SECURITY...

• Microsoft says IE updates possible - Microsoft has insisted that all hands are too busy working on the much-delayed operating system under development--called Longhorn--to revisit the browser. But now the company says that through the browser's add-on capability, it might add IE features that customers deemed a "super high priority."
• Web Security Flaw Settlement - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reached a settlement with pet food retailer Petco Animal Supplies of charges that the company's Web site violated federal law by making deceptive security claims. A security flaw in Petco's Web site left customers' credit card numbers exposed to attackers. The FTC alleges that Petco did not take reasonable measures to protect its Web site and made deceptive claims in stating that customers' credit card numbers would be "shielded from unauthorized access."
• Kerio Personal Firewall 4.1.1 DoS Issue -  Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in Kerio Personal Firewall 4.1.1 and earlier. The vulnerability lets a remote attacker reliably render a system inoperative with one packet. Physical access is required in order to bring an affected system out of this "frozen" state. This specific flaw exists within the fwdrv.sys component, which performs low-level processing of TCP, UDP, and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets. According to Kerio, version 4.1.2 and higher is not vulnerable.
• Kerberos Flaws Allow Access to Protected Networks - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has disclosed a number of serious security flaws in the Kerberos v5 authentication system, the worst of which could give unauthorized users access to protected corporate networks.
• MPAA seeks Internet2 tests, P2P monitor role - The Motion Picture Association of America is in talks with the Internet2 research consortium, hoping both to test next-generation video delivery projects and to monitor peer-to-peer piracy on the ultrahigh-speed network.
• Windows XP SP2: A bandage, not a panacea - With SP2, Microsoft has delivered much in the way of security improvements. But before you let it loose on production machines throughout your company, you'd be well served to run it on test machines: Some additions can actually break your applications.
• Using the Windows Firewall INF File in Microsoft WinXP SP2 v 1.4 - Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes the Windows Firewall, a replacement for the Internet Connection Firewall component in previous versions of Windows XP. Network administrators can use the Windows Firewall INF file (Netfw.inf) to modify default settings either before installation or after installation. This article describes the usage of the Windows Firewall INF file.

OFF-TOPIC...

• Bill Gates is most "spammed" person in the world: Microsoft CEO - Internet junkies, take heart: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates receives four million e-mails daily, most of them spam, and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world. But unlike ordinary users, the software mogul has an entire department to filter unsolicited e-mails and only a few of them actually get through to his inbox, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said here Thursday.
• For developers, it's not all fun and games - To Joe Straitiff, it was clear that video game giant Electronic Arts expected its employees to more or less live at the office. His manager hung a neon sign that said "Open 7 days" and "constantly sent out e-mails to his whole team, saying that he'd see them over the weekend," said Straitiff, who worked as a software developer at EA for about a year and a half until being fired a few weeks ago. Straitiff says his termination owed partly to his refusal to put in 80-hour weeks for months on end....
• Raimi Remaking "Evil Dead"? - Has Hollywood's staleness finally rubbed off on Sam Raimi & co.? Get this, Sam Raimi is remaking 'Evil Dead', the 1981 horror cult classic.

TECHNOLOGY...

• AOL Developing File-Backup Service - America Online is developing a new service that will let its members back up files from their PCs onto AOL data centers, so members can recover files either deleted accidentally or lost due to a hard-drive failure, an AOL executive says.
• Microsoft Accused of Destroying E-Mails - Microsoft Corp. developed policies stressing the systematic destruction of internal e-mails and other documents crucial to lawsuits it has faced in recent years, a California software company alleges. Burst.com, in court papers unsealed this week, also accuses Microsoft of destroying e-mails crucial to Burst's lawsuit against the software giant even after the trial judge ordered it to retain the documents. Burst had previously claimed that Microsoft deleted e-mails it needed for evidence. But the unsealed 50-page motion, filed Oct. 29, provides new details, Burst says, of "institutional policies" by Microsoft "to make sure that incriminating documents disappeared."
• Google Unveils New Scholastic Research Tool - The company's new service, unveiled late Wednesday at http://scholar.google.com, draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request. Mountain View-based Google doesn't plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads - the primary source of its profits.
• Maxtor ups desktop, enterprise HDD warranty periods - Hard drive maker Maxtor has followed rival manufacturer Seagate and upped the duration of the warranty it offers for enterprise-class drives. The company also increased the warranty period for internal desktop PC drives to three years. In some territories, that's already the warranty duration for these products - in others it's just one year. Maxtor's move is essentially about unifying the coverage period across all the territories in which it operates.
• Half-Life 2 Graphical Performance Evaluation - The TechLounge testing consists of running each timedemo three times at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with No AA/No AF & 4xAA/8xAF. All in-game graphics were set to Highest. Each result shown in the graphs to follow are an average of three runs at each setting. Let's get to the benchmarks! Another benchmarks can be found on HardOCP.

