“Acts of terrorism have shaken the world in recent years and security precautions have been tightened globally,” said Clive Beattie, the chief executive of ThruVision. “The ability to see both metallic and non-metallic items on people out to 25 meters is certainly a key capability that will enhance any comprehensive security system.” The technology works on the basis that all people and objects emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation. Terahertz rays lie somewhere between infrared and microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum and travel through clouds and walls. Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.

Source: Reuters

The problem the Pentagon had with these images was that they were shot with great detail and were found to represent a significant security risk. The defense department said in a statement quoted by BBC News, “Images include 360-degree views of the covered area to include access control points, barriers, headquarters, facilities and community areas.” The fear is that terrorists could use the detailed images to develop plans to attack the base. The U.S. military isn’t the only military force that has had problem with images shown on Google Earth. In July of 2007 that satellite imagery form Google Earth had shown a new Chinese ballistic missile sub in dock. Indian officials became irate when images of its new Sukhoi 30 MK1 aircraft turned up on Google Earth as well.

Source: Dailytech, BBC

Apple plans to add support for Exchange 2003 and 2007 servers into the update, and has licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync, which allows the iPhone to support push email as well as automatic calendar and address book updates. The iPhone will support Exchange’s remote wipe,......

Once Tanya Andersen files her amended Complaint, which the RIAA is barred from contesting this time around, the organization could have to explain the following details by producing documents and allowing major-label anti-piracy executives to be deposed:

- How much the RIAA’s lawyers make
- Why the average file sharing settlement fee is $4-5K
- How it decides which file sharers to sue, and which ones not to sue
- Where the settlement money goes (i.e. whether any of it makes it to the artists)

If it turns out that the RIAA is paying its investigators (such......

The browser will render the Acid2 browser test correctly, and fully supports CSS 2.1, Microsoft said. In an apparent coincidence, the Web Standards Group announced the release of the next-generation Acid3 test on Wednesday. The beta will also include two new features,......

More than 25 motherboards featuring the chipsets from OEM partners such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, Micro-Star International and Elitegroup Computer Systems are available as of the launch date, according to AMD, which also boasted that some 30 system builders across the chipmaker’s tiered channels had signed on to build and ship 780 Series-based PCs starting in the second quarter. Early reviews have been......

With IE8, Microsoft plans to have three rendering modes: the new standards-compliant mode, the IE7 rendering engine, as well as an option for displaying older Web sites. Because of the default shift, Web sites that want IE8 to use its IE7 engine will have to add a tag to their site’s code. Microsoft noted that there are some legal reasons for changing course. “While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. Microsoft hasn’t said when the final version will be out, but a beta version of the browser is due out in the first half of the year.

Source: ZDnet

The ultra high-speed memory modules utilize 6-layer print-circuit boards, which are often used to manufacture rather expensive graphics cards and mainboards, which automatically makes such memory devices pretty expensive.In mid-February this year Corsair Memory also joined the 2GHz club with its new Dominator-series memory modules. Back last year very few platforms could actually handle 2.0GHz memory speed and hardly all end-users who acquired such memory modules could actually make them work at their frequency. However, as Intel X48 and Nvidia nForce 790i SLI chipsets are approaching the market, it is expected that considerably more enthusiast-class platforms will be able to boast with 2.0GHz memory clock-speed. Currently unannounced Kingston HyperX PC3-16000 (KHX16000D2K2/2G) memory modules will be available in Q1 2008.

Source: Xbit Labs

The whole package, which includes the FTP server credentials as well as the Neosploit malicious toolkit, acts as Software as a Service for criminals because it supports multiple users, Finjan researchers say. Attackers use a sophisticated trading interface to classify the stolen accounts by the FTP server’s country of origin and the compromised site’s Google page ranking. This information enables attackers to determine cost of the compromised FTP credentials for resale to cybercriminals or to leverage themselves in an attack against the more prominent Web sites. Finjan researchers believe that the amount of money that criminals pay for the malware is minimal, likely in the neighborhood of $100. Attackers use the credentials to infiltrate corporate Web servers in order inject crimeware onto the legitimate servers of public companies, government agencies and financial institutions to steal critical information such as pass codes, bank account and social security numbers.

