder installed which logs details of the vehicle's movements. But a wave of new devices is giving parents the chance to follow their offspring and receive alerts by email or phone of any dangerous driving, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.
• Nanoscopic 'ruler' could provide microchip benchmark - The "nanoruler" was developed by researchers at the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, US, and industry collaborators. They say it will enable nanoscale researchers and engineers working on nanoscale objects to calibrate their instruments more precisely, resulting in and guarantee greater accuracy in their work.
• Kilogram Poses Weighty Problem - Work has been underway for about 25 years to switch the kilogram from being defined by a physical model to corresponding instead to a constant. A paper to be released Monday proposes redefining the unit via fixing the values of one of two well-known universal constants. The choices offered up are Avogadro's constant or Planck's constant; the former measures the amount of carbon-12 atoms in 0.012 kg of that element, while the latter is used to explain the sizes of quanta, which are tiny electromagnetic energy packets.
• European scientists believe in life on Mars - European Space Agency scientists think there was and could even still be life on Mars - and they want a new European mission to the Red Planet to take samples, a conference heard on Friday.
• Cultured bone offers novel wedding rings - Some will think it a romantic gesture, others will find it grisly. But one willing couple in the UK is about to get the chance, thanks to a government-funded project intended to promote awareness of the issues surrounding tissue engineering. The tricky part is that the lucky couple will have to provide bone cell samples, for which the team will get ethical approval only if both people already need surgery.
• Hydrogen ball fuels dark-matter speculation - The discovery of a big ball of hydrogen in a far-flung region of the universe might help unravel one of the thorniest problems in modern cosmology: Where is the missing dark matter in the universe?
• US Navy downs dummy ballistic missile - The US has successfully downed a dummy ballistic missile in a test of the sea-based element of its Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) programme. The cruiser Lake Erie used a Standard Missile (SM)-3 to intercept the mock warhead fired from the US Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands, Kauai. The SM-3 was guided by Lockheed Martin's Aegis Combat System, which can, according to the company, "detect, track, characterize and engage short- and medium-range ballistic missiles".
• Final Fantasy creator working on Xbox 2 titles - Mist Walker, the development studio created by former Square executive Hironobu Sakaguchi - considered to be the "father of Final Fantasy" - has signed up with Microsoft Game Studios to create two RPG titles for the next Xbox console.
• Virtual girlfriend comes to life - Hong Kong-based Artificial Life has created a virtual girlfriend (#pic) that it hopes to make available for users of 2.5G, 2.75G and 3G phones. Named "Vivienne Rose," she will flirt, chat and argue with subscribers, who will be able to call up panoramic views of her on the screens of their handsets. Continue to pages two through seven of this gallery for more images of Vivienne and her life.

TECHNOLOGY...

