Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:16 AM CET - Nov,28 2002
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- "Korean" Worm getting faster in spreading - Kaspersky Labs is
warning all users
against
the new Internet worm "Winevar" (also known as "Korean Worm"). When the
worm gets into a potential victim's e-mail box, it tries to penetrate the
computer unnoticed, using the following vulnerabilities in the MS Internet
Explorer security system: Microsoft VM ActiveX Component, IFRAME
Vulnerability. Thus allowing an infection of the computer immediately upon
reading the message. Having penetrated a system, the worm modifies Windows
booting files to activate upon system restart and to initiate its spread.
Therefore it scans all HTM and DBX files found on the computer and extracts
e-mail addresses. To these addresses the worm sends its copies using a direct
connection to the default SMTP e-mail server.
- Danish anti pirates continue to target copyright theft - The
Danish Anti Pirat Gruppen (Anti Piracy Group) is to continue targeting Net
users who swap copyright material illegally. Confirmation that the APG is to
continue its hard line comes after it issued invoices totalling 1m Danish
Crowns (L86,200) to around 150 users of KaZaA and eDonkey for allegedly
illegally swapping copyright material. The biggest offenders face bills of
around 100,000 Crowns (L8,600). According to Morten Lindegaard, a lawyer for
APG, around
80
per cent of those who received the invoices have already agreed to pay up.
Those that don't face being sued.
- AT&T Wireless Phones to Feature Sony Content - AT&T
Wireless Services said on Wednesday that it would team up with a unit of Sony
to deliver screensavers, ring tones, games and news to mobile phones. Sony
Pictures Digital, run by Sony Pictures Entertainment,
will offer its content on AT&T Wireless' mMode service that delivers
multimedia content to mobile phones on screens no bigger than a business
card. Sony Pictures Digital said it would offer content based on the movies
"XXX" and "Stuart Little 2" as well as game shows such as "Wheel of Fortune"
and "JEOPARDY!"
- Future cell phones to see the light - The University of
California at Davis announced this week it has received a grant from the
Defense Department to build
a new generation of cell phones that transmit and receive optical signals.
The researchers hope to build chip-sized devices that use a technology
standard already in some cell phones. That technology, called Code Division
Multiple Access (CDMA), transmits and receives optical signals. CDMA, which
runs about 20 percent of the world's wireless networks, is a proprietary
standard. Qualcomm owns the patents.
- "Hammer" to hold 100 million transistors - A chip with that many
transistors is currently considered unusual. But when Hammer chips emerge in
the first half of 2003, processors of that complexity will become increasingly
common. That's because designers are increasing the size of caches, which are
reservoirs of memory located on the processor for rapid data access, and
adding other features. Details of AMD's forthcoming chip have been leaking
out. The largest version of Hammer,
for
instance, will have 1MB of secondary cache, as well as an integrated memory
controller for connecting the processor to a PC's memory, according to the
company. Currently, memory controllers mostly sit on their own piece of
silicon.
- Intel: Next Itanium to run at 1.5GHz - The new chip,
code-named Madison, is similar to its Itanium 2 "McKinley" predecessor but
is built with smaller circuitry that permits faster processing and more
built-in high-speed "cache" memory. Intel disclosed the 1.5GHz speed in an
agenda for a February processor show, the International Solid-State Circuits
Conference.
- Lik-Sang changes hands, preps mod-chip court case - Lik-Sang, the
Hong Kong based online retailer of videogames "accessories", is to hand over
the running of its business to a company called Pacific Game Technology
Limited, in a move designed to allow the current management of
the company to focus on fighting its forthcoming court case against Microsoft,
Sony and Nintendo. The move comes as something of a surprise, as most
people had expected the company to capitulate to demands from the platform
holders, who have won an injunction preventing the retailer from selling mod
chips, flash linkers or any other devices which can be used to circumvent game
copy protection.
