The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said in a statement 10.11.2006 that it does not have the ability or authority to comply with a proposed court order that it suspend the Internet service of The Spamhaus Project Ltd. Spamhaus is a volunteer-run antispam service.

In a proposed order last Friday, Judge Charles Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois called on the organizations responsible for registering the Spamhaus.org Internet address to suspend the organization's Internet service. Both ICANN -- the nonprofit organization set up to manage the domain name system of the Internet -- and Toronto-based Tucows Inc., the Spamhaus.org registrar, are named in the order.

The court threatened to shut down Spamhaus for ignoring an $11.7 million judgment against it. The proposed order followed a Sept. 13 ruling in which Spamhaus was required to pay damages and stop listing an e-mail marketing company called E360Insight LLC in its database of known spammers.

ICANN said that in most cases, only the Internet registrar with whom the registrant has a contractual relationship can suspend an individual domain name.

"Even if ICANN were properly brought before the court in this matter, which ICANN has not been, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend or place a client hold on Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so," the organization said.

Seagate Technology announced today that it will ship a 1.5TB version of its Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition external hard disk drive. The new drive ships this month for $799.99.

The Onetouch III Turbo Edition is preformatted for Macintosh users and comes with FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and Universal Serial Bus 2.0 interfaces. It measures 5.4 by 3.9 by 8.5 in. Inside the drive enclosure are two 750GB hard disk drive mechanisms configured together in a RAID array for a total capacity of 1.5TB. The "OneTouch" refers to the system's ability to back up a Mac's internal hard drive by pressing a button that activates software included with the drive.

Seagate also makes Maxtor OneTouch III systems in other capacities and configurations, including "Mini Editions" for portable users.

Seagate has also enhanced the Maxtor Shared Storage II line of network-attached storage products with smaller systems. Already available in 1TB capacity for $799.99, the Shared Storage II line now comes in single-drive 320GB and 500GB capacities for $349.99 and $449.99, respectively.

The Shared Storage II devices incorporate a single 10/100/1000 RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports for printer sharing, storage, expansion or off-site data rotation. The drive includes software to enable Mac and PC users to stream digital media and back up their own local files.

Juniper Networks on Oct. 18 2006 will seek to silence critics who complain about the company's lack of an Ethernet edge aggregation switch for service providers by launching its new X-Series product line.

The X-Series switch/router is built to optimize both Layer 2 and Layer 3 functions and provide high-density Ethernet interfaces. The 14-slot X960 chassis can accommodate up to 480 Gigabit Ethernet ports through a 40-port line card. It can also support 48 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports through a four-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet line card, according to sources close to Juniper, who asked not to be identified.

The product line is aimed at shoring up Juniper's position among Metro Ethernet service providers. The financial analysts are all over Juniper's back to get into the Layer 2 switching space.

It also provides a range of QOS (quality of service) features, including support for up to eight queues per port and up to four scheduling priorities as well as per-port shaping. The X960 will run the Junos operating system software.

Juniper is also planning to add a six-slot chassis to the X-Series line that can accommodate existing X960 line cards and other components. Also in the works for a later release are fine-grained queuing line cards supporting per-VLAN (virtual LAN) queuing. Further down the road, Juniper also plans to add support for SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) interfaces as well as a 32-port Gigabit Ethernet line card, sources said.

This is one of the best sorted easy to browse collections of freeware fonts I have personally found. I know the geeks are going, just what the world needs another billion freeware fonts. That is sure what I thought when the link was forwarded on to me. But since I sat browsing fonts for 10 minutes I guess I was taken in. Go to site here.

Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.

Koders Enterprise Edition enables organizations to recognize significant productivity gains by improving code reuse. Developers and managers can search, review and report on the enterprise code base in ways never before possible.

In one of its biggest releases in recent months, Microsoft Corp. today issued 10 security bulletins detailing fixes for more than two dozen separate vulnerabilities -- several of which are already being actively exploited in the wild.

But the updates were not immediately available via Microsoft Update, Automatic Update or Windows Update Services because of what the company described as "technical difficulties."

"Technical teams are engaged and have been working around the clock" to make the updates available by the end of day today, the company said in a statement. "To be clear, it's a delay due to the networking for these systems," said a post on Microsoft's security response center blog said this afternoon. "There are no issues with the security updates themselves." The delay does not affect customers using Microsoft's Software Update Services, Windows Update V4 or Office Update.

Those who want to download the patches immediately can do so manually by visiting Microsoft's technet site, the blog post said.

Six of the bulletins announced today are rated as critical by Microsoft and detail fixes for a total of 16 separate flaws. The rest of the bulletins addressed vulnerabilities that were either rated as important or moderate by Microsoft.

