After too many patches to IE 6.0 to remember. Why did MS wait so long to even start to mention IE 7.0? After all what do they have to gain with a browser anyway? In the early days when Netscape was serious competition to the browser wars MS was all over them with new toys and a browser that laced to their OS. Perhaps that was a mistake?

With their press for security of the OS and touting how hard they are working on making Vista the last word in security. I have to ask what about all the customers you are leaving exposed now?

MS has known for sometime the weaknesses in IE 6.0 then why not race to replace it with IE 7.0. You have spent years now patching it. I have to ask, with the fact that FireFox is a browser that is better in so many ways the biggest being security, why have you waited?

With Vista it appears they are taking the position, that we will not deliver anything until we are certain it is secure. You better not be wrong! Making a statement like this, sets yourself up for the hard questions later. The truth is that no system is perfect though it likely will be better.

What happened to the day's when the company actually raced to get something done? Firefox came from no where to the ruling browser on the web in no time. They have proven that security can be done well and they do not even own the API's.

According to an alert issued by Websense Security Labs, in San Diego, excerpts from actual BBC News stories are being used to lure IE users to Web sites that launch drive-by downloads of bots, spyware, back doors and other Trojan downloaders.

One version of the spammed e-mail seen contains a portion of a BBC News item published on March 27 about the Chinese yuan hitting a post-revaluation high against the U.S. dollar. After the legitimate excerpt, the hackers embedded a "read more" link that points to a Web site that contains a spoofed copy of the BBC News story from the e-mail.

Websense researchers found that the rigged site exploits the unpatched createTextRange vulnerability to download and install a keystroke logger without any user action.  The keylogger monitors activity on various financial Web sites and uploads captured information back to the attacker. It appears that this is the work of a well-organized identity theft ring, stealing bank log-ins and other sensitive user information.

The latest twist comes almost a week after the first wave of attacks started dropping a variant of SDbot, a type of back-door attack that gives hackers complete control of infected computers. SDbot allows attackers to control victims' computers remotely by sending specific commands via IRC (Inter Relay Chat) channels.

The earlier exploits were being launched from several legitimate Web sites that were hijacked and seeded with malicious code. These include an airline ticketing system, an insurance sales site and a site that sells e-commerce software.

The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) email protocol is fundamentally flawed because it was never designed to be secure in the first place and lacks any authentication of the source of an email.  Simply put, SMTP is based on the honor system, with no way to confirm the authenticity of the sender let alone track the sender.  What this means is that anyone can send email as any assumed identity from anywhere in the world.  I can say I'm the CEO of your company or I can say I'm the Pope when I send you an email and there is no way to confirm or deny it's legitimacy. 

The only way to level the playing field against spam is to upgrade the SMTP protocol beyond the honor system and make spoofing & Forging headers nearly impossible. We will call the new protocol as SMTP v2 and the existing SMTP protocol as SMTP v1.  Unlike some who are suggesting a new SMTP protocol all together which could never be implemented easily, SMTP v2 should be backward compatible to the existing protocol to facilitate a seamless migration. George Ou "Written 2003"

AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail again are the primary targets here! Since they offer no new way of determining spoofed or forged headers which is a fact they will have to admit. If you offer nothing new except charging money, how then have you realistically changed anything? The fact is without changing the protocol or adding something people would be willing to pay for, what is the point? Since they are charging the sender for an express lane for spam this does not seem like a valid approach to anti-spam.

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Grand Challenge. In 2001, Congress set a goal that by the year 2015, one-third of military combat ground vehicles must be capable of driving themselves autonomously. In other words, only on-board computer control without any human input or assistance is used. Unlike the Mars Pathfinder and Predator Drone that transmit video back to a screen at some remote location and a human then decides what to do, autonomous vehicles must possess all of the sensory and intelligence capability to make their own decisions. The motivation for this Congressional action was simple - to save soldiers' lives. While the entries were no doubt faced with many challenges along the way the fact is the prize was won.

