SECURITY...

• Virus Top 20 for June 2005 - Mytob. Mytob was flavor of the month in June. We had Mytob with worm and bot capabilities, Mytob without bot capabilities, Mytob packed with one, two or three packers and so forth. In short, Mytob variants dominated email traffic this month.
• Hackers crack two-factor security - IT experts warned today that, contrary to popular belief, two-factor authentication is not secure enough to curb internet banking fraud. "The latest generation of spyware not only includes key-loggers that trap passwords, but screen-grabbing software. This takes multiple images of what the user is doing and sends it straight to the hacker."
• Microsoft Internet Explorer "javaprxy.dll" COM Object Exploit (Unpatched) - A vulnerability was identified in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which could be exploited by remote attackers (workaround) to execute arbitrary commands. This flaw is due to an error in the "javaprxy.dll" COM Object when instantiated in Internet Explorer via a specially crafted HTML tag, which could be exploited via a malicious Web page to compromise and take complete control of a vulnerable system.
• 12 minutes to PC infection - If your Windows computer is not properly protected, chances are it will take all of 12 minutes before it becomes infected, a major security company says
• Today's Hackers Code for Cash, Not Chaos - Marc Sachs, director of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, chats with Ziff Davis Internet News about network worms, browser vulnerabilities and the general state of Internet security.
• Computer simulate terror attacks - According to the Washington Post, the computers are running countless Sim cities inhabited by millions of virtual individuals who go to work, shopping centers, soccer games and anywhere else their real life counterparts go. And there are virtual power grids, oil and gas lines, water pipelines, airplane and train systems, even a virtual Internet.
• Man convicted for chipping Xbox - The Cambridge graduate was sentenced at Caerphilly Magistrates Court in Wales to 140 hours of community service. The man had been selling modified Xbox consoles which he fitted with a big hard drive containing 80 games. The court also seized his equipment - three PCs, two printers, three Xbox consoles and 38 hard drives.
• Prince of Piracy Convicted in Los Angeles - Johnny Ray Gasca, AKA "The Prince of Piracy" was convicted of addition charges in addition to copyright violation. Mr. Gasca has an extensive rap sheet that dates back to 1986. His convictions include grand larceny, possession of stolen property, and attempted murder. Although starting in 1992 he served several years in prison for attempted murder, things appeared quiet during the turn of the century. However, Mr. Gasca was indeed busy recording theatrical movies, and according to the DOJ, making $4,500 a week for their sale. From the April 2003 FBI press release.

OFFTOPIC...

• NASA probe collides with comet in brilliant blast - A NASA spacecraft collided with a comet half the size of Manhattan late Sunday night, creating a brilliant cosmic smashup that capped a risky voyage to uncover the building blocks of life on Earth.  "We hit it just exactly where we wanted to," said Don Yeomans, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The spectacular collision, 83 million miles away from Earth, unleashed a spray of below-surface material formed billions of years ago during the creation of the solar system. It was the first time a craft came in contact with a comet's nucleus.
• New RIAA anti-p2p campaign - Chances are, if your downloading music online and not paying for it, your taking food out of the mouths of the musicians who wrote the songs. At least that's the claims of the RIAA and 4 major record companies around the world...OMG!
• Clinic Opens for Online Gaming Addiction - In China, the first officially licensed clinic for Internet addiction has opened its doors and the majority of its patients are suffering from addiction to MMOGs
• Star Destroyer Built Before Your Eyes - These people spent 10 hours constructing their very own Imperial II-class Star Destroyer from LEGO and capturing over 7000 frames of the process with their webcam.
• 26 million text messages sent backing Live 8 - More than 26.4 million people from around the world sent text messages Saturday in support of the Live 8 campaign to cancel the debts of the poorest countries, setting a world record, organizers said.
• Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF - The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world.
• EBay Bidder Pays $351,100 For Lunch With Warren Buffett -  A bidder on EBay Inc. has won a power lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffett for $351,100

TECHNOLOGY...

