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Google’s $500 M. budget for defending YouTube?

2008-10-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

The wave of rumours flooded the IT community, and the player everybody talks about right now isn’t anyone smaller than Google with his new acquired videosharing portal YouTube. Google Inc Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Tuesday denied a widely circulated rumour that his company had set aside $500 million to settle copyright claims by media companies as part of its deal to acquire video-sharing site YouTube Inc. Speaking to more than 500 Internet industry insiders at the annual Web 2.0 Summit, Schmidt said an anonymous blog post asserting YouTube has reserved $500 million for legal claims, out of the $1.65 billion take-over price, was “not true.” Web and sports entrepreneur Mark Cuban, an outspoken critic of the Google-YouTube deal, late last month posted a claim from an anonymous blogger that he had inside information on the secret reserve plan.

In a two-part question, Battelle, organizer of Web 2.0 Converence in San Francisco, asked whether Google’s deal included a secret reserve for legal claims and, secondly, what progress Google was making in striking licensing deals with media companies to avoid threats of legal action. “The former is not true,” Schmidt said in response to the question of whether a “very large sum of money was set aside to buy peace” between YouTube and big media companies. “The latter is,” the Google CEO continued. “We have visited as many media companies as we can” to reach copyright licensing deals that can insulate both YouTube and Google, he said. Television and video producers, along with music labels, are angry that pirated versions of their copyright programming are frequently posted by people to YouTube’s site and have become a prime attraction of the video site. We all know YouTube is full of licensed, but is there someone who wants to start the war?

Windows Vista finally Gold

2008-10-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Microsoft announced today that Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing. Vista will mark the first big shift in Microsoft consumer operating systems in over 5 years. According to Neowin, the RTM version of Vista will be available for MSDN subscribers sometime after November 10, while businesses should begin receiving their copies on or shortly after November 30. Vista will be launched into the retail sector on January 30, 2007.

With Vista, Microsoft promises increased security with an improved firewall and Windows Defender and User Account Control. Other fresh additions include integrated desktop search, Internet Explorer 7.0, Windows Sidebar, Windows Sideshow, built-in system diagnostics, improved gaming support, fully integrated Speech Recognition as well as support for Windows SuperFetch, Windows ReadyBoost and Windows ReadyDrive.

Windows Vista will be available in four distinct retail versions:

Windows Vista Home Basic, $199/$99.95 (full/upgrade) - Provides a basic platform for home users who want to keep tabs on email and Internet activity. Comes standard with Vista’s new Search Explorer, Sidebar and Parental Controls.

Windows Vista Home Premium, $239/$159 - Builds on Home Basic by adding the Windows Aero interface, Windows Media Center functionality, Windows Tablet PC technology and integrated DVD burning.

Windows Vista Business, $299/$199 - Supports the Aero user interface, offers improved document managing and Windows Tablet PC functionality.

Windows Vista Ultimate, $399/$259 - Vista Ultimate combines the functionality of Vista Home Premium and Vista Business.

And then one special version: Windows.Vista.Corporate.Edition.CRACKED-SomeGroup for $0.00

Microsoft adds 3D Maps into Live Search

2008-10-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

Microsoft on Monday took the wraps off Virtual Earth 3D, a new version of the company’s mapping application that enables users to “fly” through three-dimensional models of cities from directly within their Web browser - complete with virtual billboards. The idea is that users can type a query into Windows Live Search and click on the “maps” tab to bring up results in a local context, with the ability to view two-dimensional aerial and bird’s-eye imagery, or the new 3D models offered by Virtual Earth. As part of the change, Windows Live Local is being re-branded Windows Live Search Maps.

The service is poised to compete with Google Earth, a standalone application that complements the search giant’s online mapping service. But Microsoft says its offering takes the concept to another level, by bringing the virtual world closer to the physical world. Instead of grey scale boxes of buildings like in Google Earth, Virtual Earth 3D uses photographs to create realistic, textured buildings. Microsoft says it developed the cameras it uses to capture the images in house, as well as creating an algorithmic program to build the textured 3D models. The only glitch on this nice new features is that 3D maps are now offered only for 15 cities in the USA. Kinda big glitch…

Flash code donated to Mozilla by Adobe

2008-10-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

There are still quite surprising news in the world of tough software & internet business: Adobe announced at the Web 2.0 conference on Tuesday that it was donating the scripting language engine from Flash to the Mozilla Foundation, where it will become an open source project called Tamarin as well as being integrated directly into the Firefox Web browser. Specifically, Adobe is opening up its ActionScript Virtual Machine, which forms the core of Flash Player version 9. The most recent release in June added improved debugging, faster start times, full runtime error reporting, and better performance. The code is the largest contribution to Mozilla since the organization was founded in 2003. The basic idea of the effort is to accelerate the development of the standards-based language in order to promote the development of rich Web applications, along with making them run more smoothly in Firefox.

“Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript,” commented Mozilla Corporation CTO Brendan Eich. Great partnership…

Alcohol Version 1.9.6.4629 is out

2008-10-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

Alcohol Software has updated it’s Alcohol 120% to version 1.9.6.4629. Changelog is as following, containing some nice new features:

- SPTD driver version 1.35.
- Full Windows Vista RC2 (Build 5744) compatibility 32Bit and 64Bit editions.
- RMPS V2, a totally new generation of our RMPS feature
- Option to install Alcohol with or without Virtual drive function.
- EWSS (Enhanced Weak Sector Scanner).
- Shell Context Menu support in all x64 platforms. (XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista RC2).

The most interesting new feature, even if not stated in changelog, is that now it’s possible to burn a disc and use the disc instead to mount an image on a virtual drive. The cracked version isn’t out yet, the last one is four weeks old release Alcohol_120_v1.9.5.4521-DIGERATI.

Microsoft Office 2007 finished

2008-10-03T14:33:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has wrapped up development of its forthcoming Office 2007 productivity suite and released the code to manufacturing. The application is slated for release to businesses on 30 November, together with Windows Vista and Exchange 2007. The consumer launch is scheduled for early next year. Office 2007 was originally scheduled for release by “late 2006″ but the product’s roll out was moved back to coincide with the forthcoming launch of Windows Vista. The productivity suite has been in beta since November last year and has since been downloaded by more than 3.5m people, touted Microsoft.

The suite’s main new feature is a user interface that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates unveiled last year at the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. The interface is designed to change with the current task being performed, which Microsoft expects will better inform users of the available features. Internal Microsoft research had shown that the features most requested by users were already available in the software but were difficult to find. Office 12 will also offer new business intelligence tools to help employees find and analyse information. I was playing a bit with some beta version of this new Office and although it takes some time to get used to these new functions, they make working with this much easier…

NVidia Forceware 93.71 WHQL Drivers

2008-10-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

A new WHQL Forceware graphics drivers v93.71 (dated November 2nd, 2006 - download - Win2k/XP ~ 40.5MB) are available for download from the official NVIDIA download page. As always, updating to this version is highly recommended for all owners of newer graphic accelerators. Some changes from release notes:

Single-GPU Issues Resolved (Error message occurs when running the NVIDIA Control Panel Television Setup Wizard.)
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400: After changing the color settings from the NVIDIA Control panel, the settings revert to the default.
GeForce 7950 GX2, NVIDIA Control Panel: The Multi-GPU performance mode default is set to Custom when initially creating a new application profile.
GeForce 7950 GX2: In the NVIDIA Control Panel, Multi-GPU antialiasing modes are available when Multi-Display rendering mode is selected.
GeForce 7900 GT: The new NVIDIA Control Panel lists the product name as GeForce 7900 GT/GTO, instead of the correct GeForce 7900 GT.
GeForce 7600 GS, NVIDIA Control Panel/Classic Control Panel: HDTV component-out output is split vertically when applying the 1080i resolution.
GeForce 7600 GS, GeForce 6150/6100: During video playback in VMR mode, video is corrupt and shaky when noise reduction is enabled.
GeForce 6800 GT 256MB: Windows Media Player 10 video becomes corrupt when rotating the screen while playing a video.
GeForce 6600 128MB: Windows Media Player 10 crashes when changing the resolution while playing a DVD.
GeForce 6600 128MB: The secondary Dualview monitor flickers while playing any NTSC DVD.

Grant T. Stanley, the man behind the Elite Torrents BitTorrent tracker that came under fire last year for posting a print of Star Wars Episode 3 befor

2008-10-03T14:29:00.001-07:00

The freedom of MySpace users became probably little more “wild” than the authors initially intended. News Corp., the parent company of MySpace, said Monday that it would be employing technology aimed at keeping copyrighted material off its pages. Additionally, the site would crack down on violators of the policy, kicking them off the popular social networking site. Technology from Gracenote would scan music uploaded to the site’s profile pages and then compare it to the privately held company’s database. If it detects the file does not match a filing with the company, it would be blocked.

If a user continues to attempt to upload illicit files, it would result in his or her account being deleted. In addition to these moves, MySpace would also remove copyrighted material when requested by the labels and other content owners.”MySpace is staunchly committed to protecting artists’ rights - whether those artists are on major labels or are independent acts,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “This is another important step we’re taking to ensure artists control the content they create.” Gracenote says that its technology, known as MusicID, is used in several different applications, including content filtering, broadcast monitoring, mobile music recognition, music file recognition and rights clearance. By the way, do you also think that putting some stupid music on background of webpage (which was “in” may be in 1990s) increase your MySpace respect? Well may be if you insterested in respect of similarly oriented geeks, then it’s the right choice, but it’s just and only annoying for normal people…

Sentenced to 5 months of prison for running tracker

2008-10-03T14:28:00.001-07:00

Grant T. Stanley, the man behind the Elite Torrents BitTorrent tracker that came under fire last year for posting a print of Star Wars Episode 3 before the film’s theatrical release, will spend five months in jail for his role in running the site. U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones has sentenced Stanley to a five-month prison term plus five months of house arrest, a $3,000 fine, and three years of “supervised release.”

In other news, four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker ‘Finreactor’ have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totaling 60,000 dollars each. The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close. This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site. Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines. With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members. The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning. It looks it’s slowly becoming quite a risky hobby to run a torrent websiteÂ in some countries :-/.

3 Million Downloads of Internet Explorer 7 in 4 Days

2008-10-03T14:27:00.001-07:00

The big companies always know best how to commend their own work: Microsoft is heralding the launch of Internet Explorer 7 as a success, announcing that the new browser has been downloaded three million times in the first four days. Early next month, customers will begin receiving IE7 automatically, at which time adoption numbers will likely skyrocket. There’s a small tool which can disable upgrade to IE7 on your workstation, but Microsoft doesn’t promote thig thing too much, so hardly smoeone knows about this possibility.

To promote the launch of IE7, Microsoft has bought up radio spots and employed mobile billboards in 10 cities across the United States. The new browser brings added security, tabbed browsing and built-in RSS support, and is currently available for Windows XP SP2. “Of course, weâ€™re not done with IE7 yet. Next up are the localized versions of IE7 for Windows XP and, of course, IE7 in Windows Vista,” said Tony Chor, IE7 group program manager. Isn’t it easy to reach 3 millions of downloads when every internet server post an article about your product?

Apple’s FairPlay cracked by DVD Jon

2008-10-03T14:25:00.001-07:00

The rule about every protection being beated sometimes has been confirmed once again: the locked ecosystem that Apple has created for its iPod is under threat from the machinations of an innocent-looking geek from Norway who has figured out a workaround to Apple’s DRM. Jon Lech Johansen, known in the blogosphere as DVD Jon for his work cracking DVD copy protection when he was just 15, is licencing technology through his company Double Twist to allow other music distributors the sell tracks for the iPod. By reverse-engineering Apple’s FairPlay copy protection, he’s discovered how to add coding to non-iTunes songs that mimics the FairPlay code, thus tricking the iPod into thinking it’s playing an iTunes track.

â€œToday’s reality is that there’s this itunes-ipod ecosystem that excludes everyone else from the market,â€? Johansen told Fortune magazine. â€œI don’t like closed systems.â€? He also said that he hasn’t broken the law because he hasn’t tried to remove Apple’s DRM, but rather has added another level of copy protection. â€œThe law protects copyrights, but it doesn’t keep you locked into the iPod.â€? Good work buddy.

Sony offers doubled Micro Vault Capacity: 8 GB

2008-10-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

The competition about smallest miniportable drive with biggest capacity is still on the fire: Sony doubles MICRO VAULTâ„¢ storage capacity - A huge 8GB available in MICRO VAULT â€˜Midiâ€™ line-up from October 2006. The Sony MICRO VAULT â€˜Midiâ€™ range is available with capacities of 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and now 8GB from November 2006, with a Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) interface for the convenient transfer of large files4. The clear colour coding found running through all Sony MICRO VAULT ranges (MICRO VAULT â€˜Midiâ€™, â€˜Excellenceâ€™ and â€˜Tinyâ€™) attributes a specific colour to each storage capacity which is reflected on the packaging as well as the capacity indication on the product itself. Useful piece of hardware, with sizes of new games…

AIM 6 finally supports offline messaging

2008-10-03T14:21:00.001-07:00

Although I use mostly MSN Messenger and ICQ, I have AIM also installed to get in touch with certain people who use this application. The one big minus of this instant messaging client was the lack of offline messages. This feature is supported by ICQ for years and the latest version of MSN (Live) Messenger supports it now as well. AOL has returned to number-based versioning after launching AIM Triton last year. AIM 6 is the next iteration of Triton, which was named to emphasize that it was a completely new instant messaging platform rewritten from the ground up, but caused some confusion among AIM users. Beta 2 of AIM 6 introduces a number of user interface changes to the popular IM client. Window buttons, menu items and even the color schemes used by the software have been reworked.