• Microsoft offers $5 windfall for errant software - Afraid Microsoft's anti-spyware will muck up your hard drive, erasing your digital photos, music collection and work files?  Don't worry, you've got a $5 rebate coming your way in this worst-case scenario--enough to buy five songs on iTunes. That is, if you read and take advantage of Microsoft's legal promise. According to the AntiSpyware Beta end-user license agreement (EULA), Microsoft will reimburse direct damages up to $5 for problems associated with the new downloadable tool that wards off spyware, adware and any other "potentially unwanted software."
• Microsoft Preps for the 64-Bit Wave - Microsoft has made no bones about its plans to release new 64-bit versions of Windows client and server in the next couple of months. But until now, the company has said little about its schedule for porting some of its own applications to 64-bit systems. During the past couple of weeks, Microsoft has begun to inform customers and partners of its 64-bit migration strategy for SQL Server, Exchange Server, BizTalk, Virtual PC and Virtual Server, and other key enterprise applications.
• Microsoft launches SQL Server for 2005 - The new products promise better reliability and security as well as improved user tools. The four new editions that comprise SQL Server 2005 are SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition targeted at large mission-critical business applications, a Standard Edition for medium-sized businesses, the Workgroup Edition a database solution majoring on ease of use for small to medium-sized organizations.
• China favours EVD over DVD - China has formally declared its Enhanced Video Disc (EVD) format the national standard for digital video discs, its Ministry of Information Industry (MII) said this week.
• Production of Sony's ill-fated PSX media centre halted - Sony Japan has stopped manufacturing both models of the PSX media centre cum game console, with the company revealing that production has stopped and giving no indication of whether it plans to resume at some point in future.
• NTT Develops Mobile-Phone Hydrogen Fuel Cell - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has developed a prototype fuel cell that it hopes to commercialize within three years at a size small enough to fit inside mobile phones and other portable consumer electronics devices, the company said Thursday. The prototype is a micro polymer-electrolyte fuel cell that works by combining hydrogen with oxygen, generating electricity and water. It is more powerful than the direct methanol fuel cells currently being developed by many companies, said Kazuya Akiyama, a researcher at the energy systems project at NTT's energy and environment systems laboratories.
• Orange preps 240x320 SPV C550 - The first Smartphone to feature a QVGA resolution, the C550 features: 1.3 Megapixel Camera, GPRS Class 10, 240x320 65k TFT colour screen, 64MB Internal memory and Mini SD external memory, USB, IrDA and Bluetooth, Video MMS
  Java 2.0, the following features are unconfirmed, but rumoured:Integrated SZGA and Flash, 262K not 64K Display, May have 3G technology too but no internal camera.
• Sony demos HTPS LCD panel with inorganic alignment layer - Sony announced today the development of the world's first HTPS LCD panel for front projector TV sets. The company said the technology increased display reliability and is capable of outputting higher picture quality through the incorporation of an inorganic alignment layer. Compared to conventional LCD panels, the use of this new material nearly quadruples HTPS panels' resistance to light which results in higher brightness and contrast ratio.
• AMD claims it's catching Intel on 65 nano tech - Robert Rivet, chief financial officer of AMD, spoke at the Goldman Sachs technology investment symposium 2005 and gave a fair amount of details on its process plans. AMD is on track to produce 65 nanometre processors, he said. While he said that Intel is clearly behind AMD on 64-bit technology, AMD won't be that far behind the firm on the move to 65 nanometre. Reliable sources inside Intel claim Intel has already got 65 nanometre versions of its chips taped up and running at its development fabs.

HARDWARE... 

• ATI's RADEON X850 XT 512MB: Not a Significant Design Challenge, Says ATI.- ATI RADEON X850 XT 512MB graphics card looks similar to ATI's RADEON X850 XT 256MB flavour: both have nearly the same power supply circuitry, coolers, etc., the actual difference is in memory layout. ATI Technologies, the world's largest supplier of graphics and multimedia processors, will demonstrate its graphics cards with 512MB of onboard memory at the Texas Gaming Festival in Dallas, February 25th to 27th, 2004.
• VIA unveils K8N800A chipset for slim AMD-based notebooks - VIA officially announced the availability of the new mobile chipset with integrated graphics - K8N800A. The novelty supports all the current AMD Mobile Athlon64 and Mobile Sempron processors as well as the coming Mobile Turion64. It´s especially underlined that the chipset also supports all energy saving features of processors aforementioned.
• LinuxHardware.org 64-Bit Desktop Battle! - For the majority of people that say they do more of the other tasks presented here, Athlon 64 processors are really your only options. The Pentium 4 in most applications just does not have enough performance versus the competition. If you look at value, AMD gives you more performance, at the same price point, in more applications. It will also be easier to cool it using less expensive cooling methods and save you on energy costs
• NVIDIA Multi-GPU SLI Technology: New Approach to Old Ideas - That said, we could agree with NVIDIA's claims about a super-high efficiency of SLI technology if it were not for one problem. SLI does not work with all games. In many gaming applications there was no performance gain whatever or there even was a negative effect from enabled SLI. In some cases enabling SLI made the system unstable, or a game just would not start up. Another drawback of SLI technology is its dependence on the optimizations for each particular game in the ForceWare driver. If the game is optimized for SLI, the performance gain can be huge, but if the game is not in the database, there's a high probability of your getting a very small speed bonus (far from the promised 70-90 percent) or none at all.
• Intel Pentium 4 600 series & 3.73EE CPU - The Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor has now moved to 90nm process. It has 2MB L2 cache but also has slightly faster clock speed of 3.73GHz and 1066MHz FSB support but is otherwise the same core as normal Pentium 4 600 series. But of course AMD Athlon 64 processors running at much slower clock speeds still give higher performance. It only needs AMD to increase the speed and they will leave Intel in their dust.
• Mushkin PC4400 1GB DC Kit - InsaneTek has posted a review on the Mushkin PC4400 1GB DC Kit.
• MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI Motherboard - The MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI is actually the third revision of MSI's popular K8N Neo series, and it's now based on the brand new nVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset. The motherboard supports Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 processors with HyperTransport running at a smooth 1 GHz.
• nForce4 SLI, Real World System -  Since a GeForce 6800 GT can play any game out at this moment with all the setting set to high at 1280x1024 without problems, we ran all three of our tests at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF. Also, the game settings are set too have all the settings set to highest detail. This should give you an idea how the cards can handle high stress.
• GeForce Go 6800 Ultra: Powering the Dell Inspirion XPS Gen 2 - The "new" GeForce Go 6800 Ultra graphics card is exactly the same as the original Go 6800, except that we are finally seeing it at the high clock speeds NVIDIA originally promised we would see.
• SB Audigy 4 Pro & Audigy 2 ZS notebook card - In an effort to maintain its leadership position in the PC sound card market, Creative Labs has recently released its new Notebook Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card and Audigy 4 Pro PCI card for desktops. The card itself only has the three main speaker outputs on it, and a modular plug for the break-out box - all other connections go straight to the box. Once again, we don't care for this design as it requires some sort of dependency on the bulky box if you want to use all the available features of the Audigy 4 Pro.
• U.S. Robotics 802.11g wireless turbo multi-function access point - U.S Robotics's Wireless 'turbo' access point is capable of delivering 100Mbit/s wireless networking - in theory at least. The access point increases standard 802.11g performance up to 25 per cent, according to the company, and comes with built-in 256-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption and WPA (Wi-Fi protected Access) to help protect against hackers.
• LG Flatron L1740P monitor - TrustedReviews has posted a review of the LG Flatron L1740P 17in TFT monitor which has taken more than one design que from the latest Sony panels.
• Lexmark T430 laser printer - Lexmark makes a full range of business laser printers from simple, one-per-desk models through to full departmental devices, with all the collators and stackers you could reasonably want. The T430 sits around halfway between these two types and is a typical small workgroup printer with an output speed of an impressive 30 pages per minute.
• Sony PSP - Overlocking project take a look at the Playstation Portable, which is currently set to launch in North America on March 24.
• Siemens SF65 1.3 mpixel Camera Phone - OCW has posted a review of the Siemens SF65 1.3 mpixel Camera Phone. With an integrated 1.3 mpixel digital camera and 18MB of storage, LED Flash, 4x Zoom, swivel action screen and 65K colour TTF display,every single moment can be captured in details. SF65 has a high gloss finish in Polar White and a distinctive minimalist feel. It is stylish and weighs only 97g.