The bulletins covered a total of 26 separate flaws and are part of Microsoft's regularly scheduled monthly security updates for October. The list of products affected includes PowerPoint, Excel and Word.

"What's interesting to note here is that six of the flaws [covered by today's bulletins] are being exploited in the wild or have proof-of-concept code available," said Tom Cross, a vulnerability researcher with Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc.'s X-Force threat analysis service.

Examples of active attacks against flaws fixed today include zero-day exploits against Excel and Word, Symantec Corp. said in an advisory released this afternoon. Similar attacks or proof-of-concept attacks are also available against some of the flaws addressed in security bulletins MS06-057, MS06-058 and MS06-63, Cross said.

"Today we are seeing a record high number of vulnerabilities being patched in a single month," said Monty Izerman, a senior manager of the global threat group at McAfee Avert Labs in an e-mailed comment. Sixteen of the flaws patched today were discovered in application software products and continue a trend toward "application-based malware and application-targeted vulnerabilities," he said.

Of the fixes released today, the one described in MS06-057 is perhaps the most critical, McAfee noted. The critical flaw, which exists in Windows Shell, can be used to take complete control of compromised systems and has already been widely exploited in so-called "drive-by install" and "drive-by download" attacks via Internet Explorer, McAfee cautioned.

CBS Corp. and top online video site YouTube Inc. said on Monday they have struck a strategic content and advertising partnership.

The deal calls for CBS to offer YouTube users a variety of short-form video programming including news, sports, and entertainment divisions beginning this month, the companies said.

YouTube and CBS will share revenue from advertising sponsorships of CBS Videos, they said.

PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is a scripting language that is suited for developing Web applications. A PHP script can be embedded in an HTML page and run as a .php script or as a Windows Script Host script (.wsf file). PHP 5.1.6 is the latest version of PHP and includes extensions for various databases including the SQL Server database. The SQL Server database extension in PHP 5 is installed by default when PHP is installed. With the SQL Server database extension, a connection can be established with the SQL Server 2005 database and SQL statements run on the database. The PHP extension supports databases created in different versions of SQL Server. This paper covers configuring the PHP extension with SQL Server 2005 Express Edition databases only. (18 printed pages) Details Here

Click here to download the Word document version of the article, AccessSQLwPHP.doc.

Google Inc. has laid the speculation to rest -- it is buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock transaction announced Oct 9, 2006.

YouTube operates a wildly popular Web site showing original videos that range from amateurish to professional. It will continue to operate independently after the Google acquisition "to preserve its successful brand and passionate community," Google said. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Although YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley had earlier insisted that YouTube wasn't for sale, that view changed because Google will allow YouTube to operate independently, he said during a conference call to explain the acquisition.

Bringing YouTube into the ever-growing Google empire will mean that users have a "better, more comprehensive experience" when they upload, watch and share videos, Google said. It will also provide more opportunities for professional content owners to get their work out to a wider audience, Google and YouTube executives said.

The two companies have similar corporate values in that they are both committed to users first and also to innovation, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. "Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service," he said. The deal is "an exciting next step" for Google, he said, adding that the company expects other deals that are related to providing video over the Internet. YouTube has "built a remarkable team" that is "a perfect example of the kind of people we like to work with."

YouTube will benefit from Google's global reach and technology know-how, Hurley said. "We're excited by this announcement and thrilled to join forces with the Google team," he said. The acquisition will boost YouTube's new video content platform, which is expected to launch in the next month, he said.

Microsoft's Vista will not make it more difficult for anti-virus systems to work, Russian computer security group and potential IPO candidate Kaspersky Lab said on Friday, contradicting rivals.

In an open letter this week, U.S. anti-virus provider McAfee accused Microsoft of weakening users protection by no longer co-operating with computer security groups and denying them access to the core of the Vista system.

"From what we have seen of Vista we cannot tell that Microsoft is blocking access to the core," Kaspersky Lab Chief Executive and co-founder Natalya Kaspersky told Reuters in an interview in Paris.  "It would not make any sense for them (Microsoft) to stop working with other computer security companies because it would make their system more vulnerable to attacks," Kaspersky added.

Microsoft, the world's largest software group, entered the computer security market in June with OneCare, a software that aims to protect computers from viruses, spyware and other ailments. The U.S. software giant fired back on Monday, saying that it had worked closely with computer security companies throughout the development of Vista and planned to continue to do so.

"Microsoft would have to change their business completely if what McAfee says was true," Kaspersky said, explaining that Microsoft's business model was based on working with other providers. Kaspersky said Microsoft had held its traditional annual meeting with computer security companies this summer and she had not noticed co-operation was weakening.