AOL has removed Triton’s “IM Catcher” feature and replaced it with an Away Status window and an Unknown Sender’s curtain.The Away Status window shows up when set as “away” and lets users disable sounds and pop-up notifications. Unlike previous versions of the client, users can remain away and still send messages to buddies. The Unknown Sender dialog catches messages from those not on a user’s list, and can be used to report IM spam. Offline messages, a feature long offered by Yahoo and AOL’s own ICQ service, are a new addition to AIM 6. Messages sent to a buddy who is not connected will appear when they next sign online, accompanied by a System Message that lets the recipient disable the feature if desired. AOL has restricted the functionality to reduce abuse, however, and users can only send and/or receive 40 offline messages in 24 hours. Good work.

Tough internet discussions in China

2008-10-03T14:19:00.001-07:00

All flamers living in China should be pretty careful now - China has passed legislation outlawing Internet rumor mongering. According to the law, people who post “defamatory comments” could be fined from 1,000 to 5,000 yuan (about $600) and face jail time. Distributing the comments is also outlawed and organizations like newspapers and websites could face fines of 3,000 to 15,000 yuan ($1500).

The law doesn’t affect the entire nation because it was passed in the Chongqing Municipality province in Southwest China. Other areas could craft similar laws, using the Chongqing one as an example setting precedent. I really can’t imagine something like this in any “internet-active” country - all these discussions under articles would be monitored and people couldn’t use any stronger argument to persuade the others. And everybody can confirm there is a lot of people just attacking others without bringing some sensefull ideas…

Video iPods Shipped with Windows Virus

2008-10-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

Quite funny method of daunting Windows users has been seen on some latest Apple iPod Video players. The RavMonE.exe virus installed on some video iPods at the factory should be detected and zapped by any Windows antivirus software with up-to-date definitions, Apple said. While RavMonE.exe doesn’t affect Mac OS X, it will, of course, infect Windows running on an Intel-based Mac via Boot Camp, Parallels, or similar software. The virus in question should be detected and zapped by any antivirus software with up-to-date definitions, Apple said.

The company recommends that Windows users attach their video iPods to their computers, run their antivirus application, and then restore the iPod to its original factory settings through iTunes. The virus uses mass storage devices to propagate, so Apple also advises users to scan other external devices too.While RavMonE.exe doesn’t affect Mac OS X, it will, of course, infect Windows running on an Intel-based Mac via Boot Camp, Parallels, or similar software. Such users should also undertake the steps recommended by Apple, if they are using a Windows-formatted video iPod. How is this even possible? Some crazy bet of bored Apple developers?

MS Internet Explorer 7 available. And?

2008-10-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

The big day of Microsoft became true - they released the final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 during this night. The new version is the first upgrade to the web browsing program for more than five years. New features include tabbed browsing, the ability to search the net directly and an anti-fraud system to thwart phishing attacks. The new program is available as a free download on 19 October, but many will get it as an automatic update to Windows XP in November. The new version of the browser has gone through a long testing regime and five test or “beta” versions have been made available in the last 14 months. Despite this IE 7 is still seen as an attempt by Microsoft to catch up with rival browsers as it includes features that have long been seen in competitors such as Firefox and Opera.

But is it even worth installing this new version of IE7? For me, absolutely not. I haven’t launched Internet Explorer for months, Firefox is my default browser without any comments and there’s also Opera installed as a backup. From my point of view, they just implements functions already available in these alternate browsers. But lot of classic MS crap remained. And built-in search box for searching through Microsoft’s crappy search engine? No thanks, there’s still Google guys. And the last line? First exploit for IE7 appeared just few hours after the official release. Really funny…

Iran slow downs internet to cut west’s influence

2008-10-03T14:11:00.000-07:00

Pretty crazy news came today from Iran: Iran’s Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture - by banning high-speed internet links. In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net.

The order follows a purge on illegal satellite dishes, which millions of Iranians use to clandestinely watch western television. Police have seized thousands of dishes in recent months. The situation described by one Iranian blogger sounds really weird: “Despite having the telecoms facilities, fibre-optic technology and internet infrastructure, the authorities want us to be undeveloped.” I really wouldn’t like to live in such a country. May be even China is better in terms of limiting access to some western websites, but offering Megabits of internet connection for cheap prices…

MySpace sex offender caught by hacker

2008-10-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

There’s another reason why not to think that hackers may do only some harmful acitvities: Renowned hacker Kevin Poulsen has helped police arrest a convicted sex offender on MySpace.com, using results from a Perl script he wrote several months ago. Poulsen, the former news editor for SecurityFocus and now editor at Wired News, correlated data mined from the U.S. National Sex Offender Registry with over a million profiles on MySpace.com. While his automated Perl script resulted in a large number of false positives, he was still able to find 744 confirmed sex offenders with MySpace profiles after examining just one third of the data.

The search ultimately resulted in one arrest, of repeat sex offender Andrew Lubrano in New York. Like many sex offenders, Lubrano registered his MySpace account using his real name. MySpace is increasingly being targeted by sexual predators, as the popular social networking site attracts at large number of children and teenagers. Poulsen’s Perl script, about 1,000 lines in length, is expected to be released to the open source community later this week. By the way, can someone already explain me what’s so interesting on MySpace? I haven’t found its appeal yet…

Nice Firefox tuning tips

2008-10-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

The userbase of Firefox is still growing and because of that, thousands of people notices some problems about this browser. Probably the most common one is extreme consumption of RAM, when you browse with Firefox little longer. This bug isn’t bug actually, it’s a feature, although it may sound little weird. There’s a option to configure this cache function, but it’s kinda hidden in Firefox config file. This tip is quite old, but because there’s probably still a lot of people having issues with this, I feel it could be helpfull to post here few recommendations:

Kill the amount of RAM Firefox uses for itâ€™s cache feature
Hereâ€™s how to fix it:
1. type â€œabout:configâ€? (no quotes) in the browser.
2. Find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer
2. set itâ€™s value to â€œ0â€³

Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages
1.Type â€œabout:configâ€? into the address bar and hit return.
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set â€œnetwork.http.pipeliningâ€? to â€œtrueâ€?
Set â€œnetwork.http.proxy.pipeliningâ€? to â€œtrueâ€?
Set â€œnetwork.http.pipelining.maxrequestsâ€? to some number like 30.

This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it â€œnglayout.initialpaint.delayâ€? and set its value to â€œ0â€³.

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If youâ€™re using a broadband connection youâ€™ll load pages faster now
More options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click â€“> Newâ€“ > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set â€œfalseâ€?
â€œcontent.notify.backoffcountâ€?: set â€œ5â€³
â€œplugin.expose_full_pathâ€?: set â€œtrueâ€?.
â€œui.submenuDelayâ€?: set â€œ0â€³ (zero)

Kill RAM usage to 10mb when FF is minimized
This little about:config hack will drop Firefoxâ€™s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
Ok I hope this makes a few peopleâ€™s browsing experience a bit better with Firefox and debunks a myth about their being a bug.

Sony strikes back with new line of Walkman

2008-10-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

There’s no company who would want Apple as the king of portable mp3 players. Sony on Thursday took the wraps off a new line of Walkman portable audio players, which the company says offers features not found in competing devices. Five new Walkman models will debut before the end of the year, offering capacities up to 4GB. The players are shaped like a small perfume bottle, with the high-end model priced at 29,000 yen ($240) in Japan. But Sony acknowledges it has a long way to go if it wants to unseat Apple.

“Sony has a lot of strengths that Apple doesn’t have,” said Hiroshi Yoshioka, senior vice president of Sony’s audio division in a press conference Thursday. “This is a device that takes advantage of them.” Yoshioka added that Sony expects to double its market share from 10 to 20 percent. The new Walkman lineup includes the ability to upload music directly from a CD player, as well as a built-in noise cancellation feature. Battery life is just three hours after only three minutes of charging, and the players come in four colors. The design looks pretty stylish on the first pictures, functions should be also better than in case of iPod, so we will see how will this gadget succeed. Do you still have the old sony cassette walkman somewhere in the garbage? I do!

Microsoft releases 26 new patches

2008-10-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

Microsoft just confirmed weak security of their software - Microsoftâ€™s Patch Tuesday has seen a record 26 flaws receive a fix through ten different patches. Some computers, however, may not have received the automatic security updates as usual because of a problem with Microsoftâ€™s delivery system, which is it trying to solve. Users worried about a vulnerable system can manually download the patches by visiting Microsoftâ€™s website. The total number of â€œcriticalâ€? patches number six, and cover PowerPoint, Excel, and Word flaws, amongst others. Each of the critical vulnerabilities allows remote code execution through a malicious web page or file. One of the most important patches is one that fixes a flaw in the WebFolderView Active X file that affects IE and has already been hacked.

A couple of the fixes also apply to the Windows Vista operating system, which is being trialed by selected beta testers. Microsoft hasnâ€™t said which bugs are being fixed. Two of the patches affect Office software for Apple Mac, and are rated simply â€œimportantâ€?. Microsoft also noted that it expects to release Windows Internet Explorer 7 later this month, with the browser update scheduled to be delivered shortly thereafter via Windows Update and Automatic Update. The company said it is providing a blocker tool that will allow businesses to prevent their computers from receiving the new browser. Better to install it and keep using Firefox…

End of Windows XP SP1 support today

2008-10-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

The another milestone to make Windows XP totally dominant operating system has been made: For all the Windows XP users out there that have been refusing to upgrade to Service Pack 2, today is the day support ends for any version of the operating system still running Service Pack 1. Microsoft has gone well beyond what it has stated is an acceptable support time for service packs. In the past, it has said it will support an operating system for a full 5 years after release and service packs for 12 months after the release of the next service pack. Service Pack 1 has been supported for two years; SP2 was released in September 2004.

Those unsure which Service Pack they are running can check by right clicking on their “My Computer” shortcut and selecting the Properties option. The Service Pack version should be listed under the “System” heading on the window that pops up. Updating to Service Pack 2 is free and best done via the Windows Update. Microsoft also released a bunch of new patches through Windows Update today, after some server issues, which caused quite a long delay in updating. The dominance of Win XP with SP2 is totally clear - after all, you need this system for installing the majority of new games, as the older OS aren’t usually supported…

Wild Asia: Chinese hackers attacks US gov

2008-10-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

Country with probably the biggest future potential is still kinda wild in terms of internet and illegal software. The U.S. Department of Commerce took hundreds of computers offline following a series of attacks aimed at federal employees’ computer accounts by online thieves that appear to be based in China, according to media reports published on Monday. The department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) told news agencies that several user accounts had been compromised by the attackers, but no sensitive data had been stolen. The department is the second federal agency to be compromised by attacks coming out of China. In July, the U.S. Department of State also acknowledged that some if its computers had been hit by attackers targeting information about China and Korea. The federal agency also maintained that no sensitive information had been taken. The attacks continue a trend of stealthy, low-volume attacks targeted at individuals inside government agencies and corporations that some security experts believe are sponsored by a country, likely China. In May, security experts discovered that attackers were using a zero-day exploit for a flaw in Microsoft Word to compromise targeted systems. A number of other attacks have also made use of zero-day Office vulnerabilities. The attacks have apparently originated in China or used a Chinese server from which to attack. On the other hand, China and Asia in global are countries / regions with most unsecured computers in the world…

Firefox 2 RC2 Released

2008-10-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

All Firefox fans interested in playing around with the latest 2.0 RC2 should visit this download link. The release notes have a detailed list of what’s new in Firefox 2 RC 2. I must admit this new version is the best thing for browsing I’ve tried so far, these Firefox coders really know how to make a good software. Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 also includes several bug fixes resulting directly from feedback obtained from people using our previous release candidate build. Users running Firefox 2 RC 1 will automatically be updated to Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 through the Software Update feature, and are encouraged to continue submitting feedback and Talkback reports. List of changes:

A new theme that updates Firefox’s familiar interface
Built in Phishing Protection
Enhanced search engine management and search suggestions for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
Improvements to tabbed browsing, including the ability to re-open recently closed tabs
Firefox will resume from where you left off after a system crash or browser restart
Better support for previewing and subscribing to Web feeds
Inline spell checking in Web forms
The ability to create bookmarks with â€œLive Titlesâ€? for Web sites that offer microsummaries
New Add-ons manager that simplifies management of extensions and themes.
Support for JavaScript 1.7
Extended search plugin format
Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
Support for client-side session and persistent storage
Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System

Rumours: Google buying YouTube for $1.6bn?

2008-10-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

The wave of quite shocking news appeared in majority of internet news servers. The initial report came from Techcrunch.com: Google is close to buying YouTube for $1.6bn, according to this site. the talks are at a sensitive stage and could break off. Which would be madness on YouTube’s part, if it was doing the breaking. This enormously popular bazaar of video pratfalls, US government propaganda and stolen TV and film clips, needs a sugar daddy. The knocks on YouTube have been the problems of monetizing video streams, as well as the battle against content providers who often have their copyrights violated through unauthorized uploads. YouTube has turned to a variety of advertisers, including Google, and media sponsors to help cash in on its popularity without having to pad its videos with actual visual ads.