In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Given the disheartening results of the 2004 Grand Challenge, in which no competitor had even made it through a quarter of the course, Thrun might well have been only cautiously optomistic. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the 2005 race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves.

Driverless vehicles compete in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. NOVA site

Microsoft Corp. is releasing new versions of its software packages for safeguarding and archiving e-mails and other corporate messages.

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, which was known as FrontBridge Technologies before Microsoft acquired that company, comprise of four products that can help companies do things like minimize spam and viruses and archive messages for legal and regulatory requirements.

The revamped product line will be available April 1 in most countries.

The products are offered as a service over the Internet, rather than as software that companies have to install. Web-based offerings are growing in popularity because they can be cheaper and easier for customers to deploy and less cumbersome for software makers to update. Microsoft, which makes most of its money from desktop-bound software like Windows and Office, is trying to make inroads into that field.

Redmond-based Microsoft says the products, which will be sold directly to businesses, are meant to complement other security safeguards that companies have on their premises.

What is not understood is why any government cannot simply have these sites terminated at once. Why is it that phishing is not viewed as fraud and theft? Oh PayPal is a big company it should be up to them. It is not hard to take a site down however as:AS4657 asname: STARHUBINTERNET-AS descr: Starhub Internet, Singapore. If APNIC is responsible for these IP addresses it seems that a law governing how one is responsible for their AS numbers and routes is not that hard. The contact listed for the domain name is Acidhurt@starhub.net.sg  Acidhurt is right out on front street how then could ignorance of the crime be possible? Visit the site here.. With all the members pictures to see who might be responsible. How hard is this really to figure out? What seems to be clear is that this type of activity is no longer hidden it is right out in the open.

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AjaxWrite is a powerful word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word formatted documents. Anytime you need a word processor, need to open a .doc file or edit a .doc file, simply point your Firefox browser at ajaxWrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be loaded. For 90 percent of the people in the world, the need to buy Microsoft Word just vanished. This won't make Microsoft happy, but software users should be very excited that software just got cheaper, immediate and modern.

But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com. These programs will push the boundaries of what people believe is possible today with web-delivered software. These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge. I'm convinced if you try a few of these products you will understand how the software business will fundamentally change.

Do you trust the "Microsoft insider" that apparently spoke to Australia's Smarthome News? The site claims that the source told them that up to 60% of the delayed Windows Vista's code will have to be rewritten over the next several months. Additionally, the company has apparently pulled developers from the Xbox team in order to meet an internal deadline to launch the operating system at next year's CES in early January. Smarthome also claims that Microsoft will also offer Media Center as an "optional package" with Vista, though we suspect that this isn't a new development, but rather refers to the Vista Home Premium version of the program, which will include Media Center and other goodies. We certainly hope that Smarthome's source is wrong about the 60% rewrite; although Microsoft has reorganized its Vista team, bringing in Steven Sinofsky from the Office group, rewriting that much code would take a lot longer than the nine months between now and CES (unless they're talking about CES 2009, that is). Then again, the company could always hire narf and blanka; they seem to work pretty quickly, and certainly know their way around Windows.

Update: Microsoft's Robert Scoble has checked in with the company's PR people, and says that the Smarthome article is "hogwash." Microsoft's PR agency, according to Scoble, says the article is "absolutely not true," and that, in addition to Vista not requiring a major rewrite, none of the Xbox developers are moving over to the Vista team. Separately, Microsoft said that, although the next version of Office will be done in October, and will be made available to corporate customers before the end of the year, retail versions will ship in January to coincide with the Vista release.

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don't go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces. Dojo lets you prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax requests with the most powerful and easiest to use abstractions available. These capabilities are built on top of a lightweight packaging system, so you never have to figure out which order to request script files in again. Dojo's package system and optional build tools help you develop quickly and optimize transparently.

