One day after patching a widely exploited flaw in its Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft Corp. has a new bug to worry about, this time in PowerPoint.

Attackers have been exploiting a newly discovered bug in Microsoft's Office presentation software in extremely targeted attacks, McAfee Inc. reported yesterday. Researchers were made aware of the attacks when a customer submitted two different malicious PowerPoint files, both of which exploited the same vulnerability, said Craig Schmugar, a virus researcher at McAfee. Both files installed malicious remote access Trojan software that then attempted to connect to an outside Web server, he said.

Though McAfee is not releasing technical details of the exploit, the security vendor says that it has confirmed that the attack works on three versions of Office running on the Windows 2000 operating system: Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Other platforms and other Office applications may also be affected, but McAfee has not yet had time to complete its testing, Schmugar said.

Schmugar has blogged about the issue on the Avert labs site.

Microsoft "has concluded that this issue affects users of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Office XP," the company said in an statement. Microsoft and other security vendors, including Symantec Corp. and McAfee, have added signatures to their security products so that they can detect this malicious code.

Six men have been charged with orchestrating a phishing scheme that targeted AOL users, the Department of Justice said Wednesday.

The men are accused of harvesting thousands of AOL e-mail addresses and then infecting victims' PCs with malicious software that would prevent them from logging on to AOL without entering their credit card numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information. Under the scam, victims would receive fake e-mail greeting cards that would silently infect their computers with the log-on software, according to a grand jury indictment. Victims were also spammed with phoney e-mail messages that claimed to have come from AOL's billing department.

Due to a central server meltdown, your credit card information was lost," one such e-mail read, according to the indictment. "In order to enjoy your AOL experience and keep your account active, you must enter your credit card information within 24 hours." Some of the fake greeting cards claimed to come from Web sites such as Hallmark.com or BlueMountain.com, the indictment states.

AOL users appear to have been the primary targets of the fraud, but others may also have been targeted, according to Tom Carson, a spokesman for the United States Attorney's office for the District of Connecticut. "The investigation is ongoing," he said. "I think we can say the bulk of those targeted were AOL users, but we can't say with 100 percent certainty that they were the only victims," he said.

The accused are believed to have defrauded thousands of individuals, U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said in a statement. "These are insidious crimes that wreak havoc on the lives of victims, and we will seek strict terms of imprisonment." The alleged scam was conducted over a two-year period, beginning in 2004, the U.S. Attorney said. Proceeds from the crime were used to purchase gaming consoles, laptop computers and gift cards, the indictment states.

The men were actually indicted on fraud charges last week by a federal grand jury in New Haven, but the charges were not made public until Wednesday, when three of the men pleaded guilty.

Intel made an official announcement on its response to AMD's Torrenza technology. AMD made waves earlier this year when it announced that it would open up its Opteron platform to the industry, allowing other manufacturers to create and develop add-in components that communicate directly with the system processor and memory. Going beyond that, AMD also mentioned that Torrenza would allow companies to create accelerators or co-processors that could be used directly in an Opteron socket.

Intel said that like AMD, it also plans to open up its chipset platform technology. The move would be an unprecedented move for Intel, as it has been guarding its platform for the longest time. Intel's primary goal is to introduce an alternative to AMD's HyperTransport. The technology would allow devices to communicate on a much faster pathway than PCI Express alone could muster. Interfacing directly with the front-side bus (FSB), devices will be able to communicate directly to the processor and or other accelerators. Non-Intel chips will be able to plug into a Xeon socket for example, and work parallel to the main processor or processors.

With the introduction of an open FSB platform, Intel will also be making a move towards integrating memory controllers directly onto processors. This is something that AMD has been doing for several years with the original Opteron processor. previously reported that a number of large companies were already partnering with AMD to create accelerator and other co-processors. The decision to open up its platform has propelled AMD into the enterprise market in very large way. It will be interesting to see what Intel's move into an open space will do for the industry.

Currently, the technology is expected to be introduced sometime in the next one to one and a half years. Some analysts speculate that Intel will show off an open FSB specification in 2008 on Itanium, and on the Xeon sometime in 2009. Reports say that Intel is currently working with several companies to create co-processors -- they too would be able to plug directly into a Xeon or Itanium socket.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini was not shy to talk about the upcoming 45nm process nodes the company has planned for the second half of 2007.  At the center of this new process evolution is the Fab D1D in Hillsboro, Oregon.  Intel's D1D Fab in Oregon is already producing test wafers, and will be the first CPU facility at Intel to ship 45nm silicon. The D1D facility is a lean 220,000 square feet and Intel's first 45nm Fab.

