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5-GHz CPUs are should soon be on store shelves, according to chipmakers at a conference in Silicon Valley this week.

Chip-making advances announced at the SPIE Microlithography Conference in San Jose, California, showed that Moore's Law is alive and well. Moore's Law dictates that chip densities double every 18 months, leading to smaller chips with double the processing power. But the Law has become doubtful lately as lithography and other chip-making processes butt up against the limits of physics. Naysayers say the chip industry has shrunk chips about as far as they can go.

But IBM, for example, said this week it will defy "conventional wisdom" and print circuits with 30-nanometer ridges, a third of the size of the 90-nm chips in production today, using current lithography imaging processes. Also this week, Dutch-based lithography equipment maker ASML Holding NV demonstrated its 42-nm production process and said it had the equipment to make 35-nm chips.

Both developments followed CPU-giant Intel's announcement last month that it had produced a 45-nm SRAM, or Static Random Access Memory, chip.

Shrinking chip ridges below today's 90-nm sizes means PCs in the near future will likely offer performance jumps equivalent to those achieved through the last 20 years (remember when a system with a 468-MHz Pentium and 64M of DRAM was considered a high-end PC?)

According to chipmakers and a technology road map from the Semiconductor Industry Association, we can expect transistor counts on CPUs to double from 1 billion to 2 billion in two years, and to an astonishing 4 billion in four years. The SIA roadmap predicts chips will continue to become smaller and denser through 2020.

Intel and AMD have said CPU clock speeds -- measured in gigahertz -- will not increase to the same degree as in years past due to constraints in power consumption and heat. However, the companies will take advantage of increasing chip densities to pack multiple cores onto each chip, resulting in performance leaps. Intel said there may be as many as 100 cores packed on a single processor within 10 years.

While CPUs with 5-GHz clock speeds in four years is probable, analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 agreed that performance boosts on levels commensurate with years past will be based on multi-core CPU designs.

Also, the amount of DRAM per chip should continue to double from a maximum of 1 Gigabit now to 4 Gigabits per chip in four years, according to memory chipmakers and the SIA roadmap. As DDR2 memory designs become increasingly available now for 1-Gb DRAM chips, it is possible to pack in modules with high-end motherboards that can handle more than four GB of DRAM. With the advent of 2-Gb memory chips in less than two years, 4-Gb devices are expected to follow in four years.

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• Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
• Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
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• Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
• Make your site easy to use -- and useful.
• Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
• Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
• Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Reports that Apple Computer Inc. has taken legal action against so called hacker who has been working on OS X for Intel to make it work on other processors appear misplaced. The OSx86 Project yesterday speculated at Apple action against the hacker.

It was posts and downloads from Maxxuss that spurred Apple to take legal action against the site, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to force it to remove certain links and posts from its forums.  When Maxxuss' own site disappeared it made it seem like Apple may have extended its action.

However, this morning the site reports that the hacker -- Maxxuss -- has simply launched a new Web site and blog to share what he find out with others who want to run Mac software on their Intel-based PCs.

What I simply do not understand is Apple's strong approach. If a person buy's their OS and finds a way to run it on a clone, what has apple lost really? In fact they stand to gain a large following. If they simply do not support running this on a non apple machine and people are left out in the cold where then is the problem. It seems that making it clear that anyone who sells such a machine would then be violating the law as they are then cloning for resale.

I really think that flooding the market with MAC OS on many or any Intel platforms would not be a bad thing. If they state they would never support such a beast should be clear. If people are paying for the OS where then is the problem? Personally I have refused to buy a MAC over this position. I personally would not want a clone but I think that all forms of dictatorships aren't the type of people I do business with.

I would simply like to ask Steve and WAZ did you guys forget your days in college? Seems that everyone else remembers your bout with the phone companies but you! Selling an OS without support could in no way harm Apple in fact it would only place the OS in places it was never seen before. Who knows you might even find out as many PC people that it runs faster on AMD than it ever did on Intel.

The at-large open-source community of MySQL users is panicking over Oracle's second buy of the database's two transactional storage engines, Berkeley DB, although enterprise users are far more sanguine.

"God*it"—that's a polite rendering of the very first public reaction of the MySQL community to Oracle's purchase of both of the open-source database's crucial transactional back-end engines, InnoDB in October and Berkeley DB from Sleepycat Software on Feb. 14.

