News

Quote

The complaint alleges that Dunn and Hunsaker knew that HP's outside investigators were obtaining personal phone records through false pretenses - usually by lying to phone company employees - and that both "facilitated" the use of the ruse, which Lockyer says is illegal. The defendants, if convicted, face a maximum of 12 years in prison and a $30,000 fine.

Quote

Under that scenario, a person could use the browser to surf the Web, access documents on the hard drive or log onto Web-based e-mail. But the user would not be able to directly open documents from the computer desktop or run other programs such as Outlook e-mail software, Lindeman said. Microsoft said it won't stop a computer running pirated Vista software from working completely, and it will continue to deliver critical security updates. Still, the much harsher tactics contrast to Microsoft's earlier anti-piracy measures, which have involved instituting tougher piracy checks for Windows XP users who want to get free add-ons such as anti-spyware programs. In most cases, these were seen as annoying, rather than debilitating.

Quote

The book makes no mention of questionable investigative methods like pretexting, which involves pretending to be someone else to obtain information from telephone company employees. Nor does the book say whether Fiorina directed Sonsini to spy on any individual reporter or director. She writes that Sonsini personally interviewed every board member. He reported back to Fiorina that Thomas Perkins, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had previously served on the HP board and would soon rejoin it, had been a source for the article.

Quote

Just as we near the end of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, winds whirl and clouds churn 2 billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, forming a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States. Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the first definitive images of a dark spot on Uranus. The elongated feature measures 1,100 miles by 1,900 miles (1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers). This three-wavelength composite image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on August 23, 2006. The research team found the dark spot again on August 24. The inset image shows a magnified view of the spot with enhanced contrast. Uranus's north pole is near the 3 o'clock position in this image. The bright band in the southern hemisphere is at 45 degrees south.

Quote

The AOL OpenRide software lets people access multiple e-mail accounts from AOL and other providers, send and receive instant messages, browse the Web, listen to music, view photos and watch videos--all through one integrated screen. OpenRide offers access to the AOL Buddy List and Address Book and, if a contact is not online, the software turns an instant message into a text message or e-mail.

Quote

Sharp has produced a 64-inch LCD monitor that provides screen resolution four times that of normal high-definition screens. Normal HD screens have 2 million pixel points. The new Sharp monitor, which is being shown off by the company at the Ceatec consumer technology trade show in Japan this week, sports a 4096 x 2160 pixel-line resolution--double the number of vertical and horizontal pixel lines offered by a normal HD screen. This comes to almost nine million pixel points. Small details, like plumes of smoke over an aerial shot of a rural village, can be picked out. The monitor can be divided into quarters and display four high-definition videos at once.

Quote

Obese people become as addicted to food in the same way that junkies do to their drugs, according to a new study, which may explain their constant cravings. Evidence that the obese are food "junkies" comes from brain scans of seven obese people who were fitted with electrical devices designed to fool them into thinking they are full by making their stomachs stretch. The implanted devices, known as "gastric stimulators", provide low-level electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve, which runs from the stomach to the brain. When the device is switched on, the vagus nerve stimulation causes the stomach to expand and produce peptides that send a message of "fullness" to the brain.

Quote

The high prices for these devices also militate against a worldwide launch in the near future. Panasonic's BW 200 and BW 100 Blu-ray recorders sell for 300,000 and 240,000 yen, respectively. That's about $2,500 and $2,200. Sony's player sells in the same price range. Toshiba's player sells for 398,000 yen, although HD players use less-expensive components. Ohmori, however, said that's because Toshiba puts 1 terabyte of hard-drive storage in its player/recorder. The drive on the most expensive Panasonic unit is half the size at 500GB. High-definition video gobbles up a lot of hard-drive space. A dual-layer Blu-ray disk with 50GB on it can hold six hours of HD video, a Panansonic representative said.

Quote

Theo pointed out that when the open source community works together they can help improve the situation, "in the past, our users have shown that they can help us convince vendors to do the right thing. They have shown vendors the path towards freeing up many pieces of documentation or granting firmware distribution rights. This has helped with many vendors, most of them quite large." He explained that until Intel releases their firmware freely and without restrictions that they are not open source friendly as they claim, "by withholding, Intel is being an Open Source fraud." He went on to suggest that Intel should follow the example of other companies in the market, "Intel must do this firmware grant in the same way that Adaptec, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Cyclades, QLogic, Ralink, and LSI and lots of other companies have granted distribution firmware to be used by others." He concluded by requesting that the open source community contact Intel to help get them to change their policies, "let's win back the rights to run the hardware we purchased."

Quote

The code takes advantage of a weakness in core parts of Mac OS X and could let a user gain additional privileges. Apple provided a fix for the error-handling mechanism of the kernel last week, but the exploit appears to have been authored before then. "It appears to have been written well before the vulnerability was fixed," said Dino Dai Zovi, a researcher with Matasano Security who was credited by Apple with discovering the flaw when the patch was released. "It appears to be a zero-day exploit and may have been distributed before the patch was released."