What we don’t know is whether that will be enough to offset the high costs of running a video site in the first place. Last month’s deal with Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) was a good step toward getting content owners on YouTube’s side, but in the end it will only mean more mouths to feed. Google looks like the ideal buyer and gold-mine for YouTube owners. For amazing amount of money, they would have new, extremely strong owner, which shouldn’t have bigger problems with supplying enough of bandwith, server power and propagation. Although there’s already Google Video service, I’m pretty sure it’s very possible this thing will happen…

Doubled BSAA reward to stop software pirates

2008-10-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

Pressures on common home users about their filesharing activities are still increasing - another warning came from Australia. The Business Software Association of Australia (BSAA), the Australian software industry’s “pirate hunters” have doubled the reward on offer to anyone willing to turn over pirates using illegitimate business applications. The organization, which claims to be “dedicated to promoting a safe and legal digital world,” has announced that there would now be $10,000 reward offered to anyone dobbing in copyright thieves. BSAA chairman Jim Macnamara said the group realised that the previous $5000 bounty was below international standards, while also conceding that claiming the reward is not a straightforward process.

Those willing to co-operate have to do more than just identify a suspected pirate. Informants are required to sign affidavits and “be involved in a legal process,” Mr Macnamara added, a process which can be time-consuming. Mr Macnamara also believes that Australia’s 31% piracy rate is still too high by world standards. Australia has yet to see any criminal cases for software piracy, but has assisted in some US-initiated actions. It’s quite wise to use applications like PeerGuardian if you live in some of these “hot” regions. Although it can’t block all dangerous connections, it will give you at least some increased level of personal security…

Solution for stolen mobile phone: Scream

2008-10-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

Interesting news arrived today from one british company: they invented technology called Remote XT for cellphones which will generate an “ear-piercing screech” when a cellphone is stolen. The thief can only stop the screeching by taking out the battery, and putting a new SIM card in the phone will not reactivate it. The technology, available in the U.K., has been designed to address the growing cellphone theft in the country. In fact, cellphone theft has gotten so bad that one-third of all robberies in the U.K. involve a mobile phone. In addition to the screech, the handset can be locked and all information on the unit wiped. The good news is that the Remote XT technology also backs up the phone’s data in a “secure Government-approved data centre,” so if the mobile is stolen you will simply be able to move your data to a new one.

The stolen phone alert, the remote lock, and the data wipe are initiated by the phone’s owner, who simply contacts the Remote XT call center to notify a rep that the phone has been lost or stolen. The trick to eliminating most crime is taking the profit out of it. Thieves don’t want the risk associated with stealing a mobile phone if they know there is a good chance the phone won’t be usable once taken. Considering that no thief wants a cellphone that can’t be use and only screams, this may indeed have an impact on mobile phone crime in the U.K. and later also in other countries, if these first trials succeed. The only problem is ironicaly this annoying scream - I find often myself angry if some car starts its alarm on the street by some accident and it takes long minutes of loud noise till its owner turn it off. Can you imagine that with mobile phone in overcrowded underground during the peak time? May be some inventions should remain just in the labs…

Microsoft dropped price of Zune to $249

2008-10-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

Microsoft’s portable media player, the 30GB Zune, will be released on Nov. 14 with a suggested retail price of $249. This is a $50 drop from earlier reports. According to TWICE, the Zune’s price point is a shot across the bow of Apple, which just announced a new 30GB iPod also priced at $249. Other key differences between Zune and Apple’s iPods/iTunes system include:

The Zune has Wi-Fi capability.
Zune offers two pricing plans: $.99 per song or $14.99 monthly subscriptions.
It comes with a built-in FM tuner.
Zune has a sharing feature that beams a song to another Zune player and makes it available for a three-day trial period.
The unit is pre-loaded music, videos, film shorts and images.

And because a portable media player can’t survive without accessories, TWICE reports that a selection of speaker and car add-ons will also be released in time for the Nov. 14 launch. Should we consider this as a first useful product from Microsoft ?

Japanese scientists transferring data at 14 Tb/s

2008-10-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

Crazy high-speed news appeared on the website of japanese ISP called NTT. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The value of 14 Tbps (111 Gbps x 140 channels) greatly exceeds the current record of about 10 Tbps and so claims the record of the world’s largest transmission capacity. They had to use a lot of special technologies like wavelenght multiplexing or ultra-wide amplifiers to achieve such a speed. You can read more details about this record at their website if you are interested in technical stuff. I’ll probably consider moving to Japan, this is totally worth it :).

Abacus MobileWear Bluetooth Watch

2008-10-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

All techy geeks can get a a nice new gadget now: Bluetooth Watches from Abacus. Very modern look and Fossil’s body makes these watch kinda expensive though, with price about $300. The Abacus was developed from one of Fossil’s bestselling analogue watches. In terms of functionality, it seems very similar to the MBW-100, with auto-pairing to your phone to offer caller ID information on your wrist (and the ability to reject a call) via an OLED screen, along with notification of incoming texts by vibration. There’s an out of range warning if your phone and watch separate, time/date from your phone and it’s water resistant up to 3m. The battery lasts for around 7 days before it needs a charge via AC adapter or USB. Available in two styles, with a stainless steel case and bracelet or with a stainless steel case and black PU strap. You can connect these watches to your mobile phone with special SonyEricsson wireless technology, but hey, I can’t imagine any meaningful use for that. And the idea of putting your watches to charger next to iPod and cell phone is also kinda scaring me

HD DVD will be available for Xbox 360

2008-10-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

There’s a good news for all console fans: Microsoft has expanded on its plans to launch an HD DVD drive for its Xbox 360 console to markets in North America and Europe. The drive will be available in mid-November in North America, the U.K., France, and Germany, and will cost US$200 in North America, â‚¬200 in France and Germany and Â£130 in the U.K. The add-on drive was first announced in Japan last week ahead of the annual Tokyo Games Show and Microsoft said it would hit Japanese retail shelves from Nov. 22 and cost Â¥19,800 (US$168).

And why is that so interesting? With the drive Xbox 360 owners will be able to watch high-definition HD DVD movies on their television through the console. Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 just under a year ago with a standard DVD drive and in adding the HD DVD option is making its console more competitive with Sonyâ€™s PlayStation 3, which will go on sale in Japan and North America in November and which features a drive for the rival Blu-ray Disc format. At the same event Microsoft also said it is partnering with Academy Award-winning writer, director, and producer Peter Jackson. Jackson, best known for his adaptations of the â€œLord of the Ringsâ€? trilogy and â€œKing Kong,â€? will make two interactive entertainment series exclusively for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. The first will be a collaborative effort with Bungie Studios to create a further chapter in the Halo series and the second will see a new game created. I’m really looking forward to see the quality of this high-definition movies…

All versions of Windows Vista on single disk

2008-10-03T13:27:00.001-07:00

Interesting news came from Microsoft today: Microsoft has confirmed that all versions of Vista will be shipped on a single DVD, in a feature called Windows Anytime Upgrade. According to a spokesperson for the company, “The idea is to provide customers with the most convenient user experience possible by enabling them to more easily and directly upgrade to a higher edition of Windows Vista from within their current edition”.Users would only be installing the version of the operating system that they had purchased, as the product key would be version-specific. Versions range from Starter to Ultimate editions.

Asked if this system meant upgrades would be cheaper, as production and retail costs for Microsoft will be lowered, the spokesperson said they could not give any details of pricing at the moment. The spokesperson also denied that Windows Anytime Upgrade would prove an attractive target for hackers, saying Vista was “the most secure version of Windows yet”. I think this may be considered as a great message for all warez users, because the release of some special tool / crack which will enable all versions on the install DVD is more than probable…

ATI Catalyst 6.9 Drivers

2008-10-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

All gamers should update their Windows with a new version of ATI Catalyst drivers for September (version 6.9). According to ATi, these drivers add CrossFire support for the Intel 965 Chipset, and also contain a good deal of performance improvements: 3DMark2006 overall performance improves 6.7-23.7% with anti-aliasing enabled and Doom3 performances improves up to 9.3% due to further OpenGL shader complier and transform engine optimizations. You can download it here (35 MB).

Issues Resolved in Catalyst Software Suite 6.9:

Desperados 2: Attempting to play the game with CrossFire enabled no longer results in the game failing to launch and an error message being displayed. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23254

Doom3: Enabling both CrossFire and Temporal AA no longer results in a ghosting effect being noticed when playing the game. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23284

Elder Scolls IV: Oblivion: Setting the in game video option to High Resolution and setting the 3D option in the Catalyst Control Center to Optimal Quality no longer results in corruption being noticed when playing the game. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23057

MS Flight Simulator 2004: Creating a flight and clicking on Fly Now no longer results in display corruption and flashing being noticed when playing the game on a system containing an ATI Xpress 200 series product. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23250

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory: Playing the game on a system running Windows XP and containing an ATI Radeon X1300 or 1600 no longer results in the game failing to respond when enabling AA to 6x. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23264

The Settlers: Heritage of Kings: Setting AA to 4x, AF to 16x, High Quality AF on, and AAA to on/quality, followed by setting the in game video options to high and the display to 1600×1200 no longer results in black or flashing textures being noticed on the surface. Further details can be found in topic number 737-22568

Tiger Woods 2005 or 2006: Playing the game under Windows XP with an ATI Radeon X19×0 series product installed no longer results in the playback of the opening cinematics failing to playback properly. Further details can be found in topic number 737-23006

Tomb Raider: Enabling CrossFire and setting AA to 12x and AF to 16x no longer results in corruption being noticed when playing the game on a system containing an ATI Radeon X1800 series. Further details can be found in topic number 737-22811

Soapbox: Microsoft launches YouTube competitor

2008-10-03T13:05:00.001-07:00

The still growing popularity of YouTube.com can’t leave Microsoft sleeping. They decided to launch their own service based on the similar bases, which should compete with YouTube. Soapbox MSN Video, which will allow users to upload and share personal videos with others who use the service, is now available as a beta release in the U.S. for the Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox browsers. The service initially is available by invitation-only, though users who want to take part in the beta can sign up on a waiting list. The service will let users both watch videos and browse for new ones simultaneously on the same screen, something that differentiates it from YouTube, Microsoft said. Like competing video-sharing services, Soapbox will allow users not only to upload videos to the Web in almost any digital video format, but also to tag and categorize them so other users can find them.

The Soapbox service will work with IE 6 or later browsers running on Windows XP, and the Firefox 1.0.5 browser or later running on Windows XP or Macintosh OS X. This looks like a fine decision, because the growth of Firefox share on browser market could mean a serious problem in case of allowing only visitors with IE to visit this page, as it’s set with some other MS services. And why’s all that buzz? Money, money, money - Microsoft aims for Soapbox to generate revenue by luring online advertisers, the company said. Though it won’t be ad supported in its initial release, Microsoft hopes the service will feature advertising down the line…

Adobe Acrobat 8 with new features

2008-10-03T13:03:00.000-07:00

An updated version of Adobeâ€™s Acrobat software will be unveiled today, adding new capabilities including a means for staff to join ad-hoc online meetings. Acrobat 8, due in October, offers better tools for shared reviews and real-time collaboration. It introduces an updated PDF format to package multiple documents into one file; and the free-to-download Adobe Reader can fill out PDF forms on-screen and post the results to a specified email address. Acrobat 8 Professional includes a redaction tool to remove sensitive information, preventing accidental disclosure in PDF files. Users can search long documents for specific keywords. Simply highlighting in black does not remove text from documents â€“ it can still be copied, said Lori DeFurio of Adobeâ€™s Knowledge Worker Solutions group.

Many organisations, including the US Justice Department, have unwittingly leaked sensitive data in the past after botched attempts to censor PDFs. Acrobat 8 also lets users combine portions of files into a single PDF. Source files can be Word documents, spreadsheets, web pages, or emails. However, sensitive documents are often digitally signed, and merging them would invalidate the signature. Acrobat 8 enables multiple PDFs to be stuffed into a single wrapper file. I’m not sure if this message should make me happy, because I sort of dislike Acrobat - the loading time is terrible, and the function of Adobe Reader are very limited. Better to make it free

Apple iTunes 7 - not so good update?

2008-10-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

It’s just a few days after the release of iTunes 7 and official Apple forums are being overflowed by complaints and bug reports of unsatisfied customers. It looks that developers didn’t test this version too much, the most common problems include:

Being unable to playback podcasts
Some iPod Nanos not being recognized by the Windows version of iTunes 7
iTunes 7 not being able to save preferences
Music often becomes jerky or distorted during playback
Music becomes distorted when switching to another application in the Mac version
iTunes 7 quitting unexpectedly
iTunes 7 freezes during library updates
Next track is played before current track fully finishes
Different types of coded error messages

This is just a small example of some issues, you can find many more in the forums. Apple should take this little more seriously, the userbase is kinda big for releasing “betas” like that…

Windows Vista: new keyboard from Microsoft

2008-10-03T13:00:00.001-07:00

New soon to be released software products from Microsoft enhanced also the hardware portfolio of this manufacturer. Microsoft refreshed its line of keyboards and mice yesterday, introducing a desktop system that includes a keyboard designed for use with Windows Vista and the company’s Windows Live online services. The Ultimate Keyboard comes in the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 package, which also includes a wireless laser mouse. A Windows Live Call button on the keyboard provides one-touch access to a list of Windows Live Messenger buddies online to initiate a videoconference or chat session. It automatically logs a user in to Windows Live Messenger and opens a list of contacts that are currently online.