The fear is based on the vision of Oracle forcing its tiny competitor out of business, thus leaving the MySQL user community in the lurch, forced to fork the source code.  "The reason MySQL DB users are concerned, even though the source is GPL, is because MySQL DB is heavily dependent on MySQL AB. If MySQL is forced out by Oracle, what's left, aside from some source code?" one Slashdot poster asked.

"First they bought Innobase, giving them the ability to cut MySQL's transaction [capabilities] off, then they buy another open-source-friendly DBMS which has transaction capability," another Slashdot reader posted.

"Now, if you were the largest commercial DBMS vendor in the world and you were worried about the OSS people moving into your space, what would you buy in order to stop them cold? Me? I'd keep them out of atomic transaction space."

At any rate, MySQL's April user conference is fast approaching—a time when the company has promised a full rollout of its product roadmap and storage engine architectures.

Until then, MySQL is sticking by the premise that trying to kill open-source products by buying companies that make open-source products is like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean.

America Online Inc., seeking to encourage its subscribers to sign up for high-speed connections, is raising the price of its main dial-up plan to equal that of its new broadband offerings.

That means most subscribers will pay $25.90 a month for either dial-up or broadband beginning March 9, although AOL is offering discounts to dial-up subscribers who commit to a year. AOL currently charges $23.90 a month for unlimited dial-up access.

"We're doing this because a majority of AOL members will be able to get high-speed connections and access the AOL service for this new price," spokeswoman Anne Bentley said Tuesday. "Hopefully it's an encouragement for them to get high-speed connections."

Although AOL has been shifting its focus to providing free articles, video and other materials on its ad-supported Web sites, the company sees paid broadband accounts as key to making that strategy work.

Personally I love it when a company this big rarely understands why a customer is even on dial-up in the first place. Most are in rural areas which broadband is either difficult if not impossible. The giant lacks understanding of a number of issues, and this is but another which will only cause people to make the right choice. What I personally fail to understand is why people on dial-up from AOL in the first place when others are already much cheaper.

Memory Speed:  The link between the CPU and memory is called the memory bus. Often, it runs at the same speed as the Front Side Bus (FSB), which regulates the communication between the CPU and lots of other system components. The newer Intel Pentium Processors seem to run better with the memory using an asynchrous 4:5 memory divider, meaning that the memory is running faster than the front side bus. The bus speeds are measured in MHz, or million clock cycles (CC's) per second.

Modern processors transmit 8 bits of data on every clock cycle, and all Athlon 64 and the older Socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs run with a 200MHz memory bus. Newer Intel Pentium CPUs that use the LGA775 socket use either a 266MHz or 333MHz memory bus speed. The memory bus speed depends on whether they're an Extreme Edition or not - standard Pentium CPUs use a 266MHz memory bus, while Extreme Editions use a 333MHz bus.

If you multiply 400 (200 times 2 as Double Data Rate (DDR) memory runs at twice the clock speed) by 8, and you get a theoretical maximum figure of 3200Mbits/s transfer - hence the memory rating speed PC3200 found on the label of most new sticks of DDR memory. With the newer Pentium CPUs, you will see modules labelled with PC2-4200 (DDR2-533), PC2-5400 (DDR2-667) and modules up to PC2-8000 (DDR2-1000).

Memory Latency:  Addressing memory is much like reading from a large, multiple page spreadsheet. It doesn't matter how quickly you can read, before you can start you have to find the page the data you want is on (this is known as tRAS), work your way to the row and column the data's stored on (tRCD), when you've found the cell you want it takes some time before you start reading (CAS) and when you get to the end of a row you have to switch to the next, which takes time (tRP).

tRAS is the time required between the bank active command and the precharge command. Or in simpler terms, how long the module must wait before the next memory access can start. It doesn't have a great impact on performance, but it can impact system stability if set incorrectly. The optimal setting ultimately depends on your platform - the best thing to do is to run Memtest86 on your system with variable tRAS settings to find the fastest setting for your system.

The tRCD timing relates to the number of clock cycles taken between the issuing of the active command and the read/write command. In this time, the internal row signal settles enough for the charge sensor to amplify it. The lower this is set, the better - the optimal setting is either 2 or 3, depending on how capable your memory is. As with any other memory timing, setting this too low for your memory can cause in system instabilities.