Quote

"Internet Explorer, everybody knows, is not very secure. But Firefox is also fairly insecure," said Spiegelmock, who in everyday life works at blog company SixApart. He detailed the flaw, showing a slide that displayed key parts of the attack code needed to exploit it.

The flaw is specific to Firefox's implementation of JavaScript, a 10-year-old scripting language widely used on the Web. In particular, various programming tricks can cause a stack overflow error, Spiegelmock said. The implementation is a "complete mess," he said. "It is impossible to patch."

Quote

Family members of three people slain by a 14-year-old on newsman Sam Donaldson's New Mexico ranch sued the makers of the video game ''Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'' on Monday, claiming the crimes would not have occurred had the teenager never played the violent game. The $600 million lawsuit names several companies and Cody Posey, who it alleges played the game ''obsessively'' for several months before he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister in July 2004. Posey, now 16, was sentenced earlier this year to state custody until he is 21.

Quote

The Senate also could vote on a similar bill before Congress recesses at the end of the week. Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the Nov. 7 congressional elections. For its part, the White House announced it strongly supported passage of the House version but wasn't satisfied with it, adding that the administration "looks forward to working with Congress to strengthen the bill as it moves through the legislative process."

Quote

Verizon officials say the revenue growth opportunities for FTTH and the declining network costs make the project worthwhile. The investment in a fiber service will turn profitable after four years, the company contends. So far, Verizon has shown impressive progress in infiltrating the video services business and ramping up its FTTH services, say some analysts.

Quote

"She has admirably supported our business needs across the globe and will be missed," CEO Mark Hurd said in a press release regarding Baskins. "Stepping down was a very hard decision for her, but by doing so, she has put the interests of HP above her own, and that is to be commended." HP has acknowledged that it accessed phone records of board members and journalists, including CNET News.com reporters, as part of its leak probe. The company has also followed reporters and tried to trace e-mails in an effort to track down the source of leaks from the board of directors.

Quote

Opera Software, the makers of the Wii's Web-surfing software, cleared that situation up a bit today with news that its browser for the system would be free for a limited time. Gamers will be able to download the Opera browser from the Wii Shop Channel free of charge until June 2007, the company announced today. After June 2007, the browser will be available to download for an undetermined number of Wii points, the virtual currency of the Wii Shop Channel. The browser will support Flash and AJAX-based content, and while it will be customized for Nintendo's next-gen system, Opera promises it will have "the same complete standards support as the Opera 9 Desktop browser," with functions including bookmarks and zoom. The browser will also be designed to work specifically with the motion-sensing Wii controllers.

Quote

Intel's work on silicon photonics, including its recent announcement of a silicon laser, could help contribute toward the core-to-core connection challenge. Rattner and Prof. John Bowers of the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrated Intel's newest breakthrough model of silicon laser, which was constructed using conventional techniques that are better suited to volume manufacturing than older iterations of the laser. Many of the architectural nuances of the 80-core chip can be traced back to earlier research breakthroughs announced at previous IDFs. Connecting chips directly to each other through tiny wires is called Through Silicon Vias, which Intel discussed in 2005. TSV will give the chip an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1 terabyte per second.

Quote

Some telecom providers appear to have bolstered their security earlier this year after pretexting became the subject of congressional hearings and private lawsuits unrelated to HP's current woes. AT&T said last week that in a memo to its call centers it put in place additional verification requirements, though the company would not detail those measures. Cingular said it no longer permitted its representatives to divulge records of phone calls over the phone to customers. The HP investigators who placed pretext calls used remarkable ingenuity in extracting information from the telecommunications companies--this technique of getting people to divulge confidential information is broadly known as "social engineering."

Quote

"DRM is a technical device, but it's being used in an all-embracing sense. It can't be circumvented for disabled access or preservation, and the technology doesn't expire (as traditional copyright does). In effect, it's overriding exceptions to copyright law," Brindley said. The British Library hopes to protect statutory exceptions and fair dealing, which enable libraries to make and preserve copies of content, and make them available for research purposes and for disabled people.

Quote

Mercora's M works by giving subscribers access to their digital music library--only WMA, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formatted files--from any location via their phone. The software encodes and decodes all files to Ogg Vorbis, a low bit-rate format of near CD quality, before it reaches the earphones. Sounds cool, but forget about playing songs bought from Apple's iTunes Store--Apple uses a proprietary format called AAC, which Mercora M can't play. Music ripped from a CD to an iTunes library, though, is fair game, according to Avikk Ghose, Mercora's director of business development.

Quote

But attendees will definitely hear new information about Intel's quad-core chips. Enthusiast sites have been reporting that the processor will bear the "Core 2 Quadro" moniker, although Intel representatives have strongly denied that is the name for the upcoming chip. Whatever brand Intel chooses for Kentsfield, the desktop version, it will probably be associated with something expensive, as the initial buyers of Kentsfield should be early adopters willing to pay big bucks for the highest-performing chip on the market.

Quote

The EPLA is "anchronistic", and is even disliked by some large companies such as Nokia and GlaxoSmithKline, according to Austrian Green MEP Eva Lichtenberger. Others said the measure would effectively take the software patent issue out of the reach of the EU's democratic controls. "We are all for improvements to the European patent system, but we must continue the search for solutions within the framework of the EU," said Maria Berger, the PES' spokeswoman for legal affairs, and former French prime minister Michel Rocard, in a statement.

