Incursor

Sorry, I haven’t been posting as much as usual. I have been bombarded with work lately.
This will change on Sunday when I am done with all of my work and get a new laptop!

Anyways, PC World released an interesting article about digg and the code that can decrypt HD- DVD movies created before April 23, 2007.
Full Article- http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004292.html

Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, says he’s willing to “go down fighting” rather than attempt to pull posts made to Digg.com that violate AACS copyright. The licensing adminstrator issued a cease and desist ordering Digg to remove stories containing a single code that can decrypt HD-DVD movies published before April 23, 2007.

It appears Digg.com may have thrown up its hands, conceding its user base has more control over Digg.com than it does. If the company did–or could, given the mass-Digging the users launched–pull all the postings, the backlash might be too much for the site to live with. People might lose faith that Digg is an uncensored venue for public discourse.

But the copyright laws and underlying issue will not go away because the people object.

Some people say this is a freedom of speech issue. I think not. Whose freedom of speech is threatened? The bloggers? The people who posted copyright-breaking info? It’s not illegal to post a blog.

Digg chose to not promote the original AACS posting, agreeing to remove it. (It went up nearly three months ago, by the way, as noted in my colleague Eric Dahl’s report yesterday). Customers refused to let it do so. Who pays the consequences?

Yesterday, Google announced that iGoogle would be the official name for its personalized homepage service.

Today, the iGoogle has subtly replaced the personalized service and its new Gadget Maker has been released, allowing you to create your own gagets for iGoogle.

But, with the i- prefix, there has been buzzing around the blogosphere about the fact it immediately reminds you of the iPod and similar products.

Apple surely won’t care, as Google’s CEO is on the Apple board, but this may cause some confusion and restlessness in the near future.

No matter what the i means, Google’s personalized page and Gadget Maker are sure to be an even greater success than before.

This cool cross platform BitTorrent client allows you to download torrent files within this addon.

This simple but useful client does not take up valuable space, but just waits until you are ready.

Released for only several weeks, this add-on has great POTENTIAL, but has problems to be fixed.

Their streaming ability does not appear to be very functional, and needs to be worked on by Akamai.

FoxTorrent is useful for day to day p2p sharing.

It can be found here: http://www.foxtorrent.com/

Last week, Dino Dai Zovie claimed $10,000 in a competetion to find a way to exploit the way Safari works.

(Here is the PC World Article)

Right now, every Mac is vulnerable to this.

But now, people have discovered that the same method that Zovi used can be used to manipulate PCs.

The hack lies in the way Quicktime interacts with Java.

This is a very serious threat to all computer users, including those using other browsers such as Firefox or Opera.

It is on the same level as the animated cursor hole, meaning one link and your entire computer could be taken over in a matter of minutes.

The way he implemented he attacked was released to only TippingPoint, host of the contest, meaning that most computers are safe unless this information is released.

Zovie says that his previous submissions of vulnerablilities to Apple had “nothing but positive interactions”.

Microsoft, is on a mission to double its user base. Hoping to gain even more control on the computing market, they are even selling their software for a s low as $3 to some parts of the world. Developing nations can buy this software, if they provide it to the schools for free.

They will start selling to governments in the second half of 2007.

“This is not a philanthropic effort, this is a business,” Orlando Ayala of Microsoft told the Reuter’s news agency.

Many companies are rushing to provide technology to most of the world. Intel and AMD are competing with the Classmate PC and the 50×15 laptops. Google is providing these countries with applications and tech support.

No matter what these companies goals are, it will help us all in the future.

It’s amazing. After Microsoft spent millions to advertise Vista in China, it ends up being pirated so easily and plentifully.

It threw the biggest Microsoft ad ever on top of Jin Mao Tower (in Shanghai) for vast amounts of money. And after 2 weeks, only 244 genuine copies were sold. (Pretty pitiful)

How come so little were sold? Piracy. Vista has been copied countless times and has been sold for outrageously low (and illegal) prices. The lowest costing Vista is $1 on the streets.

I guess piracy will never stop.

PcWorld had an article about Intel’s new processors. You can go to the article directly: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130810-page,1/article.html#
Or read it here:

Intel Says Penryn Chip Will Push PC Speeds
Intel new Penryn processors will push desktop PCs to run 40 percent faster for gaming than the latest Intel Core 2 Extreme chip, the company said.
Ben Ames, IDG News Service
Monday, April 16, 2007 06:00 PM PDT

Intel Corp.’s Penryn processors will push desktop PCs to run 40 percent faster for gaming than the latest Intel Core 2 Extreme chip, a company executive said Monday, giving details on the new chip design planned to reach markets in the second half of 2007.