CAS Latency is the delay, in clock cycles, between sending a READ command and the moment the first piece of data is available on the outputs. Setting CAS to 2.0 seems to be the holy grail with memory manufacturers, but the difference between tight timings and high memory bus speeds is an arguement that we hope to settle over the course of this article.

The tRP timing is the number of clock cycles taken between the issuing of a precharge command and the active command. It could also be described as the delay required between deactivating the current row and selecting the next row. In conjunction with the tRCD timing, which relates to the time taken between the issuing of the active command and the read/write command, the time required to switch banks (or rows) and then select the next cell for reading/writing or refreshing is a combination of the two timings.
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After dealing with many issues about user passwords and clients saying; I did not do this, or that, how is your mail server doing this? Well let's first say the obvious, a mail server simply is not smart enough to do anything on it's own. It will not selectively pick a user to mess with.

After spending three hours messing about with a user saying all I ever use is the web interface to make sure I never get a virus, and I am absolutely certain that no one has my password. I have never given it to anyone!! It was quite clear that the person was doing little to help the situation. He was more concerned with proving that the mail server was messing with him, and he finally had the proof.

After hours of digging through the logs of every single transaction the mail server had made over several day's it was quite clear he was incorrect and someone had got his logon and password. They had clearly attained it in a cyber cafe where he been on holiday.

I asked the fellow have you ever heard of a key logger? I knew we were in trouble when his reply was what is that? It is clear that you are sending emails from the US and France minutes appart. So someone has that logon and password. Rather than spending even more time explaining how they work. I would suggest a rule for anyone traveling. Change your password each time you use an unknown network! Paranoid perhaps, but then your link to your identity has to be protected. It is more logical than thinking your own mail server is messing with you.

The best approach when planning a vacation trip. Change that password regularly. It is totally impossible to know the security of a publically open network like a Cyber Cafe or even a Hotel or Motel. You know better than leaving cash in your Motel or Hotel room right! It should be logical to not leave your passwords laying around. A keylogger can have this information in a matter of second and using your ID to make you a major spammer on the web. Or worse yet intercepting confidental company information. There are people everywhere, that work to make the best of your information.

A rare piece of malicious software targeting Apple's Mac OS X operating system - instead of the more common victim, Microsoft Windows - has been spotted online and appears to be spreading. Like many computer viruses, the bug lures people to click on it by posing as something else, in this case a file containing a picture of the next-generation Apple operating system.

The malicious software causes computer programs to crash and transmits itself through an instant message program for the Mac called iChat. To get infected, users must download the file, called "latestpics.tgz," and install it on their computer. Infected computers will then automatically attempt to send the program to all contacts on the infected user's "buddy list."

Mac users typically have not had to worry about the computer worms and viruses that regularly hit the Windows-using world. It's a regular debate among techies whether this is because the Mac operating system is inherently more secure or whether computer hackers simply do not bother attacking an operating system that is not widespread. Apple Computer Inc. has less than 5 percent of the U.S. computer market.

Apple released a statement yesterday warning users to download files from only companies they have confidence in. "Apple always advises Macintosh users to only accept files from vendors and Web sites that they know and trust," read the statement. Apple's Web site yesterday afternoon did not appear to give Mac users any notice of the bug, and a spokesman was uncertain whether the company would update its operating system in response to this specific threat.

Hackers have released software that could be used to take over Windows PCs that lack the latest Microsoft security patches. But while this code is dangerous, security experts said today that it had yet to be used by attackers in any widespread way.

The attack code exploits two separate bugs in Windows Media Player, which were addressed in Microsoft's MS06-005 and MS06-006 advisories released Tuesday.

The MS06-005 bug concerns a flaw in the way the Media Player processes bitmap files, while MS06-006 has to do with the Media Player plug in for non-Microsoft browsers.

Of these two bugs, Microsoft rated only MS06-05 as critical, but both could be exploited to seize control of an unpatched machine, according to the French Security Incident Response Team Web site, which has published examples of the malicious code.

In fact, the code that takes advantage of the MS06-006 flaw may be of greater concern to Windows users, said Craig Schmugar, virus research manager with McAfee Inc.'s Avert Labs. "From a vulnerability side, MS06-005 is a concern, but from what we've seen so far, the MS06-006 exploits are further along."