Dojo also packs an easy to use widget system. From prototype to deployment, Dojo widgets are HTML and CSS all the way. Best of all, since Dojo is portable JavaScript to the core, your widgets can be portable between HTML, SVG, and whatever else comes down the pike. The web is changing, and Dojo can help you stay ahead.

One of the advantages of using a library is that someone else has though about optimisation for you. So for us, the library authors, we need to know which is the fastest way of doing things in our target environments. The best way to get an idea of the speed of things is to benchmark, so introducing a benchmark suite allows us to evaluate the performance of particular ways of doing things.

Dojo makes professional web development better, easier, and faster. In that order. "Get it here"

On Tuesday, an unlikely coalition of more than 50 groups, representing some 15 million people, launched a campaign to fight AOL's new pay-to-send email scheme.

In addition to Free Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation, coalition members include Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MoveOn.org, Gun Owners of America, the Association of Cancer Online Resources, the Humane Society, the AFL-CIO, RightMarch and others.

Cumulatively, these groups count more than 3 million AOL subscribers as members, or in excess of 15 percent of AOL's customer base.

While the organizations occupy almost every corner of the political landscape, we're united in opposition to AOL's plan to make large group e-mailers pay to bypass the email company's Swiss cheese spam filters and get guaranteed delivery to the inboxes of AOL customers.

AOL's Spam on Spam

AOL's pay-to-send plan is the latest media snake-oil scheme, designed to give users the impression of improved service while serving no one but the company’s bottom line.

In fact, the AOL pay-to-send plan could make spam worse. As AOL turns its attention to revenue generating email it has a cash inducement to let its free-to-send service grow increasingly unreliable.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham presents his company's new regime as a boon to end-users, stating -- misleadingly -- that a certification system will protect user inboxes from spam. This isn't true. AOL subscribers will receive certified email in addition to the regular traffic that clutters most inboxes.

"We continue to provide exceptional service to all email senders who conform to our antispam guidelines," Graham writes in a rebuttal to our campaign. "In fact, CertifiedEmail serves as a valuable, new standard and threshold for the delivery of legitimate email that will serve as a guidepost for other email senders to follow and adhere to."

Nice try, Nicholas. AOL hasn't solved the spam problem at all; they've merely created a second tier for delivery, one favoring those who can afford to pay AOL's express rate. The other tier -- which has been increasingly compromised by AOL's inability to distinguish honest email from spam -- will remain in place. It may get worse, even, as AOL tries to "incentivise" more users to move from the free lane to their toll road.

If you ever wanted a place to organize your playlists and pod casts listen anywhere in the world.

This is absolutely a brillant idea! Though it is currently in beta, we have been playing with it for days and it is seems flawless so far. If the idea even remotely attracts your attention then go sign up for your own portable playlist it is all free.  No ads all over the place, simple well layed out interface which just works. PortablePlaylist.com

The unofficial fix blocks access to the vulnerable component in the Microsoft Web browser, preventing malicious Web sites from taking advantage of the vulnerability, said Steve Manzuik, security product manager at eEye in Aliso Viejo, Calif. Microsoft does not have a fix for the flaw available yet.

Though eEye's patch does protect PCs against attacks that take advantage of the flaw, the company recommends installing the fix only as a last resort. "Organizations should only install this patch if they are not able to disable Active Scripting as a means of mitigation," Manzuik said. Disabling Active Scripting is Microsoft's suggested work-around.

"This patch is not meant to replace the forthcoming Microsoft patch, rather it is intended as a temporary protection against this flaw," Manzuik said.

eEye, which makes an intrusion-prevention product called Blink, crafted the fix at the request of its customers, Manzuik said. "Customers who don't have Blink deployed yet were looking for a temporary solution," he said. However, eEye has made the fix available for anyone, on its Web site.

Microsoft doesn't recommend installing eEye's fix. "We have not tested this mitigation tool," said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's Security Response Center. "We can't recommend it because we have not tested it...Customers should weigh the risk of applying something like this to their systems."

