Thursday Tech Reading Part #1 - tech
(hx) 12:37 PM CET - Dec,04 2003
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- Hacker gets 1 1/2 years in the Federal Pen for hacking former
employer's retail website - A former employee of American Eagle
Outfitters was
sentenced in a Pittsburgh court to 1 1/2 years in federal prison on
Tuesday for posting passwords online to the retailer's Web site and
orchestrating an Internet attack. Kenneth Patterson, 38, of Greensburg, must
also pay more than $64,000 in restitution as part of his September guilty
pleas to password trafficking and computer damage.
- Web Virus Authors "Winning Battle" -
Creators of computer viruses are winning the battle with law enforcers and
getting away with crimes that cost the global economy some $13 billion this
year, a Microsoft official said Wednesday. Counterfeit centers are shifting
from California and Western Europe to countries including Paraguay, Colombia
and Ukraine said David Finn, Microsoft's director of digital integrity for
Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In Asia, pirate plants have emerged in
Vietnam, Macao, and Myanmar (Burma) in addition to more established facilities
in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
- Yahoo Instant Messenger contains security flaw - Security
researchers
are warning of a security hole in Yahoo Inc.'s Messenger that could allow
attackers to run their own code on computers using the instant messaging
program. The buffer overrun vulnerability was discovered by researcher Tri
Huynh in a file named "yauto.dll," which is an ActiveX component of Messenger
software versions up to 5.6.0.1347, according to a security alert released
Wednesday by Secunia Ltd. of Copenhagen, Denmark.
- Banks to miss Chip-and-Pin goal - Programme Management Organisation
(PMO) has said that the vast majority of the UK's 42 million cardholders
should be using chip-and-Pin cards by the end of 2004. But as the deadline
approaches, its goal is starting to look increasingly unlikely. Lloyds TSB and
Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) have announced that most of their customers
will be chip-and-Pin enabled by that time, but both have conceded that it will
probably be
mid-2005 before they can update all of their cardholders.
- Tiscali shuts forums following "racist" complaints -
Tiscali UK has closed its news forum after recieving complaints from a
"small number" of users concerning the posting of allegedly racist comments.
The ISP denies that pulling the plug was an overreaction.
- Off-topic: Exploding black holes rain down on Earth -
Are mini black holes raining down through the Earth's atmosphere? It is
possible, says a team of physicists. They think this could explain mysterious
observations from mountain-top experiments over the past 30 years. Ordinary
black holes form when stars explode at the end of their lives. The heavy
stellar core can collapse into a superdense "singularity" whose gravity is so
strong that nothing - not even light - can escape. These black holes would be
invisibly small, with a mass of only 10 micrograms or so. And they would be so
unstable that they would explode in a burst of particles within around a
billion-billion-billionth of a second.
- Your Next OS: Windows 2006? - In PCWorld's preview code (the
official beta isn't due until the second half of 2004, and rumor has it that
the upgrade may not ship until 2006), Windows Explorer routinely displayed
much more information about files and computer resources than it does in
Windows XP.Explorer's attractive displays of files and properties come
courtesy of Longhorn's new graphics subsystem, code-named Avalon, which will
hand much of its work to the PC's graphics subsystem.
Minimum requirements for the preview call for an 800-MHz Pentium III
processor, 256MB of memory, and a graphics card with 32MB of video RAM.
Such specs are beefier than XP requires, but Longhorn-capable systems should
be commonplace by the time the OS ships.
- Intel accelerates its Celeron shift - The
chipmaker has begun shipping a new 800MHz "ultra low voltage" Celeron chip
to tablet PC manufacturers such as Motion Computing, a company spokesperson
said. New mobile Celeron processors don't always make headlines, but the
800MHz chip marks the beginning of a transition for the Celeron line to a new
generation of underlying technology--a few months earlier than expected.
Unlike past mobile Celerons, which were based on the Pentium III-M or the
Pentium 4, the ultra-low-voltage chip borrows its circuitry from Intel's more
recent Pentium M. The company had been expected to make the circuitry
transition in the first quarter of 2004.
- AOL offers PCs for $299 - The move follows AOL's announcement that
it plans to launch a new discount Internet access service to combat the
growing threat from both cheaper alternatives and speedier broadband
offerings. The stripped-down service is expected to launch in early 2004 for
$9.95 a month and offer fewer of the bells and whistles
found on AOL's $23.90 a month service, according to a source close to
America Online.
- 15-Inch LCD Prices Rising - If you've been holding off on that
15-inch flat-panel in hopes of a better deal, you may have waited too long.
After years of falling prices, high demand is driving the costs of 15-inch
LCDs up,
and analysts say they're unlikely to drop anytime soon.
- Asus Radeon 9800XT/TVD - As you might expect the
Asus 9800XT produced some fantastic performance scores, beating the
reference GeForce FX 5950 in most tests, if only by a small margin. In
3DMark03, at a resolution of 1024 x 768, it hit a score of 6024 to the 5950's
5912. In Unreal Tournament at 1600 x 1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 4x
anisotropic filtering enabled it won out with 75.2fps over the 5950's 70.2fps.
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Updated:03:04 PM CEST Jun,20
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