Napalm Riot

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A Federal grand jury as has charged a Brazilian with trying to damage and infect over 100,000 computers with a malicious botnet program that could have launched denial of service attacks, taken down networked systems or launched tons of spam.

According to the US Department of Justice, Leni de Abreu Neto, 35, of Taubate, Brazil, is charged with one count of conspiracy to cause damage to computers worldwide. If convicted, Neto faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and up to three year . . . Read more

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS).
Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG. The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.

Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.
Space news website SpaceRef broke the . . . Read more

"Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people."

He also calls the OpenBSD people "a bunch of masturbating monkeys."

Torvalds is not one to ensure that he doesn't piss people off when he writes about his opinions, which makes this a rather interesting read about his view on security. Of course, Torvalds says the way security bugs are handled with the Linux . . . Read more

In the September issue of PC Magazine, Michael J. Miller sits down with Microsoft founder and former CEO Bill Gates and talks about what Microsoft has done in the past, what they'll be doing in the future (even though he's leaving), and where Microsoft (and Windows) has succeeded and failed.

The complete interview will be available online in September, but for now, chew on this.

Michael Miller: From a technology standpoint, what . . . Read more

So, this came out a while ago, but I just so happened to stumble upon it again...

Back in March, the American Journal of Psychiatry says that compulsive internet use such as "excessive gaming, sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging" are all signs of internet addiction, and it should be classified as a mental illness. Like other addictions, such as alcoholism and drug addiction.

Like both addictions, people addicted to the internet experience cravings, withdrawal, and tolerance.. . . . Read more

From the August 1 issue of The News:"*

Yahoo's separate peace with Icahn (p. 36)

If you can't beat him, put him on your board, said Jim Goldman in CNBC.com. Yahoo this week said it has agreed to appoint "corporate rabble-rouser" Carl Icahn and two allies to its board. Yahoo "really had no choice" but to reach out to Icahn, who wants the Internet firm to cut a deal with Microsoft. "It was clear from the start that Icahn wasn't going away, and with 68 million shares, . . . Read more

SCO sued Novell for having falsely claimed to own the legal rights to Unix, shortly after suing IBM in 2003.

U.S. District Court Judge Dall Kimball rules that SCO owes Novell $2.55 million, because of a 1995 purchase agreement made by SCO's predecessor, The Santa Cruz Operation (bought by Caldera International and became The SCO Group). At the time of the deal, the Santa Cruz Operation didn't have the money to pay Novell for all of its Unix business. Novell allowed the deal, with the limitati . . . Read more

Dell plans to keep XP offered as an operating system past Microsoft's June 30th deadline, but will do so by increasing the price. Vista Business and Ultimate editions allow the option to downgrade to XP, and later the users can upgrade to Vista again when they are ready. Dell has an offer to do this for it's customers on several laptop lines, but it requires the user to pay the upgrade from Vista Home to Business and Ultimate. In addition, Dell is adding an extra "Bonus" charge for it's Vostr . . . Read more

As Microsoft develops Windows 7 (possibly slated for a holiday 2009 release) they are being watched by the US Department of Justice's Technical Committee to make sure there are no antitrust violations in the operating system. This stems from when Microsoft used to (and still tries to get away with) making it's operating systems and other software incompatible or defaulted over third party software. They were supposed to be off watch, but a judge extended the watch for 2 more years, about the r . . . Read more

Move over beige box...now there's something nicheier.

That was theme enthusiastically embraced by winners of the fourth Microsoft-sponsored Next-Gen PC Design Competition, which this year encouraged entrants to dream up futuristic designs that not only feature eye-catching aesthetics, but also cater to people's passions.

Industrial design student Avery Holleman won first place in the contest for this Napkin PC, "a multi-user, multi-interface, modular computer designed for creative professi . . . Read more

After Mozilla's near failure of a download day (their servers were essentially DDoS'd, but they did log 8 million downloads), Tipping Point reported that, five hours after the release, a bug was found. The bug was found through their Zero Day Initiative, a program that rewards researchers for responsibly reporting bugs. Tipping Point won't be releasing any information about the bug until Mozilla releases a patch, as . . . Read more

I know nothing about this stuff, but I know if a lot of you haven't read it it might be interesting for you. Enjoy:

AMD and NVIDIA's years-long battle for PC graphics supremacy started another round this week, as NVIDIA launched its stunningly complex GT 200 series of GPUs. AMD won't compete directly with the 1.4-billion-transistor GPU, but it's got a new line of its own in the Radeon 4850.

Now go check out the [url=http://www.insidetech.com/news/2351-amd-preps-radeon-4850-launch-for-june . . . Read more

The Open Source Census is a "... collaborative, global project to count the number of installations for each open source software package ..." in enterprise. After five months of operation, they have only counted around 228,000 open source packages or installations and only about 1,300 machines have actually been scanned. For a project with such an ambitious idea, they haven't gotten particularly far. As a reference, The Linux Cou . . . Read more

GNU/Linux continues to make further headway into Wall Street, as the New York Stock Exchange switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Solaris and more GNU/Linux distributions include "Real Time Linux." One of the major concerns for Wall Street companies is the ability to be sure that they will be able to complete trades just as quickly as everyone else; a firm can lose millions to billions of dollars if they can't complete trades fast enough. Real Time Linux has been the answer to this concern. . . . Read more

No more "when it's done" answers, the Mozilla Development Team finally set the date: June 17th is the day they're going to release Firefox 3. That's less than a week, folks!

Be sure you all download it on this day, as they want to break the world record of the most software downloads in 24 hours.

Read

IBM and Los Alamos National Lab have broken the 1 petaflop barrier with their supercomputer, Roadrunner. This is the first supercomputer on the Top500 Linpack list to sustain 1 petaflop, making it the fastest computer in the world.

Let's put this in perspective: Roadrunner is twice as fast as BlueGene/L (Lawrence Livermore National Lab/IBM), and BlueGene is three times faster than the next fastest supercomputer, JUGENE (Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)/IBM).

. . . Read more

So... for the official release of Firefox 3, they want to break the world record of the most software downloads in 24 hours. You know what that means...

Firefox junkies unite! Get anyone and everyone you can to download Firefox 3. Have a download party, hack into computers and download it for the hopeless, download at work, etc. I think you all get the idea.

The date is set for sometime in June... so keep your eyes and cable lines open!

At D6, an electronics conference in Carlsbad, California, Microsoft unveiled the first look at w=Windows 7, the successor to Vista. After complete silence they revealed a bit showing the touch functionality of Windows 7. In addition to the peek, they also announced when it will be released: 2009, confirmed by multiple high echelon Microsoft officers as the expected release.

You can read the article [url=http://www.insidetech.com/news/2195-microsoft-shows-off-touch-enabled-windows-7?referra . . . Read more

More good news for you Charter ISP subscribers! Seems like Charter is using or is going to implement some deep-packet inspection hardware that essentially knows what you've browsed for and for how long, and then they sell that information to ad companies for super targeted ads. VERY important to note that this is an opt-OUT thing not an opt-IN deal.

Source: http://www.dslreports.com…ur-Browsing-History-94356

SAN RAFAEL, Calif., May 7, 2008 — Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of REALVIZ S.A., the privately held developer of image-based content creation software. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Read Autodesk's full press release here.

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