The keyboard’s Start menu button for Vista or Windows XP is placed below the space bar, replacing the Start menu buttons traditionally found next to Alt buttons on traditional keyboards. A Gadget button on the ergonomic keyboard provides access to Gadgets in Windows Vista, which are windows on the PC desktop that display news, sports, weather and other information. The $250 desktop package will become available in February 2007 in the U.S. The question is, whether are there customers willing to pay quite a lot of money just for few extra buttons, because other top manufacturers like Logitech also offer special configurable buttons for better price…

Apple launching movie downloads over iTunes

2008-10-03T12:59:00.001-07:00

Another footstep for the future offering everything on the internet on payed basis has been made. Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said Tuesday that the company will sell movies from its online music store with prices starting at $9.99. The announcement is likely to jump-start a nascent movie-downloading industry, much like Apple’s move into selling music online in 2003 popularized legal song downloads. Many analysts believed Apple would introduce a wider-screen version of the iPod to better showcase movies, and they also expect Apple to soon enter the wireless phone business with a phone that plays music, videos and handles scheduling tasks. Neither product was announced. What was announced, among other new products, was the introduction of a new iPod with 80 gigabytes of storage and a brighter screen for better movie viewing.

Selling movies from the iTunes store “is probably not a game changer” for Hollywood, said Stephen Baker, a consumer technology analyst with the NPD Group. “What is game changing about it is that it’s happening on the most popular platform.” That is significant because Apple has been a pioneer in putting digital entertainment in your pocket thanks to the continued success of the iPod. More than 75 movies are offered at iTunes from Disney and its studios, including Miramax Films, Touchstone Pictures and Pixar. Prices are $9.99 for older titles and $14.99 for new releases that are offered when the DVD versions go on sale. a key question is clearly how many people will want to watch “Pirates of the Caribbean” on a 2 1/2-inch color screen in the age of 60-inch high-definition TVs and surround-sound systems. Or even a better question, will some people change their mind and start downloading movies from internet for money, while they can get it for free now?

New tool for all iPod fans: iBreath

2008-10-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

The wide choice of additional equipment for your iPod has been expanded with yet another useful tool iBreath aka iPod Alcohool Breathalyzer ($79). â€œJust fold out the BAC blow wand and exhale into it for a full 5 seconds. 5 seconds later, this jail-saving gizmo letâ€™s you know if youâ€™re safe to drive,â€? says David Steele, the company selling the product. â€œIt even houses a timer that can be set from 1 minute up to 4 hours in order to remind you when itâ€™s time for the next test. And if keeping you out of the pokey isnâ€™t enough, this cool gadget doubles as a wireless FM transmitter to beam your tunes directly to any FM stereo.â€? Pretty useful tool for all let’s-take-one-shot-before-I-leave drivers…

Webmaster gets 7 years for piracy

2008-10-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

It’s not a good idea to risk with selling an illegal software if you live in the USA. The owner of one of the nation’s largest Internet software piracy Web sites has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold products copyrighted by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The site began operating in 2003 and was shut down by the FBI in February 2005. In addition to Friday’s 87-month sentence, U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million and to forfeit the proceeds of his scheme, which included homes, cars and a boat.Peterson pleaded guilty in December in Alexandria to two counts of copyright infringement.

Justice Department and industry officials called the case one of the largest involving Internet software piracy ever prosecuted. Last month, Ellis sentenced a Florida man to six years in prison for selling illegal copies of computer programs on another site, BuysUSA.com. Big Brother is always watching you…

Samsung’s Website infecting visitors

2008-10-03T12:53:00.001-07:00

Security firm Websense warned this week that attackers had apparently broke into the Web site of telecommunications company Samsung, infecting certain portions of the site with a Trojan horse. The firm said it was likely that the site had been infected for some time. “The most current code, which is still available for download, is a Trojan Horse that attempts to disable anti-virus programs, modify registry keys, download additional files, and log keystrokes when connecting to banking websites,” Websense said in an advisory. While the Trojan is dangerous, it requires user interaction in order for it to be installed onto the computer.

The security firm said it believed those infected were being lured to the site through instant messaging or e-mail links. Websense has alerted Samsung of the problem, but as of Friday morning the code was still accessible on the site. The fact that the malware is coming from a reputable source’s actual Web site, rather than some faked version, worries researchers. Samsung has not publicly commented on the situation. You had better to stay with Releaselog

Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition

2008-10-03T12:46:00.001-07:00

Nokia has announced the next generation of both its 8800 and L’amour lines. These phones have evolved to pair high fashion styling with upgraded features. The 8800 has been updated with a slightly curvier form and a better camera, while the L’amour line has been updated with a new phone and new colors - a more masculine bronze and black design and a more feminine pink one. All the models announced today are GSM / EDGE 900/1800/1900.

8800 Scirocco: This slider still retains the stainless steel body of its predecessor but adds some new curves and a sapphire-coated display. The camera has been updated to 2 Megapixels and the sounds, previously from Ryuichi Sakamoto, have been replaced by nature-inspired tones from Brian Eno. Also features Bluetooth and comes with a matching Bluetooth headset.
7390: A new clamshell-style phone that packs of all of Nokia’s latest features. Includes UMTS 2100, a 3 Megapiixel autofocus camera with flash, a second camera for video calling, music player with external media controls
7373: An update to the 7370 spinner upgrades the camera to 2 Megapixels, and includes a new headset and phone charms. Still includes Bluetooth, media player, and stereo speakers.
7360: This candybar retains the same specs, and design, only the colors and patterns have been updated. Features a VGA camera and FM radio.

May be it’s the right time to upgrade my Motorola MPx220 to something slightly better

Internet Explorer shows off first RC

2008-10-03T12:45:00.001-07:00

Microsoft polished up the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 7 and offered it up today for download as the first release candidate (the step between beta testing and a final version). This new version doesn’t add any new features or major interface changes from the last version. It focuses on bug fixes, along with performance, compatibility and security improvements. You can get RC1 from Microsoft’s IE site for XP SP2, XP 64-bit and 2003 SP1. No release candidate for Vista yet, but Microsoft says “we’re getting close.” The final version is still planned for the fourth quarter later this year.

One little plus over beta 3 is that today’s version will automatically uninstall old betas. This release also adds language support for French and Spanish. The final version will match Windows’ supported languages. If you’re already using an IE7 beta, there’s no reason not to grab RC1. If you’re still using IE 6 for some reason, keep in mind that when IE7 is finished, Microsoft will be distributing it as a high priority update via Automatic Updates. Anyway, Firefox forever!

Logitech introduced revolutionary mouse

2008-10-03T12:42:00.001-07:00

Computer peripherals maker Logitech on Thursday announced two new mice that enable users to quickly scroll through long documents and web pages with a flick of its free-spinning scroll wheel. The wheel, dubbed the MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel, is included in both the MX Revolution and VX Revolution mice. After flicking the wheel, it spins continuously for seven seconds, and can scroll through up to 10,000 Microsoft Excel lines with a single flick. Users can stop the wheel by tapping it.

The mice also include a feature that lets you highlight a word or phrase and then conduct a Web search with a single click. Located under the scroll wheel, the One-Touch Search button can bring up Web search results for a highlighted word or phrase with just a single click. After highlighting a term in a spreadsheet or document, clicking the search button opens a Web browser with Yahoo, Google, or Yahoo LiveWords search results for the term.Â Suggested retail price is set to 99.99 U.S. dollars, which may seem quite a lot for one mouse, but the good name of Logitech and unique features will probably ensure some popularity for this gadget…

Nintendo Wii may cost less than 250 Euros

2008-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Despite some hopes, or perhaps in spite of them, Nintendo did not officially give out the final release date or the price for Wii during its big splash at the Leipzig Games Convention today. “The price has not been decided yet, but I expect it to be … less than 250 euros,” Bernd Fakesch, Nintendo’s German operations head, told Reuters on the sidelines of a gaming industry conference. Wii will also have some new titles coming its way. The sequel to Super Mario Strikers â€“ Mario Strikers Charged â€“ and Battalion Wars 2, or just BWii for short, are slated for some Wii action.

Unlike Microsoft Corp.’s new Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, which boast more power and high-definition graphics, Nintendo aims to win over customers with an affordably priced unit and ground-breaking games. It also hopes to attract a broader audience than the young males who usually make up the console gaming market. We should be only happy because of this small next-gen console war, because the result should be a better price for us, final consumers…

Website of Kevin Mitnick got hacked

2008-10-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

The most known hacker on the world was beaten in his own way - his website was hacked by pakistanian hackers. Four websites associated with Mitnick’s various ventures were sprayed with digital graffiti on Monday in an apparently personal attack. The sites defensivethinking.com, mitsec.com, kevinmitnick.com and mitnicksecurity.com (which all run on Linux, incidentally) were defaced with offensive messages that said “hacking was for homos”, among other things.

The techniques used in the attacks are unclear but are likely technical in nature. Mitnick spent five years incarcerated as punishment for attacks against Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems, among others, prior to his release in January 2000. It’s not the first time when was Mitnick’s website hacked, but it’s the first time when it was hacked in this rude way, because the previous hacks were more pleasant, just to welcome Kevin released from the arrest…

EA buys Unreal Engine for next-gen games

2008-10-03T12:35:00.001-07:00

The famous Unreal Engine achieved another big success. EA has jumped aboard the Unreal Engine 3 bandwagon, announcing it’s shaken hands with Epic Games on a licensing deal allowing the publisher to “adopt” the technology “for use in several next-generation titles”. Sadly, the publisher has chosen not to reveal the names of the next-generation titles in questions, although it has said that the games are currently under development. It’s additionally noted that Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 will be used alongside EA’s own proprietary tools and technology library.

Epic’s CEO Mark Rein said: “They have extremely talented development teams, and we’re excited to see how they apply our technology to their high profile game projects.” Unreal Engine 3 provides the core technology around which developers can create games with minimal programmer assistance. It is used in a wide variety of game genres. The question is, if EA decides to use this engine on the right places - the company is in a dislike of many people because of their way of earning money on expansions discs - it’s quite common to see a new game released by EA just with a few changes from the previous title…

YouTube’s going to publish music videos

2008-10-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

The another step to make YouTube the biggest and most popular video website has been taken. YouTube Inc. is talking with record labels to post thousands of music videos online, aiming to move beyond being a site for sharing home videos to a provider of mainstream entertainment like Yahoo and others. “What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube,” said co-founder Steve Chen. “We’re trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site.”

California-based YouTube accounts for 60 percent of all videos watched online. The site specializes in short, homemade, comic clips created by users. Founded only one year ago, it now counts as much asÂ 100 millions views a day. After the first negotiation, YouTube believes they could offer these music clips for free, without any subscription or special fees. These guys really know how to be a successfull website…

Google launches free WiFi in Mountain View

2008-10-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

Google’s slightly another approach is bringing another fruits: after months of beta testing and anticipation, the Internet giant plans to open up its free, wireless Internet network to Mountain View’s 72,000 residents. The network covers about 90 percent of the city’s 12 square miles and offers maximum data-transfer speeds of up to 1 megabit per second — slightly slower than DSL. You can say that’s nothing so special, because the prices of broadband in the USA are already at very affordable level, but still, Google does this for free.

To build the network, Google mounted 380 transceivers, made by Sunnyvale-based Tropos Networks, on light poles throughout the city. The devices will allow residents within 500 feet to connect wirelessly to the Internet. The real purpose of this action is still quite unclear, Google didn’t release any press release, so we can only wait for some other step. On the other hand, the more people on the internet, the more users for Google, as it’s still no. 1 search engine with a huge advance before other competitors…

Another bunch of patches for your Windows

2008-10-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Windows is still a pretty unsecure product. There’s over 20 new patches for Windows in latest MS security bulletin, while many of them are pretty serious and there are already some private exploits floating around for weeks. At least 17 of the 23 flaws could be exploited by attackers to hijack vulnerable systems or to install malicious code, the company warned. The SANS Internet Storm Center, which was credited in part with the discovery of this flaw, reported evidence of it being exploited publicly as early as June 30.

So far in 2006, Microsoft has issued more patches than in 2004 and 2005 combined. Some have speculated right now is a prime opportunity for hackers to exploit the backlog of unprotected vulnerabilities. Microsoft recommends people install the critical fixes immediately. The updates are available via the Windows Update and Automatic Updates tools. Temporary workarounds are outlined in the security bulletins for those who can’t immediately apply the patches. I’m still wondering why Microsoft still waits for the beginning of new month while there’s so many known and unpatched flaws…

Sony Mylo, lot of fun and features

2008-10-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

The way to build one ideal machine which could work as your mp3 player, mobile phone, and portable game station at once is one step shorter - Sony announced new communicator called “Mylo”. The product which has been especially designed for the youth to stay in touch lays emphasis on their needs. The slim, oblong-shaped device features a 2.4 inch color LCD (measured diagonally) with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for comfortable and quick thumb typing. Available in a choice of black and white colors, It’s ideal for people who want to stay connected to their online friends and family, but not be weighed down by a PC or buffeted by charges for IM and texting on cell phones.