So far, none of the code is being used much by attackers, he said. "Clearly there's been activity on the exploit-code writing side, but we haven't seen that translate into impacting customers."

Another security researcher agreed with Schmugar's assessment. "Yesterday we got a lot of reports of [the code] being used, but they turned out to be false positives," said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer of the SANS Internet Storm Center. "I haven't seen anything really used in the wild."

Security intelligence outfit iDefense Labs is offering a $10,000 reward to any hacker who finds a worm hole in Microsoft's products, but the software maker isn't exactly thrilled by the gambit.

One day after iDefense, of Reston, Va., announced the bounty as part of a newly implemented quarterly hacking challenge, Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., believes paying for flaws is not the best way to secure software products.

Of course Microsoft believes that responsible disclosure, which involves making sure that an update is available from software vendors the same day the vulnerability is first broadly known, is the best way to protect the end user.

The hacking challenge is part of VeriSign-owned iDefense's controversial VCP (Vulnerability Contributor Program), which offers financial incentives to anonymous researchers who agree to give up exclusive rights to advance notification of unpublished vulnerabilities or exploit code.

iDefense Labs, defended the new program, insisting that it promotes the concept of responsible disclosure and keeps information on critical zero-day flaws away from malicious attackers.

It is strange that Microsoft offers $250,000 as a bounty to help capture a virus writer, but frowns on paying for the information that would stop the propagation of the virus.

Should all vendors should be paying for vulnerabilities? In a free enterprise, everything has a cost and a value. We have recognized that value and we're willing to pay for it. Then vendors should be doing the same thing?

Peter Mell, a computer scientist who manages the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) NVD (National Vulnerability Database), said dangling incentives for hackers to target a single vendor could set a dangerous precedent.

Microsoft has finalized the members of its next-generation desktop line-up. As expected, standalone Tablet and Media Center Editions are no more.
After months of maintaining that it had not yet finalized its Windows Vista line up, Microsoft seems finally to have decided upon a half dozen core Vista versions. Plus two additional releases customized for the European Union that won't bundle in Windows Media Player, as ordered by European antitrust regulators.

The Windows Vista SKUs, officially, are: Windows Starter 2007, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Home Basic N, and Windows Vista Business N.

However, as some Web commentators have noted, there is no Windows Vista Small Business Edition on the current list. Such a SKU was supposedly part of Microsoft's Vista plans, as of quite recently. There also is no mention of any 64-bit-specific Windows Vista editions on the Microsoft Web site.

Microsoft currently offers six different versions of Windows XP. The line up includes XP Home, Professional, Media Center, Tablet PC, and Professional x64, and the Windows XP N editions.

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One Chinese blogger stays on the move, uses multiple blogs, and says the demand for non-corrupt political officials is the real foe of censorship.

Li Xinde has no First Amendment to protect him as an investigative reporter in China. But he does have a knack for finding stories of corruption and abuse that make their way even to state-run media outlets. "I can still spread news across the whole country in just 10 minutes, while the propaganda officials are still wondering what to do," Li told Reuters.

He described how he has to work to avoid arrest, by shuttling around to different Internet bars in rural China: "It's what Chairman Mao called sparrow tactics. You stay small and independent, you move around a lot, and you choose when to strike and when to run."

On the topic of businesses like Yahoo and Google choosing to yield to censorship requirements in order to operate in China, Li said he understands the business reasons, but, "morally it's wrong to sell people's freedom."

His freedom has become more difficult to maintain over the past two years, the article noted. Though he isn't famous, he has built enough of a reputation that he is something of a marked man.

Still, he has reason to fear. Evidence prosecutors obtained from Yahoo in China has contributed to the jailings of two journalists, and others who have published stories on the Internet also languish in prison, the report said.

As more Chinese citizens move online, their interest in the habits of politicians could be the ultimate undoing of censorship and media suppression:

Li said Chinese people's demands for clean, accountable officials, and their salacious curiosity about bad ones, were the censors' ultimate enemy.

"Our party always said revolution depended on the gun and the pen -- the military and propaganda," said Li, echoing a slogan of Mao's. "The gun is still firmly in the party's hands, but the pen has loosened."

