This page is very long and will take some time to laod.

(02.08.08) Tom's Hardware has a nice review of the last 13 years of nVidia's graphic cards. I could have done without the image of the card superimposed over the game screenshots but it's still an interesting read. Click here.

(01.08.08) Google have finally defused the legendary Google-bomb which had allow clever people with to much on their hands to spoof the search results, particularly "I'm feeling lucky", by exploiting the search engine' basic premise that the more sites that link to a webpage, the better that website is. As a result, searching for "more evil than Satan" would lead to the Microsoft's homepage (the first Gb I think). But no longer, click here to find out why.

(23.07.08) Satnavs are a bit of a menace according a survey by DirectLine. 26% of the 2000 who took part said theirs had told them to drive through no entry signs, 11% that they'd caused them to lose concentration and 10% that they'd made illegal turns as the result of instructions. So be careful out there. Read more here. 

(22.07.08) The Oyster travel has been hacked and a court in the Netherlands has ruled that the hack can be published, meaning that in the near future people will be cloning them to get free travel around London. It doesn't just effect the capital though, the technology is widely used around the country and across Europe and it could point to something more fundemental than just a vulnerability on a particular chip, meaning that contactless cards are inherently insecure. Read more here.

(19.07.08) Tomb Raider Underworld, the latest Lara Croft game, is nearing release and it looks quite good. From the screenshots the game appears to have bigger landscapes and Lara looks more, well just more really but they don't seem to have gone for the cutting edge of gaming graphics. This is probably because it's a truly mass marlet title and they want as many people to be able to play it. Click here for a interview with game's director and here for the website. 

(18.07.08) Telegraph Newspapers is moving from MS Office to Google Apps Premier for it's editorial work. The company cites cost, it's one fifth of the cost and also the obvious fact that Google provides all the hardware, meaning that all the Telegraph needs to provide are terminals. Office is one of Microsoft's main earners and this could be the start of a real struggle between the two giants. Click here for more.

(17.07.08) IT Consultants Gartner are predicting that the mouse will be replaced by gesture based computer inputs within 3 to 5 years. There are already plenty of these around, the Wii remote and exercise boards, guitars and of course Microsoft's ever arriving touch and gesture based interfaces. Other devices will ween people off their mice, mobiles phones now and in the near future televisions that detect hand movement but will it actually kill the mouse? I doubt it, the mouse does a simple job well and will be around for decades in some form. Read more here.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has said that the proposed "super-database" is a step to far for the British way of life. The database will contain all our electronic communications and web traffic for at least one year and allow monitoring for police and security purposes. Read more here.

(14.07.08) The launch of the iPhone 3g was not without it's problems, in my opinion because they didn't want customers hacking it and using it on 3rd party mobile providers. Because like the original, the new one is tied to particuler providers in each region, so this time the phone had to activated in store. This led to delays as queues built up behind as each one was connected to the network and the server crashing under the demand, which eventually led to people being sent home to complete the last stage of the process. Read more here. The phone itself has fairly good reviews, it doesn't have a very good camera and can't send movies but the software is good and it's much faster to the web than the old one, click here for a video review. It's like having a Wii in your pocket apparently.

(08.07.08) AMD has unvieled "Cinema 2" which it sees as the future of films and games, offering cinema like graphics for gamers and an interactive experience for people watching movies on their computers. It's received mixed reviews, with IT press thinking it's hype (mostly based on the fairly low-res demo) and gaming websites being impressed. Read reviews here and here. I think it looks interesting, not least because it's partly a product of AMDs purchase of Radeon, which means a closer intergration of motherboard an graphics card.

(03.07.08) Google, owners of YouTube has been ordered to hand over all the records it has relating to individual visits to the YouTube website to media giant Viacom. Details will include personal information and the clips people viewed. That's going take more than a box file. Read more here.

(16.06.08) The world's oldest recording of computer generated music has been found in the BBC archive. Recorded at Manchester University on it's "Baby" computer, it consists of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a short version of In the Mood. It sounds a bit like that little device Rolf Harris used to promote to me. Click here for more and to wonder at the size of Baby.

(06.06.08) Ray-tracing is the future of graphics according to this story on the Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN website (top name that) and will replace polygon and texture rendering in the next few years. It will lead to a whole new generation of graphics cards too, so lots to look forward to.

(04.06.08) Get ready for a music file format, MT9. When loaded in a compatible player, one with a six channel mixer, it enables the listener to tune out parts of a track, enablingyou to hear, say, just the guitar solo or lead vocal. Read more here.

Safari browser users can look forward to Java script applications loading a lot faster, 1.6 times faster in fact, in the future. The new interpreter, called SquirrelFish, simplifies the way the code loads, eliminating "overheads" (whatever that means) and speeding up the whole process. Read more here.

(29.05.08) MS has launched or is demonstrating it's new touch interface for Windows 7, which it frist introduced last year. It looks lovely but I wonder how they get over the problem of fingermarks. Click here.

(28.05.08) Viacom is taking YouTube to court over the numerous examples of it's films etc appearing on the video sharing website. They run from clips from popular shows like South Park to almost all of the film An Inconvenient Truth and amount to 150,000 breaches of copyright according to the media giant. YouTube say it has complied with the law by taking down content as soon as a complaint is launched  but Viacom say that the way the site works, with things being reposted as soon as they're removed amounts to continuous availability and is part of the business plan. If they are successful it will effect far more than just YouTube because of the way videos are embedded in blogs and websites across the Internet. Read more here. Personally I think they just want a slice of the revenue.

(18.05.08) A scripting error has been discovered on Paypal pages that could allow hackers to exploit the very thing that reassures people that they're on a genuine PayPal page. Code injected into the script by a Finnish researcher caused an "is it safe" message to appear but clicking on any of the links on it would take the visitor to the hackers website. So far there aren't any reports of it being exploited but it's worrying that a website regarded as one of the most secure out there should have such vulnerability. Click here for more.

(14.05.08) This is genius, a web game is getting online game players to solve the problem of how rubbish image searches are. Text searches are bad enough but image is even worse because so many are incorrectly labled. The game, called ESP, asks one player to guess how another has described an image and if they're correct that description matches, it's added to the picture's tags. A variant is to ask to people to trace the images main subject in an effort to get computers to be able to recognise what a picture is and to label it correctly. The games now have a million users, a fifth of them playing regularly and it's worked so well that Goggle has licensed it. Read more here.

(05.05.08) After 40 years of research, Hewlett Packard have succeded in proving that there is a fourth element of a passive circuit. In addition to resistors, capacitors and inductors, there are something they're calling memory resistor or memristor.

The memristor was first described by Leon Chua in the 70s as a mathematical theory and HP have finally created a physical example of it which brings about the possibility of computers that don't need booting because the memristor remembers the direction and power of the charge travelling through it. Read more here.

(30.04.08) GTA IV is out to predictably effusive reviews. Not much has changed in the basic concept but the city is far, far bigger, so, so is the breadth of the story. Read more, including a video review, here.

(21.04.08) Here's one of those things that you're so familiar with that you don't think about it, you mistype a URL and you're taken to list of search results rather than the website you wanted. Well as you probably guessed, the results are really adverts and that's why you didn't click on any of them.

What I hadn't realised is that just one company controls what you see, it's a UK company and it's the target of a vulnerability that although patched is bound to be exploited again. Basically the problem is that all the redirection happens on one small server running java script, one of the hacker's favourite plateforms. Read more here.

(16.04.08) 45% of women & 10% of men were happy to hand over their email passwords over to people posing as market researchers at Liverpool St. station in exchange for chocolate. The social experiment survey run by security consultants Infosecurity Europe rather assums that the passwords given were genuine but some of the other findings are interesting too. Most people use the same password for everything and given that they like to use something connected to their life, that's very insecure. They were quite happy to reveal personal details to the "researchers" and happily admitted to handing over work passwords if called by the IT department at home. Amazingly, things have improved since last year, read more here.

(14.04.08) Microsoft has a Robotics Group and PC Advisor has an illustrated article on what it's up to. It's not as exciting as it sounds and some of their work has a distinctly retro feel to it, with dinosaur pets and R2D2 featuring. Here it is anyway.

(10.04.08) Symantec reckon that the number of trojans, viruses and worms in circulation now tops one million and most of them were created in the last year, with almost half million appearing in the last six months. It's hardly a surprise that most target Windows based PCs and are after our money. The next computer I build will be a Linux. Read more here.

(01.04.08) Wikipedia has reached 10 million articles, making it by far the largest reference source on the Internet but possibly not the most reliable. Read more here. 

(14.03.08) Microsoft has submitted a version of Windows 7 to a US Government committee to check if it for "middleware" conflicts (that's things that connect the PC to applications to peripherals, applications and, erm, stuff) as part of an anti-trust ruling. What it means is that W7 is closer than we thought and Vista looks more and more like Windows Mil. everyday. Read more here.

(12.03.08) A CCTV camera has been developed that can detect solid objects carried under clothing. Unlike previous methods of doing this, such as X-Rays, it is totally passive and only picks up radiation, called Terahertz rays, already in the environment. T-Rays (their wonderfully 1950s nickname) are part of the spectrum beyond infra-red and the images produced are just of the mss of an object with no surface detail, so it's unobtrusive too. Read more here and details on T-Rays here.

(03.03.08) Intel is to launch a new processor aimed at the mobile device market, which thus far has been dominated by RISCs (click here). They will go by the name "Atom," are quite small and use very little power in comparison to a typical dual core. Read more here and expect to see mobile phones to be advertised as with "Intel inside" any day now. 

(25.02.08) The future of phones is thin, very thin. At least it will be if Nokia's nanothechnology concept device sees the light of day. It will be self cleaning and preserving (must be good, I don't even what it means), has transparent electronics (that's a see through case isn't it?), charges by solar power and has build in environmental sensors (just like me!). Anyway, it looks lovely, if you like green. Click here.

(02.02.08) Microsoft may bring the release of Windows 7 due to the unpopularity of Vista, in much the same way that XP superseded Millennium. There’s also a possibility that early code for W7 is already available for download but while some claim it’s genuine, others don’t. Read more here and here.

(25.01.08) Estonia has charged an Estonian student over the cyber attacks that plagued Government websites last year. At the time they layed the blame squarely at the door of the Russians who denied the accusations vigorously. The student was motivated by resentment towards the authorities who he believed were victimising the Russian minority of which he is a part. Read more here.

(16.01.08) Blu-Ray early adopters are probably locked out of future advances in the technology because their hardware isn't capable of taking upgrades. Hard luck according to some, that's just the way it is. So not only did you spend a fortune buying early versions but you going to have to junk it if you want the latest version. Read more here.

(09.01.08) How the mighty hve fallen, the once dominant Netscape browser is being ditched by AOL. Prior to Windows '98 it was the browser of choice of almost everyone but twhen Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with the operating system it went into swift decline, to the point where it currently accounts for .66% of browser use. Read more here.

(22.12.07) Gamespy has published it's top ten game of 2007 and it makes moe interesting reading than one might expect. Of course some of the big games are there but several of the others that were launched with huge fanfare are only mentioned in passing as disappointments. In their place are things that I was only dimly aware of and some I hadn't even heard of. Click here to read.  

(18.12.07) Seven of the worlds chip manufacturers, including IBM and AMD have formed a consortium to develop 32nm chips, partly in recognition of Intel's dominant market position and ability to go it alone when it comes to the investment required. 32nm would allow for significantly more transistors than the current best offering from Intel (42nm?) chips and so many companies working together could result in some interesting integration of technologies. Read more here.

However one day the limit of what current technology can do will be reached and there will be a need to find new ways to process data will have to found. Click here to read some of the mind bending possibilities. 

(14.07.12) AMD's Phenom processor is not quite out but it's been benchmarked by the Gamespot website; it's not quite as fast as hoped but it does have some clever technology. It's slightly shy of the top Intel offerings but it will undoubtedly be cheaper and there will be faster chips to come. What's more, with the aquisition of ATI, AMD are developing intergrated mobo, chip and gcards, which could offer great performance at low cost, paricularly for overclockers. Read more here.

(12.12.07) Those two Cambridge scientists that discovered a vulnerability in the PIN are facing a gagging order preventing them from publishing any further details. They'd been giving evidence in a court case involving a businessman who had £55 000 taken out of his account when Citibank objected to their research reaching a wider audiance. Read more here.

(10.12.07) Western Digital, on of the largest makers of hard drives, is attempting to prevent people sharing files stored on networked drives over the Internet. It's not even attempting to diferentiate between DRM protected and non-proected, merely preventing the sharing of 30 or so files types. It seems astonishingly crude and unnecessary to me but until they come to their sense I'd advise people to stay away from their products and not to download any firmware/software updates from them. Read more here.

I reported on the shortage of Wii consoles a couple of days ago on the News page, now it seems that they are considering stopping promoting the product in the run up to Christmas because there just aren't enough to buy. Read more here.

(05.12.07) Some good news for Vista users or at least prospective ones, after Service pack 1 is installed, the system will no longer go into limited function after 30 days if the product isn't registered. Read more, along with a review of the service pack, here.

(04.12.07) Tomshardware has released is latest run down of best cards by price/performance, so if you're looking to upgrade or buy someone a great present, click here. Prices start at under £50, which will probably buy a big boost if your system is over two years old.

They've also got a great test of just what the latest gear can do with the most demanding game, Crysis and the results are quite amazing. It doesn't quite look photographic yet but it's darn close. Click here and view the various images at their largest to see what I mean.

(02.11.07) More news from the hacking front: A New Zealand security consultancy has found that the PS 3 is perfect for cracking codes because of the way it processes data. Apparently code cracking involves a lot of brute number crunching and the PS 3 can get through the work a 100 times faster, going 1.4 billion rather 10-15 million cycles per second. As the time it takes to break a code is a key security feature this means that companies are going to have to come up with stronger encryption very soon. Read more here.

(30.11.07) You'll have heard of the teenage hacker responsible for getting into over a million computers worlwide. He was the ringleader of a group that organised the computers into botnets which were used to steal bank details, manipulate stock trades and hack businesses and make over $12 million. Read more here.

That's small change when comparred to the potential earnings from a flaw found by experts from Cambridge University in the ATM system. They've found that it is possible one person to fool the system into thinking two authentications are being received, so getting round one of the key security features. IBM has left it unfixed for a year. Read more here
(29.11.07) Blu-Ray discs are out selling HD-DVD by 2:1 in Europe, in a large part thanks to it's integration with the PS3. Unlike the Betamax/VHS war, Sony has licensed the technology to other manufacturers, so there are plenty of players on the market, even if they do cost as much as a PS3. Read more here.

i-Phone users in the UK are having problems connecting to the 0² network even in places that other phone users aren't. The problem seems to be something to do with the way the phone goes in and out of hibernation and can be cured by reinstalling the OS from the i-tunes website. Read more here.

(27.11.07) ITV, BBC and C4 are to take equal shares in a YouTube type online video service which will make archive material and clips of current shows available online. It will be supported by advertising, both in the clips and on the page and should it take off should earn money from a substantial international audience. Click here for more.

(20.11.07) Facebook is in trouble for the way it handles people's personal data, specifically for not deleting records after someone has closed an account. Instead they just mark it as inactive but retain it indefinately, which they shouldn't under the Data Protection Act. This seems a minor affair when comparred to the lose of the entire child allowance database bu it's still important. Read more here and get a handy guide of the DPA here.