The vulnerability has to do with how Internet Explorer handles the "createTextRange()" tag in Web pages. Since the flaw was disclosed publicly last week, more than 200 Web sites have been found to exploit it. These sites typically install spyware, remote control software and Trojan horses on vulnerable PCs, according to security company Websense.

Microsoft has also seen the attacks, but Toulouse said "the spread rate appears to be relatively limited." That means there aren't many new attacks being launched. Microsoft is working with law enforcement to take down Web sites that are hosting the attacks, which are often hacked sites, he said.

Providing additional support for agile development on the Microsoft enterprise development tools platform, Conchango has introduced Scrum for Team System. The new tool lets development teams use the Scrum agile development methodology with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team System, or VSTS. Microsoft's recent delivery of the Team Foundation Server component of VSTS enabled London-based Conchango to deliver its solution, which had been in beta.

Scrum for Team System is a free agile software development methodology add-in for VSTS, developed by Conchango, in collaboration with Ken Schwaber and the Microsoft Technology Centre UK. Schwaber co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s and is one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, according to the company.

The plug-in, which will be available as a free download from www.scrum-master.com, will provide development teams with deep support for the use of Scrum, a popular Agile Alliance methodology, when using Visual Studio Team System. This will mean that the software lifecycle development product will recognise the best practices that are defined by Scrum, and build them into any work and processes conducted by the development team.

Thermal Quake leads HTPC Case market with Bach case. It has everything for the novice kit builder and all the features and size for the expert.  More Screen Shots and details available here.

	Model		VB8001BNS
	Case Type		Media PC Case
	Net Weight		8.0 kg
	Dimension (H*W*D)		170 x 430 x 450 mm
	Cooling System		Front (Intake) : 80 x 80 x25 mm silent fan, 2000rpm, 19dBA Rear (Exhaust) : Dual 60 x 60 x25 mm, 2500rpm, 19dBA
	Drive Bays - Front Accessible - Internal		8 2 x 5.25", 1 x 5.25" Accessory Bay 5 x 3.5"
	Material		Chassis: SECC
	Color		Black
	Expansion Slots		7
	Motherboards		Micro ATX , Standard ATX

Record and watch TV with your PC. Gain control over your entertainment experience. With Beyond TV, you determine what you want to watch and when you want to watch it. With incredible features and extensive setting options, TV is under your control.

More than a DVR, Beyond TV gives you...

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Features

Security experts have warned internet users to be on their guard against a new phishing and spyware scam targeting 2006 Fifa World Cup enthusiasts. The fraud is executed using bogus emails claiming to be from MasterCard offering free travel and tickets to the World Cup finals in Germany.

Recipients of the malicious emails are encouraged to click on a link to claim the prize. But doing so results in a key-logger downloading to the user's desktop. When the infected user accesses a variety of legitimate online banking sites, the key-logger mimics the website and captures personal banking information.

The scam has been detected targeting the following banking websites: bradesco.com.br, itau.com.br, unibanco.com.br, bancoreal.com.br, caixa.gov.br and caixa.com.br, according to security firm SurfControl.

InPhase Technologies, the world’s leader in holographic data storage, announced today that it has demonstrated the highest data density of any commercial technology by recording 515 gigabits of data per square inch. Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure from all existing recording methods because it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than only recording on the surface of the material. InPhase will deliver the industry’s first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity.

"IT professionals are experiencing enormous growth in their data archives," said Wolfgang Schlichting, Research Director, Removable Storage, IDC. "InPhase Technologies' announcement is an important milestone in storage density, demonstrating impressive capacity increases enabled by holographic storage. The technology represents a potential alternative to incumbent technologies for archival storage requirements," he added.

Densities in holography are achieved by different factors than magnetic storage. Density depends on the number of pixels/bits in a page of data; the number of pages that are stored in a particular volumetric location; the dynamic range of the recording material; the thickness of the material, and the wavelength of the recording laser.

