SECURITY...

• Sober is back online - A new version of the Sober worm has been recently discovered by the companies producing security solutions. Some companies call this version Sober-N, while others called it Sober-M. The worm spreads through a .Zip attachment of an email message written in English or German. The subject of the infected messages is "I've_got your EMail on my_account!" or "FwD: Ich bin's nochmal" and the attachment is your_text.zip, having 73 Kb. Like all previous versions, Sober only infects Windows.
• Flaw found in McAfee suite - A flaw in McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005 could let employees sharing the same computer break into one another's files, according to security consultant iDefense. The vulnerability, which exists in the default settings applied during installation, gives anyone the same access rights on a PC as an IT administrator. That, in effect, would let someone remove any restricted access specified on a PC, according to a report released by iDefense on Monday. It could also let an employee install software prohibited by his employer.
• PHP falls down security hole - Several of the flaws were discovered in PHP's EXIF module, used to handle the Exchangeable Image file format (EXIF) specification used by digital cameras. A bug in the module's exif_process_IFD_TAG() function could be exploited by a specially crafted "Image File Directory" (IFD) tag to cause a buffer overflow and execute malicious code with the privileges of the PHP server, according to Mandriva, which issued its update yesterday. A second EXIF module bug could lead to an infinite recursion, causing the executed program to crash.
• Apache / OpenSSL remote exploit - openssl-too-open is a remote exploit for the KEY_ARG overflow in OpenSSL 0.9.6d and older. Tested against most major Linux distributions. Gives a remote nobody shell on Apache and remote root on other servers. Includes an OpenSSL vulnerability scanner and a detailed vulnerability analysis. Only Linux/x86 targets are supported.
• Symantec Releases Beta Anti-Spyware Software - Symantec released the public beta version of its integrated Internet security solution today, which provides broad protection from spyware and adware to home users.
• P2P is Spammers' Trove - Blue Security, a new company developing anti-spam and anti-spyware solutions, has issued a report detailing how Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks allow spammers to harvest e-mail addresses from users without their knowledge.
• Two Americans Jailed in China for DVD Piracy - Two Americans have been sentenced to jail in Shanghai for selling pirated DVDs over the Internet, China's state-run media reported Wednesday. Police had estimated the group had sold 180,000 DVDs worth roughly $845,000 between November 2003 and July 2004, the report said. However, the judge who presided over the case at the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court said evidence presented by police showed the group had sold 133,000 pirated DVDs worth around $398,000 to customers in more than 20 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia, it says. Based on the evidence presented, the group's profit from these sales was found to be almost $120,000, it says.
• Prison terms on tap for "prerelease" pirates - File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that's slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years. The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of whether any downloading took place.

OFFTOPIC...

• IFD Sicks FBI on Take-Two for "Pirated" Games - Ideas From the Deep, a small family-oriented publisher, has accused Take-Two Interactive of publishing and selling illegal copies of a game for which IFD has owned the license for the past three years. Not having sufficient funds for a long legal battle, IFD president Lane Roathe has contacted the FBI instead.
• New matter looked like "quark-gluon plasma" - A panel of researchers has produced a new state of matter at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. They call it "quark-gluon plasma". The scientists claim in the early universe, possibly for a brief period after the "big-bang" creation of the universe, all matter would have looked like quark-gluon plasma. Another article can be found here.
• World's largest iceberg "goes bump in the night" - The world's largest iceberg has finally crashed into a massive tongue of ice floating in Antarctic waters. The predicted "collision of the century"- between the B15-A iceberg and the Drygalski ice tongue - had been expected to happen on 15 January 2005 in McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea. But the icy colossus instead became stranded on a shallow seamount a few kilometres away from the 70-km-long tongue - starving penguins and blocking shipping supply routes to Antarctic bases. Now, after breaking free in early April, the ice giant has finally scraped the side of the long-lived Drygalski ice tongue, an extension of the David glacier into the ocean. An image snapped by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite on 15 April shows a 5-km-long section of the ice tongue breaking off at its seaward end as the bottle-shaped iceberg brushes past.
• Congress legalizes DVD censorship - It will soon become legal to alter a motion picture so long as all the sex, profanity, and violence have been edited out, thanks to a bill called the Family Movie Act, an attachment to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act approved Tuesday by the House. The Senate has already passed its own version, and the President is expected to sign it.
• New Movie Trailers @ Coming Soon - XXX: State of the Union | The Interpreter (three TV spots for the thriller) | Crash (clip from the Paul Haggis film) | The Holy Girl  (three clips from the drama) | Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (three more TV spots) | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (four funny new clips) | Three...Extremes (two international trailers for the horror film) | A Lot Like Love (six clips from the romantic comedy) | The Myth (teaser for the new Jackie Chan action adventure) | House of D (ten clips from the David Duchovny film) | Tom Yung Goong (second trailer for the Tony Yaa action film) | Kung Fu Hustle (new 11-minute behind the scenes featurette)

TECHNOLOGY...