(18.11.07) Saint Paul MacCartney took a moment off from fighting the forces of evil to announce that Beatles back catalogue will be online sometime in 2008. It's hard to believe that it's taken this long for them to sort it out but it's going to be enduring cool apparently. Read more here.

(16.11.07) Colossus, the computer used to decipher German WWII signals, is running again after years of painstaking reconstruction. To celebrate the event they are going to crack a signal sent by a museum in Germany and if things go to plan, they should get it done in six hours. Read more about this remarkable machine here. 

(14.11.07) Police in the Netherlands have arrested a 17 year old boy for stealing virtual furniture from other players of the online game Habbo Hotel. Basically a social networking site set in an isometric 3d hotel, players can decorate their rooms to their own taste by purchasing items real money and this kid nicked £2400 worth of it. Click here to be baffled. 

(12.11.07) Intel have launched a new chip that uses a material called hafnium which allows for smaller circuits than silicon and doesn't generate as much heat. They expect the first home computers running the chips to start shipping early next year. Read more here. 

(02.11.07) A trojan masquerading as a video codec is targeting Mac owners and they might be easily taken in as they are hardly ever the victim of this sort of thing. Read more here.

(28.10.07) The BBC has a very nice picture gallery illustrating the history of computer racing games, from an early one in which the car was merely a sticker on the screen, to near reality creations of today, click here to view.

(16.10.07) Apple is releasing it's latest operating system on the 26th, it includes various improvements to messaging, email and backup and costs only about £60 for the home addition. Funny how the webwaves aren't full of warning of doom due to OS glitches isn't it? Maybe it's partly because they only sold 1.8 million computers last reported 1/4. Read more here.

(15.10.07) Hitachi is planning to introduce a 4 terrabyte hard drive. How big is a terrabyte? Well, if a gigabyte is the size of a highland cottage, a terrabyte is about as big as the Post Office Tower. Why on earth would anyone need a hard drive that size? Well, within twenty years we'll be downloading our entire brains to them you know. Read more here.

(14.10.07) Apple's attempt to "brick" the iPhone, preventing people from signing up with other than a single provider (O2 in the UK) seem to be about to be thwarted thanks to hard working hackers, who said they were all bad? They're pretty organised too, with their own snazzy name and official sounding releases. Meanwhile TomsHardware has published their own guide to hacking the phone, which they reckon is a bit of a bargain if you don't have to sign up to O2 as well. Read more here and here.

Speaking of TomsHardware, the site has had a big make over looking a lot cleaner and more professional. Some parts don't work as well IMO, for instance the charts used to list everything in simple order, meaning that the nearer the top, the faster something was and that's not so true anymore. On the other hand it works quicker, is easier to read and has a more comprehensive list of tests. See for yourself here.

(09.10.07) The somewhat creepily named i-Pod Touch eats batteries apparently. Good thing I don't run this site on advertising revenue. Read more here.

(03.10.07) Part 3 of the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act has come into force, enabling the police to demand that any encyrpted data be rendered intelligable, so now you can keep your business secret from other members of the public but not the state without risking a two year prison sentence. Read more here.

(01.10.07) Microsoft and Adobe are to go into the online document business following the success of Google Docs. Adobe has bought "Buzzword", which is still in beta testing but proving so popular with testers, they have high hopes that it will soon rival the Google behemoth. Microsoft are a bit further behind and have only announced that they'll start beta testing later this year. Even then their offering will require users to already have a copy of Office installed on their computer, which sounds a pretty weak offer in comparison with their rivals to me. Read more here, see Buzzword here, the Microsoft story here and while you're at, why not check out this program that claims it's artificial intelligence will improve your writing, it's been getting rave reviews.

(28.09.07) XP has been given a reprieve, well the most basic version of it has been. Rather than take every version off the shelves next January, Microsoft is keep the Starter edition going until 2010. Not monumental news in itself but will have some impact on the support cycle. Read more here.

(26.09.07) Halo 3 has been released and almost immediately purchases replaced due the original being scratched. It doesn't seem to have effected the near universal enthusiasm with which the new Xbox 360 game has been received though, it's been flying off the shelves. Read more here, here and a review here.

(20.09.07) The :-) is 25 years old and to celebrate it's invention it's creator has launched a student prize for P2P communication. Apparently it was first used in this sentence, "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways." Read more here.

(17.09.07) Microsoft has finally admitted defeat in the EU case against it's anti-competitive practises. It will now have to stop bundling various applications with the operating system and more significantly give access to other companies to parts of Windows source code so they can make their applications work with it properly. The latter part of the ruling is likely to have far reaching effects on the computer world and benefit us all. Read more here.

(11.09.07) Terranet, a small Swedish company, has come up with a way of making calls directly between mobile phones for free. Backed by Nokia, the idea is that, before connecting via a mast, the phone searches for the number on any phones within it's one kilometer range. If it doesn't find the number it uses other Terranet phones to relay the request and if the number is eventually found, to act as relay stations. What's interesting about this is that it's designed for remote areas with poor coverage. Read more here.

(04.09.07) Microsoft has launched the new version of the Xbox 360, the Elite. It's got a bigger hard drive, higher definition and is hackable, what more could you want? It costs an extra £50 too. Read more here.

(21.08.07) World of Warcraft has been hit by a virus of it's own making and it's being studied by real world doctors to learn about how a plague spreads. It all started of when the programmers introduced an infected character into one of the "realms" (WoW is divided up into separate areas) who would infect others it came into contact with. The effects were supposed to be restricted to just that realm but a programming error allowed it to be carried to others as players moved around. They tried to quarantine areas but players found ways to both leave and more surprisingly, enter, as they attempted to help the "sick." Read more here.

(16.08.07) It's long been suspected that various political organisations keep an eye one the web and try to influence it without being noticed and now there is proof. An orgainsation called Wikipedia Scanner has discovered that entities as diverse as the CIA, the Vatican and the Labour Party, have been editing Wiki articles so they reflect more favourably on various subjects. Read more here, you might be surprised (or not as the case may be) on what was edited.

(14.08.07) Sony is to launch it's own virtual world via the PS3 called Home. It will be more strictly regulated than other worlds such as Second Life, have more advertising and a more formalised system of buying and selling "properties." It looks smoother than it's rivals, as one would expect, but the characters still have that "awkward man at the party" look, it will be years before avatars begin to look truly life like. It's been very popular with it's 15000 beta testers and you can read more about it here and see screenshots via a google search here.

(10.08.07) Google is to start charging users of it online services if they go over their free allowances, for instance the 1Gb limit on Picasa. Charges are modest, $12 per annum for an additional 6Gb or $500 for an extra 250, which is about the size of a new hard drive. Read more here.

(08.08.07) The Advertising Standards Authority has banned an Internet advert from Sony for the PS3 featuring a murderous character called Kovac for glamorising violence. The company has withdrawn it and will re-edit it but it makes one wonder how much power a national authority has over an international medium. The ad had been shown on BT and Yahoo UK, which they do have authority over but what about an ad hosted and shown elsewhere? Read more here.

(06.08.07) World of Warcraft has another expansion pack on the way called  and it looks even bigger than the last. It introduces a whole new continent as well as new professions, class of warriors and higher levels going up to 80. There'll be player v player battles and the introduction of siege engines. Strangely, the players I know found the last expansion pack unsatisfactory, even though it gave more opportunities, the general feeling was they felt a bit exploited. I doubt this will effect the success of the game in the long run, it's already spread into the real world economies, with people running WoW "factories" in Asian countries where teams of players are paid to aquire elements within the game which are then sold on to players in the west for real money. Read more here. 

(23.07.07) Acer president Gianfranco Lanci isn't happy with Vista, it's riddled with holes and gives no one a good reason to buy a PC apparently. I think we all knew this but it's very inusual for a leading manufacturer to come out with statements like this. Bad sales figures on the horizon perhaps? Read more here.

(20.07.07) You probably read about the leaking of pages from the latest Harry Potter novel this week, well it seems that the poster of them may not be as anonymous as they assumed. They haven't found exactly who he is yet but they can tell quite a lot from the photos posted because he forgot to strip out the exif data (a text file contained in a .jpg that logs camera details). Honestly, call yourself a hacker! Read more here. 

(12.07.07) Second Life gets more like first life by the day. Now one avatar is suing another over the design of a bed popular with amorous second lifers, which he claims has been counterfeited by another member. That place just gets weirder. Read more here.

(11.07.07) AMD has cut the wholesale price of their X2 6000 chip to around £88, making one of the best "bangs-per-buck" deal in the CPU market. Hopefully similar drops will be seen in the cost of Athlon 64 chips too, in which case a lot of us will be upgrading! Read more here.

(09.07.07) Microsoft is preparing for the release of Vista SP1 beta, due out in the next couple of weeks and rumoured to be released in it's complete form in November. Internet sites are pointing out the short time between the beta and the final release but they could equally be asking where on earth is XP SP3. It's years since the last one was released and there have been hundreds of patches since then. Read more here.

(08.07.07) Sony is rumoured to be about to cut the cost of the PS3 by $100 in the US, where it is widely percieved as being to expensive. Apparently they've been booking ad space in anticipation of the announcement but as yet there is no indication that there'll be a similar cut in the UK, where it's even more expensive because we're all mugs happy to put up with rip offs. Read more here.

A Swiss company, called - wait for it - WabiSabiLabi, has started a market place for security vulnerabilities and even has auctions for them on ebay (at time of writing). Funny thing is they're not going for that much money so far and I can't help wondering how long the site will last. On the surface it seems completely immoral but isn't it better that legitimate security companies get an oppurtunity to buy these exploits than let them be sold secretly to ner-do-wells? Read more here.

A trojan called Trojan.Spammer has managed to get round the security barriers in the Yahoo and Hotmail systems and is setting up accounts from which to send spam. It's been a while since we've seen something like this and it's bound to result in an upsurge in junk mail. It's also worrying because it implies someone has figured out how to get round the requirement to copy an image of text which was thought to be impossible for automated sytemss. Read more here.

(03.07.07) It looks like the iPhone could become as ubiquitous as the iPod if the initial sales of Apples first mobile are anything to go by. Selling in the kind of numbers that console manufacturers dream of and taken up by the kinds of people who tend to be regarded as influential, the new device promises to combine email, the web, phone, camera and other functions into a simple interface and I have to say, it does look quite desireable. Click here for more.

(01.07.07) Xbox 360 repairs, which has always been something of an issue with the console, have slowed down with boxes taking on average four weeks to fix rather than the previous and it appears to be due to action taken by the company to defeat pirates. They blocked users who had hacked the console's chip so that it could play illegal copies of games from accessing the online gaming community but presumably because the hack isn't actually illegal and they want the subscriptions to keep rolling in, they have had to offer a repair service to affected machines. At least that's the speculation. The moral of the story is don't hack the box if you want to play online. Read more here.

(28.06.07) Sun Microsystems (how inappropriate a name is that?) has unveiled the worlds largest, fastest super-computer, the 1.7 petabyte (that's 1024 terrabytes) Constellation. Running at 481 teraflops per second and needing the same amount of electricity as an inter-city train to run, it is being hailed as a big step forward for scientific computing. Bet it can run Doom at full frame rate too. Read more here.

(26.06.07) It only took a week or so but Ebay has decided to make up with Google and start to use the search engines advertising facilities again, no doubt much to the relieve of both companies, it must have been costing both of them a small fortune. Read more here.

Two Microsoft games, created as Vista exclusives and a big pull for keen gamers, have been cracked and are now available for users of XP. They won't look quite as lush as they were designed to take full advantage of Vista's DirectX 10 but will still be enough to satisfy their exisiting fanbase and it makes you wonder about Vista's much touted anti-piracy capabilities. Read more here.

(19.06.07) Manhunter 2 has become only the second video game ever to be banned in the UK due to say the BBFC, amongst other things, "its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing." The game is basically a first person killing game in which the protagonist (you) hunts down a series of victims in increasingly sadistic ways and it's just the latest of a long line of Rock Star games to come in for criticism. Read more here.

(18.06.07) Google has complained to the US Department of Justice about Microsoft's desktop search engine, which is a free addon for XP but embedded in Vista, saying that it breaches the very antitrust ruling that Microsoft has just settled. They claim that it locks out commercial competitors in the same way that, for instance, Internet Explorer did. They will no doubt win eventually but in the mean time millions of people will buy computers with DTS and it will never occur to them to use anything else. Read more here.

Nintendo is out selling it's major rivals, shifting more units than Xbox and PS3 combined, demonstrating that an innovative controller is more appealing than an embedded HD DVD player or some really good games. Read morehere.

(16.06.07) Two of the Internet's biggest players have fallen out, resulting in Ebay withdrawing all it's advertising from Google. This follows Google's decision to hold a conference for it's Checkout payment service on the same night as Ebay's annual US jamboree. Ebay, who own PayPal and are the largest purchasers of Google adwords, were not best pleased. Read more here.

(14.06.07) The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are working on a universal TV player for broadband users, which I have to say is a great idea. Having to download and manage a different player for each broadcaster is a real anoyance, so having one that works with all the main producers is an excellent idea, especially as they intend to make it available to other companies. Read more here. 

(05.06.07) Bill Gates has announced a new motion sensitive game controller for the Xbox but it won't be like Wii's. Instead it will be based on a video recognition system that will allow people to swing a bat or racket just as they would in real life. In their giant living rooms. Or they could just go outside a play a real game. Read more here.

(21.05.07) Amazon is going to open a download music store offering tracks with no DRM, which is good news and will hopefully offer some competition to Apple's similar but rather restricted offering. What would be even better is if there's some drop in cost of tracks. At present it's actually cheaper in most cases to go out and buy a CD than download it, which is rediculous. Read more here.

PC Advisor has published a list of 15 common IT myth, has judged them true or false and quite interesting reading they make too. The one that got me was whether defragging makes and difference, something I've always believed did. Does it? Find out here. 

(17.05.07) Estonia is under cyber attack and they suspect Russia or at least, very well resourced people within Russia. Estonia is one of the most wired up countries in Europe, with many government services and much commerce being conducted over the net and for the last few weeks, since just after they removed a statue in homour of Russion war dead, websites have been under concerted denial of service attacks. Britain and the US have sent computer security experts over to help, although I'm not how much help ours will be given the recent spate of fiasco's involving various UK government websites. Click here for more.

(10.05.07) The Terminator series of movies revolved around a distopian future that was brought into being by the activation of a computerised defence system called "Skynet." Run by an artificial intelligence it rapidly concluded that earth's big problem was humans and set about using its robotic armourments to destroy them. Now the US military is start using flying drones to detect and destroy enemies and what's the satelite system that controls them called? Skynet! Read more here, while you still can. 

(10.05.07) Blue-Ray and the HD DVD format, have been hacked and attempts by body that controls the encryption code to restrict distribution of the keys have backfired according to the guy who runs the Blue-Ray website. They sent out "cease and desist" (why both, aren't they the same thing?) orders to the few hacker sites carrying the keys, rather than having the desired affect, the keys started being posted all over the place, to the point where they were appearing on tee-shirts! Read more here.

DirectX 10 (thanks for the correction Steve!) is the only reason I've found so far for "upgrading" (I think that's the word) to Vista and a few weeks ago I posted a link to a screenshot taken from a game running using the new application framework. I've now found some more shots from the game and as well as showing off the remarkable lighting and textures, they demonstrate something quite remarkable, the game actually looks better than the concept art! See for yourself here.