• US seeks to retain control over web traffic - The United States seeks to retain its control over the top-level domain and addressing system (DNS) of the Internet, thus enhancing its historic role in Internet management.
• AOL launches video search service - AOL Video Beta, launched Thursday, grants users the access to over 15,000 licensed and original videos from Time Warner, including music videos, news segments from CNN & MSNBC and Warner Bros. movie trailers
• World's First Self-Playing Audio Book - Playaway is the world's very first "pick up and go" self-playing audiobook solution, and it comes packed with features. Half the size of a pack of cards, the device squeezes in volume control, control over speed of narration, skip and jog forward/backwards, bookmarks and it even houses a small LCD panel.
• Deutsche Telekom 'may sell T-Mobile USA' - Deutsche Telekom is reportedly toying with the idea of either selling its US mobile arm T-Mobile or upgrading the operator's network to be more competitive. Reports suggest that selling T-Mobile USA could potentially net the German telecommunications firm up to $30bn. However, if Deutsche Telekom holds on to the US mobile subsidiary it will need to re-vamp its network at a cost estimated at around $10bn.
• Laser pulses could power quantum logic gate - An exotic light-wielding computer that should be capable of immensely complex calculations has been designed by a team of British and Japanese researchers. Computers that perform calculations by harnessing the bizarre properties of quantum physics - such as the superposition or entanglement of particles - could one day operate at extraordinary speeds. Quantum computers should, for example, be able to perform multiple calculations at once simply by exploiting the fact that quantum particles can simultaneously occupy two distinct states.

HARDWARE... 

• Athlon 64 FX55 San Diego Overclocked 1GHz To 3.6! - So what better day to do some overclocking than the 4th of July? I can't think of one. Of course when it is 100 degrees outside you want to cool your CPU down to -40 degrees Celcius with a Prometia Mach II setup 3.1GHz, and decided to push it to 3.6GHz for a 1GHz overclock
• 500GB HDDs trickle out - Hitachi have got a new 500GB hard drive (photo) on the market, images of which have shown up at Akiba in Japan. The drive is branded Deskstar, as you'd expect, and is Parallel ATA, rather than SATA. However, there is also a SATA II version which appears here. Both drives are 7,200RPM, so fall short of the raw performance offered by a 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor - although obviously beat the daylights out of it for storage capacity.
• Next GeForce 7800 to be a GT? - NVIDIA is preparing for hard launch number two, as it will have Geforce 7800GT in the shops available the moment it releases it. Geforce series seven will get its slower but cheaper. It will be a slower clocked version of the same G70 chip that we all see as the Geforce 7800GTX series. We suspect that it will be just a slower clocked card with same number of pipelines but we could not confirm this at press time.
• HighSpeed PC Tech Station 2 - HighSpeed PC's Tech Station 2 is a very niche product. Few people will have use for it, but those who do constantly tinker with PC components will find it to be one of the best solutions out there. If you can muster the funds, it's worth the premium. Construction is solid and components will fit great.
• Athlon 64 FX-57 - Athlon 64 FX-57 is the latest and fastest single-core CPU from AMD. In this review HardwareSecrets compare its performance with the previous model of Athlon 64 FX, FX-55, with Athlon 64 4000+, which is the fastest single-core CPU on Athlon 64 line, with other CPUs from AMD and also with some CPUs from Intel.
• Intel's 955X Dual-Core Chipset Better For Business Users Than NVidia's nForce4 - If you compare benchmark results from the 955X and nForce4 Intel Edition chipsets, you'll see a slight advantage goes to Nvidia. Especially in gaming benchmarks the nForce4 IE sets itself apart from the 955X. The 955X, on the other hand, takes its rightful place among multiple business segments thanks to its flexible RAID support and stronger RAID performance, as well as its AMT capabilities.
• Leadtek 6600GT Extreme: Factory Overclocked - The Extreme version is definitely helpful when you are stressing out the GPU, but other than that we recommend opting for a regular 6600GT and overclocking it at a price tag that brings more value per dollar
• MSI NX6600GT-V2TD128E Diamond (GeForce 6600 GT) -  After all, other competitors like the ASUS Extreme N6600GT and the Gigabyte GV-NX66T128D were both capable of reaching up to 580/1160MHz and 580/1180MHz respectively. Their overclocked GPU speed of 580MHz is even 20MHz higher than what we got with the MSI card.
• XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Graphics Card - Coupled with the 256-bit memory interface, the XFX card should produce memory bandwidth of 40GB/sec compared to the 38.4GB/sec offered by the stock nVidia settings.
• NEC ND 3540A DVD writer - There is no doubt that this is a good general purpose drive. It is available at a price of 50 euros or less and so is accessible to the masses. Burning dual layer media at 8X speed is nice but dual layer media is still quite expensive. The drive's support for 32X speed CD-RW media is also a nice point which personally means I can stop using my CD-Writer for that purpose alone. The drive is also speedy with it's rewritable DVD support, it's just a shame that you can't buy the media as quick as these drives keep coming out.
• Vantec ION2 460 watt PSU -  If you've been looking for a new quality power supply that has plenty of voltage along all rails and also comes in at a very agreeable price, then you'll want to take a good look at this Vantec offering
• CoolerMaster NotePal Notebook Cooler - It is ironic that laptops these days are not recommended for use on a lap; those who try may certainly get a burn or an "unpleasant feeling". Cooler Master promises to solve that problem with the NotePal and also help with another thing or two.
• Dell Laser Printer 1100 - The Laser Printer 1100 is designed for small and home offices, but it's also destined to end up on students' desks. Technical features of the printer are relatively basic, although you can't be too hard on a printer that costs so little in terms of initial financial outlay. A skimpy 2MB of RAM also means the printer struggles with large images and fancy fonts (most budget lasers carry at least 8MB), so you shouldn't be seduced by the price tag if you plan to subject the printer to heavy use.
• D-Link Securicam DCS-5300G - IP Camera - General picture quality is above average with the best results coming from the 352 x 240 pixel resolution. The highest resolution of 740 x 480 pixels wasn't as sharply focused and this setting also drops the frame rate to a maximum of 10fps.
• Transcend T.sonic 610 MP3 Player - T.sonic 610 player can play WAV, MP3, and WMA files. It has a spectacular LCD screen and design. It is compact and portable beyond belief. It arrives with various types of straps to make the MP3 player even more comfortable to carry around. Not only can it play MP3 files, it can be used to listen to any local FM radio station. Furthermore, it can record sound with the microphone on the top left corner of the LCD screen.
• Nikon D50 camera - The D50 also features an improved autofocus system; in sports mode (one of its six scene presets), for example, it can track a subject as it moves. The D50's rubber eyepiece is larger and more comfortable than the D70's.

