Morning Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:27 PM CET - Mar,07 2003
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- Australian ISPs raided in MP3 probe - Federal have executed
search warrants on Telstra and internet company Eftel in one of
Australia's largest investigations into alleged music piracy, which could be
worth up to $60 million. Warrants were also executed at several other un-named
internet service providers, with more warrants possible as the investigation
continues.
- Bank glitch gives student $9.9 million -
An online banking glitch gave a Princeton University student access to
university accounts totaling $9.9 million when he tried to access a student
publication's account.
- Two men arrested for allegedly stealing $136,000 from bank using
Internet -
Two Japanese men were arrested for allegedly hacking into bank accounts
through the Internet and stealing $136,000, police said Thursday. Police
suspect 35-year-old Ko Hakata, a former computer software developer who is now
unemployed, and Goro Nakahashi, a 27-year-old businessman, robbed the
unidentified bank's accounts from a computer at a Tokyo cafe Sept. 18. The men
allegedly downloaded software from the Internet that detects what keys
previous users of the computer punched, police said. They then figured out the
passwords that five people had used to access their bank accounts online, and
transferred a total of $141,000 from those accounts to another bank, police
said. Using an alias, Nakahashi allegedly withdrew $136,000, police said.
- PayPal Users Hit With Another Scam -
Another Internet scam that targets online shoppers who use the EBay PayPal
payment service is circulating, according to reports from those who have
received the suspicious e-mail and to messages posted to online discussion
groups. PayPal did not respond to requests for comment. The e-mail
appears to come from "[email protected]" and has a subject line that reads "Your
PayPal account is Limited." The body of the message reads, in part: "PayPal is
currently performing regular maintenance of our security measures. Your
account has been randomly selected for this maintenance, and placed on Limited
Access status."
- GDC 2003 - And Now for ATI's Next Trick -
First up was the
9800 -- the product aimed at hardcore gamers. Like its predecessor, the
9700, this accelerator features eight pipelines, 256-bit memory, full
precision architectures, and full support for DirectX 9. Its versions of
Smartshader, Smoothvision, and Hyperz III have been updated as well. The
standard version ships in April and sports 128 MB of RAM, while the Pro model
is slated for an April release and touts a hefty 256 MB. ATI did not reveal
the core and memory frequencies at this time. Pricing of these models should
top out at $399. For comparisons sake, ATI ran some benchmarks against
an overclocked NVIDIA Quadro 2000. The rationale was that the GeForce FX 5800
Ultra was not available for testing. It was a bit silly since ATI could have
easily procured a 5800, but the company wanted to illustrate how its chief
competitor has yet to ship silicon. Getting back to ATI's benchmarks, the
company asserts that the 9800 outperforms the FX 5800 by 50 to 60 percent.
- $300,000 for Unreal Engine Per Game - Epic Games asks developers
who want to use the Unreal graphics engine $300,000 per game plus 3 percent of
royalties, according to an article on
NewsObserver.com. The company also offers a $600,000 deal that won't
include payment of royalties to Epic Games. Mark Rein, Epic's vice president,
is quoted saying the company still makes most of its money on its own Unreal
games. Sales of the graphics engine can make up half of Epic's annual income
between releases of its own titles though. (thanks PlanetUnreal).
- Nokia gaming phone set for post-summer launch - Finnish mobile
phones giant
Nokia expects to launch its first foray into phones that double as portable
game consoles shortly after the end of summer, executives of the company
said on Thursday. At the annual Game Developers Conference in this Silicon
Valley town, Ilkka Raskinen, senior vice president of Nokia's entertainment
and media business unit, told Reuters that the company's N-Gage combination
unit was getting ready to go into testing.
- Tiny Firm Loads MP3 Song Files Onto Cellphones - A tiny
company called Xingtone on Thursday said it has developed
technology to enable users to load digital songs onto cellphones for the
first time, but admits the software may hit a sour note with the embattled
music industry.
The software converts MP3 files, or compressed digital music files, onto
wireless phones, which would take the current ring-tone phenomenon one step
beyond providing the robotic sounding renditions of tunes currently playing on
phones.
- Zooming in on the nanoscale - Researchers have created the
highest resolution optical image ever, revealing structures as small as
just tens of billionths of a metre across. Carbon filaments: The
technique can resolve detail down to about 25 billionths of a metre "This is
the highest resolution optical spectroscopic measurement ever made," said
Lukas Novotny, professor of optics at Rochester University, US.
- From SoundBlaster Live! to Audigy - Please read carefully, it does
not say that it can convert a Live! into an Audigy2! However, it
does
unlock more features in a SB Live!
- Windows XP Patch: Windows XP Media Center Edition Fast User Switching
Hotfix -
Download this package if you use Fast User Switching on Windows XP Media
Center Edition. This will correct the problem where your Media Center PC may
stop responding when you switch between users while watching live TV.
- OpenOffice Build 644m4 -
OpenOffice.org (Win32
~
Linux) is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems is
releasing the technology for the popular StarOffice productivity suite. It is
an international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide
access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an
XML-based file format. The OpenOffice.org project establishes the necessary
facilities to make this open source technology available to the developer
community.
- Official NVIDIA Quadro Certified Detonator Drivers 43.00 for Win2K/XP -
NVIDIA has released
new Quadro Certified Detonator Drivers version 43.00 for Win2K/XP.
- Xabre Performance Drivers v3.10.58 - The official SIS Xabre website
has some
new Xabre Performance drivers.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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