However, Intel has two more 45nm fabs coming online within the next 18 months.  Intel Fab 32 in Arizona is expected to come online in late 2007. A third 45nm fab, dubbed Fab 28 in Israel, is coming online in 2008.  

Going from 65nm to 45nm is very prominent on Intel's roadmap. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that Intel currently has 15 45nm products in development, and designs for several of them will be completed next year. Until 2008 however, 65nm technology will still be the most prominent technology. Intel said that its first 45nm processor will be Nehalem, which will go into production sometime in 2007 and be introduced in 2008.

The move to 45nm will also bring along such features as higher clock speeds, more cores per processor and more cache per processor. Intel is also claiming that 45nm processors will achieve a 300% increase in performance-per-watt.

Otellini outlined that the first 45nm processors from the company would run off the production lines in late 2007, but the actual product family will ship in 2008.  The Nehalem product family will ship in 2008 and replace the existing "Core" family of processors shipping today on the 65nm node.

The Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro Q6600 is clocked at 2.4 GHz with a 1066 MHz front-side bus. It’s equipped with 8MB of total L2 cache. Unlike Intel’s Conroe Core 2 Duo processors, the cache configuration of the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 is 2x4MB with each set of dual-cores sharing a single 4MB pool of L2 cache. This is because Kentsfield processors are essentially two Conroe dies fused together to form a single processor—similar to how the original Smithfield Pentium D 800 series was.

Strangely the Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro Q6600 did not support Intel’s Enhanced Speedstep Technology. Whether or not this is a result of an early engineering sample is unknown at the moment. The Core 2 Quadro Q6600 does support a C1E Halt state for decreased power consumption. Speaking of power consumption, Intel has done an excellent job optimizing power consumption for its quad-core Kentsfield.

Power consumption compared to Intel’s current flagship Core 2 Extreme X6800 isn’t too bad at idle with the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 consuming 44 more watts. The higher power consumption is due to the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 lacking Intel’s Enhanced Speedstep Technology that lowers the clock speed of the processor during idle.

Power consumption under a load of 3D Studio Max 8 rendering a complex model with all four cores utilized is quite good. A total of 223 watts was drawn from the wall with the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 under load. This is quite low when compared to the Core 2 Extreme X6800 that draws around 202 watts under the same condition. We were quite surprised Intel has managed to keep power consumption relatively low with four cores.

Overall Intel’s Kentsfield performs as expected. It will scale very well in multi-threaded applications such as 3D Studio Max, Cinebench and other 3D modeling applications or encoding applications. Unfortunately, unless the application is multi-core aware or optimized for multi-threading the performance gains are minimal if not absent. While the move to quad-core hardware may be exciting, software support is still trailing behind. Although Intel positions its quad-core Kentsfield Core 2 processors as a high-end part, the soon to be released Kentsfield Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and Core 2 Quadro Q6600 appear to be a better mid-range workstation part rather than enthusiast gamer part—especially since there’s very little overlap with the Intel Xeon 3200 series.

Intel today announced that it has produced its first teraflop-on-a-chip. The chip, essentially a prototype, was demonstrated when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the wafer during this week's IDF conference opening keynote.

Each of the 80 processors on the wafer contain a die with eighty cores -- 6400 cores in total.  Each CPU has more than one terabyte per second of throughput between the CPU cores and the on-die SRAM. Otellini claims that this technology will be available within 5 years, putting it in line with the previously outlined Gesher family expected to ship in 2010. 

To put that into perspective, the fastest public supercomputer in 1996 was the ASCI Red which featured over 4,500 compute nodes using 200MHz Pentium Pro processors and was the first computer to break the 1 teraflops barrier.

Each of the individual CPUs runs at 3.1GHz in a very simple configuration.  These are far from production-ready processors and are mainly for demonstration purposes.  Each processor is also unique in the fact that the packaging is three dimensional.  The cache substrate is "stacked" directly underneath the FPUs, thus saving space and latency. 

The processors are just one component of Intel's Tera-Scale initiative -- a set of research projects geared to bringing multi-teraflop systems to the masses by 2010.  More objectives of this project, including software design, will be announced later during the Intel Developer Forum.

Analog Devices and Creative Labs have made claims that Realtek’s high definition audio solutions do not render EAX or EAX2 audio -- at least not very well. While Realtek’s audio drivers have the proper driver flags to enable EAX and EAX2 in supported games, the listening experience presents a different story. Listening tests demonstrated by Analog Devices and Creative Labs show that Realtek’s high definition audio solutions render EAX and EAX2 incorrectly, removing the 3D positional audio aspects and immersion of EAX and EAX2 completely.