The device which should not be mistaken for a cell phone operates in any Wi-Fi hotspot. The product includes JiWire’s hotspot directory listing more than 20,000 WiFi networks in the United States, so you can find a hotspot near you. The mylo personal communicator boots up in seconds and can scan for available wireless networks right away. The “What’s Up” screen serves as the hub, storing up to 90 of your friends’ avatars so you can quickly see who’s online. You can store up to nine online identities per person which allows you to first choose who you want to chat with then easily initiate conversations using your preferred application.

The embedded HTML browser lets you quickly connect to full Web pages on the Internet. You can also send and receive text emails with web mail services like Yahoo! Mail and the Gmail web mail service. The communicator comes with Skype software built into it, allowing registered Skype users to make free Internet calls with the 113 million other Skype users worldwide. Great batteries provide up to 45 hours of music playback, around seven hours of chatting and web surfing and more than three hours of continuous Skype talk time. It comes with a microphone, stereo headphones,a USB cable and a neoprene case. Mylo looks finally like a pretty cool gadget!

Unsecure websites now marked by Google

2008-10-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

The neverending fight against the dangerous website has now another reason to stop. After the time of dialers, crazy redirects, different malware and IE or another browser exploits, Google now ads warning if you are going to visit a website dangerous in some way. The warning will pop up if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programs. The initiative comes out of a larger project cataloguing programs that plague people with unwanted ads, spy on web habits or steal personal data.

Google is one of several companies trying to act as an “in-flight adviser” to ensure people stay safe online. We are not talking about few websites at the moment, but about something like 5% of all internet content. the dangerous keywords include such terms as WinMX, Limewire, Bearshare, Free screensavers, Free ringtones and so on. The thing is if this warning may stop a Google’s user to visit the page, because when something appears at the top of the results, it will be probably the exact page for which is this user searching…

Windows Vista hacked without problems

2008-10-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

Microsoft’s coders have still a lot of space to improve their software. While Microsoft talked up Windows Vista security at Black Hat, a researcher in another room demonstrated how to hack the operating system: Joanna Rutkowska, a Polish researcher at Singapore-based Coseinc, showed that it is possible to bypass security measures in Vista that should prevent unsigned code from running. In the second part of her talk, Rutkowska explained how it is possible to use virtualisation technology to make malicious code undetectable, in the same way a rootkit does. She code-named this malicious software Blue Pill.

Blue Pill could serve as a backdoor for attackers, Rutkowska said. While it was developed on Vista and AMD’s technology, it should also work on other operating systems and hardware platforms. “Some people suggested that my work is sponsored by Intel, as I focused on AMD virtualisation technology only,” she said, adding that is untrue. Do we need another proof that nothing can’t stop hackers from bypassing WGA, Microsoft Update and any other software protection? It’s all just the matter of time…

Chats and social sites may be banned at schools

2008-10-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

All fans of MySpace, MSN chat or every other popular website application giving opportunity to communicate with foreign people and giving your personal details may be banned soon in US schools. The deleting online predators act (DOPA), which was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives last week, had been expected to go before the Senate this week, but opponents appeared yesterday to have postponed the battle there until next month. The bill identifies “social networking websites” as hunting grounds for paedophiles, and requires federally funded schools and libraries to limit access to them.

The FBI estimates that one in five of the country’s 24 million child internet users have received sexual approaches, and that as many as 50,000 sexual predators are prowling for children online. Opponents of the bill say it casts the net too wide and could cut young people off from a huge range of websites. There are thought to be as many as 300 social networking sites that could fit the law’s description and more than half of all Americans between 13 and 17 belong to at least one. So if you’re still visiting school and MySpace is set as homepage in your school account, you will have much less fun probably in next months…

Verizon prepares next-gen 100 Mbit broadband

2008-10-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

The end of your slow DSL or cable internet connection is getting more and more real. At least if you live in the USA. Verizon announced on Thursday that it has chosen Alcatel, Motorola and Tellabs to provide equipment based on the latest fiber-to-the-home standard called gigabit passive optical network, or GPON. Passive optical network technology, or PON, is an optical-access system that lets multiple homes or businesses in a neighborhood share fiber from a service provider’s central office. The most widely used PON standard today is broadband passive optical networks or BPON, which splits 622Mbps (megabits per second) of downstream bandwidth and 155Mbps of upstream bandwidth among 32 homes or businesses.

By contrast, GPON allows Verizon to split 2.4Gbps (gigabits per second) of capacity downstream and 1.2Gbps of capacity upstream among 32 homes or business. This boost in speed should help Verizon eventually offer consumers up to 100Mbps downloads into their homes, the company said. Today, the carrier typically offers services of 5Mbps, 15Mbps and 30Mbps. In some locations, it offers 50Mbps. As of 2005, the fiber network was available to 3 million homes and businesses. The company is on track to make it available to another 3 million by the end of 2006. Damn, I want this too! Or no, I got a better idea: move to Korea or Japan, they got 100/100 there for $25. Jesus

ATi Catalyst 6.7 Drivers

2008-10-03T12:15:00.001-07:00

ATI has released a new ATI Catalyst drivers bringing them up to version 6.7. The package contains Radeon display driver 8.273, Multimedia Center 9.14, HydraVision, HydraVision Basic Edition, Remote Wonder 3.04, WDM Driver Install Bundle, Southbridge/IXP Driver and Catalyst Control Center Version 6.7. The new Cats introduces ‘Enhanced CrossFire’ support for those of you running CrossFire set ups. Grab them while they are hot!

This release of Catalyst introduces Enhanced CrossFire Support. The enhanced support allows for CrossFire Alternate Frame Rendering mode for Direct3D applications to be forced on by setting the Catalyst AI slider to the Advanced position. Users are encouraged to enable this setting if they are not seeing significant performance gains in applications when Crossfire is enabled. This enhancement is available for all Direct3D applications except for Direct3D applications known not to work with Alternate Frame Rendering.

The Catalyst 6.7 release also fixes some bugs, including texture corruption in Quake 4 and loss of response after task switching when running The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion at 1600×1200 on a CrossFire setup. A complete list of fixes and known problems is available in ATI’s release notes for the drivers. As with the previous Catalyst 6.6 release, only graphics cards from the Radeon 9500 up are supported.

Nokia testing calls over WiFi in Finland

2008-10-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

The another step for cheaper calls is slowly coming: Nokia has started its first tests of a technology that allows users to roam seamlessly between phone networks and local wireless hotspots such as Wi-Fi, a Reuters report said. The report said 50 families in Oulu near the polar circle in northern Finland would test the technology over the next two months. Mobile subscribers with handsets enabled for so-called unlicensed mobile access, or UMA, can make calls over the Internet when they are in range of an unlicensed wireless network such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, the report said.

When they move out of range, the connection will automatically revert to a GSM, GPRS or UMTS mobile phone network. Supporters of the technology say it would decrease the cost for mobile phone operators to offer service in remote areas through Wi-Fi hotspots. Additionally, users would be able to place phone calls from home using their own wireless networks. Good work, WiFi is still really awesome technology, so why not to utilize it little more.

Netscape hacked by Digg users

2008-10-03T12:11:00.001-07:00

The almost dead star of 1990s was hacked. Netscape’s website included cross-site scripting vulnerability, which allowed hackers to include some external scripts into their web. The probable reason for this was one article comparing Digg and Netscape. I’m quite satisfied user of Digg and never heard that Netscape has something similar, but it looked like their copied the most of Digg’s ideas to their website, although there’s not many readers or people who submit new articles.

The result of hack was quite visible for every user of Netscape.com - random popups with text like “Tom Way is the sexiest man alive”, “This site sucks” or some others. What’s even more interesting, Netscape owners still didn’t patch all vulnerable scripts, you can try it by clicking here. Although I use only Google and sometimes Yahoo for searching on the internet, company like Netscape should care much more about their security and also about proper fixing of the problem when it appears…

Final version of Firefox 1.5.0.5

2008-10-03T12:10:00.001-07:00

Mozilla has released version 1.5.0.5 of Firefox, fixing several security issues and bugs as outlined in the release notes. The one for Win32 can be downloaded from the official FT P, and those for other languages and OS - from here. Installation file is as big as 5 megabytes. The main reasons for this update is some security issue, which could be used to misuse user’s computer. Don’t expect any important change, they will come probably not until version 2.0. There’s a new trojan virusÂ FormSpy for Firefox though, which is staying installed as plugin called NumberedLinks 0.9, logging all your form inputs and then sending them away to some third party server. This may become extremely danger in case of logging some credit card or bank account details, so beware before you install any plugin…

Google still rules between search engines

2008-10-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

The search engine market has still only one king: The Google. According to the latest research from Nielsen//NetRatings, around 2.67 billion searches were carried out in June using Google, giving it 49.4 per cent of all web searches carried out in the month. The figure represent year-on-year growth of 31 per cent. Yahoo came second but still has some way to go with 1.24 billion searches, or 23 per cent of the total. Yahoo’s year-on-year growth is similar to Google’s at 29 per cent. Third and fourth places were held by MSN and AOL with 10.3 per cent and 6.9 per cent respectively. Both companies notched up around three per cent year-on-year growth.

Ask.com and My Way experienced year-on-year growth of 66 per cent and 51 per cent respectively, but each accounted for only two per cent of searches. The old-school starts, very popular in 1990s like Netscape, Dogpile, iWon and EarthLink all experienced negative annual growth, clocking up around 0.5 per cent of all searches in June. There’s also another interesting result of this survey: YouTube, famous video-sharing site, is the fastest growing website at the moment, with monthly unique audience of something about 19 million people…

AMD confirmed buying ATI: $5.4 billion

2008-10-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

We were all expecting it, different rumours started to appear everywhere, and now it’s confirmed AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, said on Monday it would acquire graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc. for $5.4 billion in cash and stock to expand its product mix and grow market share as it battles Intel Corp. The offer is 24 percent more than ATI’s closing price last week.

AMD, which has been shelling out billions to add factory capacity so it can better compete with Intel Corp., will pay for the acquisition with the help of a $2.5 billion loan from Morgan Stanley. AMD expects the deal to contribute “slightly” to earnings next year and add “meaningfully” to profit by 2008. The purchase will save the combined company about $75 million by the end of 2007. And whan can we expect after this transaction? As a result of the merger, the chipset business will rest almost wholly with AMD and Intel. Nvidia will be left to struggle on their own. It could result in Nvidia finding it hard to compete. It’s not just chipsets either. ATI will gain access to AMD’s fabrication plants. Capacity willing, it should help them reduce the cost of producing their GPUs. The end result is a tougher GPU market for Nvidia too and of course, better prices for us, home users and final customers…

Microsoft celebrates WGA protection

2008-10-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

It looks like Microsoft finally succeeded a bit with its Windows protection. Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage has faced a whirlwind of criticism, but there should not be any complaints about the accuracy of the actual piracy check, according to Microsoft. About one in five of the 300 million PCs that have run WGA validations fail, according to Kochis, a senior licensing manager at Microsoft. That is pretty much in line with industry numbers for software piracy, he wrote. Windows Genuine Advantage is a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to boost the number of Windows users who actually pay for the operating system. The company has said that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide have not been acquired legitimately–as a boxed product or bundled onto a machine, for example.

When WGA validation is run, the software sends data on the system back to Microsoft. This information includes the Windows XP product key, the maker of the PC, the operating system version, PC bios information, and the user’s local setting and language. In 80 percent of the cases that systems that fail the check, a stolen license key was used, according to Kochis. “One stolen license key from a U.S. university ended up on over a million PCs in China,” he wrote. The rest of the failures are caused by a mix of other types of counterfeiting and piracy, including a variety of forms of tampering, hacking, and other forms of installing unlicensed copies, according to Microsoft. We all know there are WGA cracks, but fixing newer and newer versions may annoy a huge percent of users, so they finally decide to buy a legal copy of Windows. Clever Microsoft, clever…

Do you also beware of third-party cartridges?

2008-10-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

Lyra Research has found that U.S. consumers have many reasons for not buying third-party, or aftermarket, ink jet cartridges. The single greatest reason is that they donâ€™t trust the quality of these cartridges. I must admit that I got also a little worries about buying non-retail ink cartridges into my HP inkjet. Here are some common reasons answered in this research:

Reasons For Not Buying Third-Party Cartridges

I donâ€™t trust aftermarket ink jet cartridges - 23%
I want only the best print quality - 21%
I cannot find an aftermarket cartridge that is compatible - 12%
The difference in price is not enough to make me switch - 10%
I am worried about damaging my printer - 8%
My preferred store does not carry aftermarket cartridges - 7%
Other - 7%
Selecting an aftermarket cartridges is too confusing - 6%
Donâ€™t know - 6%

MySpace ads installing malware into your pc

2008-10-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

Every fun costs something. And this is also the case of MySpace, extra popular social site. A banner advertisement posted on the MySpace Web site may have infected more than one million users with adware, according to security firm iDefense. The advertisement was included in user profiles on MySpace and could have been operating for about one week. The deckoutyourdeck.com advertisement exploited a flaw in the way Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser handles Windows Metafile (WMF) image files. Users running unpatched versions of IE would never have realized that the banner ad had silently installed programs that generate pop-up ads on their system.