Ever since beating down Netscape & Co however IE has been quite stagnant in terms of innovation, and has been one of the biggest security holes in an increasingly wild internet full of malicious code. A lack of competition imbued Microsoft with a sense of security in their dominant market position and so nobody saw any sense in spending money improving something with no realistic competition.

Internet Explorer 7 interface

That has been changing of late with the introduction of fresh-faced upstarts in the form of Mozilla Firefox and Opera among others. The introduction of new features such as tabbed browsing, the integration of the likes of RSS; and, arguably most importantly overall, the plugging of security holes has seen these browsers steal a fair enough chunk of IE's market share to make the industry sit up and take notice.

In response to this Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that along with Windows Vista the world is to see a new version of Internet Explorer. This new and improved IE appeared then and seems now, as we have the second beta in our hands, to mainly be concerned with playing catch-up on the young pretenders.

New features

Introducing native support for tabbed browsing and RSS feeds are just two of the modernising steps Microsoft is taking with Internet Explorer (IE7). Ironing out bugs and plugging security holes, such as the always-open ActiveX controls which have caused so much headache in previous versions of the browser, are two of the other main concerns.

When you first fire up the beta it may take you somewhat aback to see the navigation bar ripped to shreds and the classic File, Edit, View toolbar missing from sight. Microsoft has taken the top of the browser window and treated it to a complete makeover. The navigation bar has the Back and Forewords buttons on the left hand side, and the Refresh, Stop and search bar to the right.

In default mode you have another bar beneath this. The first new icon is the star which, when clicked, opens a sidebar containing the favourites menu, RSS feeds and history. Integrated RSS is the feature everyone is hopping around with IE7. The prediction is that RSS will become substantially more mainstream as millions of Joe Windows Users discover its delights through IE7.

Moving right from the star one comes to the add/subscribe plus sign, which allows you to add individual pages or groups of tabs to your favourites, as well as allowing you to import/export favourites. Moving right again with multiple tabs open there is the Quick Tabs button, which allows you to quickly switch between images of all your open tabs. This can be handiest when you have a lot of tabs open in the one window and need to be able to distinguish them by more than simply name.

MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered.

He did, however, say why he turned down Oracle's offer: the desire to keep his company's independence. "We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL! Oracle didn't immediately comment on the acquisition offer.

Though it is increasingly diversified, Oracle's primary business is selling its own proprietary database software. MySQL, in contrast, is a leader among several companies trying to commercialize rival open-source products.

Oracle already has bought two small open-source database companies--Sleepycat on Tuesday and InnoDB in 2005. But its open-source ambitions clearly are larger; for example, BusinessWeek reported that Oracle is expected to acquire open-source application server maker JBoss.

If the big boys such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and Microsoft have their way, enterprises soon will have little use for the wares that most of the security vendors here are hawking.

It's rare that those three vendors would all agree on anything, but in speeches and interviews this week, executives from all of them have said that it's time to build security into hardware and software from the ground up and stop trying to fix problems after the fact.

Of course, each vendor has a different idea about how to accomplish that goal, but the underlying idea is the same: Make security an integral part of the network, and not an add-on.

To Cisco, this means enterprises buying into the company's Self-Defending Network strategy. In his keynote speech at the conference, Cisco CEO John Chambers showed off the company's new Security Management Suite, which is designed to automate protection features and management among routers, switches and client devices.

The Cisco Security Manager piece of the suite will enable administrators to create flexible policies that can be shared among devices and then modified on the fly to defend against new threats.

"Automating that process is a fairly scary thing for a lot of people. Integration is classically the hardest and most expensive thing going. Will we get to automation? Yes, but this is more of an interim step to help solve the problem."

Sun executives have their own ideas about where security should lie. They believe security should be provided not by firewalls, IDS boxes or anti-virus scanners, but by the network infrastructure and the software running on it.

The company has started shipping its Trusted Extensions for Solaris, a toolkit that hardens the operating system. The idea is to make security a transparent part of the OS, not a group of add-on features.

Redmond is not standing still either. Many of the features, such as integrated anti-spyware software and upgraded online identity management tools, are things that dozens of security vendors are trying to sell as stand-alone products.

Many observers believe that once those technologies are integrated into Windows, they will quickly become commodities, much like browsers are today. But Gates knows there is still much more work to be done on security, by Microsoft, Sun, Cisco and hundreds of other companies.