The audible differences are quite noticeable with the Analog Devices solution having immersive audio accuracy with reverb effects that help pinpoint the direction audio is coming from. Channel separation with the audio positioning was particularly noticeable as well. Realtek’s high definition audio solution on the other hand produced a muffled sound with very little channel separation and differentiation. Sound came from all over the place.

Analog Devices and Creative Labs believe this to be a problem for gamers that use onboard audio and not getting the full EAX/EAX2 experience. There’s also an issue with some motherboard reviews that use Rightmark 3D Sound for CPU utilization tests and award the onboard audio solution with the lowest utilization the superior solution when the onboard audio solution isn’t fully rendering EAX/EAX2 audio. Analog Devices and Creative Labs testing show the Realtek high definition onboard audio showing very little CPU utilization in Rightmark 3D Sound’s EAX2 CPU utilization test because it’s not applying any EAX2 effects.

Microsoft has released an out-of-cycle Internet Explorer update to fix a critical and widely exploited vulnerability, exploiting the Vector Markup Language, but there's a general feeling among security experts that the company is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Highlighting the risks of releasing security updates on a monthly patching cycle, the software maker's MS-06-055 bulletin comes a full eight days after virus hunters first spotted the zero-day attacks circulating on porn sites hosted in Russia. Security researchers at Sunbelt Software have discovered an active malware attack against fully patched versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

In eight days, the bad guys replenished their botnets, made their money and moved on to the next zero-day. Now the industry is struggling to clean up and chase the copycats.

Microsoft has maintained throughout the episode that the attacks were limited in nature, but, according to data from VeriSign's iDefense, approximately 2,000 domains were hijacked and seeded with code to redirect users to hostile VML websites.

HostGator, an ISP based in Houston, said VML attackers compromised its servers via an unrelated zero-day flaw in the cPanel control panel software distributed with hosting accounts and redirected legitimate Web sites to malicious pages hosting VML exploits. The exploits then dumped massive amounts of spyware, Trojans, bots and rootkits onto vulnerable Windows machines.

According to timestamps in the Microsoft bulletin, the company started updating the vulnerable Vgx.dll library on Sep. 18, 2006, the same day researchers at Sunbelt Software detected the exploits in the wild. Seems they cannot continue with their proactive stance when it is clear this at least is reactive.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is doing more harm than good and must be overhauled, Alan Greenspan told a technology audience in Boston. Sarbox requires the CEO to certify the financial statement. That's new and that's helpful. Having said that, the rest we could do without. Section 404 is a nightmare." Greenspan's remarks came at a meeting of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council here on Sept. 25. Greenspan was Chairman of the Federal Reserve board for 18 years, having retired in early 2006.

He said the evidence is clear that Sarbanes-Oxley strictures are driving initial public stock offerings away from the New York Stock Exchange and to the London Stock Exchange. Increasingly, he said, people recognize that Sarbanes-Oxley must be changed. "The pressure on getting 404 significantly altered is rising and is taking on a critical mass." But he added, "You do not get a bill altered when the two names [Sarbanes and Oxley] are in the process of retiring. People are waiting until they are gone. Then, hopefully, changes will be made. Any bill that passes both houses almost unanimously, cannot be a good piece of legislation."

Greenspan addressed other technology and business issues including the state of the economy. He said the recent tapering off does not indicate a recession. "The American economy is slowing down," he said, noting high inventories and the contraction of the housing market. However, he said the recent decline in gas prices was good news and on balance, a recession is not imminent. "We're not as good as we were in recent years, but the signs of this thing folding just aren't there," he said.

"Globalization is a critical determinant of economic activity. We're no longer a separate economy. Formerly, everything was here. That is not the case today." The single greatest force in the new global economy is China, he said. "China has been moving toward capitalism without ever mentioning that's what they're doing. They've invented euphemisms to describe what they're doing as not capitalism, and they're failing.

"The jobs we are losing to China are in obsolescent industries. We ought to be doing what we do best, which is conceptual. …The value of intellectual skills is rising, and the value of manual labor is contracting." Although that trend favors the United States for now, he said our educational system isn't producing enough people at the highest levels.

"The educational system is in deep trouble. I think we've gotten very sloppy in how we're teaching math and science." One remedy would be to open up immigration for high-tech workers, he said. "It is psychologically inconceivable to me that someone who gets a Ph.D. in the United States has the psychology to be a terrorist."

Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0.

The Development Tools for .NET Framework (RC1) provides developers with support for building .NET Framework 3.0 applications using the final released version of Visual Studio 2005. This support includes XAML Intellisense support through schema extensions for the editor, project templates for the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation, and .NET Framework 3.0 SDK documentation integration. This release contains a preview of the Visual Designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (code name "Cider"), more information can be found on the Channel 9 Wiki site for Cider. This release does not include a graphical design surface for the Windows Communication Foundation.