Sender-ID is Microsoft's solution to spam, basically it requires the sender of a piece of email to verify themselves before the message is sent on to the recipient and they sent me an email about it today. It sounds great and in theory should work but Microsoft's own page suggests that perhaps its not quite what the hype claims. According to them, out of the 3.8 billion spam messages sent to hotmail addresses every day, Sender-ID detects 20 million. Which is not exactly a ringing endorsement, see for yourself here.

(02.05.07) The Lord of the Rings is the latest game to attempt to crack the highly competitive MMO market and has gone live with what appears to be sure fire winner. There's the usual combination of classes of characters, tasks, guilds and quests that are typical of the genre but the ability to explore the world of middle earth and interact with some of it's characters is bound to attract many the books fanatical fans. Read more here. 

(25.04.07) At long last Episode 2 of Half-Life 2 is available! The second in a trilogy, it promises to continue the narative in much the same way as a TV series would and it comes with a couple of fairly substantial bonus games. Read more here.

(23.04.07) Google has bought the well established banner advertising company Doubleclick enabling the search giant to combine it's vast database of users surfing habits and ad-words system, with Doubleclick's banner cookie tracking. Read more here. 

(20.04.07) Medieval Total II has an expansion pack out called Total War Kingdoms and it's huge in comparrison with the avarage EP. It has a whole new class of characters, called heros, based on great historical figures such as Richard the Lionheart, each of whom has there own unique ability. There's new campaigns and wars to be fought and they've rewritten the battle system so that the player can control reinforcements. Read more here.

(17.04.07) Relive some of the most awful moments in the history of IT with PC Advisor's handy list. It goes back some time and I hadn't heard of quite a lot of the items on it, for instance, Microsoft Bob, an over simple cartoon interface for Windows 3 point something. I'd have quite liked to have seen that. Click here.

(13.04.07) Microsoft is to stop selling XP in 2008 despite, or possibly because, of Vista's luke warm reception by the public. They say this won't affect the support cycle, which will continue for "a considerable time". Read more here. 

(11.04.07) Apple has sold over 100 million i-Pods, which must make it one of the most ubiqutous of modern products and is quite extraordinary when you consider that there dozens of mp3 players and download sites out there. Celebrate their success by reading more here.

(02..4.07) Spammers are exploiting a flaw in websites using PHP code to link to legitimate websites and then relay the unwary onto other less desireable websites. It's a bit complicated, read more here.

(30.03.07) Vista Mail, which replaces Outlook Express in the new operating system, is vulnerable to a very straight forward hack according to a someone posting on a user group in Germany. Simply by clicking on a link to a local program in an email, the program would run without any permission being sought from the user. Given the way that Microsoft OSs intergrate all their functions, this could be very serious. Click here for more, thanks to Steve for the tip.

In Car Sat Nav could be at risk from wireless hacking and I can't say it surprises me. What damage could be done is unknown, at the moment they tend to be indepenent systems and the worst that could happen is you're directed a few miles out of your way. But with more and more systems becoming wireless how long will it be before a car is taken over remotely and how long before an in car operating system falls foul to hackers? Read more here.

(20.03.07) Another "offical hack" has been found in Vista, following the one that allows you to get a full install from an update disc. This one allows you to keep putting back the activation date from the initial 30 day evaluation period to almost a year. It's apparently so that big corporations have more time to roll out the change to Vista across a company but it appears to be available to some extent for domestic users too. It's as if MS has realised that making things easier and cheaper for customers is cheaper than fighting piracy and offering support to those having problems. Read more here.

Game Studio Acclaim is inviting amateurs to take part in the development of a MMO called "Top Secret". The project is being directed by Dave Perry, a leading designer and one of the volunteers will be offered a job at some point. The concept was inspried by the success of Counter Strike, which started out as a mod built by fans of Half-Life and became one of the most successful ames ever. Read more here and read Dave Perry's blog here.

(14.03.07) The latest add-on for Half-life 2 is out called HL2: Orange, part of slew of new updates for the popular shooting/paranoia game. It looks more out doorsy to me, you get to roam the countryside! Read more here.

(02.03.07) HP have launched the first consumer touch screen PC. It's costs over a grand, can't be upgraded and isn't that fast in the first place but those aren't it's real drawback IMO. It's the finger marks. I don't know about you but I find every little mark on the screen annoying, distracting and I'd be cleaning this one every ten minutes. None the less it's the being hailed as the future of computing and they're probably right. Read more here.

Meanwhile, scientists somewhere or other (this isn't the science page) have announced that the next generation of CPUs will be made of "graphene", described as "two dimensional" graphite because it's only a single atom thick, paving the way, all be it in a very fragile way, for even smaller processors. Read more here.

(26.02.07) Samsung has announced a new graphics memory chip which doubles current data transfer speeds, heralding a far more efficient use of graphics hungery applications such as video editing, not to mention even smoother ingame graphics. Read more here. 

(20.02.07) Hitachi has succeeded in shrinking the already pretty small RFID chip from the size of a grain of rice to that of a grain of sand. The size drop means that the number of potential uses is considerably expanded and they could be appearing, as it were, on things such as concert tickets. Not only that but they will be very hard to detect on items of clothing and the like, which could be both a good and bad thing. Read more here.

(12.02.07) Intel have demo'ed a prototype 1 teraflop processor! With 80 cores! How fast is that? Here's a picture of one of the first computers to achieve that figure, it had over a hundred cabinets, required 2500 sq feet of floor space and that was just ten years ago. Here's how much things have shrunk. Read more here, including the rather interesting fact that they haven't really come up with anything useful to do with it yet.

(11.02.07) Yahoo Pipes - what are they? Well to be honest I'm not entirely sure but I think they could turn into something as big as blogging. Basically they appear to allow people to create a webpage databases from the inumerable information feeds flowing across the Internet and although the results look a bit simplistic at this stage, in time it could turn into something very interesting. Read more here. 

(09.02.07) The Perplex City (geddit?) prize has been won after two years of puzzles, clues and exploration. It's rather like a huge internet version of the hare puzzle that was popular in the '70s, drawing thousands into a frantic search for an object and cash prize, crossed with the Da Vinci code. The cash prize in this case was £100k and it was one by a bloke from "the UK", Andy Harley, who tracked the object down to a wood in North Hamptonshire. Good for him! Read more here.

(07.02.07) Bill Gates is getting hot under the collar about a series of webads being run by Apple which openly disparage the humble PC. Apple is being quite clever in not actually naming Microsoft and instead using the virtually meaningless expression "PC" (afterall, a mac is a sort of personal computer too) but who they are refferring to is clear. Or do the adverts backfire by appearing a bit smug and exagerating the problems PC users have? Judge for yourself by reading the article here, viewing the US ads here, the UK ones here and having a laugh at the excellent Charlie Brooker here.

DirectX 10: I found an amazing example of the difference that Dx10 makes on Tom's Hardware here, it's crop from a game screenshot and really you need to look carefully to realise it's not a photo!

On the news as I type: It looks like I was right about Sony's bundling of their Blu-ray HD DVD with the PS3 boosting Blu-ray discs, they've just overtaken Toshiba's HD-DVD sales. More on this tomorrow.

(06.02.07) At least us game players have a good reason for buying Vista, it really does appear, and appearances do count, to make a difference. That's because DirectX 10 is only avialble for Vista users at the moment, well, it's available to everyone but you'll need Vista to appreciate it. Of course it means you'll also need a graphics card and probably a 64bit processor (not sure, haven't checked that) too. If the screenshots on Gamespot, a pretty reliable independent website, are anything to go buy the difference is quite dramatic. Click here.

(05.02.07) Google has finally put a stop to "Google Bombing", the practice of spoofing the search engines algorithm so that it returns desired search results. Basically it works by exploiting the way that Google counts links from one website to another and so for example, in perhaps the most famous example, searching for "dismal failure" would lead you to George Bush's Whitehouse page. There are thousands of other less amusing examples and it's been used by everyone from religions to spyware sellers. Read more here and here.

(03.02.07) Ebay has banned the sale of virtual items such as magic swords, gold and characters from games such as World of Warcraft (Burning Crusade is available for download btw) because they can't work out who really owns anything. Oddly it doesn't apply to website like Second Life because they don't consider it a game. Well of course it isn't, a game has a point. The problem with ownership comes from the T&Cs of the games that state that everything ulitmately belongs to the owners and host of the game. It's a bit like being a citizen of the British Commonwealth in which everything actually belongs to the Queen and the citizens only have the right to trade freeholds and leases. Read slightly less here.

(28.01.07) Vista looks like facing the same legal problems that dogged XP for several years with several companies, including IBM, Adobe and Nokia, banding together and claiming that the new operating system is repeating many of the anti-competitive practices of its predecessor. Click here to read more.

(16.01.07) Just when you thought it safe to upgrade the base standard for PCI-E 2 is agreed. It will raise the signal speed of cards from 2.5 to 5Gbps and enable them to work far more interactively with the rest of the computer, enabling settings to be tweaked on the fly. When I built my computer it seemed almost cutting edge or at least a capable of being upgraded to somewhere close to it, now it would be more cost effective to upgrade the mobo, card, chip and memory than try to catch up by upgrading the existing components. Read more here.

(12.01.07) It seems our spooks aren't quite as clued up about technology as the TV programme would have us believe. Not only is the US version of the application form unincrypted but data is then passed on to companies without the consent of the subscribers. It's more like "The thick of it" than "Spooks" if you ask me, read more here.

The makers of the World of Warcraft have announced the release date for the much delayed expansion pack, it's January 16th, so all you Wowers better get ready! Read more here.

(09.01.07) Huzzah! Soon M15 is to join the ranks of those eager to send us alerts straight to a desktops and no doubt, our mobile phones. And there's are so much better because they're terror alerts and so could save our lives. I hope that they'll be postcode specific and not just national because if they are I'm going to stick to this.

MSN messenger is blocking any link that contains ".scr" which just happens to include www.scroogle.org, a cookie free method of using google. I'm sure it's a coincidence but wonder why they object to the file extension used by screensaver files so much. Read more here.

(07.01.07) Hitachi has announced the first one terabyte, 1024 Gbs, hard drive for the consumer market and it'll start shipping early spring at a retail price of about £200. There'll two versions, one for normal use and the other optimised for video editing. Meanwhile SanDisc is launching a 32Gb solid state drive measuring just 1.8 inches across. It's designed to replace hard discs in portable devices such as mp3 players and the like but could be used in laptops. Read more here and here.

(06.01.07) Sony PS3 is receiving good reviews ahead of launch (sometime this year apparently) despite the hefty price tag  that will make more expensive than the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. My guess is that it will get a head of the 360 due to better graphics and a wider range of games but will have a hard time against the Wii and it's unique controller. It's amazing to think that a few years ago Nintendo was hanging on to it's market share by slashing the price of its Cube. Read more here.

(02.01.07) Oh dear, if there weren't enough reasons not to upgrade to Vista, the makers of Firefox have found another 20. That's the number of bugs that prevent the ever more popular browser from working with MS's new flagship. Don't mention that on any of the adverts for computer products shipped with it do they? Read more here. 

(19.12.06) Google has released its list of the top searches of 2006 and a weird and wonderful snapshot of the world it is too. Oddly Paris Hilton tops the News search list but at least Brittany has disappeared, while the McCartney's are having the most popular divorce and Nicole's wedding beat Tom's. That's the important items and there's lots of stuff, how North Korea fares against Iran as well. Read more here.

(12.12.06) IBM has developed a new type of non-volatile memory, that's the sort that retains data when the device is off, that is faster and smaller than Flash. Called "phased change" technology, it employs a new alloy and opens the possibility of far higher storage capacity for portable devices such as mp3 three players and mobile phones. Read more here.

(09.12.06) The Chinese have launched, well 80 of their manufacturers have, a new high definition DVD disc and players for them. The players will cost about the same as conventional DVD players, which is dead cheap and could give them a lead over other formats. It's been dubbed "redray" but is really called EVD and you can read more here. 

(04.12.06) AMD launched it's answer to Intels "married" 2 core duo chips (that's two two core chips that work together) with a 4 core chip called "Barcelona"
(why?) but it's thought to be still a few steps behind in terms of raw speed. One of the reasons is that AMD are yet to move to 65nm manufacture, which Intel did sometime ago and they've just announced that they'll start 45nm soon. At the speeds that AMDs operate they are still competitive with their Intel counterparts, which for most of us, is what counts. Read more here.

(03.12.06) Vista is not proving to be the bastion of security that MS predicted, in fact it's vulnerable to exploits that date back years, including the most common trojan horse. The basic problem appears to be the need for Vista to be backward compatible, so that people don't have to renew their entire software library when they upgrade but you'd think that they'd have made it safe from well known existing threats. Read more here.

(26.11.06) AVG free edition is to be downloadable and updateable via the Vista security center, which is sure to massively increase the market share of what has been a cheap and cheerful alternative to the big AV programs like McAfee and Symantec. What Symantec thinks about this can only be imagined, what with the problems they've had getting their products to work with Vista. Read more here.

(23.11.01) From Dec. 8th those little transmitters that connect your mp3 to the car radio (or anything else) will be legal, which I'm sure is great relief to many of you! Read more here.

(18.11.01) A Guardian investigation has succeeded in cracking the chip used to store information on the new ultra-secure passports, the possesion of which will excuse people from the need for an ID card. According to the Gov. this is nothing to worry about, make your own mind up here.

(16.11.06) Vista and Office '07 may already have been hacked according to The Inquirer. Complete programs are available from bittorrent sites which claim to come with registration keys. I think I'd be wary of these, they could well be beta versions and it's hard to believe that MS won't block the keys pretty soon. I also expect to see "cheap" deals appearing on ebay in the near future. Read more here.

Gamespot has an excellent review of MTW2 which is perfectly in tune with my brief go at the game. The graphics are infinetly better but that means that it's the first TW game that requires a fast computer to appreciate and I'm not sure if it would run on a NAIDC at all, which is a pity. There's much greater depth to the diplomacy side, which gives the game greater depth and far more individuality to the characters. Click here for the review.

(14.11.06) The similarities between IE7 and Firefox have been noted here and many other places, I don't think anyone has gone to this much trouble before though.

(13.11.06) Medieval Total War 2 is out at last and the Amazon has one of the best deals, selling it for £24.99, saving about a tenner on the usual price. It can be had for less on ebay but I'm always a bit suspicous of the phrase "genuine copy" when it appears in their descriptions and it hardly seems worth the risk to save a couple of quid. Click here for the Amazon page, complete with dramatic video. You can also get the demo with latest issue of Computer Shopper magazine!

(11.11.06) Microsoft have rethought the licensing of Vista and it will now be possible for "upgraders" to reinstall the OS as they develope their systems. Not enough to make me change to it but definately an improvement on the previous "one reinstall only" license. Read more here.

(03.11.06) Microsoft has announced that Vista will be released to businesses on November 30th, with the Home version and Office '07 coming out on schedule in January. I doubt many will be rushing out for it though.

(27.10.06) Vista News: As predicted it appears that Vista won't launch on time, which is probably a good thing given that it will released to business first. According to the Guardian, Microsoft's Jim Allchin has said it will miss Oct. 24th and hoefully appear on Nov. 8th (click here for more). Home users won't get it until January at the earliest and it looks as if they're facing a price hike of about 10% on the XP equivelent if the "basic" option is as bad as the Register is saying. The cheaper version lacks so many of the key features, including the media player, that it won't be worth getting at all. Read more here (thanks to Steve for the link).