GUIDES...

• Cell Inside, the Future of Processor Architecture - The Cell processor represents an incredible leap in computing technology, and it is debuting in the consumer market next year inside the Playstation 3. So how is the Cell processor so different from AMD’s and Intel’s x86 chips?
• FiringSquad on building a high definition HTPC - A lot of people think about HTPCs as something to do with "spare parts," but in this article, we're going to help you see how you can building a high-end HTPC with quality components can result in a device that lets you do things that you normally cannot do.
• SNES Emulator comparison - AEP Emulation Page did an interesting SNES emulator comparison for Windows.
• Podcasting - How and Why - Interesting two part series on what Pod Casting is and how you (yes you) can become a Pod Caster.
• Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering explained - The article is pitched at everyone that knows that AA and AF increase the quality of their in-game image, but aren't really sure how!
• NVIDIA ForceWare tweak guide (updated) - This guide refers to the latest Official Nvidia Forceware drivers Version 77.72.
• Defrag Your Boot Files (XP) - In order to make sure that your system continues to start as fast as possible, you should verify that your computer is defragging the boot files on start up. A boot defragment puts the boot files as close together as possible, making startup time faster.

SOFTWARE...

• Cuttermaran 1.64 - Cuttermaran (download) is a cut program for MPEG1 or MPEG2 video streams. The streams can be cut without recalculation. The asynchronous between audio and video will be minimized.
• VirtualDub 1.6.8 Stable - VirtualDub (download / download AMD64 version / changelog) is a video capture and processing program. It features fast capturing, process files larger than the 2 gigabyte limit, optimized for linear editing, support for Motion-JPEG, MPEG-1 video and layer 3 audio, real-time and near-realtime video processing, video job queues, and much more.
• nHancer (NVIDIA Profile Editor) - The programmer of this handly little tool was very rather unhappy with nVidia's own control panel, especially with its game profile editing module.
• New Development 80.40 Forceware Driver leaded - Try only at your own risk!