Details.Net 3.0

Dino Esposito; summarizes the most common types of Web attacks and describes how Web developers can use built-in features of ASP.NET to increase security. (13 printed pages) While this article is dated now the information in it is very useful to anyone developing any .Net application.

If you're reading this article, you probably don't need to be lectured about the growing importance of security in Web applications. You're likely looking for some practical advice on how to implement security in ASP.NET applications. The bad news is that no development platform—including ASP.NET—can guarantee you'll be writing 100-percent secure code once you adopt it—who tells that, just lies. The good news, as far as ASP.NET is concerned, is that ASP.NET, especially version 1.1 and the coming version 2.0, integrates a number of built-in defensive barriers, ready to use.

Read Article Here

Samsung announced that it has introduced a new type of nonvolatile memory called PRAM or Phase-change Random Access Memory. The new memory technology is currently under heavy research from Samsung, but the company has finally demonstrated a working 512 megabit sample. According to Samsung, PRAM is slated to replace current NOR flash memory technology within the next several years.

PRAM, says Samsung, is much faster than the fastest NOR flash memory. Samsung indicated that PRAM achieves its performance by changing the way it writes and reads to memory. Unlike current NOR flash, PRAM does not have to erase data before writing new data. This alone achieves 30 times the performance of current memory technology said Samsung. Durability and endurance are also a key development for PRAM, allowing products to last at least 10 times longer.

Samsung indicated that PRAM will be a positive forward step for consumer products as well -- lowering prices thanks to new manufacturing techniques. Samsung said that PRAM cells are half the size of NOR flash memory and requires 20 percent fewer manufacturing steps to produce. PRAM will make an introduction into the market sometime in early 2008. According to the press release:

Adoption of PRAM is expected to be especially popular in the future designs of multi-function handsets and for other mobile applications, where faster speeds translate into immediately noticeable boosts in performance. High-density versions will be produced first, starting with 512 Mb.

Researchers at Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara have announced the world's first Hybrid Silicon Laser, or HSL. An HSL is a silicon-based laser emitting device. According to Intel, creating a laser emitting silicon chip is a breakthrough that will propel the world of computers into the light-based transmission era.

Called Indium Phosphide, the material contains properties that allow it to emit light when voltage is applied. Intel researchers were able to integrate Indium Phosphide into traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques, thereby creating a silicon-Indium Phoshide hybrid chip -- one that could process traditional electrical signals and transmit laser light. The laser light generated by an HSL chip could be used to transmit data and thus power other silicon photonic devices said Intel.

“Silicon Photonics is a critical part of tera-Scale computing as we need the ability to move massive amounts of data on and off these very high performance chips" claimed Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner. Intel said that HSL could bring along terabit-capable transmission processors that are low cost and easy to produce. Computers would be a multitude more powerful than those we use today. The technology however, is still a number of years off.

Currently, silicon chips can detect light, route light and even modulate light said Intel, but the problem is getting silicon chips to produce light. Intel is taking Phoshide lasers commonly used in other industries and bringing along new types of applications. Voltage is first applied to the HSL. The Indium Phosphide element then produces light, which then enters a silicon waveguide to create continuous laser light. Using this technique, Intel also maintains a low cost production of HSL devices. According to Intel:

The hybrid silicon laser is a key enabler for silicon photonics, and will be integrated into silicon photonic chips that could enable the creation of optical “data pipes” carrying terabits of information. These terabit optical connections will be needed to meet the bandwidth and distance requirements of future servers and data centers powered by hundreds of processors.

The application potentials for HSL chips are truly exciting. The industry in general has been talking about laser or light based electronics for a number of years already. With the development from a company like Intel -- and hopefully others like AMD -- the industry is getting the right push it needs. With multi-core processors now the mainstream, computers will only get faster. HSL devices will drive the future of computing said Intel, and things are looking only brighter. Communications technology uses a fair number of laser electronics and as the technology is refined, desktop computer and notebooks will be using the technology in the next few years as the limits of traditional silicon is reached.

AT&T announced a strategic move last week that might be a win-win for US workers and AT&T home broadband customers. The telecom giant announced that it will do away with its foreign call centers that have long been ridiculed by customers and will instead create 2,000 new unionized jobs in the United States to handle customer support calls.

The new customer support positions will pay $30,000 a year and employees will receive benefits. AT&T will begin filling the new positions in mid-2007 so customers still have another 8 or 9 months to deal with the foreign call centers. Information Week reports:

But customer pressure to improve service may also have been a factor. Users of AT&T's home DSL service frequently pillory the company on online bulletin boards and blogs. A poster on DSLreports.com complains that AT&T's "India tech support doesn't know anything." AT&T's spokesman declined to identify the vendor currently handling the company's offshore DSL support.