• Nintendo Revolution Under Wraps Past E3 - The next-generation Nintendo console, codenamed Revolution, may not be shown at this year's E3. Eurogamer reports that the Japanese console maker is going to keep the console under wraps to keep the features of the new system out of the limelight a little while longer.
• Playboy heads to the PSP - Playboy Enterprises will announce plans Wednesday to offer nude and non-nude photo galleries that have been specifically formatted for viewing on Sony's Portable PlayStation.
• Microsoft wants your feedback to build Longhorn - The Microsoft network product team is investigating ways of resolving peer-to-peer connectivity problems in Longhorn, and we would like to get customer feedback to help validate some of the design proposals. This survey outlines some of the proposals for resolving these connectivity problems, and asks for feedback on them. We would love to get the opinions from a wide range of users, and markets (e.g. consumers, large IT departments, etc) since this would have implications for everyone.
• Cisco upgrades main carrier router - Cisco Systems is updating its main carrier router with new modular software that will make it easier for service providers to address changing customer, traffic and security needs. The Cisco XR 12000 series starts at $45,500 (L25,300). Upgrade options for existing Cisco 12000 routers start at a list price of $12,500.
• Nokia's Visual Radio headed for United States - Nokia's Visual Radio has been available in many countries around the world including Finland, the UK, Singapore, Thailand and Germany and will soon be available in the United States. The service merges traditional FM radio with mobile phone interactivity that is based on the content of the broadcast. The announcement was made with Nokia's technology partner, Hewlett-Packard. The partners re determining which of Infinity's 185 radio stations will be the first in the country to offer the service.

HARDWARE... 

• ATI to Launch New Mobile GPU - ATI has just taken the wraps off of the mobile version of its Radeon Express 200 chipset for Intel-based systems. Like the desktop versions, the Radeon Express 200M will pack a true DirectX 9-class graphics processor derived from ATI's R300 graphics core - a.k.a. the Radeon 9700 - only in this form, it has just a pair of simplified pixel pipelines. Other features of the chipset include PCI Express connectivity and support for DDR2 memory at speeds as high as 667MHz.
• 7 PCI Express 3D Pro graphic cards - Behardware.com has tested 7 PCI Express 3D Pro graphic cards to measure the improvements compared to the standard versions.
• GIGABYTE GeForce 6600 TurboForce Ultra Edition -  The performance of this GigaByte GeForce 6600 128MB PCI-Express graphic card is out perform the ATI 9800 series even the ATI X700 Pro and it was very close to the GeForce 6600GT performance
• Seagate vs. Hitachi 400GB SATA hard drive comparison - GamePC's tests have shown that the Barracuda 7200.8 has a better overall feature set, consumes less power, creates less heat, and runs faster in both disk read and write speeds. It’s a pretty clean sweep, as far as we can see. Granted, the Deskstar 7K400 has been out for over six months already, which some might say gives Seagate an advantage. Still, these are the only 400 GB drives out on the market today, and the Seagate is simply the better of the two.
• 16X DVD burner comparison (AOpen vs. Gigabyte) - If you've been holding off on upgrading your CD or DVD-ROM now is an excellent storage to bring things up to date with incredible transfer rates, cheap media, and prices for most DVD burners below $60 you really can't go wrong with either drive you choose.
• eDimensional AudioFX Gaming Headset - TechIMO has posted a review of the eDimensional AudioFX Gaming Headset.
• Lite-on LVW-5045 Recorder - The only glaring negative is the lack of MPEG-4 video compression, which would have easily increased onboard storage limits by an order of magnitude. Still, even if not for recording, basic MPEG-4 playback support would have been a nice touch.
• Samsung HD 850 DVD Player - The DVD player is capable of playing your standard DVDs, VCDs, Audio cds, and cd's burnt with MP3 and WMA files on it. The unit is also cable of viewing JPGs, allowing the unit to be used as a digital photo viewer.

GUIDES... 

