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April 14, 2003
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Intel Releases Canterwood Processors
Conclusion: For Intel, the World is Hunky Dory
Compared to the previous Pentium 4 3.06 GHz (133 MHz FSB), the new P4 3.00 GHz (200 MHz FSB) succeeds in making significant performance gains in applications with frequent memory access. With this, Intel has scored a significant jump on its arch rival AMD. In addition, Intel can boast AGP 8X, Dual DDR400 and integrated Serial ATA (including RAID).
We got a pale impression of the Intel CSA technology, which enables the motherboard manufacturers to connect Gigabit LAN chips directly to the northbridge of the 875 chipset. However, whoever wants to offer this feature must use Intel network chips, since these are the only ones that can handle CSA at the moment. Although the competition from 3Com, Linksys and Netgear is about 20% to 30% less expensive, this type of chip has to give priority to the ICH5 Southbridge, which, with a 266 MB/s (Hub Link) connection, eventually becomes the bottleneck. After all, USB 2.0, Serial ATA, Ultra ATA and video streaming together gobble up quite a lot of bandwidth.
The new Pentium 4 3.00 GHz costs $417 per 1000 units. Two Dual-DDR400 modules (PC3200) with CL2 are currently available in stores for $180. We were able to determine a shift in the market structure with regard to Rambus. The prices for PC1066 of a comparable level are about 50% more than for DDR400.
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Genome Sciences Centre Sequences SARS Associated Corona Virus
At about 4 a.m. this morning, scientists at the BC Cancer Agency's Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre completed the first publicly available draft sequence for a coronavirus implicated in SARS.
"This is a huge step forward in the fight to control the spread of SARS," says Dr. Caroline Astell, projects leader at the Genome Sciences Centre.
Since receiving 1 millionth of a gram of purified viral genetic material from Dr. Frank Plummer at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, relayed by the BC Centre for Disease Control, scientists at the Genome Sciences Centre have worked around the clock to complete the sequence, using both molecular techniques and state-of-the-art laboratory automation.
"We are very excited about having the ability to do this, and to contribute to a solution for a serious health issue," says Dr. Victor Ling, vice-president, Research, BC Cancer Agency. "I think we can say that we have a rapid-response team who can deal with immediate health concerns."
Dr. Marco Marra, director of the Genome Sciences Centre stated that, "I am delighted that our team of scientists at the Genome Sciences Centre has responded so effectively to the challenge of rapidly sequencing this coronavirus isolate. I am extremely proud of our team. I am similarly impressed by the speed with which viral genomic material was sent to us by Frank Plummer's group a the NML in Winnipeg and by Drs. Bob Brunham and Martin Petric at the BC CDC."
It is expected that this information, posted on the Genome Sciences Centre's website (http://www.bcgsc.bc.ca) as soon as it was generated, will lead to the development of definitive diagnostic tests for SARS. In the longer term, these results may allow scientists to understand why the SARS virus is so deadly, and may assist in the development of an effective vaccine.
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AOL chiefs accused of insider trading
Two institutional shareholders have launched a lawsuit against top executives at media giant AOL Time Warner claiming they took part in insider trading.
The suit has been filed by the University of California along with the Amalgamated Bank's Long View Collective Investment Fund.
It alleges that those named in the suit gained nearly $1bn (£640m) by selling shares while using "tricks, contrivances and bogus transactions" to boost the company's share price, according to the law firm representing the institutional shareholders.
AOL Time Warner declined to comment on the suit that has been filed, amongst others, against outgoing chairman Steve Case and vice president Ted Turner.
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Windows gets tough on spam, viruses
Microsoft on Monday will detail a future version of Windows that will make it easier to detect and isolate viruses.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant will also show off new features in Microsoft Word 2003 and Exchange 2003 for fingering viruses and spam during this week's RSA Conference 2003 in San Francisco.
The Windows Filter Manager Architecture is a set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) and code that will be added to Windows to handle some of the basic operational tasks of antivirus applications, such as how the application sets up an ordinary hard drive scan, according to Jonathan Perera, senior director of Microsoft's security business unit. In a sense, Filter Manager is analogous to printer drivers, he said. In the past, printer makers did their own drivers. Now, they write to a common set of APIs.
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Bubbles Key to Cooling Hot CPUs?
"With future CPUs expected to generate as much as four times the heat of today's processors, wicking away that heat remains one of the biggest engineering hurdles in the biz. Researchers at Purdue have developed a pumpless liquid-cooling system that removes nearly six times more heat than existing systems. The trick, it seems, is in the tiny bubbles."
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DNA chip gives drug advice
Doctors will be able to personally tailor treatments using a DNA test which shows which drugs will work best.
Its makers Roche say the chip will cut out the need for patients to try out a series of drugs, risking side effects or reactions, before finding the right one for them.