In its open letter on Monday McAfee alleged that Microsoft had firmly embedded in Vista its own security system which could not be disabled even when users purchased an alternative security product.  "Microsoft seems to envision a world in which one giant company not only controls the systems that drive most computers around the world but also the security that protects those computers from viruses and other online threats," McAfee said in its letter. Symantec and other computer security companies have backed McAfee's criticism of the Microsoft Vista system.

Microsoft has rejected their allegations and said it wished to deliver a secure version of Windows Vista that would be compliant with EU law.

It’s been a good year for great technologies.  This one is an MIT tool called ASSIST - It will at very least open the creative minds of those who are interested in design. 

Design rationale is often not recorded in mechanical engineering designs because it is not convenient to stop the design process to record every design decision that is made. Designing directly on the computer could assist the process of design rationale capture. At the very least a computer design tool could record all the changes made to a design over its lifetime.

Unfortunately, current computer-based design tools for mechanical engineers are not tailored to early stages of design. Most designers use pencil and paper at first, and input their design into CAD systems only after it is nearly complete. The tradeoff between the ease of drawing and the precision of a CAD tool is too great for engineers who are just sketching out rough designs.

We aim to create a tool that allows the engineer to sketch a mechanical system as she would on paper, and then allows her to interact with the design as a mechanical system, for example by seeing a simulation of her drawing. We have built an early incarnation of such a tool, called ASSIST, which allows a user to sketch simple mechanical systems and see simulations of her drawings in a two-dimensional kinematic simulator.

Video Presentation:

Oct 3, 2006 Google launched a new search engine geared towards the needs of programmers.

"Searchers can seek out specific programming terms or computer languages and dive deep into compressed code to locate specific features. Users also can narrow a search to find software code based on specific licensing requirements, which is a big deal in warding off future patent litigation." (Reuters)

A very useful tool for geeks. "Code search here" Though as with anything there is clearly a downside.

Several software programmers say Google Code Search appears to answer some of the basic nightmares of building software by creating a single place where one can trawl through all the publicly available computer code in the world. Though the downside is that it might be viewed by some as a hackers paradise as the focus is moving off server attacts and toward applications both desktop and web. Below is a couple quotes from the discussions link.

The US Government stunned the online gambling industry over the weekend by passing laws that effectively ban the services from their biggest market.

The $US6 billion ($8 billion) industry went into meltdown over the news, with shares in UK-listed PartyGaming, 888 Holdings and SportingBet - which has operations in Australia - plummeting in early London trading overnight. Also in the line of fire is Betcorp, which is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and, like the UK-listed companies, counts on US customers for most of its business.

The US Senate, which was expected to block the legislation, sneaked the bill through early Saturday morning US time, following some last-minute manoeuvring ahead of the Senate break for mid-term elections. The bill outlaws the processing of bets for online gaming companies, effectively preventing US banks and credit card companies from doing business with the operators. It could be signed into law by President Bush as early as this week.

The bill excludes US-based online betting on services like horse racing and lotteries and has no impact on American casinos and other gambling operations. The US Government has been in a tussle with the industry for more than a decade, dating back to when foreign operators accepted bets from US citizens over the phone from offshore operations in the Caribbean.

These online sports betting, poker and casino operators have been drawn to the London Stock Exchange, where investors have profited from the explosive growth in US internet wagers, despite their questionable legal status. That is expected to change. According to UK reports, 888 Holdings, PartyGaming, and SportingBet are expected to halt their US-facing operations. Shares in PartyGaming slid 64.5p, or 59 per cent, to 43.5p in early London trading. SportingBet shares were down 69 per cent to 58p and 888 Holdings 48 per cent to 76p.

The latest move is not entirely surprising given the hard line already being taken by US authorities. SportingBet's former chairman, Peter Dicks, was arrested last month on a warrant issued by Louisiana State Police, but was released by a New York court recently. Mr Dicks faced being extradited to the state on charges that include gambling by computer, a charge that could land him a year in jail.

Intel plans to essentially offer two cores for free when it begins rolling out quad-core Xeon 5300 server processors in November. By offering quad-core chips, which contain four processor cores each, for roughly the same price as two-core versions, Intel expects its latest semiconductors will rapidly proliferate in the server space, company executives said here at the Intel Developer Forum on Sept. 26.

Intel executives said they were confident in the new quad-core Xeon chips' design and capabilities. But in order to speed their introduction, the chip maker will tout the chips' performance—Xeon 5300 chips will offer as much as a 50 percent increase in performance versus today's dual-core Xeon 5100s—along with their ability to drop into existing server platforms and their capability to match current power consumption levels, Intel executives said.