An iDefense spyware analyst, Michael La Pilla, told The Washington Post that he discovered the attack on Sunday as he browsed the MySpace site. When he came across a page with the offending ad, he received a message from his browser asking him if he wanted to open a file named exp.wmf. After a brief investigation, La Pilla found out that the spyware installation program contacted a Russian-language Web server in Turkey that tracks the PCs on which the program has been installed. The tally had climbed to 1.07 million machines, though La Pilla said the seven Internet addresses contacted by the downloader seem to be inactive now. There’s probably no excuse for myspace owners, they should check their ads when they have such a huge website. And yeah, users should also patch their browsers, or use not so vulnerable ones…

Cool Teddy USB drive

2008-10-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

There’s a set of nice pictures of very original USB flash drive at Flickr. It is probably home-made, as there’s no retailer selling this kind of good, but it will take some attention of your friends for sure. The only problem is the look of Teddy “plugged” into your computer, your children wouldn’t be happy looking at this for sure

Skype protocol was cracked

2008-10-03T11:48:00.001-07:00

Probably the most important message of this night is the ability to use Skype protocol without the Skype client. Chinese engineers have allegedly cracked Skype’s Internet telephony protocol, according to a Thursday blog posting. If the blog posting is correct, software developers who currently don’t have access to Skype’s protocol could develop and sell alternative Skype clients. In a statement, a Skype representative acknowledged but dismissed the claim.

“We have no evidence to suggest that this is true,” the representative said. “Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype, which is enjoyed by over 100 million users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype’s cryptographic security or integrity.”

Charlie Paglee, chief executive of Vozin Communications, a company that sells a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) plug-in called Talqer for Google Talk, first reported the claim on his VoIPWiki Blog. Because Skype’s protocol is proprietary, third-party developers are not able to develop applications that align closely with the client software. Other VoIP applications, including Google Talk, have opened their protocol to the public, allowing companies like Vozin to develop service add-ons that are specific to the software client. This will probably result the Chinese licensing its reverse-engineered protocol to third-party developers, which will be able to embed it in software used to build Skype-compatible applications. I have nothing against Skype at all, but there are some quite bad things like this Super Node mode, so this may be a good news for all Skype users…

The Pro Piracy Lobby starts in Sweden

2008-10-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

The latest pressure on peer to peer networks and website culminating with shut down of The Pirate Bay brings first fruits. People around The Piratebay launched a new international organization called “The Pro Piracy Lobby” with aim to start a discussion about filesharing and find similar organizations all over the world. They also request freedom of the internet, in meaning of port or traffic limiting, which is still very popular by certain internet service providers.

The interest in file sharing, piracy and the Internet in general increases exponentially each day, says Tobias Andersson from the swedish PiratbyrÃ¥n (The Bureau of Piracy). Pirate groups and parties are being grown as flowers in springtime. In Scandinavia cooperation across borders has already been fruitful. The swedish PiratbyrÃ¥n has acted offensively and succeeded in inspiring the startup of both a Danish and a Norwegian Pirate Group. Together with the international file sharing website The Pirate Bay, Scandinavia has established itself as a prominent figure in the debate concerning intellectual property and piracy.

It will be probably a long way to reach some progress in the area, but we should be happy someone thinks like this and put some effort into similar organization. There are already political groups promoting filesharing in the Sweden, so why not to make something similar also in other countries. Good idea guys…

Nvidia nForce Drivers 6.86 with WHQL

2008-10-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

Nvidia released a new version of nForce drivers for motherboards using this chipset. These drivers includes WHQL certification from Microsoft so you will not experience any warnings or problems during the installation. You can download either 32 bit or 64 bit version, depending on your operating system. This new version 6.86 includes following parts:

Audio Driver (v4.65) WHQL
Audio Utility (v4.51)
Ethernet Driver (v50.25) WHQL
Network Management Tools (v50.19)
SMBus Driver (v4.57) WHQL
Installer (v4.89)
WinXP IDE SataRAID Driver (v6.66) WHQL
WinXP IDE SataIDE Driver (v6.66) WHQL
WinXP RAIDTOOL Application (v6.63)

10 Most Destructive PC Viruses Of All Time

2008-10-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

They are with us for 20 years, causing more and more serious damages to targeted or just random victims. Yeah, viruses. The first one was coded in 1986 and was called “Brain” - as a boot virus, it infected every floppy disc inserted into floppy drive. This was nothing in comparison to very dangerous viruses in late 1990s - this time is specific for viruses deleting everything, whole content of your drive. Current viruses don’t seem so harmfull, but they are also a pretty nasty kind of malware, with enormous spreading speed. If you want to find 10 most destructive viruses ever, I recommend you to read quite interesting article over Techweb - they included such names as IloveYou, Melissa, Code Red from the end of 1990s, or Blaster, Sobig, Bagle and Sasser from recent history. Have you already applied all new updates?

SanDisk offers another iPod’s rival: Sansa e200

2008-10-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

These asian companies are becoming a serious opponent for every manufacturer of portable players. Latest product from SanDisk called Sansa e200 is again highly inspired by iPod, but it offers more functions for lower price. The Sansa e200 player is offered in capacities of from 2 gigabytes to 6 GB, with an additional 1GB possible from the largest available microSD card from SanDisk. That allows users to expand the amount of content they can store in their players and to easily swap out music between devices with microSD slots.Also, in contrast to a proprietary or closed system of selling music online - in which songs can be played only on designated players - the Sansa e200 supports an open platform, accepting the broadly-used MP3 and WMA music formats (downloads plus subscription). The Sansa e200s also are Microsoft PlaysForSure compliant, which means they can take advantage of numerous music service providers such as Rhapsody, Yahoo Music and Napster. This player also features a 1.8-inch TFT color screen, while a durable metal backing helps avoid scratches and cracks, a common problem with iPods. The firm is already number two on the american market, so you can expect some serious competition with Apple and other brands…

Filesharing insurance in Sweden

2008-10-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

There are some details about a new interesting service offered in Sweden. One company decided to sell personal insurance for all filesharing fines in case some copyright organization like RIAA will lawsuit you. Magnus Braath’s company Tankafritt promises to pay any penalties incurred from crackdowns on your rampant piracy, and he’ll even throw in a free T-shirt to help you glorify your outlaw status. The price is also interesting, only $19 per year of protection. Sweden is well-known as one of the most developed country if we talk about warez, because almost everyone can get there 10/10 home connection for affordable price. There were also some governmental pressure about illegal content, so this may a nice deal for all these swedish DC and BT boys…

Another cool gadget: transparent toaster

2008-10-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

Toasts. We all love them, people in England eat them every morning and they are so easy to prepare. Designers from concept studio Inventables realized that too and developed a slightly different tool for making toasts: first transparent toaster. You can now always check the colour of your toast because of transparent heating glass and avoid these burnt ones. This machine allows to heat only one toast at the time but your friends will be definetily surprised by the look of this. The only shame is this is only a concept, because the glass can’t get hot enough to toast the bread but may be it will be possible one day…

Dell: notebook explosion in Japan

2008-10-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

Developers of latest hi-tech notebooks are often coming around the thin border of excellent piece of hardware or just a dangerous tool for geeks. I’m pretty sure that many visitors of Releaselog own their very new and very powerfull notebooks/laptops and they can probably also confirm how’s the heat becoming a serious problem. As I come across to some new notebooks from time to time, I can clearly watch the current trend (or better to say a nasty problem) of this new hardware: it’s getting too hot! The lossy energy produced by still better CPUs and still higher amount of memory is getting little out of hand sometimes.

I was pretty surprised by some (not only) Acer notebooks, because their touchbad became simply too hot to even touch it after few minutes of work. The coolers, often build in at the bottom or at the back of notebook are producing so hot air that you can hardly place your lovely friend into your lap. The noise produced by these fans is sometimes also pretty annoying and disturbing. And it may get even a bit worse: one Dell notebook exploded at some tech conference in Japan, reported by The Inqueror’s reader. The battery became probably too hot and exploded resulting in 5 minutes fire and dangerous explosions in the surroundings. It was only a mater of luck there wasn’t anybody nearby - it could injure him seriously. You can check out two pictures, although the exact model of this laptop isn’t known. A bit of safety by these manufacturers would be really fine…

Skype still rocks: free international calls

2008-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

An extremely popular VoIP application Skype continues to provide great-quality services. After the announcement of free landline calls between the USA and Canada, there’s another great offer: free international calls to 30 countries all over the world. These free minutes don’t include mobile phones, only landlines as before, but it’s still a nice offer. What’s bad for many people is that this will work again only in the United States - we all in Europe still have to pay for calling. Under the terms of the offer, which runs until 30 June, US Skype users signing up to the firm’s SkypeOut service will be offered 60 minutes of free calls to landlines in Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico and the UK among others. Skype users in both countries were previously required to pay for Skype calls from their PCs to traditional telephones. Good work Skype!

Final version of Opera 9 released: BitTorrent!

2008-10-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

There’s a new version of quite a popular web browser Opera 9 available at the homepage. It’s already time since you can get this browser free and coders are still working hard on many improvements. In my point of view, Opera tried exactly different approach than another popular alternative browser, Mozilla Firefox. While Firefox targets mainly new users with easy interface and limited amount of functions and features, Opera’s plan is to bundle everything you *could* need into one package. If I can share my opinion, I prefer the first method used by Firefox and expanding the area of functions by installing many of these widely available plugins, but there may be also many of you who gave their preference to all-in-one pack.

The new versions offers many new features, but the one is the most important for us, filesharers. There’s a support of BitTorrent protocol included in this new version. Developers decided to make it very easy, so it looks like normal file download with a little of additional info like the amount of peers, tracker url etc. An another nice new feature is support for IRC, which is still popular by some group of users. If you want to get little more info about new Opera, you can visit either the official homepage or one review written by some blogger. English version of Opera 9 has 4.2 MB which is almost the same filesize as for Firefox, you can also choose to download international one with more languages. It’s worth a short try, definitely better browser than IE…

Microsoft announces Windows Live Messenger

2008-10-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is starting the offensive. Microsoft said Monday that it was committing fully to Windows Live, with 20 new services currently in various stages of testing. Windows Live Messenger is the first global product from the lineup to come out of beta, and the company says others would soon follow. The instant messaging client was selected as the first to exit beta because of its importance in tying other Live services together. You can already download it at this page. Microsoft is feeling the heat from small, niche players offering software as a service, as well as from larger competitors. For example, its nemesis Google. has a growing menu of hosted software for consumers and businesses which includes spreadsheet, word processing, photo sharing, Web analytics, and mapping applications.

“In many ways Windows Live Messenger is one of the main hubs of Windows Live,” Windows Live and MSN corporate vice president Martin Taylor said. “Windows Live Messenger also is the first core service that incorporates the sleek user interface and look-and-feel that will be used across all of the Windows Live services.” The company also plans to open up the Windows Live platform eventually to allow advertisers, developers and businesses to build their services on top of Windows Live. An SDK is currently in beta testing. This will probably mean another portion of these annoying flashing banners in your IM client. However I’m pretty sure there will be some special tool / fix to remove these ads as it was with previous versions of the majority of clients for instant messaging. Microsoft has a quite hard position at the moment, because the market and users are used to “standards” like AOL, MSN or ICQ and new IM client will have to fight hard to gain some decent position…

Wikipedia protecting some entries from editing

2008-10-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no longer as freewheeling as it once was, protecting some subjects from sometimes contentious editing. The New York Times reports that at the moment 82 articles are barred from any editing while another 179 are “semi-protected,” with only people who have been registered members of the community for at least four days allowed to touch them. Albert Einstein, Christine Aguilera and China fall into the first, totally protected category, while U.S. President George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler only rate semi-protection.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, said he does not think the protection significantly detracts from its openness, pointing out that the vast majority of all sites are open for editing. While anyone on earth with Internet access could, in theory, edit or write a Wikipedia entry, Wales said most of the work is done by a core group of about 1,000 volunteers. Wikipedia is still getting bigger and bigger, is now the web’s third most popular news and information source and contains almost 4 million entries. By the way, did you know there’s also one entry about NewTorrents.info (not my work)?

Looking for job? Write your own virus!

2008-10-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

WWW still means more likely “World Wild Web” than anything else: Silicon.com has been contacted by an individual claiming to have written the Yamanner virus which targeted users of the Yahoo! webmail service earlier this week. The man claims to be from Iran and says he is just trying to find work by advertising his programming credentials. Sillicon adds: “While a number of antivirus experts who have seen the email claim it is quite likely the sender is indeed the culprit, there is no sure-fire way of confirming this. However, one added that whether or not the man in question wrote the Yamanner worm it is certainly “an unusual way to try to land a job”.

The email, sent from a webmail address, stated: “I don’t like to disturb no one. I am from Iran. I just looking for good job in good computer company and I wrote this worm only to prove that I have some abilities in web programming.” I’m not sure whether this can have a success, and once again, there’s no way how to prove whether is this mail from real author of Yamanner. However, it is an approach which has proven successful in the past when Sven Jaschan, who wrote the Sasser virus, landed a job with German security company SecurePoint on the back of his notoriety. Are you looking for job? Now you know the right way how to get a good position…

Microsoft’s plans to kill iPod

2008-10-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Microsoft really likes world dominancy and there are still some areas where they haven’t reached the majority share of the market. According to inside sources, the company is preparing to launch both a new rival to the iPod and a new music service bent on toppling iTunes from its perch at the top of the online music world. The company has apparently demonstrated a device which plays both music and video internally. It has also been negotiating with record labels about licensing for its own service. There is no specific word on when the device and the service will launch.