• Windows versus Windows or 32-bit versus 64bit - Is it worth it to install the 64-bit Windows and give up your old Windows XP? To answer this question, Softpedia have put together a test, whose main objective was to identify if the performances of the Windows x64 are better than the ones of Windows x32.
• RAM amount benchmarks - The article is benchmarks for business and content creation applications with 256 ­ 1024 MB of RAM. The tests were run with lots of multitasking, in an effort to simulate real world scenarios as closely as possible.
• Intel Technology Guide - PC Mechanic has published an Intel Technology Guide.
• Chaos Theory Benchmarking Scripts - There is a total of 10 initialization files, all ending with the .ini extension. These are split into 2 main groups -- one for using ShaderModel 1_1 in the game and the other for using ShaderModel 3_0 in the game. Each group covers the usual 5 resolutions used for testing video cards -- 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960 and 1600x1200.
• Website Hosting From A Home PC - PC Stats has posted a beginners guide about Website Hosting From A Home PC.

SOFTWARE...

• AutoPatcher XP April 2005 - AutoPatcher is a comprehensive collection of patches, add-ons and registry tweaks that give you peace of mind in the knowledge that your Windows system is up to date, even before you connect it to the Internet. It's designed to quickly patch a system with the most current updates and tweaks available, and requires no user interaction once you have selected what to install. This release is based on the all-new AutoPatcher 5.0. Although it was made with Windows XP SP2 English/Portuguese in mind, it will load on any (English/Portuguese) Windows version (i.e XP SP1), showing only the items which match the running environment. More mirrors can be found here.
• Updates for Windows Media Player 9 Series and for Windows Media Player 10 - This update (WMP10 / WMP9 XP / WMP9 2k/2k3) fixes some issues (memory leaks, problem with script commands, etc) that may occur in Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 Series and in Windows Media Player 10.
• After W2k3 SP1 Upgrade MOM 2005 Admin console fails -  A problem has been identified in the MOM Administrator Console. After Microsoft Windows Server 2003 has been upgraded to Service Pack 1, the Administrator Console may fail when the Computer Groups node is selected. This fix resolves the issue.
• Removing your Norton program using SymNRT - Symantec has a program that removes the programs listed at the beginning of this document from your computer when Windows Add/Remove programs does not work. This program is called SymNRT. SymNRT works with Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Do not use SymNRT unless Windows Add/Remove programs cannot uninstall your supported program.
• avast! Home/Pro 4.6.652 - avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users, non-commercial users
• Skype 1.2.0.48 - Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users. Not to share files, but to talk with them for free. The technology is extremely advanced, but very simple and easy to use. You will be making perfect quality free phone calls to your friends all over the world in no time using your computers sound card, speakers and microphone
• RealPlayer 10.5 Build 6.0.12.1069 - download
• K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 1.29 - This package is a combination of three codec packs: K-Lite Codec Pack Full (a slew of different codecs like Divx, etc.), QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative and other encoders/decoders.
• FlashFXP 3.1.14.1078 RC1 - FlashFXP (download) is the most powerful and popular FTP & FXP Client for Microsoft Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP on the market today.
• FileZilla 2.2.13a - FileZilla (download) is a fast and reliable FTP client and server with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.
• 7-Zip 4.18 Beta - 7-Zip (download) is a file archiver with high compression ratio.
• Nero Vision Express 3.1.0.0d adds Dolby surround - The 35MBdownload can be found here..
• AnyDVD v5.1.0.1, CloneDVD v2.8.0.2, CloneCD v5.2.0.2 and Virtual Clone Drive - SlySoft has released new versions of AnyDVD, CloneDVD2, CloneCD5 and Virtual CloneDrive. The software is now out of beta, supports 64bit Windows.
• CPUCooL 7.3.6 - CPUCooL (download) is a program that monitors temperature, fan speed, and voltages for many motherboards. It provides Cpu cooling under Win9x/2000/XP/NT, allows FrontSideBus changing, optimizes your memory and CPU. This version adds support for NForce3/4 chipsets.
• NVIDIA Optimized Driver 64bit v1.7671 - The NGO NVIDIA Optimized Driver is a tweaked version of the nVidia Forceware driver. The main purpose is to satisfy the users with a better performance and better image quality. The Driver has support for all Geforce cards. These drivers are for Windows Server 2003 AMD64, Windows Server 2003 IA-64, Windows XP AMD64, Windows XP IA-64.
• Xtreme G 71.89 HD (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.