The chip will be able to analyse drugs used to treat conditions including heart disease and psychiatric disorders.
The test will be used in high-tech laboratories in the US from May, and the company is also seeking European approval for the chip.
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Spam: It's Going Postal
Fancy taking revenge on someone you don't like by deluging someone with junk mail?
A little bit of knowledge can go a long way. Thanks to the increased readiness of companies to send out brochures and magazines to anyone who bothers to register online, the US Postal Service can become the agent of denial of service attacks.
This much is well known, but a recent paper by security researchers Simon Byers, Aviel Rubin and Dave Kormann demonstrates how to automate this attack.
If you type the following search string into Google -- "request catalogue name address city state zip" -- you'll get links to over thousands of Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalogue in the mail.
It'd be a tedious business to fill out many forms.
But anyone with a modest amount of programming skills, and a target's snail mail address, can automate the attack and deluge their victims with junk mail.
Last December, self-styled "spam king" Alan Ralsky let slip his snail-mail address. Internet activists seized on this information to deluge him with unwanted snail mail.
Within weeks he was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.
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U.S. and Russia set goals of reaching Red Planet
From combined dispatches NASA picked landing sites last week for twin rovers slated to land on Mars in January, where the vehicles will look for geological evidence that the planet was once warmer, wetter and more hospitable to life.
The sites, announced Friday, were selected after extensive analysis to maximize the chances for safe landings and good scientific prospects. Data gathered from NASA satellites orbiting the planet suggest both locations once were abundant in water.
One is a crater into which a now-dry river apparently once emptied, perhaps creating a lake. The other is a plain rich in hematite, an iron mineral that typically forms in standing water. The sites, both near the equator in the southern hemisphere of Mars, are halfway around the planet from each other.
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McAfee aims spam tools at small business
McAfee Security on Monday unveiled new spam-fighting software aimed at small and midsize businesses, the first product resulting from its acquisition of DeerSoft in January.
The new McAfee SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange Small Business is designed to ward off annoying spam through a combination of white lists, blacklists, content filtering and heuristics, which calculates the probability that a particular e-mail message is spam by examining a pattern of characteristics in the message.
The product, which scans e-mails as they come into the company's network, also contains a self-tuning feature, meaning that it can do things like recognize familiar people with whom an e-mailer frequently corresponds and let their messages though even if the e-mails contain characteristics that would otherwise flag them as spam.
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T-Mobile, Kinko's hook up for hot spots
T-Mobile USA is copying its own efforts with other chain store partners in its latest agreement with Kinko's to offer hot spot service.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless phone company on Monday announced a deal to make wireless broadband Internet access available in some 1,100 Kinko's stores. The rollout of the so-called hot spot service will start in the fourth quarter of this year; pricing and location information have not yet been announced. Hot spots are areas where wireless Internet access is available to the public.
"Availability of T-Mobile hot spots at Kinko's will make it easy for mobile professionals to access their corporate network, check their e-mail, and even wirelessly print documents from anywhere inside our stores," Dan Connors, Kinko's senior vice president of corporate strategy, said in a statement.
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Blackboard Campus IDs: Security Thru Cease & Desist
On Saturday night, Virgil and Acidus, two young security researchers, were scheduled to give a talk at Interz0ne II on security flaws they'd found in a popular ID card system for universities. It's run by Blackboard, formerly by AT&T, and you may know it as OneCard, CampusWide, or BuzzCard. On Saturday, instead of the talk, attendees got to hear an Interz0ne official read the Cease and Desist letter sent by corporate lawyers. The DMCA, among other federal laws including the Economic Espionage Act, were given as the reasons for shutting down the talk (but -- update -- see the P.P.S below). I spoke with Virgil this morning.
Virgil was there two years ago when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested and led away in handcuffs at Def Con 9. He's not in handcuffs now, but in speaking to me, he had to stop and think about everything he said, and every third answer was "I really shouldn't talk about that."
The DMCA is largely to thank for that. Section 1201 states that no one "shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work," and that no one "shall... offer to the public... any technology" to do so. Blackboard Inc., whose card system is called the Blackboard Transaction System and known to end users under various names, uses a network of card readers and a central server, and they communicate over RS-485 and Internet Protocol -- using, or so they apparently claim, measures that effectively control access.
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Superbug 'worst in cleanest hospitals'
Some of the "cleanest" hospitals have the highest rates of superbug infection, a survey has revealed.
All 40 hospitals with the worst rates of MRSA (methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus) were classed as either green or amber under the government's traffic-light grading system for hospital cleanliness.
None received the red rating, which would have indicated they needed to improve.
An estimated 5,000 people die from hospital -acquired infections such as MRSA each year.
The Liberal Democrats looked at 20 specialist and 20 acute hospitals with the highest rates of infection of MRSA.