McAfee (my new security provider) has some interesting maps on its website which track hacking attacks as they happen round the globe and they contain a few surprises too. I'd thought that eastern Europe was the main source but it's not, it's western Europe and the USA. See them here and click on the "worm attacks" animation while you're there. 

(24.10.06) Apple has launched their Mac2 Pro laptops with Intel dual core processors and they work faster than ever apparently. Now that they've released the operating system for PCs, it means that here is another real alternative to MS operating systems and given the confidence they enjoy comparred with Linux and the doubts surrounding Vista, they could make a real dent in Microsofts monopoly in the next few years. Read more here.

(23.10.06) Microsoft has delayed the release of XP Service Pack 3 until 2008, leaving a massive gap between it and the last one. There have hundreds of Mb's of updates since SP2 came out and one has to wonder what is causing the delay. Some people suspect that it's to make Vista more attractive. Thanks to Steve for the tip.

(20.10.06) Currys and Dixons have taken the unusual step of banning a game from a mainstream manufacturer. "Bully" is made by Rockstar Games, the company behind the controversial Grand Theft Auto series which has caused so much controversy in the States. It's set in a school and characters are basically encouraged to pick on the virtual pupils to earn points and power. Read more here.

(18.10.06) The EU may have resolved the row between Microsoft and the security companies by ordering MS allows access to some of Vista's code. The security companies are sceptical because they don't believe it resolve one of the main bones of contention, Vista's kernel protection which prevents anyone else making changes to the core of the operating system. Read more here. Personally I can't see how MS are going to get anyone to upgrade from XP until they resolve and other compatibilty problems and their only customers for Vista will be first time buyers.

Second Life is a virtual community in which people interact with each other within a 3d environment. It has over a million users, of which about a third are regulars and it's developed an economy that mimics the real world, turning over around half a billion dollars a day. Some people are making so much money that the US government is considering whether it and similar communities should be regulated and taxed. To make the illusion complete Reutors news agency has just appointed a reporter to cover it. It's all very strange. Read more here and here. 

(16.10.06) Vista slows down games according to tests carried out by the Inquirer and by significant amounts too. In a world where graphics cards are heralded for a few extra frames per second, drops of 12% are a disastor this close to the OS's release. Read more here. Thanks to Steve for the link.

(14.10.06) Medieval Total War has released a demo version of MTW2, which is due out next month but depressingly it's a well over 500mb download! It wasn't that long ago when entire games were that big and it's a sign of how many people now have very fast broadband connections that they think this is a reasonable size. It's beyond my 1mb connection anyway, I know from experience that it just won't maintain its speed when a file is that big. They've also released new screenshots, faction details and 3d unit models which are worth a look though. Click here. 

(08.10.06) Vista is on track for its November, business, and January, public, release dates according to industry experts but if what I've heard about it is correct they should hold back a bit. They're now at release candidate stage, by which time all major problems should have been sorted out but apparently nvidea drivers require reinstalling and even then don't work properly right away. Antivirus programs don't work at all, I think that was expected but it really shouldn't be corrupting passwords when people upgrade at this point in its development. Read more here.

(06.10.06) Tomshardware has released it's latest list of graphics cards ranked by value for money. They've broken the list up into price brackets, sub £100, £101-£130 etc, so no matter how much you've got to spend it should be helpful. Click here. 

(05.10.06) Vista is going to have even more anti-piracy features built into it than XP did. XP would nag you everyday to register until you did and if you didn't would start to lose function after a month, Vista will do that plus not all its feature will be available until the product is registered, pop-up messages will appear in the corner of the screen and users of non-genuine versions will recieve messages telling them so. Read more here.

(04.10.06) Two the most popular games have updates out this week; World of Warcraft has Patch v1.12.1, which is small but fixes significant problems, click here for details and download; while Half-Life has a total conversion mod available, click here for that. 

(03.10.06) Ati has developed a method (?) of processing data at 40 times the speed of an equivilant cpu. This is one of those stories that I don't really understand but I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more about in the near future and rather than try and explain it I think you should just read more here.

(02.06.10) Netflix, a big Internet based dvd rental service, is offering a million $ prize to anyone who can come up with a way of improving it recommendations system. Anyone who has used Amazon will be familier with the "if you like that, you'll like this" bit when they browse the website and Netflix's is much the same. They say that they can't come up with a way of improving it themselves, so they are opening it up to anyone and they're granting access to their vast database too. Read more here and visit Netflix here.

(28.09.06) The MS - Symantec war continues apace with the security goliath accussing MS of withholding "application programmable interfaces" needed for its programs to work with Windows Defender, Vista's security application. Read more here.

(26.09.06) Half-life continues to generate updates and mods and the latest is called "Penetration". Unlike many, which either tweak the existing game or turn it into something entirely new, this appears to be more like a new level and so of more interest to die-hard fans. Click here to get it.

(18.09.06) Virgin have banned all Dell and Apple laptops, not just those with the recalled Sony batteries. If you want to fly with one you have to remove the battery first, which is OK if you're flying first or business class, you have on seat power supplies. Read more here.

The Jabberwocky speech Ai now has an avotar similar to Annanova's, it really does make a decent stab at holding a conversation and they reckon it could one day replace call center workers. I think may already have done so in some cases. Try it here (website to busy to connect when I last tried). 

(16.09.06) I've seen some dumb IT stories published on the Internet over the years but this beats the lot. A would be hacker joins a hacker chat group, falls out with someone, threatens to hack them and ends up wiping there own hard drive. Read how here.

(15.09.06) Samsung have announced a new form of flash memory which is many times faster than existing technologies. Not only that but it's actually cheaper to produce and scalable without lose of function, which means that drives can be bigger without hiking the price of a gadget. Read more here.

(13.09.06) Hewlett Packard are facing the prospect of prosecution for attempting to find who was leaking information about its accounting practices by illegal means. It's chief executive has already resigned and the California's chief prosecutor has described its behaviour as "stupid". Read more here.

(10.09.06) There's been a slew of articles about Vista this week and they're not very complimentary. Which is a pity because the basic concept behind the operating system, that instead of writing a lot of independent applications and then create an OS that they can all work with, you write the OS first, is sound.

The problems are familier to anyone who has watched the development of previous MS operating systems. Firstly there's the need to meet deadlines, which has lead them to describe a beta version as a "release candidate", which has not amused some in the IT community according to Information Week (click here). Then there's the problem of trying to create something that is simultaneously brand new and yet compatible with existing applications, The Observer thinks that it's time to abandon the concept all together (click here) and has a suggestion what will replace it. It's not all bad news, Info Week also says that RC1 shows improvement over previous beta, citing five improvements (click here).

Microsoft hasn't just been busy developing Vista, it has dozens of other applications, some new, some upgrades like Office '07, available for beta testing. Click here to get an idea of what will coming our way next year but bear in mind that beta versions become unusable when the commercial product arrives. Thanks to Steve for the link.

Amazon US is already taking pre-orders for Vista, the Home Basic upgrade DVD (which gives you an idea of the size of the program) is only $99, so it will probably be around £99 when it gets to the UK. See for yourself here.

(07.09.06) Sony has had to put back the launch of Playstation 3 again due to problems with Blu-Ray technology. This means that the system is over a year late and will miss the big Christmas market, so losing more ground to Xbox. There will be a knockon affect on game developers who have already had to put there work on hold by previous delays. Read more here.

Samsung are to demonstrate a 4G mobile phone capable of recieving data at 100mbps when travelling at speed or an amazing 1Gbps when the user is walking around. While it's hard to see what use this is on a phone, when you think of say a laptop on a train, you can begin to see how useful it could be. Read more here.

(04.09.06) It's Turin Prize time again and its gone to the Jabberwocky team, who won last year too I think. This year's incarnation is called "George" and "learns" by analising all the conversations it has in order to improve its skills. Read more here and follow the links to test it for yourself.

(02.09.06) It didn't take long for Microsoft to fix the DRM flaw that allowed subscribers to music download services to strip out the copy protection information. They've distributed the patch to all affected stores and the FairUse4WM software no longer works. Read more here. 

(01.09.06) Microsoft has been a bit cagey about Office '07's release date but Amazon has inadvertantly let it slip by taking pre-orders for January 31st, coincidently the same as Vista becomes available. So, it's not a bad time to sign up for a course that will entitle you to a student copy then, just makes sure that it runs until Febuary 2007. Read more here.

(28.08.06) SpiralFrog is a terrible name but an interesting idea which could see free music downloads available legally before Christmas. The company behind it intends to offer the entire Vivendi music catalogue, the biggest in the world apparently, online and to make it's money through advertising attached to the tracks. This could mean that a jingle or sponsorship message is embedded in the music, which could in turn explain why they haven't announced the file format it will use yet. I can't wait to see how long it takes for someone to start offering a program that will strip out the messages, whatever happens it should make established music download sellers rethink their pricing structure. Read more here. 

The fragility of media control systems is demonstrated by the emergence of a free program that strips out the copy protection from Windows Media DRM, allowing users to burn tracks to whatever they want, how ever many times they want. Read more here, I'm recommending the links in the article though, I've no idea where they lead or what they may contain.

Chinese web censorship comes in for a lot of criticism and the reporting on the small victories of those who dare to challenge it (click here for a good example) remind me of the stories that came out from behind the iron curtain during the cold war. It's not often that I come across an example that affects me, so I was surprised that when looking for an article entitled "Details Emerge in British Terror Case" in the New York Times that had been picked up in the UK, I was confronted with the message "This Article Is Unavailable...On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial." Self-censorship is very different from that imposed by the state but it raises interesting questions, not least "is there any point in it?" After all, it's pretty easy to find the information elsewhere, which came from a British source anyway.

(20.08.06) Microsoft has released a, pause for breath, a fix for a bug found in the hotfix for a vulnerability in a patch released to solve a critical security issue. This time its the MS06-040 thats causing all the excitement. Read more here if you can stand it.

(18.08.06) MS is to re-release patch MS06-042 following problems experienced by users of up to date versions of IE. Apparently some webpages are causing the browser to crash without warning. Read more here.

The addition of fluorine (the active ingredient in fluoride) to the chip making process has been found to lead to huge leaps in the speeds the circuits are capable of. Until now the record has been held by Phillips with a chip that can run at 7Ghz, the new process has the potential to reach 10Ghz and it's very cheap, which means that it could be applied to existing products ranges. Read more here.

(17.08.06) The Symantec vs MS Vista security fued shows no sign of diening down and with good reason. Obviously Symantec have a vested interested but if they're right and they appear to be, Vista's security features will make life very difficult for third party firms. In the short time this may pay off for MS but in the long term I can't help thinking that the big buyers, especially government, won't be happy with not being able to use them. Read more here. Thanks to Steve for the link.

You don't need a fancy computer to play great games, even a NAIDC system will run somme of the best with just a little investment. £25 for a graphics card and £30 for some memory and you could be playing some of the greatest games ever. See which by clicking here.

(15.08.06) Well, that didn't take long. The worm predicted on Sunday has already appeared, with virus writers reworking old exploits to attack the vulnerability found in the MS patch released last Tuesday. It was only this time last year that I was writing about the emergence of the "zero-day" attack and it appears to have arrived. Read more here and Symantec's ongoing response here.

(13.08.06) Experts are predicting to a widespread worm attack targeting the problem addressed by one of the 23 patches Microsoft released on Tuesday. "This is not a drill" said one, while others think the attack could rival MS Blast of 2003. Read more here.

(11.08.06) Tom's Hardware has just released the final part of its graphics card guide. It draws together the first too and helps you use them to judge one card against another. The most interesting nugget of information is on the last page, where a nvidea 6800 PCI card is put up against its AGP equivilent and there's hardly any difference! (Which is a bit depressing if you built your computer around a fairly expensive PCI mobo and card) Read it here.

Pharming is the new phishing according to Symantec. Now that people are wising up to conventional cons to get people to visit fake websites, the conmen are adopting a much more devious approach. Teaming up with virus writers they aim to corrupt your browsers DNS cache where the real address of websites are stored so that when you try to visit, say, your bank, you are redirected to their site. Its not common yet but it could be soon. Read more and the other pharming methods here.

(09.08.06) Game News: Microsoft are releasing a demo of Flight Simulator X, containing 3 missions, such as flying around the Caribbean in a beaver light aircraft. The full game will have 50 missions and plenty of "career" options. Click here for details.

Meanwhile, Creative Assembly have released some great movies of Medieval Total War 2, which will be released in November. Covering a slightly longer time period than the MTW1, so it includes the discovery of the Americas, there have been lots of improvements to the already superb original. Each soldier, and there can be 10000 on a battlefield, is individualy animated, rendered and makes "intelligent" moves in relation to what is going on around it. Missions, such as spying and assasination now come with movies portraying there outcomes and cities look less generic. Click here for more (click on the image to access all the movies).

Google is warn people when they click on a search result known to lead to a website containing "malware". Typically, malware refers to free (usually) programs that contain spyware that reports the users online activities back to a company that then sells the information to spammers. It's legal because the user has to agree to terms and conditions before installing, they get away with it because no one ever reads them. Read more here. 

(06.08.06) Tomshardware has issued another excellent guide to graphics cards, explaining just what things like "pixel shaders" and the like do. This is actually the second part of the guide but the first was about connections etc and not that interesting. Click here for the guide.

(03.08.06) Symantec has issued another warning about MS Vista, this time pointing out what it regard as a fundemental flaw in the way the operating system asigns security levels to various components. They just won't let it lie but hopefully this time MS will listen, in contrast to the warnings they ignored before the luanch of XP. Read more here and once more, thanks to Steve for the link.

(02.08.06) Microsoft has released the upgrade options for people wanting to move to Vista and they're surprisingly complex. The option to upgrade is only available to users of XP and Media PCs, even then you'll have to check which version you have. The good news is that XP Home supports upgrade. Read more here and the Register's reaction here. Thanks to Steve for the links.

(29.07.06) Symantec isn't the only company complaining about Vista; Agnitum, makers of the Outpost  personal firewall, say that the "kernel patch protection" feature of the operating system will mean that security companies will have to "adopt the tactics of hackers" in order to update their products. This is going to be a big issue in the near future, mark my words. Click here to read more. Thanks to Steve for tipping me off, it's his words you should be marking I suppose.

(27.07.06) Kazaa has agreed to pay £53 million in damages to a consortium of big music industry players and to become a legitimate company. It gives you some idea how much it's been making from illegal P2P trading and it will be interesting what form their new business will take. The keen file sharers have already moved on to pastures new and companies that will no doubt follow the same path as kazaa and its precursors. Read more here.

(26.07.06) Graphics cards could be in for a big shake up with ATI the target of possibly two takeover bids, from AMD (confirmed) and possibly Intel. AMD would seem a better fit, being the low priced outsider fighting Intel, in the same way as ATi has struggled against the dominence of Nvidea. Read more here, here and Nvidea comments here.

(24.07.06) MySpace was off-line for a few hours today, sparking panic amongst the millions that use it. It's back now and the problem was blamed on mains and backup generator power failing due to the heatwave in California. You'd think they'd be used to them by now. Read more.

(22.07.06) An 8 bed residential clinic for game addicts has opened in Amsterdam, catering for what it claims to be the 20% of gamers who display addictive behaviour patterns. 8 beds hardly seems adequate but they do out clinics too and it's not doubt just the first of many. I seem to recall that the idea was greeted with some derision when China opened its first clinics a while back but maybe they were onto something, I certainly know people addicted to particiapating in online gaming communities. Read more here.