It would seem like an uphill battle for Microsoft against iTunes. They already provide the copyright software technology behind several of iTunesâ€™ rivals, but none of those sites have been able to make any more than a small dent in Appleâ€™s juggernaut. On the other hand, Microsoft will certainly have the money to fight the battle, and a base of Xbox devotees to harness and build from. There are already first more accure information from the unknown inside source: Microsoft’s service will mostly emphasize the pay-per-download. A subscription component will also be offered, according to early accounts of the planned service. The price of one song will be probably very similar as with iTunes, about $1. They will have pretty hard work at least with beating iPods majority share mostly in the USA but also in the rest of world, but as we already realized many times, nothing is impossible, especially if we talk about Microsoft. I also found one cool image showing probably the most-known blue screen of the history on the iPod. We can only hope this will not become a real thing…

The Pirate Bay strikes back in Sweden

2008-10-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

There are good news for all TPB fans: they are moving back to their homeland, Sweden. After the short visit of the Netherlands, they are moving servers back although their original, confiscated one weren’t returned yet. There’s no change of the internet provider, PRQ will take this work again. Site isn’t working at the moment, significantly because of this over-country transfer. However we can see nice message after checking DNS result of their actual IP address, short notice is pretty self-explaining:

hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org

There’s already a first message from TPB admins about the current situation: So the site took a trip to the Netherlands, but we got so homesick we just couldnt take it. We had to go back to beautiful Sweden! The big plan is to spread the site on different locations all over the world, so it will be faster and harder to take down. They really know how to beware another problems. Good work friends…

NewTorrents: when popularity becomes a problem

2008-10-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

I have some problems with NewTorrents.info. It’s nothing so serious, but it forced me to think for few nights (yeah, I think about stuff mostly before I get sleep :)). The problem is ironically the popularity of NewTorrents.info. This project was started cca 2 years ago as a very small website (you could find some screenshots of this old version somewhere at NT forums) with absolutely no intension to make some huge website or torrent portal. I think that I can see that after these two years, NewTorrents took up a decent position in BitTorrent world. Yeah, we are still not that big as many others, Mininova, Torrentspy and these websites offering all sorts of torrents, but that’s also one of the reasons why is this web popular. Sticking to pure scene releases limits our amount of torrents on the one way (and with this come some limit of visitors), but it also makes many people happy because they may rely on the quality and public trackers. And I’m not going to change anything about this.

In these days, the main website is visited by 50-70 000 unique visitors every day from the whole world. This is not as much as get some bigger torrent websites, but it’s still a decent amount of people every single day. Many webmasters would be really happy for these stats. And this now became a small problem. I had begun the website on free webhosting, but it was just in the roots, where it was visited by almost noone. Then I quickly moved the website to some third party servers or shared hostings kindly provided by satisfied fans or visitors of original NewTorrents. This provided few weeks of work, but the amount of visitors had become to increase quite rapidly and these not dedicated servers weren’t enough powerfull to handle the load and traffic. The next step was shared hosting on very powerfull server, which was able to provide enough resources for it in the time of the biggest boom. But the again, somewhere at the level of 20-25 000 visitors of day, webhosting company decided to dump it and offered us an own server. The price was just too high to pay for it so we had to choose some less powerfull option which did a great service for some months again.

I will not cover next boring details but just describe the current situation. NewTorrents.info are running on dedicated server at the moment with some 2 GB of memory and good CPU. The current problem isn’t the load of this server, it’s managing it fine, but there’s another issue: traffic. May be it’s hard to believe for somebody, but this single website “eats” a constant bitrate of 10-20 Mbits. The traffic for one month is ballancing somewhere between 2 and 3 terabytes of data. Ask some owner of web server, or just check some offers, and you will quickly realize the common offered traffic is somewhere about 500 GB or 1 TB a month. Noone will also provide you with 20 Mbits of unshared bandwith, you will be almost always placed on some shared line with hundreds of other clients. Our current webhoster just realized, it’s not much profitable for him, so he asked for incredibly higher price. The problem is also the foreign traffic, which is always more expensive than the transit inside one country - our traffic to abroad makes something like 98% of overall one. And that costs money. A lot of money.

I wouldn’t be probably writing this in case of some normal price or anything, but we are forced to pay little more than usual price for your leeching pleasure. One would think that such a website with mostly text and not so many graphic parts can’t make such a load, but the reality is slightly different. Our website is also heavily spidered by bots crawling torrent portals to gain new torrents and save them on their server. So the price we must pay every month is not a few dollars, its also not $100 or $300, but it’s something like $500+ which is quite a lot for such a hobby. That’s also the only reason why I must keep all the ads on the site. You probably think I must be earning millions, but that’s terrible wrong. The reason is simple, torrent sites aren’t accepted by the majority of ad serving companies, so we must take what is offered. And that’s often the biggest shit you can find on the net - companies paying you $0.01 or even less for 1 click. There’s also this nasty problem with spyware and adware, which is really killing my mind. I’m always trying to remove this ad with some malware/spyware/adware as soon as possible, but it’s just an infinite fight - you contact your ad company, it’s ok for few days, but then there’s another bastard misusing you, my visitors.

So the conclusion is that these money from ads are so-so enough to cover a still increasing hosting bills. I would be so happy to have fast & clean website just with one or two ads, but it’s quite impossible at the moment - I’d have to pay quite a lot of money from my normal salary (which isn’t too high anyway) every month to keep the server alive. We will be moving the website to a new dedicated server during this night or tomorrow, hopefully without bigger problems. It’s still my hobby so I’ll do my best to keep it the best, but please be kind of pleasant when you see some annoying ad or the server will load a bit slowly. We’re all just humans…

Hacker in US nuclear energy department

2008-10-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

People on such important places like the department of nucler energy in the USA should care a bit more about their security - A hacker stole a file containing the names and Social Security numbers of 1,500 people working for the Department of Energyâ€™s nuclear weapons agency. The data theft occurred in a computer system at an Albuquerque service center belonging to the National Nuclear Security Administration. The incident happened last September, but senior officials were informed only three days ago.

Linton Brooks, an administrator at the agency, said during a House hearing that he learned of the security breach late in September, but did not inform Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman about it. It had occurred earlier that month. Brooks blamed a misunderstanding for not informing either Bodman or Clay Sell, the deputy energy secretary. File contained names, Social Security numbers, birth dates , a code indicating where the employees worked, and codes showing their security clearances. Do you know where are floating details about you? Just putting your own name into Google may bring some surprising results…

Another busts on the US scene

2008-10-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

The reports of new scene busts are happening more and more often. These more interested of you may clearly remember wave of scene busts and raids, the biggest of them from the beginning of last summer. And now it’s here again: FBI agents raided two datacentres with some huge sites hosted there and took down over 20 boxes. The affected hostings are Layered Tech and Servermatrix, both located in Texas, US. Owners of these hostings also provided FBI names and address of server owners so it may have serious consequences too.

The affected release groups include such a big names as FLAMES, DiAMOND, SAGA and HAFVCD (all movie groups) or F4GC and TBE (0day appz). Some of their presites were completely shutted down while others get offline due to recent events. There are also reports about one topsite with 24TB of space being confiscated in Servermatrix datacentre. The reason of these busts is quite simple - the insecurity of such servers hosted as normal colocation servers. Everyone can start such a server and it’s not hard for the network operators to find out there’s some site with enormous traffic and huge portion of warez, and then report it to MPAA/FBI. Security should be always on the first place…

NFOs (sorry, not for public):

First.Info.On.US.Busts.2006-06-08.READ.NFO-CONFiRMED
Report.of.US.Busts.20060608.READ.NFO-SDE
Smoking.The.Race.Raided.5.Boxes.Warning.LT-BUSTS

iPods more popular than beer…

2008-10-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

The world is getting crazy. There’s some new research made by Ridgewood company between undergraduate students in the USA which showed that you are more “in” if you have iPod than if you go to pub with friends.

Nearly three quarters, or 73 percent, of 1,200 students surveyed said iPods were “in” - more than any other item in a list that also included text messaging, bar hopping and downloading music. In the year-ago study, only 59 percent of students named the iPod as “in,” putting the gadget well below alcohol-related activities. This year, drinking beer and Facebook.com, a social networking Web site, were tied for second most popular, with 71 percent of the students identifying them as being “in.”

Though beer might soon regain its No. 1 spot, as it quickly did with the Internet a decade ago, the iPod’s popularity is still “a remarkable sign,” Weil said. “For those who believe there’s an excessive amount of drinking on campus, now there’s something else that’s common on campuses.” I’m saying what’s wrong with this world, or at least, with american one? I don’t know anything better than going to some party with your friends, dancing with hot chicks, chit-chatting about nothing and of course, drinking a beer. May be the America is a bit different, but I really don’t see this trend in my country and I hope it will never be like this, admiring someone just because he has the iPod…

Toshiba unveils 200 GB laptop drive

2008-10-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

A common problem with notebooks and their low-capacity drives is probably the history now. Toshiba’s Storage Device Division (SDD) has introduced a 200 GB, 2.5-inch HDD, based on advanced Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology. This second-generation PMR offering also features, according to Toshiba, the world’s highest areal density at 178.8 GB per square inch, and the highest capacity in the standard 9.5-mm mobile PC format. At 98gms, the new 2.5-inch HDD is light-weight, and incorporates the Serial ATA (SATA) II interface with native command queuing that enables faster data transfer rates and improved technical performance. The HDD boasts of boosting data capacity to 1.67 times that of Toshiba’s highest capacity, conventional 2.5-inch drive. The new drive is a slim 9.5 mm, as it contains just two hard-disk platters and four heads.

According to Toshiba, with its new HDD, mobile PC manufacturers can create value with end consumers by providing enough capacity for gaming, video, music, and other multimedia applications. The mass production of the 2.5-inch 200GB MK2035GSS HDD will start in August 2006. Toshiba is the industry leader in mobile HDD shipments (2.5 inch or smaller form factors), with a 29 percent market share. The company has held this position since Q3 of 2005. This is a really huge jump from current biggest drives offering 120 GB and also a great news for all us, filesharers. The size of current games and movies is still increasing so every additional gigabyte is really welcomed change…

Lawsuit with spammer: 25 mil. emails a day!

2008-10-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

One of the world’s most notorious spammers has settled lawsuits with the state of Texas and Microsoft Corp. that cost him at least $1 million, took away most of his assets and forced him to stop sending the nuisance e-mails.Ryan Pitylak, 24, who graduated from the University of Texas last month, has admitted sending 25 million e-mails every day at the height of his spamming operation in 2004. At one time, Pitylak was listed as the fourth-worst spammer in the world by the Spamhaus Project, a London-based international clearinghouse that tracks spammers and works closely with law enforcement officials.

The civil settlements were both reached last month in federal court. As part of the settlement with Microsoft, Pitylak promised never again to send out false, misleading or unsolicited commercial e-mails. Pitylak, who plans to help Internet companies fight spam, said he would sell his $430,000 house and a 2005 BMW to help pay his fines and legal bills. The only problem is that his place is arleady replaced by someone else, so my email box may continue to be filled with tons of viagra, cialix and home mortgage crap. Burn in hell

Disney will start selling movies online

2008-10-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

Disney is planning to start selling movies over the internet via CinemaNow - including new films on the day of release. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Disney’s home video arm, is to make the films available on a download-to-own basis. This move will allow downloaders the ablility to purchase films, new and old, for viewing on personal computers and portable devices. Films downloaded using this new service will, however be copy-protected using some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Disney’s service, scheduled to begin on 6th June, follows a similar move by five of its’ Hollywood rivals, who launched similar services back in April. Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures collectively created a download-to-own movie service via Movielink. Up until April of this year, Hollywoods’ major studios had been reluctant to distribute their films on the internet, as they feared that it would encourage illegal copying of their films and harm revenue from box office and video rental sales. But now, it appears they are ready to cash in on the lucrative online market.

The Police Bay strikes back!

2008-10-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is now back under the new name: The Police Bay. This swedish tracker whose servers were seized by police and are checked for illegal content returned sooner than everyone expected. The thing is, they don’t have their hardware back yet, but as TPB’s admins said before, they moved into another country. This country is Netherlands with well known hosting company Leaseweb. Holland is popular for relatively free laws if we talk about the filesharing and torrents. A majority of world biggest torrent trackers and indexers is hosted in this country, including Mininova, Torrent Spy and now also The Pirate Bay. There are still some bugs and problems with the website so you can see some PHP errors or not working images, but I’m pretty sure these guys will fix it sooner or later. The only unanswered question is now the result of police investigation in Sweden - we are talking about serious amount of high-end servers which costed a lot of money. Anyway, long life TPB!

UPDATE: You can watch exclusive content filmed by cameras in server room showing the policemen in civil dress. There’s also a torrent floating around with video from the bust (83 MB). These bastards covered all cameras through the action so we’re unable to see the details of servers confiscation, but they were in really good mood…

UPDATE #2: The true unedited story of The Pirate Bay lawyer, Mikael Viborg. TPB announcing they are preparing servers also in Russia and Ukraine. Website of swedish police was unavailable on thursday evening because of DDoS. There’s probably 17 years old student behind this attack. A demonstration took place in Stockholm, Sweden today. It was organized by several youth political parties (picture #1, #2 and #3).