Twenty-eight were classified as green and 12 as amber.
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Check Your Viral Load for Bugs
Is your computer stuck in first gear? Does it cough and sputter and crash more often than usual? And, by chance, are you seeing an unusually high number of pop-up ads?
If so, it's possible your machine harbors one or more programs known collectively as spyware, nasty little intruders that combine the worst features of e-mail viruses and spam into one package.
Like spam, spyware co-opts bandwidth in an attempt to sell you something. And just like viruses, spyware can slow down your computer, alter its settings without your permission, monitor your every move and transmit personal information about you to snoops.
Spyware isn't new to the Internet, but it is becoming more prevalent. According to a December 2002 report from research firm GartnerG2, more than 20 million people now have spyware, also known as adware, lurking on their machines, and those numbers are rising rapidly.
Some security experts warn that spyware, not viruses, is the biggest threat facing computer users. Whereas most businesses have set up filters to fend off known viruses contained within attachments -- and some users are learning not to click on attachments at all in order to avoid getting hit -- few casual users even know about spyware.
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AMD Opteron workstation chipset nears
Trust the Inquirer to be in the right pub at the right time. Just as the most dreadful fate to befall a journalist seemed imminent, that of having to pay for a drink, there was a shout from the corner of the bar. The PR bunny was already waving a fiver at the barman so it would have been churlish to refuse to listen to her patter. Only it wasn't the usual patter. This was all about the Opteron workstation plans.
Maybe a glass or two of Chardonnay had already passed her lips as the story came out fast and furious. Not only will there be a workstation chipset for the Opteron but some interesting things have started to happen with it. Our little friend had been guzzling spritzers with an AMD employee the night before and the beans were spilt.
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Big Bucks for Nanotech
The science of small things is back in the spotlight. Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil testified before the US House of Representatives this week on the societal implications of nanotechnology, the science of manipulating pieces of matter-atoms and molecules-measured in nanometers (one billionths of a meter). His testimony was related to a bill called H.R. 766, The Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003, which could lead to more than 2 billion dollars of funding for the budding science.
Nanotechnology was first cogently envisioned by physicist Richard Feynman in a 1959 speech at Caltech, according to many observers. Some scientists predict the science will lead to a sweeping revolution in manufacturing, electronics, and all kinds of engineering, with profound implications for high technology. There is talk of creating steel that is ten times stronger than any produced today, storage drives with thousands of times the capacity of current devices, and much more.
At the same time, many industry watchdogs-such as ETC Group-warn that there is no regulatory body to oversee the rise of nanotechnology, which could lead to nightmare scenarios such as nanoengineered particles escaping into the environment and worse. "The world's most powerful emerging technology is developing in an almost total political and regulatory vacuum," says a white paper from ETC Group. Author Michael Crichton has written a book called Prey which envisions swarms of nanoengineered bots wreaking havoc, and Sun Microsystems' scientist Bill Joy has debated Kurzweil on the topic, going so far as to say that the development of nanotechnology could lead to human extinction.
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Computer magazine advice can kill!
HSE WARNING OVER SAFETY ADVICE ON UPGRADING PERSONAL COMPUTERS
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) today expressed concern about advice given in some computer magazines to home computer owners on how to install electrostatic sensitive components in computers.
To prevent damage to components from static electricity computer owners are being given the potentially dangerous advice to:
Plug the computer in to the mains;
Switch off the power supply at the mains;
Earth themselves to the computer chassis using a conductive wrist strap.
The HSE warns that this procedure can be dangerous. If there is a fault in the computer power supply, or if the electric socket is wired incorrectly, the computer chassis can become live and give a fatal electric shock.
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German electronics legend goes bust
Germany's Grundig, one of Europe's best-known consumer electronics makers, has filed for bankruptcy.
The move follows the failure of rescue talks with two potential partners, Taiwan's Sampo and Turkish Beko.
Grundig, founded in 1945 and a key participant in Germany's post-war revival, had been struggling for years.
In 1996, it was spun off by parent company Philips, but failed to get its finances in order.
There is no news yet on the fate of the company's plants - including two in Germany, and one each in Portugal and Austria - or its 3,500 staff.
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Sprint axes roaming, distance charges
Sprint PCS on Monday became the last of the four major U.S. cell phone carriers to offer new calling plans for consumers that don't include extra charges for roaming or long-distance service.
The PCS Free & Clear America plans cost between $55 to $125 a month, similar to the rates charged for plans offered by Sprint PCS competitors Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless.
PCS Free & Clear America is for consumers, Sprint PCS said. The company introduced a similar plan for business customers last year.