In this demonstration there were over 1.3 million bits per data page, and 320 data pages spaced 0.067 degrees apart were stored in the same volume of material. A collection of data pages is referred to as a book, and InPhase’s PolyTopic recording architecture enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books. Three tracks of overlapping books were written with a track pitch of 700 microns. The InPhase TapestryTM material was 1.5 millimeters thick, and the laser wavelength was 407 nanometers.

“The latest results from our ongoing tests on holographic data density have surpassed expectations,” said Kevin Curtis, chief technology officer of InPhase. “We are particularly pleased at the rate of improvement. In April of 2005, we demonstrated 200 Gb/in2 data density and - a year later - the density has increased more than 2.5 times. “

The write transfer rate is determined by the time required to position the laser at the correct angular address, the speed of the shutter, the laser power, and the exposure time. In this demonstration the average exposure time per page was 2.7 milliseconds, which translates into a user write transfer rate of 23 megabytes per second.

The impact that these data densities will have on future products is tremendous. For the home video fan, one disk could hold the equivalent of 106 DVD movies. For IT managers dealing with archiving millions of email messages, higher densities mean savings on space, time, and power.

Michael Mangiona, president of offsite storage provider Data Solutions, adds that “with extremely high densities of holographic storage demonstrated by InPhase, IT companies such as Data Solutions benefit, as greater storage density ultimately translates into lower storage costs for us and for our customers.”

InPhase will be presenting several holographic storage papers at the Optical Data Storage Conference from April 23-26, 2006 in Montreal, Canada. In addition, InPhase will exhibit its products at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas next month, from April 24-27 in the Maxell booth C6932, Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. "Inside the box" 

This is our second warning in first wave of attacks against an unpatched flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has already begun, and security experts warn that the threat will grow significantly over the weekend.

Less than 24 hours after Microsoft issued details for IE users, malware hunters have started detecting drive-by downloads on more than 20 maliciously rigged Web sites.

It is already reported that a list of more than 20 unique domains and 100 unique URLs hosting the exploits, which are dropping a variant of SDbot, a dangerous family of backdoors that give hackers complete ownership of infected computers.

SDbot allow attackers to control victims' computers remotely by sending specific commands via IRC (Inter Relay Chat) channels. The backdoors have also been used as a keylogger to steal sensitive user information and spread to local network and to computers vulnerable to exploits.

Some of these attackers are the same people that were exploiting the WMF vulnerability. This will continue to get worse over the weekend, especially if they can figure out how to get the exploits to work efficiently.

One of the interesting things we're seeing is that the shell code doesn't work on a lot of these sites. That suggests they're testing the exploits and getting ready to do some major damage.

In addition to SDbot variants, the sites are dumping spyware and keystroke loggers on machines without requiring any user action. Simply surfing to these sites will hose your machine.

Priced as low as $139.00 each. With 2 in SLI total cost for Video $278.00 Hits The Low cost sweet spot.

Ultrasilent Cooling (Passive Thermal Solution) Yes Memory Clock 800 MHz Clock rate 400 MHz Chipset 7600 GS Memory 256 MB Bus Type PCI-E Memory Type DDR2 Memory Bus 128bit Highlighted Features SLI ready , Dual DVI Out , DVI Out , HDTV ready Performance: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS 400 MHz GPU 12 Pixel Pipelines 400 MHz RAMDAC Memory: 256 MB, 128 bit DDR2 800 MHz (effective) 12.8 GB/s Memory Bandwidth Interface: PCI-E 16X DVI-I, VGA, HDTV SLI Capable Resolution & Refresh: 240 Hz Max Refresh Rate 2048 x 1536 x 32bit x 85 Hz Max Analog 560 x 1600 / 1600 x 1200 @ 60Hz Max Digital

With the acquisition of Alienware, Dell will sell computers with chips from Advanced Micro Devices. The deal closes in about 30 to 45 days.