Source: CRN

“We anticipate these changed will provide greater opportunities … to sell more stand-alone copies of Windows,” said Brad Brooks, a Microsoft corporate vice president. In the United States, Microsoft will reduce prices for Windows Vista Ultimate, the company’s top-end operating system, to $319 from $399 for the full version and cut the price for an “upgrade” version to $219 from $259 for consumers who already run Windows XP or another edition of Vista. It also cut prices for upgrade versions of Vista Home Premium, its mainstream product, to $129 from $159. The price cuts vary by country. This price cut may be a good news for users who have problems with their illegal copy after recent security update.

Source: Reuters

A document posted to the company’s support site spelled out the details. Among other things, it promised that the 3MB update “does not affect the functionality of your operating system.” That jibes with what Alex Kochis, senior product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program, said last week when he announced the update. If the update finds one of the cracks, a notice pops up alerting the user, but it doesn’t disable either crack. The first, dubbed “Grace Timer,” extends Vista’s activation grace period, while the other, “OEM BIOS,” mimics factory-floor activation. Users whose PCs don’t have the cracks will not see the pop-up. Ouch, dark times for all Vista pirates! I’m sure there will be workaround pretty soon though…

Source: Computerworld

10 fundamental reasons for using TuneUp Utilities 2008:

• Powerful hard drive defragmentation
• Optimum start-up, Internet, and Windows acceleration
• Quick and extensive clean-up for hard drives
• Effective elimination of junk data
• Fully-automatic clean-up and improvement of your PC
• Extensive clean-up of the registry
• Effective help in solving standard Windows problems
• Secure data recovery and data elimination
• Simple custom Windows configuration
• Individual Windows styling

Links: Homepage, NFO
Download: Rapidshare.com, Torrent

That rate would translate to 150 times that of the average high-speed ADSL connection rate of 8 Mbps, or 12 times the speed of a fibre-optic communication delivery to a person’s premises (FTTP). The “Kizuna,” which also means “bond” in Japanese, is expected to begin transmitting and receiving data with terrestrial infrastructures in July after completing preparations and confirming the satellite’s safety. The satellite will enable students in Asian countries to communicate smoothly and with no time lag among one another, as if they were in the same classroom, it said. The satellite will to last five years, an agency spokeswoman said. The launch was delayed by one week after JAXA said it had discovered a problem with the gas jet thruster for its launch rocket.

Source: AFP

Today, Norway appears to be a much safer country for petty file sharers. The Hollywood lawyer Espen Tøndel has been told by Kripos (serious crime police) that they will not be spending time investigating small-time pirates.

Like many lawyers in the anti-piracy arena, Tøndel tries to blur civil and criminal law to obtain leverage. The police are clear - their priority is investigating real crimes, such as murder and robbery and sadly for him, file-sharing does not fall into those categories. Tøndel must now make his claims against alleged pirates in a civil court.

Following this major setback, Tøndel wrote to the Department of Justice and demanded a meeting with them. He complained that copyright holders need to go through the criminal system as without the help of the police, all they have is an IP address. They cannot sue an IP address, they need a real name and identity.

Unfortunately for Tøndel, the response wasn’t what he’d......

“We’ve broken disk encryption products in exactly the case when they seem to be most important these days: laptops that contain sensitive corporate data or personal information about business customers,” said J. Alex Halderman, one of the researchers, in a press release. “Unlike many security problems, this isn’t a minor flaw; it is a fundamental limitation in the way these systems were designed.” The researchers successfully performed the attack on several disk encryption systems — Apple’s FileVault, Microsoft’s BitLocker, as well as TrueCrypt and dm-crypt — but said they have no reason to believe it won’t work on other disk encryption systems as well, since they all share similar architectures. They released a paper about their work as well as a video demonstration (available at YouTube) of the attack.