On the subject of our previous rant about Xigla and their restrictive copyright policies. They sent us some updated .dlls which corrected the problem of even letting someone remove their company images from the login.aspx page. Honestly when a company reconsiders their approach and corrects it to me at least, it gives that company high marks for customer service. It is refreshing to see that sometimes companies can still just do the right thing.

The complaint we had of simply removing the company images broke the application has been corrected. Otherwise the two applications we tested get high marks on the features functioning as advertised. Seems if they had been less concerned about someone trying to steal or rebrand their software this would have never happened at all. They stated that all that was required was the two lines which include their copyright. Since they handed back the recompiled .dlls this means they knew all this, and there is no secret that the problem was created by them.

We have recommended xigla asp applications for several years, the apps were good and functioned much as advertised. We recently purchased two applications to promote their .Net products. We purchased the Form processor and the Newsletter application. We thought these would be really great products for the end user and even though the company could have gained alot of positive free advertising from us promoting their products, we regret, this will not be the case.

We have reseller agreements with SmarterTools and other application providers as well. We feel that promoting and supporting applications is in the best interest of both our clients and the companies who create the applications. Our agreement with Smartertools has clearly proven to be one of the best promotional agreements on the web. It is true that Smartertools puts the version and their name in the page which has proven to help with keeping your application current. We have no intention on trying to hide the fact that we did not write the third party application in the first place.

Many companies on the web produce freeware versions that put their link in the footer of each page and if you purchase the product this can be removed. Community Server is a prime example of that as with many products. This has been the accepted norm with most companies. It is clear, if you want to change even the images of one of these .Net versions of Xigla applications you will be opening a can of worms. We were told by Juan D. Arbelaez of Xigla that the two lines at the bottom of the login.aspx must remain in tact and visible or the copyright would be violated. So fine, we can live with that.

The fact is that when someone buys an application for their web site it seems that making it look like their site or keeping a consistant look should not break the application. I have tried just deleting only the Xigla images from the login.aspx page and that by itself has stopped the application, which in turn throws the error stating that you violated the copyright. So as long as you do not touch anything related to their branding all over the application (we will say) it is a good application; though personally we find this level of control well beyond what many clients would view as acceptable.

We are finding, more and more everyday, that many .Net application providers are more concerned with their business model than they are about promoting products that are priced fairly and work well. Another prime example of this is with BVCommerce. We purchased their 2004 server version of the product which was sold for $1000.00 per server and more than fair. Now however, if clients wanted to upgrade to the BV5 version of the product it will be $999.00 per website. One should ask the question as to how many shopping carts are actually going to be sold at this price. There are many PHP applications which are free and can do many of the same things. The question is real, with imposed restrictions left up to the policy of a specific company and prices that only rise, what then does this do to the long term viability and growth of the platform?

A few years ago another company Ipswitch released their ICS product at $8,499.00 for an unlimited version. We had been paying $2,100.00 per server. We simply said see you later, SmarterMail was a fraction of the cost with a much better interface. They then released a version called Imail 2006 and is $5995.00. I know everyone should be saying what a deal. SmarterMail Enterprise edition costs $899.00 per server and proves that some .Net applications can be priced right and delivered without enough strings attached to hang yourself on.

Intel is planning to release quad-core Kentsfield based Xeon 3000 seriesprocessors. The new Xeon X3220 and X3210 processors will be identical to the recently named Intel Core 2 Quadro processors and share the same Kentsfield core.

There will be no architectural or socket differences between desktop Core 2 Quadro and Xeon X3000 series processors, with the exception of product placement and marketing. The new Xeon X3220 and X3210 processors will arrive clocked at 2.4 and 2.13 GHz with a 1066 MHz front-side bus respectively. Both Kentsfield Xeon X3000 processors will feature 8MB of L2 cache. Expect the Intel Xeon X3220 and X3210 to arrive in Q1’07 for $851 and $690 in 1,000-unit lots.

Before Intel releases its Kentsfield based Xeons it will release Clovertown Xeon DP processors. The new Clovertown Xeon DP processors are quad-core and multi-processor enabled. With a compatible LGA771 motherboard users can install two Clovertown processors in a system for eight-core computing. The new Xeons will arrive in X5355, E5345, E5320 and E5310 models clocked at 2.66, 2.33, 1.86 and 1.60 GHz respectively. Intel Xeon DP models X5355 and E5345 will have a 1,333 MHz front-side bus while the Xeon DP E5320 and E5310 have a slightly slower 1,066 MHz front-side bus. All Clovertown Xeon processors will have 8MB of L2 cache. Pricing for Intel Clovertown Xeon DP processors will be $1172, $851, $690 and $455 for models X5355, E5345, E5320 and E5310 in 1,000-unit lots respectively. Availability is expected later this quarter.