Microsoft Corp. has reported a problem with one of its security patches released yesterday that requires some users to take additional steps to ensure it installs properly.

The problem affected patch number MS06-007, which fixes a TCP/IP vulnerability in several versions of Windows that could allow a denial-of-service attack. Microsoft called the patch important but not critical, and said users should install it as soon as possible. It was one of several patches released yesterday (see "Microsoft issues seven security patches").

Soon after its release, Microsoft discovered a problem for users who tried to install MS06-007 through the following channels: Automatic Updates, Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), and Systems Management Server 2003 when used with the Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates (ITMU), the company said.

Customers using Automatic Updates don't have to take any action because the patch will install properly with their next scheduled update, Microsoft said.

However, Microsoft Update and Windows Update customers who visited those sites before 8:30 p.m. Pacific Time yesterday need to revisit them and accept the security updates being offered, the company said.

Likewise, WSUS and Systems Management Server 2003 administrators who synchronized their servers to obtain the updates before 8:30 p.m. Pacific Time yesterday should manually synchronize their servers and approve the new updates, Microsoft said.

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A would-be hacker was being investigated by police Monday after threatening to attack the internal computer network of the Turin Olympics organizing committee.

The man — a technical consultant for the TOROC committee — illicitly gained access to off-limits sections of the network, police officer Fabiola Silvestri said.

"This consultant — who is now a former consultant — said in a very strong way that he could do certain things to the network," TOROC spokesman Giuseppe Gattino said. "Nothing has happened and all the passwords have been disabled."

Officials declined to reveal the consultant's identity, and Gattino said he didn't know the reasons for his threatening behavior. No charges were immediately filed against the man.

In a separate case, police found that a Turin antiques dealer had acquired five Internet domains that had similar names to Olympic Web sites. If accessed, the domains redirected users to the dealer's Web site, which also carried Olympic logos and other copyrighted material, Silvestri said.

Once he had been told that what he was doing was illegal, the dealer deleted the material and redirected users from his domains to Olympic Web sites.

Microsoft Corp. has won backing from major cellular networks for a new generation of phones designed to transform mobile e-mail from executive accessory to standard issue for the corporate rank-and-file.

The partnerships, with operators including Vodafone and Cingular, to be announced Monday at a mobile industry gathering in Spain, could spell more trouble for the embattled Blackberry and other niche e-mail technologies, analysts say.

Unlike the Blackberry and its peers, phones running Microsoft's latest Windows Mobile operating system can receive e-mails "pushed" directly from servers that handle a company's messaging — without the need for a separate mobile server or additional license payments.

As costs fall, Microsoft is betting companies will extend mobile e-mail beyond top management to millions more of their employees.

Vodafone Group PLC is to sell the phones under its own brand, in a joint marketing deal, targeting companies that already run Microsoft's Exchange software on their servers. Exchange is the collaborative glue behind Microsoft's popular Outlook application, which manages appointments and electronic address books in addition to e-mail.

Together with Cingular Wireless, Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone will also deliver phone software upgrades to subscribers who are already running the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system on their smart phones.

Microsoft laid the groundwork for its e-mail offensive with an October update to Exchange — which led the server software market last year with 48 percent of global sales, according to technology research firm Gartner.

 Microsoft Corp.'s plans to rebrand its free e-mail, instant messenger and Web search products under the name "Live" could be interpreted as a sign that MSN — the unit that previously housed those products — is a sinking ship.

But John Nicol, the executive recently put in charge of MSN, insists that isn't the case. In an interview Thursday, he said the changes will allow MSN, Microsoft's Internet portal, to focus more on providing content such as entertainment and even home videos.

Nicol, a longtime Microsoft executive who took over as general manager of MSN about three months ago, said the revamped MSN will include more opportunities for users to contribute their own content, such as posting their own videos or rating hotels on the unit's travel site.

A major focus will be on providing more video content online, aiming to go beyond just rebroadcasting television. As an example, he cited an MSN Web site, launched last summer, that complemented a reality show search for a new lead singer for INXS.

(In a separate arrangement, The Associated Press is launching an ad-supported online video news network using technology and advertising support from Microsoft.)