PC World’s 100 best product of the year

2008-10-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Still pretty respected computer magazine PC World published its traditional chart of 100 best products for this year. It’s an ideal chance to check out what’s hot and what’s worth buying or visiting. I’m writing visiting because there are also some websites and online services besides theÂ hardware. The top product for this year is Intel Core Duo, a new processor from Intel which brought really nice boost in performance and speed-up in work with multiple applications. The second place is very similar, just another two-core CPU from AMD, Athlon 64 X2. There also can’t miss some portable player, and because it’s mainly american magazine, there’s no wonder we can see Apple Ipod Nano on fourth place. To mention also some websites, Youtube.com ranked at 9th place. I can only agree with this ranking, because Youtube has become extremely popular and offers also nice features, all for free. We can’t forget on software - there were many brilliant applications released this year, PC World prefers products from Adobe - Adobe Photoshop Elements, an easy tool to edit your images, or Adobe Premiere Elements, lightened version of old good Premiere. Check out the list for more interesting products…

Serious anti-p2p raids in Sweden, Pirate Bay closed

2008-10-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Damn, it’s not that long time since last message about massive busts in fxp scene and now there is another warning for all filesharers. This morning will be probably the worst in the history of The Pirate Bay (TPB): all of their servers were seized and the site is closed now with a message about this raid. The police officers were allowed access to the rack where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the rack were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the rack, including the non-commercial site PiratbyrÄºn, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.

The Pirate Bay was considered as one of the most secure torrent site, with server in Sweden, where were laws not that strict about filesharing. Swedish politics then voted for a new law, which seriously increased the punishements for users sharing warez. We all know these mails which were displayed on their website, refusing every request from companies like Microsoft, Macromedia or Adobe, which wanted to remove their torrents from the server. There are some reasons for this server confiscating, as it’s written on TPB website:

The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.The TPB can receive compensation from the Swedish state in case that the upcoming legal processes show that TPB is indeed legal.

The current state of this affair is like this: all servers are confiscated, being checked if they were providing illegal content or not. What’s interesting is that servers of Pirate Byran, a partner website of TPB were also seized, although the website provided completely legal information and services. It’s not clear now, whether the website remains offline or it will be back online after few days. Administrators of Pirate Bay reported they want to get it online for every cost, which means also the opportunity to move servers into another country, which wouldn’t consider it as illegal activity.

If we look more in depth, there are some really nasty details: besides confiscated servers, three people, administrators of The PirateBay were arrested and are being investigated now. The usual warranty mentioned by all administrators of torrent websites is that their server doesn’t contain nothing illegal, just small encoded .torrent files. We must wait to the end of this police investigation to definitely say some conlusion but I’m aware that another wave of attacks against torrent websites could be launched in case of TPB marked as illegal. This would have an enormous impact on all torrent websites and indexes (probably including NewTorrents.info), resulting in many closed and confiscated websites.

For now, all torrents with Pirate bay as announce URL don’t work. The only way is decentralized tracking, also known as DHT which allows to connect people with each other, although they will not reach as good speed as in case of working tracker.

I got also some more information about this raid from my swedish friends. Also if you understand swedish, you can read some more articles about it. The people from Sweden talk about 50 policemen entering the serverroom where was Pirate Bay hosted and confiscating whole rack. All servers were visible marked with their URL so it wasn’t a hard task to find the correct ones. There’s also a picture of the person who contacted the police and told them about the servers - this man, Henrik Ponten is now hated by whole Sweden. The nicknames of admins being arrested by swedish police probably include the main admin known as Anakata and also co-admin using nick TiAMO. As the result of this police raid, some other swedish torrent trackers were already closed. The most popular one is probably SweBits.org. Many swedish users already refused visiting The Pirate Bay because they felt the site is being watched and many IPs being logged. Now it looks they were pretty right.

So the situation isn’t just ideal at the moment. I will try to keep you up to date with all hot info about this case, I am also planning some interview with one of available TPB admins. Good luck guys, we all hope you will get over this…

UPDATE #1: MPAA published a press release about the situation. Burn in hell…

Dell notebooks will come with Google software

2008-10-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dell and Google signed very interesting and also very profitable deal: Dell PCs will come with Google Desktop and Google Toolbar preinstalled and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 set to use a Google home page. The two companies will share Internet ad revenue. On Wednesday, at Goldman Sachs Annual Internet Conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed longstanding rumors that his company plans to partner with Dell to install Google search software on Dell computers.

The software, Dell said, would be included only in machines sold to consumers and small and midsize businesses. Though last quarter consumer sales comprised only about 14 percent of Dell’s revenue, the deal will involve millions of new computers over time. Google could get a significant boost in its competition with Microsoft for search-advertising revenue. By ensuring prime real estate on Dell computers, Google will gain exposure to millions of consumers who might otherwise have used Microsoft’s search technology. It looks like nice counter-attack against Microsoft but I really don’t see nothing bad about it when MS could bundle his own browser and media software…

Microsoft announces Internet Explorer 7+

2008-10-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has announced that its Vista-bundled browser will be renamed to “Internet Explorer 7+” to help differentiate between the separate build for Windows XP. IE7+ will include additional features such as protected mode, parental controls and an improved network diagnostics engine. According to the IEBlog, these features take advantage of native capabilities in the Windows Vista operating system and it wouldn’t have been feasible to port them to older operating systems.There are no feature differences between IE7 and IE7+ beta 2 other than the ones I mentioned above, however MS developers fixed a bunch of bugs between the two releases. More information on how to sign up for Windows Vista beta 2 with IE7+ will be available shortly, but for now, you can download the IE7 beta here. Microsoft have to be always special. At least I hope there will be not 20 bugs a month like in case of IE6…

Stylish keyboard: made of wood

2008-10-01T11:38:00.001-07:00

If you want to be original for every price, there’re pretty inventive things for you: wooden mouse and keyboard. I really don’t know anyone who would have something like this so you can surprise your friends with this strange retro-looking piece of hardware. There’s no wonder these products are from swedish company because everything natural is very popular in Sweden. Keyboard is standard: 104 keyboards, connectable through USB, no extra buttons. You can also choose from three types of wood. The mouse is available in two versions, wired one and wireless. Just two buttons may be little low for some people and again, the look of this mouse is at least a bit strange. But it’s not about functions this time. You can get these items for around $40 each. If you check the website of manufacturer, SwedX, you can find also wooden LCD displays and TVs…

Microsoft wants to kill JPEG: Windows Media Photo

2008-10-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

People in Microsoft probably like dominance. Microsoft introduced the Windows Media Photo picture format - .WDP - that promises better quality and smaller file sizes than JPEG files. The format uses a new compression algorithm that, according to Microsoft, can compress photos to 1/25th their original size - without visible impact on image quality. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and Windows XP, officials said. Microsoft boasts that its compression technology can offer better images at half the size of a JPEG file.

Although Microsoft plans to take a huge piece of graphic media formats market, it will be a hard fight. The support in Windows Vista may be a big help though, because we all know how does the story about IE and WMP ends - millions of people use them just becuase they are “default”. Microsoft already published some closer specifications in the Word document, but it may be still just a nice try to get some attention. There were already some serious attempts to start new graphic format, mainly from competitors like Adobe, but they had ended without bigger success. New format requires cooperation of many companies, mobile phones manufacturers, web browser developers and so on, so I don’t expect bigger changes in next few years…

Best of the Best: KOSS PRO4AAA Titanium

2008-10-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

If you want to really enjoy top quality sound, there’s ideal tip for you: new KOSS Pro4AAA headphones. These high-end headphones are made of titanium, so they are light and firm in one stroke.

The PRO4AAAT features titanium coating on 2 mil mylar diaphragms for a frequency response of 10-25,000 Hz. Oxygen-free copper voice coils improve signal transmission and conduction for accurate sound. Computer optimized ferrite magnet structures provide deep bass and treble clarity.

If you are wondering what does this mean, there’s an easy hint: their sound is simply brilliant, clear, bass-powered. Isolated ear cushions provide the best maximum sound and bass effects, while you almost don’t feel them on your ears. As every other KOSS model, there’s a lifetime warranty, so you don’t have to worry about some problems. If you want to get rid of your still-crying baby, this is an ideal choice. Suggested retail price is set to $149.99.

MFJM53: New 8 GB mp3 player from LG

2008-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

There’s another nice mp3 player entering the market. LG MFJM53, portable media player with 8 GB hard drive bets on nice original design and a wide choice of supported functions. This player weighs only 88 grams and the size is quite small too, 10 cm at lenght isn’t that much. What’s also nice is an OLED display with very clear characters, visibility and low energy consumption - LG says it should offer more than 30 hours of music playback which is very good in comparison with the others.Display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and 260 000 colours can be also used for video, but it’s not enough big for some serious movie watching. Anyway, support for WMA, AVi, MPG, OGG and JPEG is very nice. If you are annoyed by all of these songs on your drive, you can listen or record FM radio or make some podcasts with a built-in microphone. Simply another great product with bunch of features, nice design and ability to compete with iPod. The price isn’t set yet though.

Casio’s first 10 megapixel camera reviewed

2008-10-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

The run for more and more megapixels doesn’t end yet. Casio strikes back with new 10 megapixel digital camera: Casio Exilim EX-Z1000. Casio isn’t somehow big player on digital camera market, so every new product may bring some decent change - this new model probably has some nice potential. What makes this camera different is support for ISO 3200 and very nice and big LCD panel on the back: 2.8 inch monitor with great resolution and nice menu is really cool addition. Exilim EX-Z10000 is “normal” machine if we take a look at the zoom - 3x optical zoom is considered as a standard nowadays.

I personally prefer ultrazooms and that’s also why I’ve chosen Olympus 765 about two years ago. But back to Casio: camera is very economical with energy, you can make over 350 pictures with one charged battery. That’s pretty good number, because many camers has problems to get over 100 pics. Anyway, if you would like to buy this new gadget, you will have to pay something slightly above $400, which may be quite a lot for many consumers. You can check out one review over LetsGoDigital.com if you are attracted by this camera…

Security hole in MS Word exploited

2008-10-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Symantec, the antivirus company, warned yesterday that a new and yet-to-be-fixed security hole in Microsoft Word exposed computer users to cyberattacks. Vincent Weafer, the senior director at Symantec security response, said yesterday that would-be intruders had already tried to compromise PC’s at a Japanese government agency by exploiting the flaw. In response, Symantec has raised its ThreatCon to Level 2, which means an outbreak is expected. Microsoft is preparing a security update for Word that repairs the vulnerability, a Microsoft representative said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. The fix is scheduled to be released on June 13 as part of security updates, or sooner, if warranted.

The malicious software arrives as a Microsoft Word file attachment to an e-mail message. When the document is opened, the vulnerability is exploited. In the Japanese case, the Word document actually displayed some text related to a treaty with China, but while the text was displayed, a backdoor was installed on the system, Mr. Weafer said. Backdoor software allows intruders to enter computers surreptitiously. The vulnerability was confirmed in Word 2003, Symantec said. The malicious file caused Word 2000 to crash, it added. I really don’t understand the approach of Microsoft - they know about serious security flaw, but instead of immediate patching, they “schedule” the patch to 13th June, which stands for over 2 weeks of possible security attacks everywhere on the world. Yeah, I’m lazy, but these guys at MS are much worse…

Windows system requirements since 1990

2008-10-01T11:21:00.001-07:00

Revealing Windows Vista’s system requirements on Thursday gave an nice idea to guys over Techweb.com - they made an interesting comparison of minimum system requirements of MS Windows since the very first version published in 1990. They also added an average price of desktop PC and notebook, which is falling down through years. May be these olders of you still remember this frustrating installation of Windows 95 which came on 13 floppy disks. Minimum requirement of 4 MB RAM seems a bit funny now, when you’ll need at least 1 GB to run Windows Vista…

Apple counter-sues Creative for iPod

2008-10-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

apple ipod

The quiet war between two big producers of portable music devices is rising on power: Creative, which makes a range of MP3 players called Zen, had alleged that the Apple iPod user interface infringed on patents Creative owns concerning the method in which users search for music on portable MP3 devices. Now Apple has alleged that Creative has infringed on its iPod patents. At the moment Creative stocks are at an all-time low, while Apple Computer’s price is in the stratosphere. There were more than a few market watchers who believed that the Creative lawsuit launched against Apple this week was simply a ploy to make some quick money in an out of court settlement. If so, then it has back-fired.

Apple has 77 per cent of the US market, while Creative has less than 10 per cent. Although this ratio isn’t so good for Apple in Europe and Asia, they are still one of the leading companies producing mp3 players. Creative this month reported a record quarterly loss of US$114m, which it blamed on falling prices in the digital player market and unsold inventory. Sim Wong Hoo, Creative founder and chief executive, last year decided to challenge Apple for dominance of the MP3 player market but the effort appears to have proved wrong. I know iPods are extremely popular, but I personally prefer much cheaper and better equiped mp3 players from companies just like Creative. Even if the company is Asia-located, brands like iAudio or iRiver or Mpio can produce a pretty good device which has much more functions and features than over-hyped iPods…