A British security researcher has figured out a way to manipulate legitimate features in Adobe PDF files to open back doors for computer attacks. David Kierznowski, a penetration testing expert specializing in Web application testing, has released proof-of-concept code and rigged PDF files to demonstrate how the Adobe Reader program could be used to launch attacks without any user action.

"I do not really consider these attacks as vulnerabilities within Adobe. It is more exploiting features supported by the product that were never designed for this, said Kierznowski". "At this point, it is obvious that any malicious code [can] be launched," Kierznowski said.

The use of Web-based exploits to launch drive-by malware downloads is a well-known tactic and the discovery of PDF back doors is further confirmation that desktop programs have become lucrative targets for corporate espionage and other targeted attacks.

"One of the other interesting finds was the fact that you can back-door all Adobe Acrobat files by loading a back-doored JavaScript file into [a local] directory," Kierznowski said in a blog entry that includes the proof-of-concept exploit code.

A spokesperson from Adobe's product security incident response team said the company is aware of Kierznowski's discovery and is "actively investigating" the issue.

"Active exploitation techniques such as buffer overflows are becoming more and more difficult to find and exploit ... The future of exploitation lies in Web technologies," he said, noting that internal users are often in a "relationship of trust" with the surrounding network. Confirming a trend that sees Microsoft Office applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint—used in zero-day attacks, Kierznowski sees a future of client-side hacking that expands the functionality of a service.

This form of hacking merely manipulates the user's client to perform a certain function, effectively using the user's circle of trust.

Seagate Technology, citing major research and development strides in improving areal density of hard drive disks, claimed on Sept. 15 that it has set a data storage world record of 421G bits per square inch in revealing the results of a magnetic recording demonstration.

A hard drive with that kind of areal capacity could carry as much as a 2.5TB of data—enough to store 41,650 hours (1,735 days, or 4.75 years) of music, 800,000 digital photographs, 4,000 hours of digital video or 1,250 video games.

However, Seagate spokesman David Szabados said the company anticipates that hard drives at these density levels probably won't be available until 2009. PMR is a newly implemented technology for data recording on hard disks that was first demonstrated in Japan in 1976.

The technique is believed to be capable of delivering up to 10 times the storage density of conventional longitudinal recording—on the same media. There were some attempts to use PMR in floppy disks in the 1980s, but it was not reliable enough. Today there is renewed interest in using it in HDDs, which are quickly reaching their space limits.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies said this week that hard drives could soon hold 1TB of data and that it expects the average home to have between 10-20 hard drives in the next five years. At the demonstrated density level, Seagate expects the capacity ranges to result in new HDDs ranging from 40GB to 275GB for 1-and 1.8-inch consumer electronics drives, 500GB for 2.5-inch notebook drives, and nearly 2.5TB for 3.5-inch desktop and enterprise class drives.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered Wednesday that Spamhaus must pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its chief, David Linhardt, who sued the U.K.-based organization earlier this year over blacklisting.

The court also barred Spamhaus from causing any e-mail sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be "blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway" and ordered Spamhaus to publish an apology stating that Linhardt and his company are not spammers, according to a copy of the order.

"This ruling confirms e360insight's position that Spamhaus.org is a fanatical, vigilante organization that operates in the United States with blatant disregard for U.S. law," Linhardt wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com on Thursday. One would hardly think that a ruling by the state of Illionis, which was a default judgment hardly proves anything at all. So please Linhardt give the world a break.

Spamhaus appears unfazed by the ruling. In a statement on its Web site, Spamhaus dismissed the judgment as invalid and charges that the court was "bamboozled by spammers." Spamhaus didn't mount a defense in the case; the ruling was a default judgment in absence of counterarguments.

Default judgments obtained in U.S. county, state or federal courts have no validity in the U.K. and cannot be enforced under the British legal system," Spamhaus said on its Web site. "As spamming is illegal in the U.K., an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."

Linhardt and his company are indeed spammers and remain on the Spamhaus blocklist, Spamhaus said. Posting a note that e360insignt was inaccurately labeled as a spammer would be a lie, Spamhaus said. If Linhardt wants a ruling that counts, he needs to refile his case in the U.K., according to Spamhaus.  ROKSO  e360insight is the preferred service provider for Brian Haberstroh

If the US had any lawmakers with the brains and the heart to make proper laws. People who spam should be running from the law, rather than twisting it in the name of what they refer to as legitmate business practice. SpamHaus lists are quite legitmate from my personal experience and other companies who depend on these lists also believe so.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday on Sep. 12 brought three bulletins covering a three software flaws, but the day will be remembered most for an Internet Explorer mega-patch that is being re-rereleased to address a 10th vulnerability that was missed by the software maker.