Intel's first Xeon 5300 chips will fit into an 80-watt power envelope—the same as dual-core Xeon 5100—while Intel also will offer a 120-watt performance version of the chip. Xeon 5300s will come with either a 1,066MHz or 1,333MHz front-side bus, which shuttles data to and from the chips.

During the first quarter of 2007, Intel will add a 50-watt quad-core Xeon 5300 chip for low-power applications. Still, Intel had to compromise to bring out the Xeon 5300, also known by the code name Clovertown, quickly. The company will create the quad chips by combining a pair of dual-core Woodcrest or Xeon 5100 chips using special packaging. By lowering the clock speed slightly, which cuts down on power consumption and heat production, the chip maker can fit the two dual-core processors into one package.

With 10 Gigabit Ethernet prices coming down and data center performance requirements going up, Cisco Systems is moving to grab broader market acceptance for its high-speed networking technology.

On Sept. 25, Cisco launched a higher-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet module for its Catalyst 6500 that doubles the number of ports, increases performance by 60 percent and reduces the cost per port for its Catalyst 10 Gigabit Ethernet offering by about 30 percent.

Along with the new eight-port, 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, Cisco added the Catalyst Blade Switch 3040 for Fujitsu Siemens Computer servers and created a community interface for users who develop automation scripts based on the Cisco IOS (Internetworking Operating System) Embedded Event Manager to allow the users to share scripts with each other.

To attract data center operators to its switching platforms, Cisco emphasized improved port densities for better scalability, better manageability and greater resiliency, according to Marie Hattar, senior director of network systems marketing at Cisco, in San Jose, Calif.

And although the new module can be over-subscribed, Cisco sought to ensure better availability under heavy loads by increasing the buffer size of the module from 16MB per port to 200MB per port.

It's been primarily a Force10/Foundry race in high-performance computing and data center networking. Cisco has managed to sell product in there as a result of its brand, but they haven't had a competitive product until now.

Futuremark ® Corporation is the leading provider of performance analysis software products for PCs and smartphones, and professional services including technology demos, performance analysis services and data research projects. Futuremark® is known around the world for its benchmark products, including the 3DMark® and PCMark® Series and SPMark™ (with more than 30 million copies distributed worldwide) and value-added services powered by a database of over 13 million real life benchmarking results from over 3 million registered users. Futuremark® maintains offices in Saratoga, California and Helsinki, Finland. For more information, please visit http://www.futuremark.com

AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., is the pioneer of hardware-accelerated physics for PC games and has developed the world's first dedicated physics processor, the AGEIA PhysX™ processor. The AGEIA PhysX processor powers massive and pervasive real-time interactive worlds that for the first time obey the laws of classical physics. AGEIA provides a world-class cross platform software development kit to simplify advanced physics programming for the PhysX processor, as well next-generation gaming consoles. AGEIA is changing the face of gaming by working with more than sixty leading developers and publishers to deliver the next generation of physically immersive entertainment. The company, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is privately-held. For more information visit http://www.ageia.com

Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 1 show that the new browser will be a worthwhile upgrade, with welcome usability enhancements and improved security controls, but anyone hoping that it would set the Web on fire with innovative new features will probably be a little disappointed.

Firefox 2.0 RC1 changes the way that the browser handles large numbers of open tabbed windows. In previous versions, the browser would squeeze all the tabs onto the screen. Now, the browser leaves the tabs sized normally and adds arrows to the left and right of the tabbed window bar; users can click on these arrows to see tabs that have moved off the screen. This model is much better when it comes to actually seeing what's in the tab, although we kind of miss being able to easily tell how many tabs we have open.

A smaller change in this release provides additional options when clicking on RSS feed links within the browser. Firefox 2.0 RC1 launches an informational screen about the feed and provides subscription options, allowing users to choose among adding the feed to a feed-reading service or a feed-reader application, or adding it as a Live Bookmark in Firefox.

Protection against fraudulent phishing Web sites has been enhanced in Firefox 2.0 RC1. The browser can now subscribe to a Google-based service that checks a site against a known list of phishing sites. Firefox 2.0 RC1 also can use a periodically updated list that is downloaded to the browser. We liked that the latter method is the default because the live Google service involves sending surfing information to Google—something that the browser smartly warns users about when the Google-based anti-phishing features are turned on.

While Firefox 2.0 RC1 is most likely very close to what will be the final version of the browser, it is still intended mainly for those testing the browser and is not considered suitable for everyday use. Those interested in testing out the browser can download it at developer.mozilla.org.