Alienware will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary, and Alienware CEO Nelson Gonzalez said that the deal will not affect its relationship with AMD. Granted, circumstances can change, but that's the plan now.

The number of AMD PCs Alienware offers rises and falls, but AMD chips are typically always part of the company's active line of computers. Right now, Alienware sells AMD-based desktops, workstations, media centers and a notebook.

The subsidiary nature of Alienware's status means that consumers won't see AMD chips in computers that are primarily branded under the Dell name (instead of being Alienware machines) as a result of this deal. But still, since Dell owns Alienware, they are technically Dell computers.

That leaves Apple as the only major computer maker selling Intel-based, but not AMD-based, computers.

Dell has resisted selling AMD-based computers for years for a number of reasons. The popularity of AMD's Opteron chip for servers, however, has prompted some to speculate that Dell may adopt Opteron.

Dell rarely makes acquisitions. The Alienware buy is only the third or fourth in the company's history.

The unthinkable has happened: Microsoft has delayed Windows Vista yet again.

Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division, announced on March 21 during a conference call that Microsoft is now planning to roll out Windows Vista in two stages. The business, volume-licensed versions of Vista will now ship in November 2006, as many expected. But the consumer, retail versions of Vista won't be ready until January 2007.

Until March 21, Microsoft officials had said Vista would be ready to ship in time for the holiday 2006 selling season. The delay will likely impact PC makers who had been counting on preloading Vista on new PCs this fall.

Allchin attributed the decision to delay the retail versions of Vista to quality concerns. "Product quality is the first priority. We won't compromise on that," Allchin said, reiterating his oft-repeated statement that product quality trumps all else when it comes to Windows.

When asked for further details, Allchin cited performance, drivers, testing and security as areas where Microsoft and some of its partners had concerns.

Microsoft is still planning to release the next test build of Vista, its "consumer Community Technology Preview" build, to an estimated 2 million testers sometime in the next quarter, Allchin said. Microsoft had been telling testers to expect that CTP build in April. Lately, however, some partners said they heard Microsoft might not make that April date.

Microsoft is still on track to release the Vista code to manufacturing in 2006, however, Allchin said. "We expect some to say that this [the next CTP build] was fine and why didn't they just ship this," Allchin said.

Microsoft plans to release a pre-patch advisory with workarounds for a "highly critical" vulnerability that could put millions of Internet Explorer users at the mercy of malicious hackers.

The advisory, which will be posted here, acknowledges a code execution hole that was discovered and publicly reported by Secunia Research of Copenhagen, Denmark.  Secunia said in an alert that the vulnerability is due to an error in the processing of the "createTextRange()" method call applied on a radio button control.

"This can be exploited by a malicious Web site to corrupt memory in a way that allows the program flow to be redirected to the heap," Secunia said in the alert, warning that successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code whenever the target visits the rigged Web site.

The vulnerability was confirmed on a fully patched system with IE 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2. It has also been confirmed in IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, Secunia said. The MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center) said in a blog entry that users of the new refresh of the IE7 Beta 2 Preview announced at Mix '06 are not affected. Lennart Wistrand, a program manager in the MSRC, recommended that IE users turn off Active Scripting to prevent a possible attack.

"Customers who use supported versions of Outlook or Outlook Express aren't at risk from the e-mail vector since script doesn't render in mail [being read in the restricted sites zone]," Wistrand added. The latest warning comes just 24 hours after the discovery, and public release, of a denial-of-service bug in the dominant Web browser.

