Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce its first desktop microprocessors produced using 45nm process technology on the 8th of January, 2009, the first day of Consumer Electronics Show. The code-named Deneb chips will not get truly high clock-speed boost, but will be able to offer substantially higher performance thanks to larger cache and architectural improvements.

The first desktop processors from AMD made using 45nm process technology will be AMD Phenom X4 chips clocked at 2.80GHz and 3.00GHz, sources familiar with AMD’s plans said. The new processors will support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, but since the initial chips will be available in socket AM2+ form-factor, the chips will have to rely on dual-channel DDR2 PC2-8500 (1066MHz DDR2) memory.

View: The full story @ Xbit-Labs

Network giant Cisco has acquired email and calendaring software vendor PostPath for $215m, in a move seen as an attempt to compete with Microsoft in both the email and online collaboration markets. Cisco said PostPath's technology could interoperate with "many other email systems, as well as providing a browser-independent Ajax web client, and maintaining compatibility with a number of mobile clients, including RIM's BlackBerry and Microsoft's ActiveSync". It will also be integrated into Cisco's cloud-based Webex software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

In a blog post, Alex Hadden-Boyd, Webex marketing director at Cisco, said, " PostPath offers Linux-based both client and server-based email and calendaring, uses innovative Web 2.0 architectures, and can be used by both large enterprises and SMEs, the technology has native compatibility with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange." The deal is subject to standard closing conditions, and PostPath employees will become part of the Cisco Collaboration Software Group (CSG), which also includes web collaboration vendor Webex and email security provider IronPort.

View: The full story @ vnunet

BBC engineers have solved a mysterious, long-running bug that has meant iPlayer and live TV streams have frequently prompted the BT Home Hub, UK's most common router, to reset itself.

The source of the problem has been identified after a lengthy, "tricky" search and a fix is currently working its way through the BBC's back-end systems, iPlayer and embedded media architect Andy Smith told El Reg. iPlayer catch-up streams of TV and radio no longer cause the crashes, while live webcasts of news programming should get the all-clear soon.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Panasonic will soon begin selling Blu-ray Disc-based video recorders in Europe, it said Thursday at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. The company put its first Blu-ray Disc burners on sale several years ago in Japan but the planned launch of the products in France later this year marks the first time they will be available in Europe.

Using the recorders, consumers will be able to record high-definition TV programs to Blu-ray Disc without losing quality. The only other options available are to record at standard definition to DVD or VHS tape or in high-definition to hard-disk drive, although the latter makes saving favorite programs difficult because of the limited amount of disc space available.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Microsoft yesterday warned users of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won't be able to uninstall either the service pack or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) under some circumstances. The warning was reminiscent of one Microsoft made in May, when Windows XP SP3 had just been made available for downloading. At the time, the company told users they wouldn't be able to downgrade from IE7 to the older IE6 browser without uninstalling the service pack.

In a post to the IE blog today, Jane Maliouta, a Microsoft program manager, spelled out the newest situation, which affects users who downloaded and installed IE8 Beta 1 prior to updating Windows XP to SP3. If those users then upgrade IE8 to Beta 2 , which Microsoft unveiled today, they will be stuck with both IE8 and Windows XP SP3. A warning dialog will appear to alert users. "If you chose to continue, Windows XP SP3 and IE8 Beta2 will become permanent," Maliouta said. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won't be able to uninstall them."

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

A British man accused of hacking into U.S. military computers lost a major court battle today and could be extradited to the United States within weeks. Gary McKinnon is alleged to have illegally accessed computers belonging to the Pentagon, NASA and the U.S. Army and Navy in 2001 and 2002. McKinnon lost his appeal today to the European Court of Human Rights to block his extradition.

A British man accused by the United States of "the biggest military hack of all time" lost an appeal on Thursday and could be extradited to the United States within weeks. Gary McKinnon, 42, had asked the European Court of Human Rights to block his extradition, complaining that he could face inhumane prison conditions if convicted there. He took his case to the court after losing an appeal to the British House of Lords last month.

View: The full story @ eWeek

Nvidia will authorize native SLI support on Intel X58 motherboards without the need for its nForce 200 chip, according to Tom Peterson, director of Technical Marketing for MCP products at Nvidia. Peterson detailed that the company's partners will need to certify their X58 motherboards through Nvidia and, after certification, will receive an approval key to place in the system BIOS. Nvidia's drivers will check for the approval key and the device ID of the chipset before determining whether to enable SLI support on the system.