Likewise, Penryn-powered workstations will deliver a 45 percent improvement for bandwidth-intensive tasks, versus today’s quad-core Intel Xeon, said Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. Intel will achieve the feat by shrinking its chip features from 60 nanometers to 45nm and by using “high-k metal gate” transistors, which are arguably the biggest breakthrough in microchip technology in 40 years, he said.

Maloney spoke to reporters in a preview of comments the company plans to make at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Beijing Tuesday. This is the first full IDF show Intel has held in China, and marks another step in the company’s commitment to developing its products with Chinese expertise and employees, he said. Intel has already invested US$200 million in Chinese ventures through its Intel Capital arm, and announced in March that it plans to build a $2.5 billion chip fabrication plant in Dalian, with plans to hire many more workers than the current 6,000 Chinese it now employs.

In other advances, Intel will deliver a new line of high-end multiprocessor server chips code-named “Caneland” in the third quarter of 2007. This Xeon 7300 series will include a quad-core and dual-core chips running in 80-watt and 50-watt versions for blade servers. Those chips could help Intel compete with a major new chip release from competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), which plans to unveil its “Barcelona” Opteron server chip in the middle of 2007.

Intel also said it plans to shrink enterprise-level platforms down to the size of a single chip. Under this “Tolopai” project, designers will create a system-on-chip (SOC) platform by integrating several components into a single processor, reducing chip size by up to 45 percent and power consumption by 20 percent compared to a standard four-chip design, Maloney said.

The approach is similar to an SOC plan Intel announced on April 3 for low-wattage embedded tasks like print imaging and in-vehicle automotive platforms. That version of the strategy reduces three chips to one by combining the main processor with its memory control and I/O control hubs.

Intel will use this same design in its CE 2110 Media Processor, a SOC architecture that could allow consumer electronics vendors to make simpler designs for digital home products. By 2008, Intel will begin selling the chip as a common foundation that spans products from PCs to consumer electronics, including laptops, televisions, set-top boxes and other networked media players.

Finally, Intel shared its plans for a programmable architecture code-named “Larrabee” that could allow a system to run at trillions of floating point operations per second (teraflops) of performance, a huge boon to applications in scientific computing, mining, visualization, financial analytics and health care. Pressed for further details on the conference call, Maloney declined to describe it more precisely.

Adobe has introduced its new media player, which is part of its Creative Suite 3, at the National Association of Broadcasters show.

It not only allows you to play standard files, it also lets you download, store, and play flash videos much more easily.

By easing the process of downloading, it makes it easier to play locally and not stream everytime it is played.

The starter page presents the user with a great number of options, including new videos, RSS, and your “catalog” of videos.

Also, the user interface is very intuitive and easy to change. It is possible to custom skin the player depending on the video.

However, there is one downside. It lets the owners of the video to embed advertisements into the video, even when you are offline!

The initial release will be on the Mac and PC. They hope to have it on mobile devices also soon.

The public beta is scheduled for Fall, as a 1.0 release.

Google has long been a wonderful vendor of free services that can rival even its commercial relatives.

With docs and spreadsheets, there was little reason to pay for Microsoft Office.

Soon, Google will add on to its Docs and Spreadsheets, with a Powerpoint competitor.

Eric Schimdt, the CEO of Google, announced Google Powerpoint in the Web 2.0 expo in San Franciso today.

Like its Docs and Spreadsheets brothers, Google Powerpoint will allow user to easily collaborate and share information over the internet.

The basis of all three web based products is a web architecture which Schimdt calls “a killer application”

Google Powerpoint is set to release in the US around Summer.

P.S. Also on Tuesday, Google acquired Tonic Systems, who has the technology to produce presentations and the power to convert other documents.

In an official blog, they said, “It will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets,”

Almost everyone has DRAM inside their computer. It has become the standard for users and is important for your computing speed.

Intel hopes to replace it with new PRAM, which will be demonstrated at the IDF Conference in Beijing.

PRAM is nonvolatile memory, meaning it will be capable of storing memory even when not powered.

This is a potential replacement for flash memory and DRAM. Flash memory is also nonvolatile, but holds less memory, reads/writes data slower, and is expensive. It also become useless over time because of the way it sotres the memory. DRAM, the one in many computers, is volatile, meaning it has to be powered to hold memory.

PRAM is based on chalcogenide glass. It works by altering the glass by applying heat, which changes the physical structure of the glass. It is hoped to have a better read/write speed than flash memory.

Even though it is a reasonable replacement, it doesn’t mean it will surely overtake it completely.