MAC Spoofer 2006 MAC Addresses Changer Our Rating: (Good) MAC Spoofer 2006 enables you to change (spoof) the MAC address of your network card, regardless of whether the manufactures allow this option or not. The program comes as standalone executable, no install needed. Just run it, change your MAC address and restore it to the original when you're done with testing. Freeware

As the April 15th tax filing deadline approaches, cyber fraudsters are planning their attack on online tax filers to steal confidential information. Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ:WBSN) , a global leader in web security and web filtering productivity software, today announced that Websense(R) Security Labs(TM) has seen a rise in phishing attacks via fraudulent emails and websites that spoof the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Since December 2005, Websense Security Labs has been working together with the IRS and other organizations to investigate the rise of tax scams and better protect consumers and employee computing environments from increasingly sophisticated and dangerous internet security threats.
   
   Websense Security Labs has discovered tax attacks targeting the U.S. in several countries outside of the U.S. hosted on compromised web servers. For example, one of the largest IRS phishing campaigns claims that the taxpayer is eligible for a refund and needs to log on to a website to verify their information. Users receive one of a variety of email messages with a link to a fraudulent website. Upon accessing the spoofed tax website, the user is then forwarded to a fraudulent site that requests credit card information and other personal identifiers. The intent of these attacks is to dupe users into revealing confidential information which can be used for withdrawing funds.
   
   Phishing can present a serious security risk for consumers and organizations. Phishers are becoming more sophisticated in their deception techniques to lure employees to spoofed websites, as most employees cannot determine which is a genuine site and which is a fake. However, employees don't have to "fall for the phish" and actually enter confidential information on a phishing website to be compromised. For example, recent trends indicate that by just visiting a website, many types of phishing URLs can install spyware, such as a malicious keylogger, which has the ability to capture data including network passwords or social security numbers without their knowledge. It only takes one employee to click on a phishing site and accidentally give out confidential corporate data, customer records, network passwords, or trade secrets, to jeopardize an entire organizations' intellectual property.  Full Article

Industry’s First Ultra High-End 1GB Workstation Graphics Accelerator
Introducing the ATI FireGL V7350 with Avivo™ Technology – the ultimate graphics accelerator designed for the most complicated 3D models, the largest data sets, and highest definition textures. The FireGL V7350 delivers industry leading features and performance for the most demanding workstation users running OpenGL and DirectX based applications. ATI Technologies said Monday that it had begun shipping a workstation graphics card with a gigabyte of onboard memory.

Two versions of the card, the FireGL V7xxx series, are now shipping. In addition to the more prosaic V7300, which includes 512 Mbytes of on-board RAM for a suggested price of $1,599, is the FireGL V7350, which includes the full gigabyte for a suggested price of $1,999.

As the prices indicate, the cards are designed for high-end graphics workstations, where the additional frame-buffer memory will be used to facilitate graphics rendering for CAD and other applications.

For those with extra pocket change, however, the cards will offer the ability to drive multiple HD displays, creating images over 5,000 pixels wide, ATI said, using multiple monitors that can accept up to 16 bits of information per RGB component.

"The high clock rates of these new graphics cards, combined with full 128-bit precision and extremely high levels of parallel processing, result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times," ATI said.

Wavesat, developer of WiMAX chipset and software, and Sanmina-SCI, a leading global electronics manufacturing services company, announced an agreement for production and cost optimization of the WiMAX Mini-PCI. The low-cost, small-form factor WiMAX 3.5 GHz Mini-PCI modules are now available for volume delivery anywhere in the world.

The WiMAX Mini-PCI modules are based on Wavesat's recently launched WiMAX 3.5 GHz Mini-PCI reference design, and incorporates Wavesat's Evolutive DM256 chipset and MAC coprocessor. Plus, the WiMAX Mini-PCI modules are fully compliant with the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, offer easy upgradeability to 802.16e-2005 for basic mobility applications, and support TDD and HFDD, 3.5 and 7.0 MHz bandwidths and modulation up to 64-QAM.

"We are excited to be working with a WiMAX pacesetter such as Wavesat," said David Dutkowsky, EVP for Sanmina-SCI's Communications Infrastructure Division. "Wavesat's unique WiMAX expertise and strategic positioning, in conjunction with our manufacturing capability and international presence, will result in tangible benefits for the WiMAX industry worldwide."