Symantec is claiming to have found significant problems in Vista's networking capabilities but the warnings are being taken with a pinch of salt by many commentators because of the companies commercial interests, its rivalary with MS and the fact that Vista is still in its beta stage. I wonder though, networking was the core complaint in the build up to the launch of XP and the fears of the sceptics have been proved true many times over. I'd hoped that Vista would prove more secure than previous MS OS's so I hope Symantec is wrong but I think that if they'd really wanted to put a spoke in the wheels of the MS juggernaut, they'd have waited until the full version was released. Read more here.

(19.07.06) Games News: Half-life 2: Episode1 is out, it's cheap, it's got great reviews but it's a pretty brief gaming experience by all accounts. It's about to joined by episode 2 (there's three in the series) which comes with two free games. Also out is a patch for the massively popular massive online gamer, World of Warcraft, I've no idea what it does, apart from causing rows between spouses that is. That's a freebie, as is the Penumbra Game, described as horror for people who didn't find Half-Life scarey enough, it's a 159mb download though. Click here, here and here.

(18.07.06) Did you know that you can now run an Apple operating system on an Intel based computer (you can also run XP on a Mac but who in their right mind would do that)? It means that there is now a real choice of operating system for people who want the flexibility of a PC but don't want the problems inherent in Windows nor the "adventure" of a Linux system. It cost about the same, £5 less than XP on Amazon and as it appears to have inspired much of Microsoft's upcoming Vista, offers a chance to experience a more advanced and secure OS than is currently available. Sadly it doesn't appear to work on AMD based systems, which rules me out. Read side by side reviews here and here.

Microsoft has denied that WIndows Genuine Advantage will include a "kill switch" as reported before. Read more here.

(17.07.06) You may have heard that Apple laptops run a bit hot but just how hot may come as a bit of a surprise. Switch one on, turn it over and you can fry an egg on it! Click here to see for yourself. 

(15.07.06) Intel's new Core 2 Duo processor has absolutely trounced AMD's top perfomer, the X2 in 35 out of 37 benchmark tests performed by Tom's Hardware. And "trounced" is no exageration, in some games it was twice as fast, a 20% performance improvement was common and it was only in the synthetic tests that AMD was able to salvage some pride. It's the first time in ages that Intel has beaten AMD and with price points getting closer, there'll be some worried people at AMD. Read more here (link to benchmarks in article).

(12.07.06) ebay is not going to accept Google "Checkout" for auction payments, presumably because it dosn't meet the "historical record" condition of the terms and conditions, any lot offering it will be deleted. I'm sure the fact that ebay now owns paypal is purely coincidental. Read more about Checkout here and ebay's stance here. 

(11.07.06) b4usearch.com has been ordered by the ICO to stop using information derived from the electoral role in search results because it is a breach of the data protection act. Anyone who has searched for info on someone will have been disturbed by the number of websites apparently offering very comprehensive reports on private individuals and I can't help thinking that the ICO's action is a good thing and they say they're going to be looking at other website too. Read more here.

(10.07.06) File sharers are coming under increasing pressure in Europe with the UK music industry calling for them to be cut off from the Internet and Spain wanting to ban the practice of sharing copywrite material altoghether. Neither seems to be practical or necessary, given the flexibility of the Internet and the ever expanding success of payed for music and movie downloads. Read more here and here.

Firefox 2 beta is out and it looks very interesting. There's a scrolling tab bar and various intergrated security features aimed at combating phishing websites and the like but I'm not recommending it as it will overwrite your existing installation and make all your extensions, themes etc inoperable. Read more here and, if you install it and want to tweak it, here.

Sony seems to have gone mad if the reported price of PS3 is to be believed. Up until now two things have kept Play Station out in front of the technically superior Xbox, game choice and price. They've always launched and then reduced the price to keep themselves at a lower cost than their Microsoft rivals but PS3 is said to launch at over £400! Read more here.

(30.06.06) Microsoft is being sued by a Californian man for not offering him an "informed choice" when he was asked to install the Genuine Advantage software. He is trying to turn the case into a "class action", meaning that more or less anyone in the US can join in and the consequences for MS are potentially very serious and at the very least could change the way they introduce new security software in the future. Read more here.

Windows Genuine Advantage has been causing controversy for some time, due to its habit of "phoning home" and the occasional mis-identification of legitimate MS software as warez. I've wondered whether I should recommend that people ignore requests to install it, it downloads with automatically but unlike most updates offers you a choice whether you install it or not, but decided that it might unduly worry many readers.

Now it appears that we are no longer going to have a choice and that come the autumn we'll have to install or our computers will stop working. Not only that but WGA could come with a kill switch that can shut down systems running illegal windows software. Given the mis-identifications, this is very worrying. Then there are the people who have bought software or even complete computer systems, believing everything was above board, only to find that it isn't. In the past MS has issued licenses to them if they report where they bought it but now they would appear to be taking a harder line. Click here and here for more. Thanks to Steve for the links.

(25.06.06) The AMD vs Intel battle took another twist this week with the announcement that AMD's dual core processors support reverse hyper-threading (hyper-threading definition here). This means that compatible applications can be fooled into thinking they are working on a single core cpu and combined with the onboard cache and enables a relatively modest Athlon 64 3800+ to out perform the latest Intels in some applications. Read more here.


(23.06.06) Microsoft has issued a warning about another unpatched security flaw in Excel, only days after the last one. This concerns the way hyperlinks are handled and is another example of the risks inherent in applications that attempt to do absolutely everything (IMHO). Read more here.

(22.06.06) Channel4 is to show its home grown content online at the same time as it's broadcast conventionally, starting on the 27th of June. The programmes will be available for up to a week after first broadcast. With BT offering "freeview" and the BBC showing live World Cup football over the net, Internet telly is finally with us. Read more here.

(18.06.06) There are several reports on the 'net of the latest patches from MS being hacked within days, hours even, of their release. One example is a vulnerability found in Excel spreadsheets of which can read here.

(11.06.06) Windows Genuine Advantage has been described as spyware after it emerged that the program, required to get MS updates, reports back to head office every time a computer is booted up. It does this even after it has been assertained that the all the MS software on a computer is legitimate and even if automatic updates have been disabled. Microsoft that it does this to check for updates to the program and to see if there have been any instructions issued for it to disable itself. Following criticism they have agreed to alter the report interval to once a fortnight. Read more here.

(06.06.06) Toshiba has launched a 200gb, 2.5 inch, hard drive, which packs a remarkable 178gb of data into a square inch. The seek times and transfer rates are slower than the faster 3.5" SATA drives but it shows how size, data storage and weight ratios are shrinking and promises smaller devices in the future. Read more here.

It's not the first dual core graphics card but it's the first real competitor. The Geforce 7950GX2 offers high performance at a reasonable price and could be a solution for people with on one PCI-e slot. It performs very well against high-end rivals and further models are to come. Read more here.

(03.06.06) Star Office, the popular budget alternative to MS Office, has become a victim of its own success and now virus writers are creating malware to target it. The same thing happened with Firefox and it will become more common as computer manufacturers seek cheap alternatives to MS licenses. Linux will be next. Read more here.

PCWorld has published a list of what it considers the 25 worst IT products ever released. Its no surprise to see IE 6 and MS Millennium in there but I was surprised to see RealPlayer 99 on the list. No place for the BBC Climate Change Experiment software either, certainly the worst and most timewasting piece of software I've ever come across. See the list here.

(02.06.06) Tomshardware has run MS Vista beta for 500 hours to test its stability and usability and surprise, surprise, they quite like it. Admitedly they were running it on pretty powerful computer and noted that MS had done a lot of work on the most popular aspect of their rivals programs. Read more here. 

(26.05.06) Microsoft has come up with the revolutionary idea of making the next version of Office, 2007, user friendly. Spurred by surveys that showed that only 20% of the program was being uitlised and armed with hundreds of thousands of video tape of how people used it, they've revamped the interface to cut down on the number of menus and make functions easier to access. Read more here (incidently, MS gets it nickname from the latin name of the commonest US vole, the Microtus).

(25.05.06) Windows Media Player 11 will soon be upon us and if this review is anything to go by, it comes with an improved interface (minus the ability to open multiple windows) and improved sound. It will of course have the media licensing software that have put some off getting WMP upgrades in the past but I tend to feel that as you can always use another player for anything that has a problem with it, so why worry? Click here for more.

(23.05.06) The SNP has been reprimanded for cold calling using automated messages by the Information Commisioner. The messages used the recorded voice the greatest living Scotsman, Sean Connery and its not the first time his name has got the SNP into trouble, the last time was when they used it in spam email. Read more here. Thanks once again to Steve for the tip.

AMD has announced the first 15 processors that will fit its new AM2 socket. As with previous sockets the company intends to have a huge range, from the budget to the high end, available and to keep it going for quite some time. The new range doesn't offer a huge speed improvement on their 939 equivilents but the best is, no doubt, to come. Read more here.

(22.05.06) A weird trojan is spreading via Yahoo messenger and message boards that installs what it calls a "safety browser" on your computer and reconfigures Internet Explorer. Needless to say that it is anything but a safety browser, redirecting users to very dodgy websites, enabling pop-ups and more. Read details here (follow the links for even more).

(20.05.06) Blu-Ray, Sony's new high density storage disc, has started to ship at last. Pioneer is producing compatible drives and Sony is selling Blu-Ray computers in Japan. The discs are capable of storing 25Gb of data, enough to store six DVD movies or backup the average hard disc partition. Read more here and here. Meanwhile...  

Japan's NTT lab has produced a storage media, if that's the word, capable of storing even more than Blu-Ray. Not only that but it can destroy nasty chemicals. I'm not sure I understand all this. See if you can make head or tail of it here.

(19.05.06) Tomshardware has posted benchmarks that show a sub £100 Pentium reaching speeds of over 4Ghz. The Pentium D 805 rated at 2.66 was incrementaly overclocked until it reached 4.1Ghz, faster than chips costing over £500. It was all done with pretty straight forward tweaks and some extra cooling to cope with the extra power consumption. Read more here.

Two major lawsuits started this week that could seriously affect companies involved and the customers they serve. First up is Creative vs Apple i-tunes, in which the parites are sueing each other for breach of copyright, if Creative lose it could mean the end of the already loss making company. Even more dramatic is Symantec's case against Microsoft, in which they claim that patented technology in its Veratis has been stolen by the software giant and used throughout the Vista operating system. Unless the case is speedily resolved it could mean that Microsoft's next gen OS won't be available for some time. Read more hereand here, thanks to Steve more the MS/Symantec tip.

(18.05.06) An expansion pack for Rome Total War will be released next month which will transport players to the world of Alexander the Great. Just like all the previous titles it will run well on NAIDC computer if a £25 graphics card has been installed but unusually will only be available via download, suggesting it will be cheap but only practical if you have broadband. Click here for some reduced size screenshots.

Tomshardware, has posted an interesting article about a feature of PCI express cards called "next generation content". Although utilised by very few games at the moment, it promises to greatly improve lighting and texture affects in 3d games and is something worth considering when buying a new computer or upgrading your card. The article uses the latest Tomb Raider game to compare screenshots generated by a GeForce 6800GT but with mixed results, sometimes things looked better, while other shots looked a bit muddy. This could be because game designers have yet to get to grips with the new technology or because THW hadn't quite got the settings right (check their message board for other experiences). Clickhere for the article and here for a previous article that explains some of the other features graphics features. I was struck by the THW statement that the new "next generation content" was a feature of "high end" cards, yet it's not, a branded but OEM 6800GT can be bought for as little as £80.

(17.05.06) F-Secure, the Finnish Security company, has found that software offered back an apparently legitimate poker advice website contains a program designed to steal the login details for gambling websites. Read more here and avoid checkraise.com.

(16.05.06) MTV, pioneers of music tv, is teaming up with Microsoft to provide a music download service for the non-itunes market. This accounts for about a third of the consumers, who now have a far wider choice of providors and prices than itunes users. Read more here.  

(15.05.06) Paypal is to offer customers a credit card facility, initially by invitation but eventually to all their existing customers and as a standalone product. They promise instant acceptance/rejection, 12.9% interest on outstanding accounts and internet/ID theft security features.

(11.05.06) Tom's Hardware has released it's latest review of graphic cards and the most notable aspect is that they are mostly from Radeon and only two are AGP. It's only part one and maybe this will change in part two. Click here for more.

World of War, a popular game in the community and one of the most popular online multiplayers in the world, is to release an add-on pack which promises to expand the world and add a new faction, click here for more.

(09.05.06) Dell, one of biggest names in computing, has warned shareholders that there is only so far that it can go with its low price business model. This has led to a slide in its share price which has led in turn to Intel's dropping too. Read more here.

(08.05.06) Apple computers has won its court battle with Apple records over its right to associate its name with i-tune downloads (see below). The judge decided that the agreement between the two companies only applied to physical music formats and not to downloadable files. However the company is yet to win the right to use its bitten apple logo in that context. Read more here.

(03.05.06) BT is to buy Dabs.com, one of the most popular of the online electronic/computing retailers and will use it to promote their networking, business and support services. Dabs will continue to operate as an independent entity within the BT group but there is bound to be changes to how advertising on the website and BT has got its hands on a very comprehensive database of customer data. Read more here.

The credit card for online "gamers" (see below) is specifically for members of the Entropica Universe, which isn't a game at all really but an online world in which things can be traded for affectively real money. Click here for the websites announcement and click the links to get an impression of whats going on "out there".

(02.05.06) Online multiplayer games have been generating real money for dedicated players for some time, Warcraft being the most obvious example, with sought after ingame items being traded through ebay. Now a credit card company is to make it easier to access the money earned in the game by marketing a card that will enable gamers to withdraw it through cashpoints. Read more here, the story about the virtual night club set in a space station is amazing.

(26.04.06) How big is big? I've got a 200Gb hard drive and it feels like a huge house with to little furniture, even after splitting it up into seperate drives, every part of it looks bare. Now Seagate has introduced a 750Gb internal drive, what are people going to use it for? Making Hollywood epics on their PCs? It's only going to cost £300. Read more here. 

(22.04.06) Microsoft is to reissue the MS06-015 security update due to the problems outlined last week on the Software Upates page. These affected, amongst others, the users of numerous Hewllet-Packard devices and included the inability to open common folders such as "My Documents". The Software Updates page has a link to a work-around issued by MS but it will be a bit too technical for many. Read more here.

Google is some planning a revamp of its search results page which include expandable descriptions, allowing users to see more detail about a website than the current two line preview. There will also be a "search this site" facility, which could prove really useful, given the number of times one clicks a link and the thing searched for is nowhere to seen. Read more here. 

(19.04.06) AMD is bringing forward the release of its next generation of CPUs that will fit the new AMD2 socket from June 6th to May 23rd, probably to get a head start on Intel's Conroe chip, which is thought to be faster. Read more here.

(17.04.06) The Beatles back catologue is to available in downloadable form thanks to the up to the minute thinking of the Apple Corporation. The announcement slipped out in statements made in the Apple vs Apple court case. The music is being remastered to make it "brighter" and new booklets are being written to go with it. "Booklets"? Read more here. 

(12.04.06) The release of Lara Croft - Legend has sent the game back to the top of the game charts, a welcome return after the last episode's dismal outing. Gone are the poor controls and camera, back come the big storyline and spectacular stunts. Obviously everything, including Lara, looks better than ever and so the only downside is that there'll be another movie tie-in. Read more here (news story) and here (review).

(10.04.06) Violent video games can make you violent, paranoid and prone to over indulgence in drugs according to the University of California. Violence and paranoia has been found in previous studies but the drug aspect is new. Read more here. I'm off for a quick toke - it relieves the stress of the constant survielence..

