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May 12, 2003
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Hackers: iTunes can be shared over Net
Apple Computer's iTunes software has apparently opened up a new way for Macintosh owners to share music collections across the Internet.
The new music jukebox software, released two weeks ago as part of a set of high-profile Apple music announcements, contains features that allow Mac users to stream music to each other over a network. The songs are not downloaded permanently but do allow computer users to listen to any song on another network-connected Macintosh's hard drive.
Several groups of online programmers say they have figured out ways to extend this feature from a local area network to the Net. A few Web sites and software applications are claiming to allow people to search other Net-connected Macintosh computers' hard drives in order to listen to songs online.
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MSN offers look at new consumer IM
Microsoft's MSN unit continued a gradual unveiling of its new instant messenger application for consumers, showing screen shots of the new software and setting a summer timeframe for its release.
Pictures that Microsoft posted on Monday of MSN Messenger, version 6, show new voice and video features that will bring the company's consumer IM application up to speed with both its fiercest competition and its own separately marketed IM clients.
Microsoft has waged a determined battle to wrest consumer instant messenger market share from AOL Time Warner amid similar challenges to AOL from Yahoo and countless IM start-ups. The company has sought to create buzz around the new version with an announcement in March, today's sneak peak and promises of more details to come between now and the summer launch.
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Review: nVidia Retaliates With GeForceFX 5900 Ultra
So NV35, now the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, is here. And so is a 256MB version of the Radeon 9800. Is there a clear winner? It's tough to say.
Advantage nVidia: nVidia has just about caught up to the Radeon 9800 on current-generation games, and appears to have a strong shader performance outlook for upcoming games. The 5900 Ultra clearly won our 3DMark03 testing. But that's a synthetic benchmark, albeit one with plenty of DX8/DX9 shader code.
Advantage ATI: In our game tests, which are by and large DX7-class content, the outcome is a decidedly mixed bag, although in the final score, the Radeon 9800 Pro has outlasted the 5900 Ultra, particularly at the grueling 1600x1200 test resolution. Add to the mix that ATI will likely bring out a Radeon 9800 Pro running on 0.13-micron, with an engine clock that could go from 375MHz to upwards of 450MHz, and ATI would appear to have the high-end performance situation well in hand
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Intel Warns of Itanium 2 Bug
An electrical problem within some Itanium 2 chips can cause systems running on the 64-bit processors to "act improperly or shut down," according to a company spokesperson.
The "errata" affects only a small number of Itanium 2 chips within the McKinley line, which run at 900MHz and 1GHz, and will not impact the next-generation Madison or Deerfield Itanium chips, due out later this year, Barbara Grimes said.
The problem is uncommon and can manifest itself only when a specific set of operations containing particular data is called for, Grimes said. The problem was reported to Intel earlier this year by a customer who discovered it during a series of stress tests, and confirmed by Intel through its own subsequent internal testing, she said.
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Fizzer Worm Is on the Move
The Fizzer worm continued to spread rapidly late Monday afternoon as anti-virus experts raced to analyze the code of what they called one of the more complex worms in recent memory. First seen late last week, Fizzer began spreading in Asia initially but then hit Europe and North American hard Monday as office workers started to open e-mails received over the weekend.
As of 4:30 EDT Monday, MessageLabs Inc., a managed service provider in New York that tracks virus activity, had seen more than 25,000 copies of the worm, making it the fifth-most prevalent virus on the Internet this month.
"This is one of the more complicated worms we've seen", comments Mikko Hypponen, manager of anti-virus research at F-Secure Corp., based in Helsinki, Finland. "The worm is 200kB of code spaghetti, containing backdoors, code droppers, attack agents, key loggers and even a small Web server."
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eBay's Worst Nightmare: Scammers
Sitting in his eight-by-ten cell in a federal prison in North Carolina, Michael Paul Jackson, 23, still marvels at how easy the whole thing was. Several years ago when he decided to post fake auctions on eBay "selling" products he didn't own, Jackson knew, in some recessed corner of his mind, that one day he'd probably get caught. He just didn't imagine it would take four years. "I never knew how easy it was to manipulate people," Jackson said in a recent phone interview. "It was like taking candy from a baby."
All told, he stole $120,000 from more than 100 eBay users, most of whom won't get any of it back. A student at Radford University, Jackson would get photos of laptops and digital cameras from other people's auctions or elsewhere on the Internet and pretend that he owned those items. If the product retailed for $2,500, he'd sell it for $1,500, offering a killer deal people found hard to resist. When someone "won" one of his auctions, he'd ask for a bank check or money order and within a week or two the payment would show up in his post office box. Jackson was having the time of his life. He bought his girlfriend diamond rings and went on trips to Europe. He wasn't even trying all that hard to disguise himself--he registered with the Post Office using his real name and had people make the checks out directly to him.
Welcome to the dark side of eBay.
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AMD Athlon: We Fare Thee Well
Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday will release the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops, the last scheduled member of a chip family that helped turn the company's fortunes around.
The 3200+ features a 400MHz bus, faster than the 333MHz and 266MHz buses found in earlier Athlon-based computers, and runs at a slightly faster clock speed than other high-end Athlon chips, said John Crank, senior branding associate for AMD.
Graphics chip maker Nvidia, among others, is adjusting its chipsets to complement the faster bus found on the processor.
Overall, the chip will run neck and neck in terms with Intel's fastest products, Crank said. It holds about a 15 percent performance advantage over Intel's 3GHz Pentium 4 processor when the Pentium 4 is connected to a 533MHz bus, according to AMD benchmarks. Intel, though, recently came out with a new chipset that runs at 800MHz and plans on coming out with another 800MHz chipset and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 soon, according to sources close to the company.
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The joy of lyrics
Ever searched for that infuriating song lyric you couldn't quite make out? If the music industry gets its way, you had better sort it out while you still can.
"OK - let's make this the big one, frubmlub."
Trying to figure out that last word, the opening line from John Otway's classic 1975 song Beware of the Flowers (Cos I'm Sure They're Gonna Get You, Yeh) nearly drove me mad for 20 years.
I must have listened to the first few seconds of the record thousands of times but I could never quite make out what "frubmlub" really was.
Then one day in 1996, on a small website set up by Otway himself, I came across his e-mail address.
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