Recently announced in Red Herring.com, Clearwire - a so called 'start-up' - is looking to invest about $1 billion in funds to build its own WiMAX network, and plans to offer wireless broadband service over wide areas. Specifically, Clearwire is anxious to acquire spectrum and build new markets, Chief Strategy Officer Ben Wolff told RedHerring.com.

Clearwire is definitely a new firm, but with a solid history. Clearwire was founded in October 2003 by Craig McCaw, the cellular phone pioneer who sold McCaw Cellular Communications to AT&T in 1994 for more than $11 billion.

With the new capital available, Clearwire may start to compete with incumbents like Comcast and AT&T in the growing high-speed broadband Internet market. More specifically, the company could partner with satellite-TV companies who want to offer a bundle of video, voice, and data in their quest to compete with the cable and telephone companies.

Speculation on the potential pairing grew earlier this year after News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said his DirecTV company was looking for a way to enter the wireless broadband market. Clearwire was considered a leading candidate to help.

“What we like about our business plan and technology is there are a number of parties we could partner with,” said Mr. Wolff, declining to say whether the company is negotiating with DirecTV. Clearwire could even partner with wired and wireless phone companies as well, he mused.

"Building up a network like ours is very similar to building up a cellular network,” said Mr. Wolff, who is also co-president. Clearwire currently offers service in more than 200 cities and towns in the United States, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Mexico. In the U.S. the company operates under the licensed 2.5 GHz band in places like Jacksonville, Florida; Modesto; California; and Bellingham, Washington.

Clearwire deploys an early, nonstandard version of WiMAX. The equipment for its network comes from its wholly owned subsidiary NextNet Wireless.

The service is considered fixed because phones or other mobile devices that work with the technology are not yet available. Nevertheless, Clearwire’s service can transmit voice and data at speeds comparable to DSL and cable. And because it is wireless, there is no need for fiber-optic cables or copper wires.

Currently the speed of the connection is up to 1.5 Mbit/second. The company charges $30 to $37 a month for the service and $5 for the modem, to a rather small number of customers.

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Of course, it wouldn’t be a palmOne handheld if we didn’t push the boundaries of what a handheld can do. That’s why we included Bluetooth® wireless technology for wireless connectivity. Now working and communicating will be that much easier. Taking work to go? View and even edit spreadsheets and word processing documents right on your handheld. Plus you can sync your calendar and contacts from Outlook1. And don’t forget to grab your MP3 tunes. You’re going places.

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Hollywood, Interrupted reports that sources inside Paramount and South Park studios say  the scheduled repeat of one of my fave South Park episodes, "Trapped in the Closet" - the one that satirizes Scientology and has R. Kelly singing to  Tom Cruise to "come out of the closet" - was pulled due to Cruise threatening parent company Viacom. Cruise reportedly threatened to pull advertising for his upcoming film, Mission: Impossible: 3  if the South Park episode was aired. 

In their long history with Comedy Central, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have never been censored, not even for their infamous "Bloody Mary episode", but Cruise throws his weight around and suddenly the boys have their mouths duct-taped? Following the news that Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who voiced The Chef on the show, quit because he was offended by the Scientology spoof, this story, if it proves to be true, doesn't really serve to make Hollywood Scientologists look like good sports, eh?

South Park has poked fun at every single religon on the planet in their bits. Did Hayes and Cruise get their panties in a twist over any of those episodes? Nope. But when Parker and Stone turn their lens to an examination of the foundations of Scientology and put Tom Cruise and John Travolta in a closet together, Cruise suddenly brings on the threats? The irony is that you can view the funnier parts of the episode on Comedy Central's website anyhow or in flash here. Parker and Stone are rumored to have been muzzled by the big dogs on the truth around the episode being pulled, but knowing those two, I wouldn't expect them to just take this sitting down. I smell a South Park episode with Cruise as a Scientology terrorist coming around the bend...