(09.04.06) Paypal is to introduce it's online payment service to mobile phone users with the launch of PayPal Mobile. At the moment its only available to users in the US and Canada but its sure to come over here sooner rather than later. If it it became popular it could make it unnecessary for us to carry credit cards, which would make life a lot safer too. Read more here.

(06.04.06) Microsoft has announced the aquisition of Lionhead, makers of Black & White amongst other games. MS say that its to improve unique content for the X-box and Lionhead has already released titles for the consol well before they appeared for PC Gamers. Black & White fans will be less upset than they might have been following the destinctly second rate B&W2. Maybe MS will encourage the company to actually produce games the fans want. Read more here.

(31.03.06) You'd think they'd have learnt their lesson from the Betamax debacle but Sony seem determined to go it alone again with their Blu-Ray DVD technology in the face of the luanch of the snappier named HD-DVD. Read more here (I realy chose this because they chose to promote HD-DVD at the wheel of another design classic).

(29.03.06) Remember all those "3 mobile" adverts with the big flamey 3 that were all over the media before Christmas? I  never really took in what they were about but they seem to have payed off, with the company behind them reporting that there customers account for more than half of UK music downloads, which is way above their share of the mobile phone market. If the chart people counted music video downloads their position would be even stronger. Read more here.

(28.03.06) Oh the horror - Unlike peerages, up until now Blue Peter badges weren't for sale but now Blue Peter is considering replacing it's badges with ID cards, in a bid to combat the trade in the childrens equivilent of the honours system. What next? False swimming certificates? Read more here.

It's almost as if companies are beginning to take pity on Microsoft - there's been another unofficial third party patch available for one of the recently discovered (don't know which one) vulnerabilities. I'm not going to recommend this one after the last fiasco, you can make your own minds up I'm sure. Click here for more and a link to the patch.

(27.03.06) Blue Peter badges have been on sale on ebay and fetching high prices because they can gain wearers free entrance to many attractions. Amongst them is Edinburgh Zoo, which has stopped the practice after noticing entire families were turning up adorned with them. According to the BBC story here ebay has withdrawn the listing but when I searched earlier today there were still plenty available (click here).

(23.03.06) Another vulnerability has been found in Internet Explorer and that's on top of the two that MS is already trying to fix before April update. It's described as critical by its discoverers because it allows the remote takeover of a system and they expect it to be exploited in the near future. Read more here and change to Firefox if you haven't done so already.

(15.03.06) RFID chips, the tiny grain of rice sized radio tracking devices, have been shown to be hackable. At present they are used to locate all sorts of things, from supermarket deliveries to parcels but it is thought that they have even more potential. As everyday items increasingly rely on computer chips more and more, the prospect of hacking looms ever larger. What's to stop someone hacking into the sterring system of an expensive car for instance? Read more here.

(14.03.06) Mozilla, the organisation behind Firefox and various other open source applications is turning into a very profitable company. Last year it created a commercial arm and thanks mainly to click throughs from the built in Google toolbar on Firefox, it made around $72 million in its first year. Not bad for a browser that costs at most  $15 million a year to develop! Click here for more.

(13.03.06) The Met, has issued guidelines to policeman on the keeping of blogs, which basically amount to "don't keep one". I wonder if they've got anything to say about recording phone conversations...Read more here and some real bogs here.

(11.03.09) Google is beginning to match Microsoft in its desire to satisfy the computer user's every need. It's already branched out into blogs, webcreation, online storage, maps etc, now its going to offer an "office" service following the puchase of the web based application, UpStart. As internet connections get ever faster, running programs online becomes increasingly practical and no doubt google will offer an intergrated document and storage service. Expect there to be free version featuring strategically placed ads and one that's fee based and ad-free. Click here for more.

(09.03.06) Firefox is to follow Opera and Netscape and address the problem of phishing websites, so protecting their users from this increasingly popular method of depriving people of their money. In so doing they are beating Microsoft to the punch by many months, it won't be until late this year, when IE 7 is released, that they will address the problem. Read more here.

(07.03.06) The next sunspot cycle could be more violent than the last and could bring chaos to telephone, power and satellite networks according to National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, US. It's start has also been delayed, nothing arrives on time these days does it?, by six months until the end of 2007. Read more here.

Ashley Cole, who is currently sueing the News of the World and the Sun newspapers for indirectly identifying him as a particapent in the "gay footballers" video, has complained to Google because if you search for his name it the first item on the page is "News results for Ashley Cole - Gay". At least it did, now if you google his name it reads "News results for Ashley Cole - miffed over google gay libel". Read more here and on google.

(06.03.06) Google is planning to offer customers online storage for all the files they currently store on their hard drive, so protecting them from computer crashes etc. This isn't an innovative service concept, many companies offer similar products now but its a sign that increased broadband speeds and the falling cost of storage is making this something that will appeal to a mass market. It's just another reason why connection speed is so important. Read more here.

(03.03.06) Windows Live Local has launched, offering virtual tours of the streets of San Fransico and Seattle. Powered by MS Virtual Earth, it will eventually cover most of the worlds major cities and is a really remarkable undertaking. Each street is covered by multiple updating, hi-res, eyelevel, webcams and you can just wander the city at will taking in the sights.

The window is split in two, the top half shows three images, side, front and side, while the bottom has the navigation map. The best options to choose are "Road", which displays thumbnails of the pictures laid out on the map and "walk" because your view is unobscured by the car interior overlay. I've only seen the site on a 1mb connection and it wasn't seamless even at that speed, even if it was still very impressive and quite addictive. It's an example of how more and more of the Internet is catering for truely hi-speed connections. See for yourself here. 

(28.02.06) Apple has announced the downloading of the 1 billionth i-tune, which must make it one of the most successful products of all time. When you think that two years ago hardly anyone had heard of them, it's really quite remarkable. Read more here.

(27.02.06) Google's website creator has crashed due to demand on the servers. The online website creator is even easier to use than their blog program apparently and allows users to create free websites, hosted by Google, with the extension "googlepages.com". It's a sure sign that the company's popularity hasn't been affected by it's recent troubles. Read more here.

Speaking of which, I came across this article criticising Google's performance at the recent US hearing into its operations in China. What's odd is that its on a Chinese website, all be it one hosted in Hong Kong.

(26.02.06) Coldplay's X&Y comes with some extraordinary restrictions on how it can be played. It won't play on some; car stereo's, game players, DVD players, MS computers, any Apple Mac, nor can it be converted to MP3 or burned to hard disc. You don't dicover this until you've bought the CD and I think they're being so restrictive that it will actually make people seek out illegal versions of the disc. No doubt it's the first of many such releases, a thought almost as depressing as Coldplay's music. Read more here. 

(25.02.06) Medieval Total War 2 isn't out until next winter but the previews are already making it one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the year. Like each version of the of the game, it isn't a revolution on the previous edition, just a great improvement in game play and graphics. Some of the screenshots, which will take a while to load on a dial up connection btw, are so good that they look more like artists impressions, rather than actual ingame images. Click here for more and remember that the game is so effiently written that it will run on a NAIDC system as long as you've added a graphics card and extra memory.

(24.02.06) The UK Government has won this year's Internet Villian of the Year award from the ISP industry in recognition for using its term as EU presidency to push through rules that will require ISPs to retain a lot more information for a lot longer. It's all in the name of the war on terror of course. Read more here.

(23.02.06) Hackers have slowed down the rate at which the hijacked machines send out email in an effort to prevent them being detected by eamil servers. They can do this for two reasons. So many people now have broadband (see broadband news) that most won't notice their connection slowing down and secondly, so many systems have been infected that there is no need for each to send out so many emails. Read more here.

Can MP3 players get any smaller? I've got one about the size of  a Christmas stamp and as thick as a biscuit but the MobiBlu takes that biscuit and spits it out. Click here, you'll be amazed.

(22.02.06) Microsoft Vista will be available in eight different versions according to the Register. There'll be three for home users, three for businesses, an "ulitmate" version and basic for small businesses. It'll be just like Office, you'll shell out the money and six months later you'll find it's missing the component you need. Read more here.

(21.02.06) The discovery of "X-rated" scenes in GTA 3 has led shareholders of Rockstar's parent company, Take Two Interactive, to sue two of its directors for misleading them over whether or not the scenes had been included in the original game. When the scandal first broke it was claimed by the company that the scenes were the result of an unauthorised mod but it turned out that they were actually an easter egg activated by a cheat code. As a result the games certification was raised, which in turn led it several major retailers ceasing to stock it and the share price dropping dramatically. Read more here, I hope this doesn't have consequences for the games orginal developers, Rockstar North, which is based in Edinburgh.

(17.02.06) Microsoft is being accused of failing to disclose a problem with XP USB drivers that leads to an excessive drain on battery power. This is because they told the manufacturers last July in a KB article which was never made public. Shame on them, read more here.

Apple computers are being targeted by Trojan that behaves like virus and can be spread via bluetooth. Confused? Well I was after piecing the above from various articles. They can't decide whether it's a virus or Trojan because it requires the victim to initiate the process but once on a system, propagates itself and it spreads via an Apple chat program and bluetooth. I blame i-pod, no one cared enough Apple to create threats before it came to dominate its market like MS does. Read more here and here

(15.02.06) Google Desktop 3 is available for beta testing but I would advise people to steer clear for now, particularly those who network computers. There have already been concerns expressed that the new search functions that make it possible to search any computer on a network is an invitation to hacker and the utility has already been the target of of hackers. Read more here.

(11.02.06) NTL going to go into partnership with the owners of BitTorrent, the file sharing protocol, to offer a fast movie download service. This is a bit of a surprise because I thought that the service was going to be the next p2p portal to bite the dust and they could be the first such service to go legitimate before prosecution. Read more here.

(09.02.06) Rootkits pop up in the press all the time these days but what on earth are they? Find out here.

(08.02.06)) Danish websites have been targeted by hackers in protest at the publication of those cartoons and the failure of the Danish government to take any action. Most of them have been defaced with slogans similar to those seen at recent demos. Read more here.

(07.02.06) Google has delisted BMW from its results after it discovered that the car company was spoofing the search engines ranking system. Apparently they were imbedding keywords, such as "secondhand cars" in webpages that just redirected visitors to the car company's home page. BMW denies the charge, read more here.

(05.02.06) Scottish GPs are abandoning the NHS supplied patient management software, GPASS (an unfortunate name if ever there was one), following a series of problems that resulted in records being associated with the wrong person or lost altogether. Over a quarter of the 880 surgeries that use the software have presented cases for the funding of third pary programs and some have gone as far as to replace at their own expense. The suppliers GPASS say that the problems were due to the setting up of the central server, rather than the program itself and that things should run smoothly in the future. Read more here.

(03.02.06) ID Fraud is one of the many things that the Government claims that ID cards will help combat. I say "help" because even they have had to accept that they won't cure the problem. That hasn't stopped them making inflated claims about how big the problem is nor from saying the cards will solve things they can't possibly affect. This week they have been touting the latest ID fraud figures and all is not as it should be, as this article reveals.

(01.02.06) The High Court has ordered ten ISPs to hand over the customer details of 150 file sharers charged with illegally uploading and sharing software. About a quarter of all the software used in the UK is warez, most of it illegal copies of GTA, MS Office and Photo Elements as far as I can make out and the court decision marks a change from attacking the websites to targeting the individuals by the authorities.  Read more here.

(31.01.06) Microsoft has finally given up stalling on the EU ruling that demanded that it made its server code available in the face of the threat of €2 million a day. I never thought it would happen, read more here.

(26.01.06) 2006 is going to be a big year for graphic cards and games. The technology behind the top cards is moving ahead in leaps and bounds and the games that they run are going to look even better as a result. To get some idea of what this means click here for a Tom's Hardware article on what all the "vertex shader" stuff means, here for the latest Radeon and here for the Game of the Year awards from GameSpy.

If you're thinking of buying a laptop you might want to hang on for a bit, AMD has just cut the price of some mobile chips by a third. The CPU can make up a significant part of a laptops overall cost and this will lead to reductions as the cuts work there way through the system. Read morehere.

(20.01.06) A German court has ordered the closure of the country's Wikipedia after it published the real name of the deceased hacker known as Tron. The action was brought by the boys parents but sadly it has had the opposite affect to the one desired as local newspapers are now delibertly using the name in articles on the subject. Oddly the court agreed to allow Wiki to still be accessed on a temporay URL, even though the name is still there. Read more here and here.

(18.01.06) Steve Gibson, security expert and programmer, is suggesting that there is a "back door" into Microsoft operating systems that allows the company execute code without the owners permission. The recent automatic installation of the WMF patch on systems set up to require permission to given suggests that he may be right. The clear implication of this is that the back door can be used others, they only have to spoof a machine into thinking it is visiting the MS updates system. Read more here.

(15.01.06) The next generation of Macs will use Intel dual core chips, rather than the IBM and Motorolas they use now. Not only does this mean a great improvement in speed for the same money but it means that applications are more likely to work across PCs and Macs more easily and Mac users in particular won't have to wait for programs to be adapted for the. Read more here.

(14.01.06) Microsoft Vista isn't even out but they're already issueing security patches to those beta testing it and quite a lot of them too! I'm still sure that the new OS will be more secure than '98 or XP but it's not a great start, click here to see for yourself. Thanks to Steve for the tip.

(10.01.06) AMD has announced a new dual core Athlon 64 FX-60 chip which plugs into the conventional 939 socket. It has impressive specs and the equally impressive price tag of over $1000, I only mention it because I hope it heralds a drop in price for the rest of the 939 ranch. I highly recommend 939 socket motherboards, they're very cheap to get started on if you get a basic Athlon 3000+ CPU and from there I can't think of another socket with so much potential for upgrade. They run cooler than the P4s too. Read more here.

(07.01.06) Dell have unveiled what is described as by far the fastest gaming computer ever, so fast in fact that they claim it ranks 70th in the world against all types of system. Boasting 4 Nvidia 7800 GPUs, running through dual card SLI boards at 16x and an Intel Extreme Edition 4.6 cpu, it is benchmarked at 41 Gigaflops per second. Frankly, I think they skimmped a bit, I mean - it's only got one CPU! Read more here (btw, that's not a lighting affect, that's the case's paint job.

(05.01.06) A US spammer has been fined 11 billion dollars by a court in Ohio after sending over 250 million spam emails through a local ISP. The court fined them $10 for each message, which seems fair enough and puts the EUs highest fine, £37 000, in perspective. UK spammers face fines of up to £5000 in our tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime country. Read more here.

(03.01.06) Google is to launch its own brand, low cost, non-Microsoft, PC and market it through the retail giant Walmart according the LA Times. Gossip on the web thinks that it is almost bound to use Linux rather than develop its own operating system and many think that this could be the first serious rival that Microsoft has faced in the desktop market since Apple. Read more here.

The BBC has launched an online news footage archive with eighty clips from reports going back as far as 1957. Everything is downloadable and this has been the key factor limiting what is initially available because everything had to be copyright cleared beforehand. Click here for the archive.

(22.12.05) Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, has started his own blog and it's received a massive welcome from the blogging community, the responses to the first post already running to ten pages already. When you read the first post it dawns on you just how young this medium is, how fast it has expanded and how much we now take it for granted. His post includes his thoughts on the Internet and a link to a screenshot of the first browser he designed. Click here for the blog. 