Source: Wired

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the company’s past efforts to arrange educational discounts for these programs limited the number of students who ultimately could use them. DreamSpark, as Microsoft is calling the free software offering, opens up access to many more students. “We give up some revenue, but we gain the fact that we’ll get the feedback of these students, get more courses to incorporate our tools into the programs and get more startups where kids are familiar with Visual Studio, Expression Studio and SQL Server,” Gates said in a phone interview. “It’s a brilliant strategic move on the part of Microsoft,” said Chris Swenson, a software industry analyst with NPD Group. “This is one of the core audiences you have to hit if you really want to make a difference in the rich Internet application market going forward.” The programs are available now to more than 35 million college students. My university already provides a bunch of free software from Microsoft, but this will make things even better!

Source: AP

Links: Homepage, NFO
Download: Rapidshare.com, Mirrors

It has been three months since the popular (semi)private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid went offline. Since then, there has been a lot of speculation about its future, and many feared that the site would never return. Totally out of the blue, however, the tracker is now responding again.

The frontend of Demonoid is still hosted in the US, together with the popular Subdemon forums. Interestingly, the tracker - which has been offline for months - is now hosted in Malaysia, and has started to respond again, approximately 30 hours ago.

It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.

Last December, Deimos, the founder and main admin of what used to be one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, posted a message on the Subdemon forums on the possibility of a return. At the time he wrote: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there. And there’s some personal stuff I need to take care of that takes most of my time at the moment, and that does not help.”

For those who forgot, here......

Xunlei offers downloads of popular peer-to-peer file sharing software Thunder5 and WebThunder from its Web site. The names of the two downloads have been translated to English from Chinese. Xunlei means Thunder in Chinese. Early last year, the New York Times reported that Xunlei attracted a US$5 million investment from U.S. search giant Google, in return for a 4 percent stake in Xunlei. The MPA members allege Xunlei’s software is responsible for the unauthorized trading of hundreds of MPA member movie titles, and listed 32 titles on the complaint, including ‘Spiderman 3,’ ‘War of the Worlds’ and ‘Mia......

Despite that, the month contained indications that the industry actually grew. That’s because NPD’s January 2007 reporting period was actually five weeks long as opposed to this January’s four-week span. NPD analyst Anita Frazier noted that the numbers are much rosier when that adjustment is taken into account. “At the top-line, on an average sales per week basis, January 2007 was actually up nearly 18 percent as compared to last year,” Frazier said. “And the big winner was console software which was up nearly 50 percent when compared on a level playing field to last year.” However, even on a week-by-week basis, hardware sales were still down 6 percent from last year. Frazier blamed that slide on price cuts made to the consoles, and speculated that hardware shortages in the wake of stellar December sales contributed to January’s slide. That assertion was backed up a statement from Microsoft saying the Xbox 360 was suffering from temporary shortages.

Source: Gamespot

It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.

In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes” was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes are downloaded every year worldwide.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years - over 40 percent are TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it to download a TV-show.

......

In her blog, Campbell provides a timeline of her contacts with Best Buy, starting May 25, 2007, when she left the broken notebook at the Tenleytown store for repair under a service contract. On Jan. 25 of this year, a Superior Court judge recommended that she and Best Buy try to settle the matter on their own. Campbell said she offered to drop the suit, if the company paid her for her expenses and time and addressed “the shortcomings in its property and privacy protection practices.” Best Buy hasn’t responded, according to Campbell, and the next court hearing is set for Feb. 22. The only compensation Campbell has received from Best Buy is $1,110.35 that was transferred into her credit card account in late October without her consent, the plaintiff said. She’s obviously not that busy when she invested a lot of time into writing longish blog posts…

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress gives you the freedom to take almost any video file and encode it to your desired file format including DivX 6 AVI, QuickTime, MPEG 4-ISO, H.264, DVD-Video, DVD-VR, HDV camcorder, and much more. This powerful software provides you with functions and features ranging from a simple cut-editor tool to multiple powerful video filtering and effects.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress gives you an easier way of encoding with 4 steps: Start, Input, Output, Encode, along with settings template so you don’t waste your time figuring out the spec settings. Now it doesn’t take a video guru to be able to encode video; with the simple user interface, workflow is a lot more enjoyable.