Microsoft Corp. announced final licensing and pricing information for its soon-to-be-released Windows OneCare™ Live, the all-in-one, automatic and self-updating PC care service aimed at helping consumers more easily protect and maintain their PCs to keep them running well. Now available free to new beta testers in the United States, at http://ideas.live.com, Microsoft^® Windows OneCare Live will be available in June from retailers and via the Web for an annual subscription of $49.95 MSRP for up to three personal computers. To thank its valuable beta customers and offer an easy transition to the paid service, Microsoft also announced today a promotional deal offering the first year of Windows OneCare Live service for $19.95 to beta customers who become subscribers between April 1 and April 30, 2006.

“Consumers have made it clear they need more assistance than what’s offered today, and we are excited to deliver the value of improved protection and maintenance in one comprehensive solution,” said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of the Technology Care and Safety Group at Microsoft. “Windows OneCare Live eases the frustration of protecting your PC and gives consumers greater peace of mind so they can spend less time worrying and more time doing the things they enjoy.”

Windows OneCare Live helps make it simpler and easier for consumers to enhance the overall health of their personal computers by offering automated protection, maintenance, performance tuning and support in an all-in-one package. Hundreds of thousands of people have tested Windows OneCare Live since the beta was launched in November 2005, and Microsoft has continually added features — such as backup for external hard drives — based on their feedback. People have particularly liked the simplicity of the all-in-one nature of the service and, according to recent surveys conducted by Microsoft with Windows OneCare Live beta testers, the vast majority of testers said they would recommend it to a friend or relative.

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Google has announced a major update that will affect the ranking of web pages in Google's index. In contrast to the usual algorithm updates, this update will be much bigger because it changes the way Google works behind the scenes. Google has given the update the name "Bigdaddy".

What is Google's Bigdaddy update?

Google uses a network of data centers with different IP addresses to answer search queries. These decentralized servers share the workload of indexing web sites.

The upcoming Bigdaddy update is not an algorithm update but a change in Google's data center infrastructure. It contains new code for sorting and examining web pages. According to Google's search engineer Matt Cutts, the update will be live in February or March.

Less spam, more content and a new Google spider?

Google is updating the data center infrastructure to handle potential spam problems such as 302 redirections or canonical URLs more efficiently. In addition, the new infrastructure will allow Google to develop more advanced algorithms and larger databases.

Another reason for the new data center infrastructure is that Google wants to be able to index different content types. Google is now testing a new search engine spider that is based on the Mozilla browser.

The new spider should be able to index more than traditional search engine spiders, possibly links within images, JavaScripts or Flash files.

How can you test how Bigdaddy will affect your rankings?

Some Google data centers that use the new Bigdaddy system are already online. For example, if you go to 66.249.93.104 you can test Google's new data center.

Google even wants your feedback. Click the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" link at the bottom right of the result page. Enter your feedback and use the keyword bigdaddy so that Google knows that your feedback is about the new data center.

It's hard to tell how the Bigdaddy update will affect your web page rankings. If you have a spam free web site with good content and many incoming links, the update should have a positive effect on your Google rankings.

Two of the world's biggest e-mail account providers, Yahoo Inc. and America Online, plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters, representatives of both companies said Sunday.

The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.

Both companies have long filtered e-mail by searching for keywords commonly contained in spam and fraudulent e-mail. AOL also strips images and Web links from many messages to prevent the display of pornographic pictures and malicious Web addresses. Both practices sometimes falsely identify legitimate messages as junk mail, making life difficult for businesses that rely on e-mail.

"We were hearing not only from members but also e-mail partners that they wanted a different way of delivering e-mail that would stand out in the inbox and would guarantee them delivery," said spokesman Nicholas Graham, adding that AOL, a division of New York-based Time Warner Inc., will start offering the service in the next two months. Company spokeswoman Karen Mahon said Sunday Sunnyvale-based Yahoo will begin offering a similar service in the coming months.

This is too funny, let's get this straight... You want to charge people to not do anything to their mail which has proven unreliable due to your filters which do more harm than good???? If you had built a proper mail system, as we have been stating for months and put this control in the hands of your users none of this would matter. What is so complex about putting the white-listing in the hands of your users where it belongs.

If you developed this software in house the team should be fired. If you paid an outsourcing company to do it, you should get refund. People talk bad about MS when they make a mistake of any kind. Now AOL and Yahoo can dictate whatever foolish policy they want and people say nothing. Where are the M$ Zealots when there is something like this happening right out in the open?