(21.12.05) Wikipedia, the popular collaborative online cyclopedia, has tightened its security following some embarrassing contributions that went uncorrected for some time. Up until now anyone has been able to contribute, just join and add or edit a page but now that privilege will only come after you've proved a responsible contributer. Until then, your work will have to be approved by a senior editor.

(20.12.05) The Data Retention act has been passed by the EU and it has some interesting implications for the UK. The UK already makes telecoms and ISPs retain details pertaining to the source and destination of data, such as mobile phone, email and websites, for two years and government agencies access at those details of at least half a million people a year (according to the Home Office).

The EU act demands that the content of communications is retained where practical but only for six months. And it can only be accessed after an event, not just to check up on people as happens in the UK. They will also create independent monitors to ensure that the rules aren't abused, something that doesn't exist in the UK at the moment. Read more here.

(19.12.12) MS has raised the white flag and is given up trying to get Mac users to adopt IE. Following the decision to stop code development in 2003, they are now stopping support, saying that Maccers prefer Safari and there's not much chance of IE making progress against it. Read more here.

(10.12.05) The security firm F-Secure has cracked the algorithm that the Sober worm uses to update itself, hopefully this will make it easier to combat future outbreaks. The next could occur on Jan 5th, the anniversary of the Nazi party, which has been reffered to in some varients. Read more here.

(07.12.05) A three core IBM cpu was one of the unusual features I noted when writing about the Xbox 360 last month and I wondered if similar chips would appear in the future. Now Intel have revealed that they are planning 4 and even 8 core processors over the next 2 years, a revolution in processor terms. Multicore proccessors are exceptionally good at multi-tasking and as so many activities need this these days, they will have a big impact on practical computer speeds. Read more here and wonder if you should wait a bit before upgrading again. No change there then.

(01.12.05) Symantec has a couple of interesting articles about security issues that are bound to become more important over the next few years. The first looks at the exploitation of mistyped URLs, a phenomena exploited by clever hosts for years. For example, a man who registered various mispellings of the word "millenium" made a lot of money in the months either side of the 2000 new year, just by having websites containing links. Now the idea is being exploited by trogan writers by creating websites with slightly mispelt URLs that look like the genuine website but install viruses when you visit them Symantec also predicts that instant messaging is the next big target for virus writers. Read more here and here .

(29.11.05) Kazaa has been given to December 5th to get all copyright material off it's website. The website, which many regard as the successor to Napster has finally been brought to it's knees by the Australian Government and time will tell whether it will fight on in other jurisdictions or follow Napster into the commercial arena. Read more here.

(27.11.05) Message boards are reporting odd problems with the first Xbox 360s. They seem to be a result of overheating when playing particularly intensive games, with some consoles shutting down after only 40 minutes play. As you will recall the box features a unique triple core chip which could be the source of the problem. Read more here.

Also on the PCAdvisor website, I couldn't help noticing the "which browser" poll results that put Firefox ahead of Interent Explorer. While this isn't indicative of the overall situation, it does indicate that experienced or keen Internet users are leaving IE in their droves. See the poll here. 

(23.11.05) IE Flaw: Method for exploiting a flaw in IE5&6 on XPSP2 computers has been published on the Internet. The exploit relies on someone being fooled into visiting a compromised or specially constructed website, at which point code can be executed on the visitors computer. This is not yet a common problem but be careful out there. Read more here. 

Xbox 360 is due out in Europe on Dec. 2nd and here are some details of what's to come. I've already written about the triple core processesors but the size of the hard drive is interesting and hints that the games may behave more like those available for PCs. The limited number and the price of games has always been a problem for Xbox, 360 attempts to address this by launching with 18, some of which have impressive pedigrees. Read the specs here and the game reviews here.

(18.11.05) Internet Governance Forum has decided that Icann, the Californian quango, can continue in it's role as the Internet's traffic officer. It will continue to hand out domain names and resolve disputes, to the relief of the US, who feared the UN might take over the role. It won't be turned into the a commercial entity as the US hoped but ultimately they do retain the power to turn off access to any country they like. Read more here.

(17.11.05) Visually impaired computer users are to get a smart card that will enable them to input their preferred settings into computers providing public services. Obviously this will take sometime to implement but in the years to come everything from the cash machine to medical services could become easier to access. Read more here.


(13.11.05) After years hanging on to their coat tails, AMD have finally overtaken Intel in the US home market for the first time. The tipping point seems to have been the decision by Dell to offer a choice between the two, this will undoubtedly encourage more makers to do the same and result in cheaper PCs for all of us. Read more here.

(09.11.05) Grokster, one of the largest P2P services to emerge in the wake of Napster, has finally given up following the lose of a court case in the US. No doubt it will just be replaced by another company, which will persue the same course of it's predecessors. That's, fans start free service, get money, get greedy, get sued. Read more here.

(07.11.05) Google is to offer a customisable "homepage" to UK users, echoing MS live (see below). Users will be able combine favorite searchs with streaming content and services. Click here for more.

(04.11.05) This is very odd, when I first read the story I thought it might be a hoax and I'm still not a 100% convinced. It seems that chip designers, particulalry those at Hewlett Packard, have been in the habit of putting microscopic images in their chip design. Discovered by a photographer who wanted to record the surface of chips in their minutest detail, they include Wally, of Where's Wally fame,  animals and faux "small print". Click here to see the gallery of examples and here for the story of their discovery. The second link has an interesting feature on it's left hand side, CNET has a graphical representation of the story's links to other news items, click on the lines emanating from the centre and you will find an endless collection of links, which you can focus on, read and follow the subsequent links. A really innovative and imaginative idea.

(03.11.05) MS has launched Live.com (as someone said on a messageboard, "I wonder who they had to kill to get that address), which is being hailed as the first action in what could be a very long war with Google. The site is very beta, especially for MS, who usually launch these things in a fairly finished form, and it's thought that the site will eventually make things like Office programs available online. The site already has an email program and customisable weather (try "Tiree"). Click here to go there.

(02.11.05) Google is to through its weight behind Open Office, the free alternative to MS Office etc. It's already a very impressive program and can do most of the things that the MS alternative can do. With Google's backing it could really become a serious contender. Read more here.

Civilisation IV is being reviewed and very well too, the only complaints seem to be that it's rather addictive. Apparently they've improved the 3D engine and sped up the game play. It's one of the most popular games out there, so read this review at your own risk.

(26.10.05) Game News: Now under new management, Lara Croft is showing signs of life following last year's virtually DOA Tomb Raider 3. The first two levels are being previewed and aren't being universally slated as they were last time out. The game appears to follow a familier track but the method of overcoming the trials has been reworked concentrating more on the dexterity of the player, rather than on problem solving. Read more here.

Less than a month after it's release and Black and White 2 has dropped out of the top 20 games chart, which doesn't auger well for the Lionhead studio. It was about two and half years in development, with only one expansion pack and some platform games to boost revenue and I think we will be hearing of cutbacks soon. The first version was in the charts for months but the new one appears to have disappointed fans and critics alike. In contrast other big franchises are doing well, HL2 is still there after almost a year and RTW Barbarian Invasion has done well and has boosted the original game. Read more here.

IBM has launched the chip which will power the next XBox 360, featuring the first triple core and the highest speed ever. The numbers are quite mind boggling and I can't help wondering when will be seeing the first triple core PC CPU. Read more here.

(14.10.05) The modifying of game boxes, PS2, Xbox etc, has long been the subject of court cases. Modding the chips so that they can play warez (copied) games and discs from other regions being the favourite exploit and boxes altered in this way are available in every town. A commercial modder, selling his boxes through a shop, has just won his case in an Australian court on the basis that copying discs was illegal but watching them wasn't. Cases like this have implications in other countries because of the international nature of the "crime". The same principle would apply to Xboxes, so maybe modified boxes will become more common. Read more here.

Only three days after Microsoft's massive patch release one of them has been "cracked" and exploits for it are "doing the rounds" according to Techworld. The latest vulnerability affects  MS05-051, which addressed a "remote and unauthorised attack vector" (whatever that means). Roll on Longhorn, Vista or whatever its called I say. Read more here.

(11.10.05) Games update: B&W2 dispatches have been delayed until tomorrow, at least from the supplier I chose, CD-WOW, until tomorrow. Whether this is because of demand or because of their suppliers I don't know. Meanwhile the add-on to Rome Total War, Barbarian Invasion, has been released to universal praise from both reviewers and fans. The add-on advances the game beyond the fall of Rome and you can choose play one of the original Roman houses or from many barbarian factions. It's even harder than the original apparently and is available from Amazon for £14.99.

(05.10.05) Black and White 2 has finally arrived, two and half years after the first screenshots appeared and after so many deadlines that I'd given up posting them. Initial revues are favourable and the game lookseven better than the last. Read about it here and go here for the cheapest deal I could find.

(03.10.05) Revenues from legal music downloads tripled between 2004 and 5 according to industry figures and now make up 6% of sales, coincidently the figure by which CD sales fell. Meanwhile the RIAA, the US music copyright enforcers, are prosecuting another 750 P2P downloaders, most of them students, you can read more about that here.

(30.09.05) Opera has released a no ads version of its browser and is hoping to overtake Firefox as the main rival to IE. Opera is thought to be the fastest browser (some argue Safari) out there but lacks Firefox's range of pluggins.

(25.09.05) MS shock - they're going to try creating a core operating system! According to Allchin, who is running the Longhorn/Vista project, the first version was dropped because it was to complex to work. The reason for the complexity was the tradition within MS of the designers of the various parts of the "package" working away by themselves and then once they'd all finished, the programs being "stitched together" into one huge program. I know, it's hard to believe, no wonder it's not exactly stable and secure. Allchin persuaded Gates that they needed a core system and basic tools to detect flaws in the code written for it, as a result the beta version only produced a tenth of the bug reports that XP beta did. Maybe it will be worth buying, read more here.

(13.09.05) Ebay has bought Skype, the Internet phone service that offers free calls over the Net for over £2 billion. The news has garnered a mixed reaction in the press but it makes sense to me. Ebay has a huge user base, many of which are in contact with each other already via the ebay message boards etc, getting them to sign up to use a phone system is a simple and logical step. Read more here.

A security flaw has been identified in Firefox that could allow websites to run code on remote computers, as yet it hasn't been exploited and we can expect to see it fixed very quickly if past vulnerabilities are anything to go by. Meanwhile the Beta (testing) version of Firefox 1.5 has been released, I'm trying it out and don't recommend it if you have a lot of extensions installed. They won't work and the only improvement I can see is that you can reposition tabs using drag and drop.

(09.09.05) The i-phone is a bit of a disappointment IMO, it's not really an Apple product, just a mobile that can store up to 100 i-tune tracks. It's rather over shadowed by the luanch of i-pod nano, which as the name suggests, is a very small and yet still quite expensive, i-tunes player. Apple controls a similar proportion of the downloadable/portable music market as MS does OS systems. Why, when there dozens of far cheaper and more versatial systems out there? Read more here.

(07.09.05) A company owned by Symantec has discovered a very basic flaw that allows the Windows registry to be written to in a way that is undetectable to spyware and anti-virus programs, including Norton. The exploit is so basic that you wonder why it hasn't been spotted before, all it requires is a registry entry of over 256 characters! Read more here.

(06.09.05) The Government is dropping plans to introduce online and text voting for next years council elections. It's finally dawned on them that there is no affective way of making the system truly secure, and not before time. Read more here.

(01.09.05) Apple to launch i-phone: It's logical, as phone companies add the capacity to play mp3's on their handsets, Apple are planning to create an ipod that can make phone calls. The ipod is rapidly becoming the Windows of the music world, this is not a good thing IMO. Read slightly more here.

Meanwhile HMV, who were a big name once upon a time, are to launch a music download service. Which is great, they off free software and some tunes are only 49p. Not many though because just like Virgin and i-tunes, most tracks cost 79p. It must be just a coincidence, otherwise it would be a cartel.

(31.08.05) Serious Sam 2, the sequal to one of the most popular games of the past five years is due out soon and has been reviewed by Gamespot. It appears to have stuck to the formula of the original, an occassionaly funny, out and out shootemup. What mad it stand out for me, someone who doesn't particularly like the genre, was the game environment. Unlike most of it's rivals, which tended to be dark, set at night or in dank cellars, the action took place mostly in a brightly lit outdoors. See for yourself by clicking here.

(25.08.05) A hacker has succeeded in breaching the US army's computer system and accessed personal details, including the social security numbers, of personel. Expect to see some geeky bloke appearing on UK TV denying he was any kind of a threat in about six months. Read more here.

(16.08.05) IBM is to donate 50 000 lines of code to the makers of Firefox to make it more accessable to the visually and motor handicaped. It will allow users of the latest versions of the browser to magnify areas of webpages, have text narrated and to navigate using the keyboard rather than the mouse. Read more here.

(15.08.05) Users of Apple computers often have a pirated copy XP or Win'98 somewhere on their computer so they can access various websites or use applications. Now the Apple OS has been hacked and is available to a limited range of PC users. Its all very complicated - read how complicated here. 

(09.08.05) Microsoft's priracy protection, supposed to protect owners of illegal copies of its software from downloading updates, has been hacked and with a really old hack. Read more here and for details on the hack, here. 

Rome Total War (my favourite game) has released spawned a mod that highlights the move to faster broadband speed. The mod is ambitous, adding units, factions and tweaking the game system system so that it's more historically accurate (tough that - if its accurate Rome always wins) but it's a 256mb download, if you only had a 512k connection you'd be downloading for ages. I still want it though :( On a happier note the official expansion pack, due out any moment, looks good, if the demo on the latest PCGamer disc is anything to go by. It takes the story on to the fall of the Roman Empire and the battles look more detailed and harder. Click here for the mod.

(15.07.04) The GTA "Hot Coffee" scandal has spurred Senator Clinton into action and call the ESRB (the US rating agency) to investigate as a matter of urgency whether pornographic code had indeed shipped with the game as claimed by the modders. Reclassification would raise the age at which the game could be bought. This would be serious if it was a movie but won't be for a video game and I wonder if it's not all a scam to gain more publicity for the already notorious title. Read more here.

Sharp have produced the first split screen TV, although that description doesn't really do it justice. The TV is capable displaying two moving images at the same time and which you see depends on where you sit. The makers suggest that one person might watch a television program while another surfed the net but to me this looks like 3D TV without glasses. They would only have to reduce the convergence to do it. Read more here.

(14.07.05) Having won against Microsoft, the EU Competition Commission has decided to go after Intel for uncompetitive practices following complaints from AMD. They alledge that Intel are competing unfairly by using their market dominance to induce PC manufacturers to only use Intel processors. The EUCC raided Intel offices across Europe, including the companies UK headquarters in Swindon to in search of records and contracts. This is only the first round of what will be a long running saga but hopefully it will result in cheaper PCs for all of us. Read more here.

(13.07.05) Grand Theft Auto has long been the target of those that would censor or ban violent video games and it's latest incarnation, San Andreas, is no exception. Apparently a simple cheat not only changes the game play but virtually adds a new level, a new level that gains you points depending on how, erm, satisfied, you keep your girlfriends. Not only that, you actually play the part, as it were. RockStar, makers of GTA claim that moders have taken code and tweaked it, while the discoverers of the cheat code say they've just found the key to hidden code that ships with every version of the game and I would have to say that I side with them, I think if they'd done this much work they'd claim credit for it. Read more here and if you follow the links you'll find more details still. Did you know that the GTA cheat for constant rain is "ilovescotland"?