You can now open Windows XP Media Center files (DVR-MS) with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. It also accepts DVD video files, DVD-VR, along with support for High Definition Camcorders such as JVC.
The new video generator blends the text into your video, and the new subtitle editor also provides numerous options and settings at your disposal.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress includes 19 unique......

This award-winning divx to dvd video converter software supports most video and audio formats for video conversion (avi, mpg, mov, wmv, mkv, ogm and more) and even handles DVD to DVD copy!

In a single click, the software offers easy and speedy conversion and burning (without the need of avi codec download). ConvertXtoDVD automatically makes DVD menus and chapters, handles advanced subtitle support (SSA, SRT, SUB/IDX) and lets you choose between 4/3 and 16/9. You can also convert video from NTSC to PAL formats along with lots of other useful features.

Release Name: ConvertXtoDVD.3.v2.99.13.900.RC5-TE
Size: 16.2MB
Links: Homepage, NFO
Download: Rapidshare.com, Torrent

Michael Winship, president of WGA’s East guild, said, “The success of this strike is a significant achievement not only for ourselves but the entire creative community, now and in the future. It is not all that we hoped for, and it is not all we deserve,” Verrone said when a tentative deal was announced Saturday. But he added, “This is the best deal this guild has bargained for in 30 years.”Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp., told The Associated Press, “At the end of the day, everybody won. The vote meant that the Academy Awards ceremony on February 24 will be the usual scripted gala, the AP reported. I really look forward to see new episodes of my favourite shows…

Source: CNN

While Mozilla obviously will take its time, and stick to perfecting the fourth beta candidate, the third beta looks much more like a finished candidate than its prior brethren. The first beta focused on speed and leanness, and surprised testers with visibly faster page loads than the current generation Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Microsoft browsers. The next beta maintained this new speed while beefing up security with a number of key improvements and some minor user interface modifications. Mozilla is also aiming for “richer personalisation” by offering one-click book-marking, smart bookmark folders and better customisation of download actions for file types. Mozilla also announced live support via instant messaging. The full release of Firefox 3 is due later this year.

Source: Vnunet, Eweek, Cnet

“This year’s version looks like a stripped-down version of last year’s,” Jamz Yaneza, research project manager at Trend Micro said in an interview last month about Storm’s one-year anniversary. “They’ve optimized the way [the bot is delivered] over the past months,” he said, citing an example of how this year’s Valentine’s Day campaign would differ from 2007’s. “They’ve learned that there’s no need to add an attachment.” Trend Micro senior antivirus researcher David Sancho spelled it out in a post to the company’s blog on Monday. “The spammed e-mail messages are just plain text, but contain links that lead to malicious......

Nvidia, which announced plans this month to buy Ageia, will use the latter company's products in conjunction with CUDA. CUDA is technology that Nvidia provides developers for offloading work from a computer's general-purpose CPU to a separate graphics-processing unit. Support for Ageia's PhysX software and hardware would be added to CUDA for GPU rendering of PhysX-provided special effects.

Ageia has built a niche for itself in gaming by offering technology that handles those elements of a video game that add realism to the overall experience. For example, the technology adds dust and flying debris to explosions, more life-like character motion and interaction, and dense smoke from objects in motion or on fire.

Ageia's PhysX software is used in 140 titles shipping or in development for PCs, Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, according to Ageia. There are more than 10,000 registered users of the PhysX software development kit.

CUDA is used in conjunction with Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT GPU, which has 112 processors for handling the heavy computational tasks of graphics-intensive games.

Nvidia competes for the wallets of gamers with Advanced Micro Devices, which......

Yahoo Tuesday said it plans to contribute its display advertising sales force and technologies to Maven’s platform to help publishers display more targeted ads in videos. The deal means that advertisers can buy video, search and display ads through Yahoo, which believes that video is a fast growing segment of the online ad market. Maven has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo, which has established a Cambridge, Massachusetts, office with the acquisition. I hope this won’t mean a new wave in video advertising, which is quite annoying…

Source: CIO