While AJAX is the current rage for building interactive browser-based client applications, the action on the server side has focused on Web services. In fact, Web services have become the de-facto standard for exposing business functions at the server level. Given these conditions, a central development question becomes: How do you enable your AJAX-based applications to communicate with Web services? This article explores how you can use Microsoft Atlas (recently renamed to ASP.NET AJAX) to achieve just that.

To follow along, you'll need Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Atlas downloaded and installed. If you don't have Visual Studio 2005 installed, you can download a free Visual Studio Express version. This article explains how to interact with Web services through Atlas using an application I've called "ZipCodeRUs." The ZipCodeRUs application retrieves detailed ZIP code information such as the names of cities, counties, and their latitude, longitude, area code, etc. for up to three ZIP codes entered by the user. It relies on a free and publicly available Web service at tilisoft.com to retrieve the information. Full Article Here

On Thursday, Microsoft warned people about a vulnerability in the Windows Shell, the part of the operating system that presents the user interface. The flaw affects Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and could be exploited via the Internet Explorer Web browser through a component called WebViewFolderIcon, the company said in an advisory.

"An attacker could host a specially crafted Web site that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer," Microsoft said. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user."

While sample exploit code has been published, Microsoft said it has not yet seen any related attacks. The vulnerability was actually discovered two months ago, but the code only surfaced this week, according to the French Security Incident Response Team.

Security monitoring company Secunia deems the issue "extremely critical," its most severe rating. Microsoft said it is working on a fix and plans to release it on Oct. 10 as part of its regular patch cycle. Meanwhile, it suggested several workarounds in its advisory to protect Windows systems.

On Friday, security company Determina provided a third-party fix for the flaw. It is the second time in as many weeks that an outsider has patched a flaw in a Microsoft product. Microsoft does not recommend using such third-party fixes, saying they could cause compatibility problems.

The Windows Shell bug is one of several flaws that are publicly known and for which exploit code is available, but which Microsoft has yet to patch. Cyber crooks are actively exploiting yet-to-be-fixed holes in PowerPoint, Word and IE, Microsoft has acknowledged.

Miscreants are taunting Microsoft with zero-day code, or attack code released immediately after a flaw or patch is made public, experts have said. Some security watchers have started to coin the term "zero-day Wednesday" to come after "Patch Tuesday," Microsoft's patch day on the second Tuesday of each month. Microsoft put its patches on a schedule to give IT managers time to plan and prepare.

Billionaire investor and dot-com veteran Mark Cuban had harsh words on Thursday for YouTube, the online site that lets people share video clips, saying only a "moron" would purchase the wildly popular start-up.

Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, also said YouTube would eventually be "sued into oblivion" because of copyright violations. "They are just breaking the law," Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. "The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue."

YouTube, based in San Mateo, California, specializes in serving up short videos created by everyday people. Its popularity, with more than 100 million video showings daily, has spurred speculation the firm will be sold or taken public. YouTube company representatives were not immediately available to respond to Cuban's comments.

YouTube, which has nearly one-third of the U.S. Web video audience, three times that of Google Inc., or twice that of News Corp's MySpace, has been working on signing licensing deals with music companies and TV networks to ensure they are paid when users view their content.

This month YouTube unveiled its first deal to distribute music videos legally from a major music company by agreeing a deal with Warner Music Group, home to pop stars James Blunt and Madonna.

In other remarks, meanwhile, the often-controversial Cuban also told advertisers that the reach of YouTube is limited, particularly when it comes to user-generated videos.

Microsoft's maiden entry into the anti-phishing space outperforms similar technologies offered by more established security applications providers, according to a new report commissioned by the software company and conducted by researchers 3Sharp.

Based on a comparative study sponsored by Microsoft that tested anti-phishing applications from eight different software vendors and online specialists, the malicious Web site-blocking capabilities built into the latest beta version of Internet Explorer, specifically when used with the Microsoft Phishing Filter, catch a higher percentage of phishing attempts than rival technologies. Phishing attempts most frequently involve the use of spam e-mail to direct traffic to Web sites built to appear as the online operations of a legitimate business in the name of stealing users' private information.

Common iterations of the attacks have sought to trick people to hand over their password information to sites tailored to look like those of large financial institutions, or popular online businesses such as eBay. According to the APWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group) industry consortium, the number of phishing sites operating online is growing at a rate of 400 percent per year.

3Sharp, which is based in Redmond, Wash., and focuses its research primarily around Microsoft products, said that the IE 7 Beta 3 RC3 browser beat out similar products from anti-phishing technology makers Netcraft, Google, eBay, EarthLink, GeoTrust, Netscape and McAfee, whose product finished in that order in the test.

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.