The new plans are a mixed blessing for most U.S. carriers. On one hand, eliminating calling distinctions such as long distance or roaming (an extra charge for using a competitor's phone network to complete a call) will keep customers on board and attract new ones, Sprint PCS President Len Lauer said of Sprint's new efforts.
But most carriers still offer plans that charge extra for long-distance, and these new limitless plans will likely eat into that revenue, said wireless analyst Joe Laszlo of Jupiter Research.
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Intel puts Pentium M in networking gear
Intel has begun to sell its Pentium M processor for notebooks as a chip for networking devices, part of the company's long, slow slog to become a dominant manufacturer in the communications market.
The Pentium M, which debuted last month in Centrino notebooks, will essentially function as the nerve center inside telecommunications servers running virtual private networks, voice over IP applications, voice messaging systems or firewalls.
Nokia Networks has already said it will use the chip in some of its networking products. Other companies, such as QNX and Momentum Computer, are also building products for Pentium M-based communications equipment.
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Pocket tracker monitors children
Worried parents will soon be able to keep an eye on their children at all times via a wearable tracking device and a website that maps where they go.
The wearable device will have a panic button that, when pressed, instantly alerts parents via phone that something is wrong.
Through the website parents will be able to pinpoint the location of their children in real time as well as replay where they have been over the last few hours.
SOS Response, creators of the service, says testing of the tracking system is due to begin soon.
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Opera scales up to 7.1, vows Mac update
Opera Software released a test update to its Web browser for Windows and Linux, and pledged to continue developing its Mac version.
The Oslo, Norway-based company, which commands only a sliver of market share but has gained some prominence for surviving first Netscape's and then Microsoft's stranglehold on the market, released a test, or beta, version of Opera 7.1 with new features that it said would speed surfing and ease customization.
Opera typically releases its Mac version separately and later than its other browsers, but this time the delay was ominous to Mac users.
That's because in January, after Apple computer released a beta version of its own browser, Safari, Opera threatened to halt development of its Mac product and urged Apple to prevent that cessation by licensing Opera's code. Apple on Monday updated its test version of Safari.
"The Mac platform may not be viable for us any longer," said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of privately held Opera, at the time.
Apple subsequently characterized Opera's remarks as "sour grapes."
Tetzchner on Monday said Opera had decided to stick with the Mac after all, citing new ease of development for multiple platforms with the company's rewritten browser code base, and what he called market demand for the Mac product.
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Asthma vaccine shows promise
A vaccine that could ease asthmatic reactions has been described as "promising" by scientists.
The discovery is being tested at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.
It works by "de-sensitising" asthmatics to the things that trigger their attacks, such as animal fur or dust.
This is done by injecting the patient with tiny amounts of the substance itself.
This technique has been known for some time, but exposing asthmatics to allergens - substances that trigger allergies - has always carried the risk of causing a serious attack.
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Solar cells less pricey, more efficient
Every minute, the sun bombards Earth with enough energy to supply its power needs for a year. Yet only two one-hundredths of a percent of all the electricity fed into the U.S. grid originates from sunlight.
The world still largely relies on diminishing supplies of environmentally unfriendly and politically destabilizing fossil fuels. Despite decades of research, it's still cheaper to burn coal than get power from the sun.
But photovoltaic technology is improving efficiency and lowering costs for solar power, and experts believe the development will in the next few years drive solar adoption far faster than any government incentives or environmental concerns.
"Today, if solar energy were available in a quantity and at a cost comparable to fossil fuel, it would be a revolutionary change," said Stephen Empedocles, business development director at Nanosys Inc. The Palo Alto, California-based startup is working on photovoltaic cells so small and cheap that they can be sprayed or even painted onto surfaces.
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Intel kicks off carrier collaboration
Chipmaker Intel said Monday it's taking the unusual step of working with a phone company to fine-tune cell phones that use its chips.
The arrangement may be the start of a trend for other chipmakers and service providers as the telecom industry seeks to boost revenue.
Intel will collaborate with U.K.-based carrier mmO2, the companies announced Monday. Together they will chose new wireless services that mmo2 will offer for its cell phone, which is based on Intel's PXA 255 processor. Then, the companies will add layers of new software to improve the services, said Intel spokesman Mark Miller.
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WorldCom plans image change
Fallen telecoms giant WorldCom has announced plans to change its name, move offices and emerge from US bankruptcy.
It has also appointed a new chief financial officer, Robert Blakeley.
The second-largest US long-distance telecoms operator last year filed the world's largest bankruptcy after a $9bn (£5.7bn) accounting scandal was unearthed.
The deal will see the company renamed as MCI and given over to its creditors, who are owed $3.5bn-4.5bn.
MCI is the name of its domestic long-distance telephone unit.
Under cowboy-booted former chief executive Bernie Ebbers, the company embarked on a debt fuelled acquisition spree that spectacularly imploded after accounting irregularities were exposed.
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