The flaw, which exists in the way IE handles long URLs when visiting Web sites using HTTP 1.1 protocol and compression, was flagged by eEye Digital Security, the same company that had its name zapped from the flaw credits when the update shipped for a second time on Aug. 24.

"We found another problem that they missed, even with the rerelease," said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer at eEye, in Aliso Viejo, Calif. The latest bulletin credits eEye with finding the additional bug. According to Tony Chor, group program manager in Microsoft's IE team, the additional flaw was similar to the one that caused the original rerelease but actually existed in a different location.

The embarrassing IE update episode underscores the challenges Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., faces in shipping patches for multiple browser and operating system versions and strengthens the arguments from critics that the complex nature of the company's widely used software is a major security threat.

Multiple security flaws in Apple's QuickTime media player could put Mac and PC users at risk of malicious hacker attacks, according to a warning from the Cupertino, Calif. company.

Apple released QuickTime 7.1.3 as a high-priority update alongside warnings that maliciously crafted movie and image files could be used to execute harmful code on vulnerable computers.

The update fixes a total of seven vulnerabilities, including an integer overflow that occurs when viewing maliciously crafted movies that use the H.264 digital video codec standard.

By carefully crafting a corrupt H.264 movie, an attacker can trigger an integer overflow or buffer overflow which may lead to an application crash or arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user, Apple warned in an advisory. The QuickTime update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of H.264 movies.

The company also warned that specially rigged QuickTime movies can lead to an application crash or arbitrary code execution because of a separate buffer overflow bug in the program. A third flaw in the way QuickTime deals with corrupt FLC movie could also lead to arbitrary code execution.

Microsoft has announced official names for its technology set for enabling AJAX development, previously known as Atlas, and has released a road map for delivery of the technology.

Microsoft had been calling all its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-enabling technology by the code name ASP.Net Atlas. However, from now on the technologies will have separate names that better describe the functionality they provide, the company said.

The server-side Atlas functionality, which tightly integrates with ASP.Net, is now called ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions, Microsoft said, while the client-side Atlas functionality, which integrates with ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions or other back-end platforms like PHP or ColdFusion, is now called the Microsoft AJAX Library, the company said.

Microsoft is also rebranding the Atlas Control Toolkit, which will be known as ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit, Microsoft officials said.

In a blog post, Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, said that although the plan has been to ship Atlas with the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas, which is expected to be available in 2007, Microsoft will deliver a production-ready version of ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and the Microsoft AJAX Library by the end of 2006. This will enable our enterprise customers to take their Atlas applications into production with fully supported APIs.

A number of people have been having trouble with MS FTP server and finally discovered that their firewall is blocking the ports. They had thought that FTP used only ports 20 and 21 which were opened in the firewall. But they have discovered that FTP uses other ports as well, specifically if they required passive mode. The problem is about the port range which have been blocked by the firewall.

Seems they can find no way to set the range of ports that IIS FTP server will use to assign to passive FTP so that I can open that range in the firewall. Is there a way to assign a range of ports for passive FTP in IIS FTP server other than a huge block?

Yes it is possible to configure the passive port range in IIS so here it is.

To do this in IIS5 you need to be running SP4 :
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=810639

In IIS6 you can also do this :
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=555022

There are delays between each of the steps in memory access. These delays are referred to as latencies and expressed as a number of clock cycles. Here's a brief explanation of some of the most common, and important, memory timing parameters that affect access latencies:

When we see what a RAM’s CAS latency is, it is 4 numbers, such as 2-2-2-5, which correspond with CAS – tRCD – tRP – tRAS. You should be able to change the CAS Latency in your BIOS. In most BIOSes, it can be found under the “advanced chipset” menu, though it can be found in different areas in different BIOSes.

CAS stands for Column Address Strobe. This is the number of memory cycles that pass between the time a column is requested from the active page and the time the data is ready to send across the bus. This number is usually 2, 2.5, and 3, on DDR memory. This is actually the last part to come into effect.