Nvidia will charge motherboard makers for certification, but the price will be cheaper than that for its nForce 200 chip, costing around US$30, which until recently Nvidia insisted was required to enable SLI on motherboards not using its own chipsets. Peterson also noted that Nvidia will continue to support the nForce 200 solution.

View: ]The full story @ DigiTimes

It's not a secret, nor a surprise that laptop sales are soaring. People are constantly on the move and there is an ever increasing demand for their PCs to be equally mobile.

Just as purchasing a new desktop can feel overwhelming to the untrained eye, buying a new laptop tailored to your specific needs whilst remaining cost effective can seem virtually impossible with the sea of potential component combinations. Realizing this, we have analyzed the market and assembled a number of specification tables outlining the ideal components for the most in demand system types today:

* Desktop replacement notebooks
* Ultra-portable laptops
* Budget/Value-minded laptops

View: TechSpot Laptop Buying Guide - August 2008

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has issued a warning for what it calls “active attacks” against Linux-based computing infrastructures using compromised SSH keys.

The attack appears to initially use stolen SSH keys to gain access to a system, and then uses local kernel exploits to gain root access. Once root access has been obtained, a rootkit known as “phalanx2″ is installed, US-CERT said in a note on its current activity site.

Phalanx2 appears to be a derivative of an older rootkit named “phalanx”. Phalanx2 and the support scripts within the rootkit, are configured to systematically steal SSH keys from the compromised system. These SSH keys are sent to the attackers, who then use them to try to compromise other sites and other systems of interest at the attacked site.

Phalanx, which dates back to 2005, is a self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch. It allows an attacker to hide files, processes and sockets and includes a tty sniffer, a tty connectback-backdoor, and auto injection on boot.

Link: More at ZDNet

Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 will be launched shortly. Whats new !?

Faster than ever. It'll be up to 70 percent faster to sign in and see your e-mail. Of course, along with more speed, you'll get powerful technology that deflects spam and helps protect you against viruses and scams.
Simpler, cleaner design. We're combining the classic and full versions of Hotmail, so you get access to everything Hotmail has to offer. The reading pane will let you check out your e-mail without having to open it up.

Put more you in your e-mail. New themes and colors will let you design the look of your inbox, so your personality can really shine through.

Closer to your contacts. Just start typing in the "To" line and you'll get a choice of e-mail contacts that most closely match what you've typed. Plus, it'll be even easier to e-mail groups of people.

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.

Emboldened by settlements with Apple and AT&T, inventor Judah Klausner filed a voicemail patent lawsuit on Tuesday against Google, Verizon Communications, LG Electronics, Comverse Technology, Citrix Systems, and Embarq. Anticipating the attack, Verizon filed its own lawsuit against Klausner two weeks ago in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York that seeks to have a federal judge declare the inventor's visual voicemail patent invalid.

The new case involves claims by Klausner tied to patents in various countries he began receiving in 1992 for "visual voicemail"—applying a graphical way of interacting with voicemail messages that allow it to be used like e-mail. In June, Apple, which recently popularized "visual voicemail" through its hit iPhone device, together with AT&T and eBay, the owner of Web-based calling service Skype, settled a patent suit filed last December by Klausner. Klausner previously sued and won settlements from Time Warner's AOL and Vonage.

View: Full Story at eWeek

A television advert for the iPhone misled consumers, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled. Two complaints to the watchdog noted that the advert said "all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone". But the ASA said because the iPhone did not support Flash or Java - two programs that form part of many webpages - the claim was misleading. Apple had argued its claim referred to availability of webpages, rather than their specific appearance.

The iPhone employs a web browser called Safari, which is built on freely available software. Many webpages, however, employ small software programs like Flash and Java to display graphics and animations. Those programs are proprietary software, and Apple opted not to enable them on the iPhone. The result is that pages viewed with Safari may look different to those same pages viewed on other browsers.

View: Full Story at the BBC

Google has commented on our IE8 Beta 1 improvements, and we’ve made IE8 even faster since then. Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to 2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7. Thus far, tweaks to the JScript engine have contributed to improve IE8’s performance on the SunSpider benchmarking suite by 400% compared to IE7.

The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. As we started building IE8 it was clear that we could do more to take advantage of the increasing prevalence of high bandwidth connections. Two key improvements we made with IE8 were to unblock downloads in the presence of external scripts and to increase the number of parallel connections per server that we support.

View: Full Story at IEBlog