Quote

Like the 1987 movie, which parodied well-known science-fiction movies, "Spaceballs: The Animated Series" will spoof current blockbusters as well as every genre of entertainment from movies and reality TV to culture and politics. It is set to debut on cable network G4 in fall 2007. Production has already started on an initial batch of 13 episodes. Brooks, who will voice two characters in the show, co-wrote the pilot with longtime collaborator Thomas Meehan, who will oversee all writing for the series.

Quote

In 1998, the FCC directed the cable industry to develop a physical device--now called a CableCard--containing the security functions that could be inserted into the equipment of independent manufacturers. That made sure their boxes could be used with cable systems around the country. The FCC thought this separate security device would allow multichannel video program distributors to retain control over the security function while enabling independent entities separately to market navigation devices. The cable industry has so far supplied about 200,000 CableCards for use in more than 140 models of digital cable-ready devices. But the vast majority of cable subscribers continue to use equipment leased from their cable companies.

Quote

In her new role, Snyder plans to share Mozilla's security secrets with the world, strengthen ties with the security researcher community and rid Mozilla products of old, potentially dangerous, code, she told CNET News.com in a recent interview. Snyder is a self-described geek and the daughter of programmers. Before she was even a teenager, her mom taught her to program Basic on a Texas Instruments 99 computer. She went on to a career that included various security consulting jobs, such as at @Stake, which was purchased by Symantec.

Quote

The DOMINATOR TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF memory kit that we have reviewed today is by far the fastest production memory available from any company. Corsair has raised the bar when it comes to performance memory. Not only did they increase the frequency of their flagship part they also lowered the timings and temperatures at which the modules operate. To make things better they have room to overclock. Being able to hit 1.2GHz at default voltages with C4 timings is very impressive. If you want to have the ultimate memory kit for your dream machine the answer is simple - Corsair PC2-8888 modules are what you need...

Quote

Back in July we took a look at the PC-3200 version of OCZ's Special Ops ram and we were very impressed. The ram performed great, not to mention the awesome paint job on the heat spreaders. Today we are taking a look at some DDR2 from OCZ, called the "Special Ops Urban Elite". This time OCZ has outfitted the heat spreaders with Urban camo instead of the regular camo we saw on the previous version. The RAM is PC6400 running at 800Mhz so we will see how far we can push these modules.

Quote

Using the 2:3 ratio (DDR633) the best I could muster was 3-4-3-10 @ 235MHz. This is uncharted territory for me; I was barely able to run the Corsair at 210MHz with the stock timings, let alone these aggressive numbers!

Quote

We discovered last week that not every Intel motherboard is expensive; Gigabyte came out with 2 new boards supporting Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors for $90 and $120 respectively. Foxconn always has an entry-level solution, so it's no surprize that their P965 board is targeted to the mainstream market. However it does tout some overclocking features and as always, should be a rock solid performer. How does it compare to the popular Gigabyte solutions though?

Quote

In regards to the board itself, I am pleased with the layout. At first I didn't think I'd enjoy the vertical ram slots or even the way the socket bracket is, but I've come to prefer them over previous methods. However, one thing I found about the ram slots is that for whatever reason, it makes it harder to install modules. More times than not, installing ram can be a mindless process... I've done it many times. However here I actually felt that I needed to be careful so as to not accidental snap the modules pins. You need to grip the module well and carefully push it down and secure it. A few times I thought I had the modules turned around the wrong way, but I didn't. This is not a big deal, but was the first time I encountered this problem with a board.

Quote

The KA3MVP Extreme is a good example on how motherboard makers solve the lack of features in the ATI chipset. Both on the SATA-front and on the LAN-front ECS has added some third-party solutions. Even so the motherboard only got a single Gigabit controller, something that probably won't bother that many people. I did actually have some issues installing the drivers for the Agere controller though so for this article I choose to use the Realtek controller.

Quote

There are people on this planet that will spend over $1000 dollar on a graphics subsystem. But there are far more people around that just want to spend about $200-250 on an excellent, allround graphics card. If you fit in the last category, The XFX 7900GS might very well be the card you're looking for...

Quote

For CrossFire, there's a little more appeal to not having a dongle. It's not the dongle itself that's the problem, it's the expense of a CrossFire Edition master card. Take the X1900 GT, which at the time of writing weighs in at around £120-150, depending on bundle, cooling and what not. A CrossFire edition card to go with that could be £220 or more. So we must ask if the sacrifice made with dongle-less CrossFire is worth the ~£100 saving? It all depends on whether you want the most from your multi-GPU solution, or if all you really need is a boost that's good value for money. If you're after the latter, we reckon a pair of X1900 GTs might be the wiser option.

Quote

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that Congress should require Internet service providers to preserve customer records, asserting that prosecutors need them to fight child pornography. Testifying to a Senate panel, Gonzales acknowledged the concerns of some company executives who say legislation might be overly intrusive and encroach on customers' privacy rights. But he said the growing threat of child pornography over the Internet was too great.