HARDWARE...

• VIA ships K8T890 chipsets - VIA is now shipping its K8T890 PCI Express chipsets to motherboard manufacturers. Abit, Albatron, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Shuttle, and Soltek all have plans to use the chipset, with retail products expected to arrive before the end of the month.
• Asus ships first nForce4 SLI motherboard - The new board marks the launch of the Nvidia's SLI technology which allows enthusiasts to integrate two GeForce 6600 GT or higher graphic cards into one system via a bridge chip. Nvidia said that currently gaming would be the only application to benefit from increased graphics performance devlievered by SLI.
• Seagate ships "world first" 400GB PC HDDs - Hard drive maker Seagate has begun shipping what it claims is the world's highest capacity PC hard drive: a 400GB beast that's also the first drive of its class to hold up to 133GB on a single platter.
• Dual AMD A64 Socket 754 motherboard spotted - A motherboard going by the name of "Stretto 2" rev 200 features 2 sockets for AMD 754 CPU's. The motherboard is up for grabs at a Taiwanese Yahoo Auction site.
• ATI XPRESS 200 review - ATi's new Athlon 64, PCI-Express chipset is here, so Hexus.net have put it through their paces to see if it will be the basis for the formiddable motherboards of future months.
• hp LaserJet 1320 review - At the launch of this new LaserJet, hp made much of its built-in duplexer, enabling you to print on both sides of the paper in one operation, as well as its wireless networkability.
• Sharky Extreme's November extreme gaming PC buyer's guide - With $4000 in cold hard cash we set out to assemble the absolute best PC our budget can achieve. However, we still need to follow the same format as our other price guides; we keep an eye out for relative value, and weigh price-to-performance ratios heavily before making a decision on which components to include

SOFTWARE...

• Microsoft Money 2005 Deluxe 90-day Trial - The Money 2005 Deluxe Trial Edition contains most of the features available in the full retail version of Money 2005 Deluxe (see below for details). If you are already using Money or Quicken, the Money 2005 Deluxe Trial Edition will work with your existing Money or Quicken data.
• Kernel 2.4.28 - A new Kernel from the 2.4 tree has been released. The full changelog can be found here.
• FirePanel XP 1.5.4.0 - FirePanel XP is an extension for the new firewall found in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server2003 SP1. It modifies your Windows Firewall, with features not normally available to users.
• VideoLAN 0.8.1 - VideoLAN is an excellent multimedia player with it's own plugins for playing different formats, so it doesn't need any codecs to be installed. It works great for previewing partially downloaded files too. It can also be used as a server to stream on a (wired or wireless) high-bandwidth IP (Internet Protocol) version 4 or 6 network in multicast or unicast.
• Portable Thunderbird 0.9 (USB Drive-Friendly) - Thunderbird supports running from removable drives with minimal reconfiguration. Repackaged Thunderbird as a complete, removable drive-friendly email client. This grew out of a mozillaZine forum topic on making Firefox portable back in June of 2004. This is an unofficial package. It is an official build, but has been modified and a specialized launcher added to make extensions portable. No warranty is expressed or implied.
• Portable Firefox 1.0 - Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more. This is an unofficial package. It is an official build, but has been modified and a specialized launcher added to make extensions portable. No warranty is expressed or implied.
• gPopper (Formerly Pop Goes the GMail) 1.2 - gPopper is a FREE Gmail utility which acts as POP3/SMTP Gmail server allowing you to use programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Thunderbird to send and receive Gmail.
• AM-DeadLink v2.04 - AM-DeadLink is an easy to use tool which detects dead links in your Browser-Bookmarks. If a Bookmark has become unavailable you can delete it from your Browser. AM-Deadlink checks Bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape.
• WinAmp 5.06 - Nullsoft Winamp (download) is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity media player for Windows. Winamp supports playback of many audio (MP3, OGG, AAC, WAV, MOD, XM, S3M, IT, MIDI, etc) and video types...
• ClockGen Updated - The ClockGen serie consists in a set of overclocking softwares, based on the Panopsys hardware detection engine. Each of these softwares is dedicated to one or several motherboards. A ClockGen software allow to dynamically overclock several devices of your system : CPU, memory, AGP and PCI bus.
• ATI Catalyst Radeon BETA 4.12 - ATI currently recommends installing this drivers set over the official 4.11 if you intend to play the recently released Half-Life 2 game.
• ForceWare 67.20 Win2K/XP - In it's original form this is a Quadro driver with revision build 67.20, strangely enough at standard it does support a lot of modern consumer graphics cards like the 6600 series.  Try at your own risk.