- First hackers sighted in high speed mobile phone arena -
T-Mobile has installed a firewall on its GPRS network in the States after a
small number of users complained of
receiving hacker probes when using its high-speed mobile service. The
issue came to light after Mike Palmer, the technology director for the
broadcast division of AP, spotted numerous probes against his PC while using
T-Mobile's GPRS network, Computerworld reports. T-Mobile admitted to
Computerworld that around 100 users were affected by the issue, prior to the
recent introduction of a firewall on open segments of its GPRS network. Palmer
told reporters that he's not spotted probes since then.
- Visual & Game Programming Degree - The San Francisco chapter of the
The Art Institute of
California is now accepting applications for its new Bachelor of Science
program in Visual & Game Programming. This course of study teaches the
foundations of art and design, then moves on to more technical areas of
programming for 3D animation. (thanks
GameSpy)
- ATI claims 174.6GB/s for Radeon 9700 Pro -
The
Inquirer learned from ATI executive, that the firm claims it trounces
Nvidia's up-and-coming Geforce FX (NV30) on bandwidth. As far as we
know, Nvidia uses either the 3 to 1, or 4 to 1 compression method which gives
48GB/s in the best case. So: 500MHz x 2 (DDR) x 128bit (16bytes) x 3X
compression = 48 GB/s. ATI said it is using 8.8 to 1 compression method on the
Radeon 9700 PRO cards that can deliver an astonishing 174.2GB per second in
the best case. A rare bird in practice, we'd suggest. As in: 310MHz x 2 (DDR)
x 256bit (32 bytes) x 8.8 compression rate = 174.2 GB per second.
- Philips JackRabbit32 - Now that Firewire and USB 2.0 are
frequently found on computers, external CD burners work almost as well as
their internal brethren. Philips has found a way to improve on the external CD
burner, with the JackRabbit32. This external drive lets you burn CDs, watch
DVDs, and much more. When connected to your computer, the
JackRabbit32 can act as either a CD Burner or a DVD Player. In the former,
you can burn CD-Rs at 32x and CD-RWs at 10x, or read at 40x. Any software you
might need is provided, including Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 (or Toast 5 for Mac
OS X) and PowerDVD. Connection is via a USB 2.0/1.1 port.
- USB Christmas Lights - My original plan was to run them from the
power supply, but then I thought that wouldn't be practical at all. Why not
USB?! I went to the save-a-lot
and picked up a $5 USB cable and headed home. If you can find a $2 USB
mouse or any piece of junk with a USB connecter on it then good, the cheaper
the better.
- Mozilla 1.2 -
Mozilla 1.2 has
just been released. New to this version are features like Type Ahead Find,
basic toolbar customization (text/icons/both), support for GTK themes on
Linux, multiple tabs as startpage, Link Prefetching, "filter after the fact"
and filter logging in Mail, Palm sync for Mozilla addressbook on MS Windows,
and more.
- TVTool 6.8.4 -
TVTool
(download)
was developed to replace the poor support video card manufacturers had for
TV_OUT. TVTool works with most NVIDIA based cards such as TNT, TNT2, TNT2
Ultra, GeForce cards with BT86x (e.g. Viper 550, Erazor 3, Xentor 32, 3D
Prophet, etc.). The main problem is the black borders around the picture on
the TV screen. These can be very annoying for most applications like
DVD-playback or decoding. TVTool is a completely software based solution to
this problem. TVTool has many features, such as dualview, which makes
simultaneous output to the TV and monitor possible.
- Speed 1.1.0.27 - Measures both sustained and burst data
transfer rates of your hard disks, cd/dvd-roms and floppy. Realtime graphical
display. (download
/ homepage).
- Hardware Sensors Monitor 4.1.1.2 -
This
software is quite possibly the best hardware sensor monitoring program out
there. It will allow you to check the temperature of any component on your
computer with a sensor. It is fully customizable with alarms that can be set
when the temperature goes too high, a CPU throttle, and it even has built in
software cooling that kicks in when your CPU is idle.
- Nvidia 41.09 BETA Leaked -
DriverHeaven has posted a new set of Beta drivers (German
mirror) which are dated November 18 and are labeled as version 41.09.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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