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Still free of charge! Build complex regular expressions by selecting components from a palette Test expressions against real or sample input data Display all matches in a tree structure, showing captured groups, and all captures within a group Build replacement strings and test the match and replace functionality Highlight matched text in the input data Test automatically for syntax errors Generate Visual Basic or C# code Save and restore data in a project file Maintain and expand a library of frequently used regular expressions   Here are some of the additional features available in Expresso 2.x Expresso Analyzer interprets and diagrams a regular expression to aid in understanding and debugging Analyzer produces an English description of the expression that can be automatically incorporated into comments in the generated code Improvements to the user interface New "Partial Match" and "Exclude Match" enable testing selected portions of a regular expression to aid in debugging Code generation now supports Managed C++ More extensive options for customizing the generated code Multithreaded operation allows interruption of time-consuming matches Performance tester for timing optimization Improvements and added features in the Expression Builder More extensive Help features Built-in regular expression tutorial Improvements to the Expression Library Bug Fixes

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AnonymizerR Inc., the leader in online identity protection technology and software solutions, today announced that the company is developing a new anti-censorship solution that will enable Chinese citizens to safely access the entire Internet filter-free, and also free from oppression and fear of persecution or retribution. This new program expands upon Anonymizer's history of human rights efforts which provide a censor-free Internet experience for those in oppressed nations. Anonymizer's new anti-censorship solution for Chinese citizens will be available before quarter's end. The solution will provide a regularly changing URL that users can access to open the doors to unfettered access of the World Wide Web. In addition, users' identities will be protected from online tracking and monitoring by the Chinese government. 

The communist government has taken a hard line against freedom of the press and access to information on the Internet. Google and others have been forced into a box by the Chinese government's strict requirements, but Anonymizer stands firm on the issue of protecting civil liberties. The company has been protecting basic liberties for more than a decade. It enabled safe Internet communications for families split on either side of the Kosovo conflict; it was used previously by the Voice of America to ensure that news Web sites were not blocked by the Communist government in China. Anonymizer also works in conjunction with the Voice of America today to bring safe Internet access to Iranian citizens. 
       
   Its Web site is home to the world's most popular Internet privacy service, Anonymous Surfing, which defends users from the most prevalent Internet privacy and security threats. Anonymizer identity protection solutions have been used to protect billions of Web pages since the company's inception in 1995. Anonymizer is privately held and headquartered in San Diego, California. (anonymizer.com)

As the world waited for one computer virus to strike on Friday, another wriggled its way into the Russian stock exchange and knocked it offline.

Computer experts had warned that 3 February could bring gloom for many as a computer virus called Nyxem was scheduled to start deleting files on machines it had infected.

Nyxem is programmed to randomly delete Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as pdf files, zip files and several other file types. The virus was released several weeks ago and has spread by forwarding itself to email addresses found on the computers it infects.

But widespread damage failed to materialise and by early evening UK time on Friday several anti-virus companies said they had received no reports of incidents involving Nyxem. Patches against the virus had been released on 16 January.

But a collective sigh of relief was tempered by news that the Russian stock exchange has been subjected to an attack instigated by an unnamed, and apparently unrelated, computer pest.

Specific hack

Dmitry Shatsky, vice president of the Russian Trading System (RTS) said in a statement that a virus had infected a single computer used to test trading software that was connected to the internet. The entire network had to be temporarily shut down on Thursday as experts sought to isolate the infected machine and scanned others PCs for signs of infection.

Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky said sources had revealed that the infected machine was controlled remotely to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against other systems on the trading network.

This involves bombarding a system with huge amounts of irrelevant information in an attempt to bring it down.

"While all the world was in a frenzy over the damp squib that was Nyxem, this attack infiltrated the RTS and could have potentially given hackers access to their systems," adds Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for computer-security firm Sophos. "A virus which can disrupt a stock exchange can have obvious financial consequences, as well as harm the important credibility of an institution in the public's eye."

Adding Blogging to Your Apps with My.Blogs and Visual Basic 2005

My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that shows how to easily provide programmatic access to blogs in your applications. Chris Mayo shows how easy it is to read and publish blog entries within Visual Basic 2005 using My.Blogs. Full source code is provided under "Related Resources".

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