GUIDES... 

• ATI Radeon to ATI FireGL mod guide rev. 4.2 - If you read our Radeon 9800 SE to Radeon 9800 Pro Mod Guide, you should have known ATI's R350 and R360 cores are used in the Radeon 9800 series of graphics cards. In fact, ATI used the same cores in their FireGL X2 workstation graphics card as well! Yes! The GPUs ATI used in their desktop graphics cards are the same GPUs they use in their FireGL series of workstation graphics cards! They only make some minor changes to the PCB of the FireGL cards. In some cases, it looks like they even use the same PCB used in the desktop cards!
• 3D Performance with Chronicles of Riddick: High-end cards - As far as performance is concerned, NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800 Ultra put up a very strong showing in Chronicles of Riddick, sweeping all tests we conducted. At lower resolutions, the margins between the NVIDIA and ATI cards are pretty great - in one case the X850 XT PE trailed the GeForce 6800 GT by 15% at 800x600 -- but the X850 XT Platinum Edition begins to reel in the 6800 GT once AA and AF are turned on, especially at 1600x1200, thanks to the X850 XT PE's memory bandwidth advantage. For example, with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled, the GeForce 6800 GT outperforms the X850 XT PE by just 3% at 1600x1200, but at 800x600 the margin between both cards is a more substantial 9%.
• Memory Timing Comparison - For testing at DDR400 I ran the processor at 10x200, with a htt multiplier of 5x and for ddr500 I ran at 8x250 with a htt multiplier of 4x. This insures that everything is running at the same speed other than the memory
• Quadro vs FireGL - In some areas the cost performance ratio is heavily outweighed by the PNY Quadro in its outstanding excellence and prevailing raw performance in the applications. Many customers still rely upon the Quadro name for quality and long term value.
• Installing The XP Fax Service (XP Pro/Home) - Not everyone has a dedicated fax machine in their home or office. XP includes a fax service that provides you with complete faxing capabilities. Using your XP computer, you can send, receive, track, and monitor faxes. The Fax service is not installed with XP by default. Therefore, if you want to utilize this feature, you must first install it. Once you have the Fax service installed, you must configure it before you can start using it.
• What is Bluetooth Technology? - Just like 802.11 b/g wireless networking systems and many cordless telephones, Bluetooth devices operate on 2.4 GHz radio signals

SOFTWARE...