RAS to CAS Delay is referred to as tRCD. This is the delay in memory cycles between the time a row is activated and when data within the row can be requested. This only happens when data is not on the active row.

tRP is the time for RAS Precharge. This is the time in memory cycles that is required to clear out the active row out of the cache, before a new row can be requested. In other words, it’s the time it takes for the memory to stop accessing one row and start accessing another. Once again this only takes place it the data is not in the active row.

tRAS refers to the minimum time that a row must remain active before a new row can be activated in each memory bank. A new row can not be opened until the minimum amount of time has passed. If there is more than one bank on memory, this will help the performance of the tRAS. If there is only one active bank, then the need to change rows is guaranteed, and if there is more than one bank with memory, then there is only half the chance that there will be a need to change rows. In turn, the tRAS will only come into effect half the time. The tRP and tRAS together are often referred to as the Row Cycle time, because they happen together.

No discussion of memory latency would be complete without mentioning the DRAM command rate. The command rate is the delay between when a memory chip is selected and when the first active command can be issued. The factors that determine whether a memory subsystem can tolerate a 1T command rate are many, including the number of memory banks, the number of DIMMs present, and the quality of the DIMMs. Some memory manufacturers claim that their DIMMs are rated for operation with a one-cycle (1T) command rate.

Since latencies refer to delays, lower is better. That doesn't mean you should hop into your motherboard's BIOS and set each memory timing option to its lowest possible value, though. Memory modules are rated for a specific set of latencies at a given clock speed, and they're generally not stable with lower latencies. A DIMM's latencies are usually expressed as a series of four hyphenated numbers corresponding to the CAS latency, RAS-to-CAS delay, RAS precharge, and active-to-precharge delay. Low latency DDR400, for example, is generally rated for 2-2-2-5 timings at 400MHz. That refers to two cycles of CAS latency, RAS-to-CAS delay, and RAS precharge, and five cycles of active-to-precharge delay.

CAS Details  Crucial Details

Microsoft has issued a recall for Small Business Server 2003 R2 (SBS 2003 R2). Microsoft had only released the update to OEMs, system builders and distributors -- consumer availability was limited so the affect on them is minimal.

“Recently, and during a regular audit as part of our software production process, Microsoft became aware of an issue with the final SBS 2003 R2 software containing non-final versions of a few core components to SBS,” said Eric Ligman on Microsoft's Small Business Community Blog.

Microsoft is in the process re-releasing the SBS 2003 R2 update with final-spec components which will cause a minor delay in general availability of the software.  Microsoft had stated earlier this month at the Worldwide Partner Conference that the update would be available in August.

Instalinux.com is a handy Web site from which users can create customized installation images for a handful of different Linux distributions. The site's service, SystemDesigner, is free, and administrators should find it particularly helpful when provisioning multiple machines—either physical or virtualized.

The Instalinux site was put together by former Hewlett-Packard employee Chris Slater, and SystemDesigner is based on HP's open-source Linux Common Operating Environment project.

We appreciated the option of having all available updates applied at install time. We also could choose to either set up our disk partition layout in advance or to take care of it interactively once we'd booted into our system's installer.

At Instalinux.com, users can create installation disks for CentOS' CentOS 4.3, Debian 3.1 and 3.2, and Red Hat's Fedora Core versions 3 through 5. The site also supports Novell SUSE 9.3 and 10, but not yet SUSE 10.1, as well as Canonical's Ubuntu and Kubuntu. The site does not support the latest Dapper Drake versions of Ubuntu or Kubuntu, however.

We could create installers for the x86 versions of each of the supported distributions; for the newer Fedora and Debian releases, we also could opt for x86-64 versions.

Instalinux.com's SystemDesigner acts as a front end to the automated install systems of the Debian, Red Hat and Novell SUSE distros, and it was interesting to compare the differing levels of customization that each automated installer offered.

Intel cutting around 10,000 of its employees.  As expected, the company today announced that it will be laying off 10,500 jobs, which is around 10 percent of its work force. Intel hopes it can save around $5 billion over the next two years -- and the job eliminations are a critical part of the company's restructuring. Almost 5,000 of the affected jobs have already been eliminated.

Intel is hoping to turn around sinking profits while trying to raise efficiency in its battle to take back market share from AMD. Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said “These actions, while difficult, are essential to Intel becoming a more agile and efficient company, not just for this year or the next, but for years to come.”

Most of the job cuts by the Santa Clara-based company will impact the management, marketing and information technology departments, according to Intel. Manufacturing, design and other departments will suffer job cuts sometime in 2007. Intel expects severance costs to total around $200 million. This is going to be the largest number of job cuts by Intel in 21 years.  Even though the loss of 10,500 jobs is bad, analysts expected numbers in the 15,000 range.

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Unfortunately, most firewalls leak. But Comodo's Firewall is unique in that it passes all known leak tests to ensure the integrity of data entering and exiting your system. Comodo has put our firewall through all kinds of sophisticated tests to ensure our firewall is powerful enough to ward off these attacks with default settings. No other firewall has had to work this hard. Take this test yourself.