• Windows XP Professional x64 Edition RC2 Preview -  In short, XP x64 looks and acts like the 32-bit version of XP Pro with Service Pack 2 (SP2). Virtually everything you see in a default XP Pro system is present in XP x64, including the Security Center, with just a few exceptions. There are also occasional features in XP x64 that aren't present in XP SP2, such as a 64-bit version of Internet Explorer.
• Apache HTTP Server for Windows 2.0.53 - Undoubtedly the best HTTP server. For those of you experiencing crash during shut down of apache, try to update your OpenSSL DLL files in your windows\system32 directory. When I was using old versions of openssl dll, the apache would crash during shutdown. This problem can easily be reproduced. Update to latest version, no more problems!
• Update for Windows XP (KB884883) -When you work in a program that loads both version 5 and version 6 of the Comctl32.dll file in Microsoft Windows XP, the program may stop responding, and an access violation may occur in the Comctl32.dll file. (patch)
• SimplyMEPIS 3.3 - For the beginner, SimplyMEPIS is a complete desktop Linux that bundles and preconfigures the KDE 3.3.2 desktop, OpenOffice 1.1.3 (with WordPerfect document support), Firefox 1.0, Mplayer plugin, Gaim, Xchat, Konqueror, Kmail, Pan, Skype, GIMP, Digikam, Acrobat Reader, Real Player, Xine, XMMS, Kino, GTKPod (with automatic support for both Mac and PC iPods), Scribus, Checkbook Tracker, KPilot, QTParted, Synaptic, Kpackage, and many other applications.
• Trillian 3.1 - Trillian is a multi-network chat client that currently supports IRC, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger.
• PDFCreator 0.8.1 RC5 - PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
• XP Codec Pack 1.0.5 - XP Codec Pack is one of the most complete codec pack which helps you to play all major audio and video formats. And to complete your multimedia experience, instead of 3 or 4 different players you get one simple integrated player that plays almost all audio and video files: Media Player Classic
• MenuShrink  - MenuShrink (download) is a small app that lets you compress DVD motion menus by turning them into still menus with or without audio. In many cases, the space savings is tremendous. For the Star Wars movies, the main menus take about 600MB, and can easily be shrunk to about 40MB (keeping the audio).
• CCleaner 1.17.094 Final - CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimisation tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing it to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.
• SCARABAY v2.5 - SCARABAY is an easy to use password manager that can store your Web site logins in an encrypted database. It offers a convenient drag and drop approach to enter the username and password into the Web site form. The program includes a built-in password generator, and supports multiple users, each with their own database files.
• Opera 8.0 Beta 2 - Opera has released their second beta version of Opera 8.0. There are a few apparent changes such as the new Appearance settings and a new option to "Report a site problem".
• ResizeSearchBox for Firefox - ResizeSearchBox is an extension that adds a resize thumb to the toolbar which can be used to resize the search box. The resize thumb is added by customizing the toolba
• ATI Tray Tools v1.0.1.527 - ATI Tray Tools is a small utility that can be found in the windows tray which then allows instant access to options and settings.
• DHzer0point Drivers 0.6766 (ForceWare) - Zer0point Drivers are modified Forceware drivers, meaning they are NOT supported or endorsed by nVidia, or any 3rd party OEM manufacturers. They are not covered by any warranty or guarantee, and you install them at your own risk
• Xtreme G 75.90 (ForceWare) - This is the Xtreme G driver which includes many performance and Image Quality tweaks. These are modified NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for Windows 2000 & XP. Modified drivers simply means that the author takes official or beta drivers from the manufacturer and starts to tweak them for either better image quality and or performance. Please bare in mind that the driver manufacturer, in this case NVIDIA, does not support drivers like these.
• ATI Radeon DNA-drivers 3.7.5.2 - These are modified/hacked ATI Catalyst drivers, use them at your own risk. The drivers have been optimized with two things in mind, better Image Quality and more/stable frames per second when compared to the Beta Catalyst drivers from ATI.
• ForceWare 71.84 Win2000/XP - This new driver set was tracked down by rflair, one of Guru3D forum members. The driver supports the entire range of graphice cards to date. As far as I could tell these drivers are not WHQL (Microsoft tested) signed.