Microsoft is planning to release an operating system for cars which operate various media, satnav etc. I was only saying to someone the other day that it won't be long before car systems are hacked and this only brings that possibility closer. Imagin sitting in a traffic jam and finding that your firewire gear box or stearing is not responding as you might expect. It'll be a plot device in a thriller movie any day! Read more here.

(07.07.05) MS will release an interim patch, ahead of it's usual monthly update day, if they deem the threat identified on the 4th (see below) serious enough and they've come up with one (I suppose). I wonder if they're feeling paniced by the advice that people should set their IE security settings to high, which stops most websites working properly? This can only drive more people towards Firefox IMO.

(06.07.05) TV Genius is a new free online TV guide that allows you to search for programs and print out results. It's customisable up to a point, you can select terrestial, freeview or Sky channels but you can't pick from a list of channels as you can with the downloadable Digiguide. Still, it doesn't cost £8 a year either. Click here to give it a go.

(05.07.05) The FBI co-ordinated operations around the world to close down 11 of the leading "warez" websites supplying pirated versions of DVDs and CDs. Visiting the sotes now now produces a "currently unavailable" notice and as yet they don't seem to have popped up elsewhere. The websites have been providing material eventually distributed through P2P networks, read more here.

(04.07.05) Another serious flaw has been found in Internet Explorer, which could lead the computer being taken over remotely. The exploit uses javascript either embedded on legitimate websites or, more likely, on fake websites and the advice is that people should change their security level to "high" (Tools > Internet Options > Security > Settings (I think)) . The issue of these flaws is getting more serious as the sophistication of phisihing spam gets higher and higher, as the new Paypal fakes proves (see today's News). Read more here.

(03.07.05) Microsoft is contemplating buying Claria, the new name for Gator, which for many years has been regarded as spyware by many people. Gator is downloader that tracks Internet use and then targets people with tailored advertising. Some are not welcoming the news wholeheartedly, click here for more. Thanks to Steve for the tip.

(01.07.05) The BBC is to close it's very popular Cult TV website that played a big part in bringing back Dr Who, amongst other things. It's being done in response to demands to close some of it's services that were clashing with commercial alternatives, I can't quite remember who made the demands, despite writing about it a while back :( Users can complain about the closure, which might have an affect by clicking here and visit the website, while it's still with us, by clicking here. Thanks to Steve for the tip

The US govt. has announced that it intends to keep control over the main functions of the Internet rather than allow them to be overseen by an independent, international, body as many have been demanding. All in the name of commercial stability apparently, which is big hearted of them. Read more here.

(30.06.05) Symantec is to buy Veritas, the online verification company in another example of how the big companies continue to swallow up smaller independent companies. In a lot of ways the computing today is a lot like the early days of any other industry - once there was a Mr Rolls and Mr Royce who made cars you know. Read more here.

(27.06.05) File sharing was dealt a severe blow in the US yesterday when the Supreme Court found in favour of the music industry and ruled that the makers and distributors of P2P software were responsible for the use to which it was put. The accused, Groxster and Morpheus, cited the Betamax ruling of 1984 but the court was unsympathetic. If the ruling stands it has implications way beyond the downloading of free music. There are whole industries devoted to circumventing encryption systems, all of which would be affected, for instance in the Satellite TV. Read more here.

(25.06.05) Africa's leading medical journal has published the work of a thirteen year old girl, their youngest ever contributor, which reports on the affects of game playing on her class mates. Having surveyed 130 of them, she found significant levels of what she calls "playstation thumb" and notes that RSIs normally occur in adults who have been doing the same job for long time. Read more here.

Graphics cards: Once upon a time I aspired to owning the latest graphics card, it would cost around £250 or so but one day it might be a luxury I could afford. No more. The new king of the hill, the nVidea GTX7800, is significantly faster than it's nearest rival, improving performance at higher resolutions by huge margins but it costs around £400 from bargain retailers and, AND, is really designed to be installed in pairs. That's over £800, more than I expect to pay for my next computer. Even a writer at Toms Hardware agrees that things are getting out of hand, read his thoughts here.

(23.06.05) Google just keeps getting bigger. Online retailers report being contacted by the huge search company to beta test an online payment system and it's thought that Google is trying to find a way to cash in on Froogle, it's shopping search. Read more here. (New York Times links don't last that long, so read it while you can!)

(19.06.05) Microsoft has developed a new way of sharing large files that they claim be 200 to 300% faster than Bit-Torrent when sending unencoded data. It may seem odd that a company so dedicated to stopping file sharing should do this but they have a lot of material that needs delivering fast and this reduces the strain on individual servers by sharing the load amongst many. Read more about Avalanche here.

(18.06.05) Two stories have appeared that suggest that even the most secure sites are vulnerable to hackers and that the attacks are very, very co-ordinated. The Register reports that MI5 has revealed that a gang of hackers based in the far east has been systematically attempting to hack governent departments in order to steal secrets.They don't seem sure whether the gang is criminal or intelligence in nature but the attacks have been going on for over a year. Read more here (thanks to Steve for the link).

Meanwhile, in the USA, Mastercard and Visa have confirmed that tens of millions of credit card details have been stolen from their servers. It seems unbelieveable that such high level companies could allow the theft of so much data but it seems that no one is safe these days. It seems that only US card holders are affected but the fact that the servers are vulnerable at all is very worrying. Read more here. (Washington Post links are liable to fail after a few days, so read it while you can)

(16.06.05) Creative, the hardware manufacturers that tries to live up to it's name, has come up with a 2.5 inch hard drive which uses a PCI slot as it's locater and power source. It still connects via the motherboard though. Toms Hardware doesn't seem that impressed but I think it's an example  of how the reduction in physical size, coupled with the increased capacity of hard drives, is producing new choices for the consumer. There'll be more of this sort of thing in the near future IMO. Read more here.

(15.06.05) Epson has won a significant court case against a compatible ink manufacturer. The makers of PrintRite inks were found to have infringed a number of Epsons patents and will no longer be able to sell 75 models of ink cartridge. Think about that, 75 models of ink cartridge, I didn't know there were that many Epson printers. Epson said  "Epson believes that its ink-jet printers and genuine inks provide users with advantages in terms of print quality, durability, and value for money, and as such welcomes fair competition in the marketplace,"... "However, we have invested considerable resources into developing our unique technologies and will vigorously defend our intellectual property."  That would be fair enough if it wasn't so obvious that the purpose of most of the patents was to foil compatible ink makers, rather than improve print quality. Read more here. Thanks again to Steve for the link.

(10.06.05) If you look at the front of a NAIDC tower, you will see the word "Compaq", it might be on the monitor too, I've can't remember. Since then the company has changed hands and is now owned by Hewlett Packard, this actually improved things in my opinion because HP has a superb online support system. Now it looks as if HP is going to be taken in turn, possibly by Acer, mainly known for their laptops. Read more here. Thanks to Steve for the link.

(30.05.05) Samsung has announced that it is to commence the mass production of 70nm flash memory chips which will double capacity from 2Gbit to 4Gbit at a stroke. I thought they'd reached the limit at 90nm, read more here.

(28.05.05) The legitimacy of Nominet has been questioned by Ben Cohen, who owned i-Tunes.co.uk until an independent adjudicator hired by the domain registry, ruled that he didn't. Cohen has used the Freedom of Information act to discover that Nominet has no formal arrangement with the Government, despite having a number of Government officials sitting on it's board. Although this unlikely to help him in case, it does highlight the rather peculiar position the company has in the UK. Exactly what right does it have to register or pontificate on domain names and why can't anyone else provide the same service? Read more here.

i-pods have replaced mobile phones as the favourite target for street thieves, probably because of the new protection features built into our, well, your, mobile, I don't have one. No doubt it won't be to long before i-pods are protected in the same way, it would suit Apple if the security of the product was tied into the ability to access tunes very well I imagine. Read more here and be careful not to flash your i-Pod when you visit a city. 

(26.05.05) What a great idea - a mobile phone that just makes phone calls! Having found that a significant proportion of users found modern mobiles to complicated, vodaphone has introduced a range that just what it says on the tin, make calls. Read more here.

Will Wright, inventor of the worlds most successful game, The Sims, has made the next move in god games and come up with a creation game, called "Spore". It takes the player from an amoeba that they design themselves all the way through space exploration that discovers the worlds created by other players, which sounds even more time consuming that Rome Total War (surely that's impossible?). Read more here.

(25.05.05) The latest edition of Civilisation is being previewed on the game sites, it looks like more of the same but slightly tweaked to me. The map still looks very tiled comparred to, say, Rome Total War but game play is much improved apparently. The civilisation games run very well on NAIDC computers I'm told. Read more here.

(24.05.05) An MS download tool, aimed at ensuring that only people with genuine MS programs can download updates, is actually enabling people with fake MS software to get their hands on the restricted add-ons. Ironically the download tool is called "genuine advantage"! Read more here.

Hackers have come up with a new way of extorting money from large companies, they infect their computers with a virus, "quarantine" vital files and then demand money to allow access. It's breaking into someones house and robbing it in installments, read more here.

(20.05.05) Nintendo's launch hasn't had quite the same razmataz as the new Xbox, possibly because there's no definite launch date but it does look like a big change from it's previous incarnation. Although selling far fewer than it's rivals, well PS2 anyway, it had carved a niche as the box you bought for anyone under 12. The latest box looks as if it's aimed at a more sophistacted market. Let's hope the innards match the outards. Read more here.

In twist to the usual run of things, Microsoft has released a warning about a vulnerability that it's not responsible for. At least I think that's what's going on, read more here.

(19.05.05) Microsoft has extended it's "appeals" for people to get legitimate versions of XP, as you'll see if you follow the latest link on the Software Updates page. You're informed that the update is for genuine copies of XP only and offers to scan your computer to check that it is. You can still get the update without the scan but it is all part of the latest drive to legitimise MS software. They are also offering people with illegal copies of XP a genuine license number if they supply the name of the person who supplied them with the illegal disc. 

(16.05.05) Sober.O or P, has a very nasty side affect. Along with the usual stuff of using the infected computer to send out spam, after a while it downloads and redistributes, racist spam. The spam appears to originate from Germany but in the nature of these things, it could be anywhere. Read more here.

(10.05.05) How do tempt fans of Grand theft Auto onto the Internet? Just give them what they want! "Live-shot" offers all the thrills of medium game hunting, coupled with the convenience of the computer. Why struggle across rough terrain, when for $80 an hour you can hire a webcam connected to a high velocity rifle and shoot whatever crosses its path? For a few dollars more (that reminds me of something...) they will send you the head and pack the meat. Read more here.

(06.05.05) Google has released it's latest idea for getting it's hands on your surfing habits. The world's favourite search engine's latest wheeze is a web accelerator that combines the cache held on your computer with the cache held on Google's servers, along with compression software, to make web pages to load quicker. Although they promise not to share your surfing habits with others, except if a court demands they do (in this country, many government agencies can demand without recourse to the courts), they do use the information to target advertising more accurately. See for yourself by clicking here and here.

This year's Webbys have been awarded, the Internet's equivalent to the Oscars, awarded by the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes such people as David Bowie and Matt Gronning (Simpsons). The BBC got 4, the Guardian picked up one and PayPal got the people's award for the best financial site. Rathergood.com got one, which is nice as it was featured here well over a year ago, it's that website with weird cartoons of singing cats and the like, click here to see for yourself.

(02.05.05) Apple has launched it's latest operating system and it includes over 200 improvements on the previous one apparently. I've used an Apple-mac with the last OS and I was suprised just how different it was from XP, I can't help wondering if it's possible to install it on a non-iMac computer. It's a much more stable and secure OS and it costs just about the same, £90. Read more here.

(29.04.05) Computers can reduce your IQ according to the University of London in piece of research they did for Hewlett Packard, bet they were pleased with the results. IQ can reduce by as much as 10 points by the distraction of incoming phone calls and email, more than the reduction caused by smoking a joint apparently. Read more here, thanks to Steve for the tip, I meant to post it days ago but I forgot...

(26.04.05) MS has announced a 64bit version of XP Pro and more details of the next operating system, codenamed "longhorn". It's going to be more secure apparently. No, really, it will be. Read more here and here.

(19.04.05) It hasn't been a good day for our file sharing friends, with UK coursts ordering ISPs to hand over the names of a further 33 sharers and a Finnish company claiming to have come up with a piece of software that scrambles files and makes them impossible to share. I've seen a lot of claims regarding the protection on copyright, so I doubt the latest idea will last long but the first story is a bit worrying. Read more here and here. Thanks to sgegreen for the tips.

(13.04.05) Only one day after MS's monthly patch release (details coming shortly to a software update page near you) they've had to acknowledge the discovery of a brand new security hole in Office. It's rated "highly critical" by experts Secunia and you read more here.

Moore's Law is  almost as famous as Einstien's E=MC², well in the computing world anyway. He came up with it in 1965 and it predicts that processor speed will double every eighteen months. It's proved remarkably resilient to the changes in computing and today is the fortieth anniversary of the article it first appeared in. Read more, including the article, here.

(12.04.05) XBox 2, code named Xenon, is due to launch on MTV on the 13th of May at 8pm, if you have Sky but no doubt it will feature on the news. The new box is expected in the shops at the end of the year and specifications have already "leaked" out. They're pretty impressive too, with three (3!) 3.5ghz processors, a 500mhz graphics card and 256mb of RAM. I'll believe it when I see it.

(05.04.05) Google has added satelite images to its ever increasing list of search services. In the past finding these has been a matter of searching through dozens of websites, often fruitlessly, now they should be just a click away. I say "should" because I found the new service both slow and unsatisfactory but then it is still in its beta phase, so maybe it deserves time. Read more here.

Hitachi has announced the first 1 terrabyte desktop hard drive as well a 20gb microdrive (just how many tracks do you want on your i-pod?) and promises even bigger things in the next few years. Exploiting the ideas of a 19th century scientist, they've managed to pack 230Gb into a single square inch of a desktop HD, using "perpendicular" writing. And to think, I'm quite excited by the imminent arrival of an 80Gb drive... Be boggled here.

(01.04.05) Scott Richter, the driving force behind OptInRealBig and the third biggest spammer in the world, has filed for bankruptcy protection in the USA claiming debts of $50 million, most of which are in the form of damages being claimed by Microsoft. His company is accussed of sending out billions of unsolicited emails through hundreds of compromised computers around the world. Read more here.

(29.03.05) The US Supreme Court has been pontificating on the the thorny issue of file sharing. Surprisingly they seem to think that sueing file sharers might stifle inovation and cite previous technologies, such as photo copiers, as examples of things that might not have developed had users been sued for copying copyrighted material. Read more here.

(23.03.05) Well that didn't last long! iTunes has plugged the hole that allowed PyMusique to work. From now on only people who have upgraded to the latest versions of the downloader will be access the store. Read more here.

(21.03.05) PyMusique has introduced a downloader that filters out the encryption software of, amongst others, used by i-Tunes. According to them it allows you to redownload tunes but according to Apple it means that people can burn and share tracks with impunity. Oh, the horror! Read more details in this pleasingly biased article.

(16.03.05) Remember all the trouble caused by those pop up adds telling people that their computers were infected by spyware? Well one of the culprits has been shut down and ordered to refund the $29.95 that people taken in by the ads shelled out. Read more here.

(09.03.05) Apple has decided to make the i-Tunes jukebox software available to us mere mortals who use the humble PC rather than the i-Mac. Downloading the software enbales you to access the massive music library and run an i-Pod. They must have realised where their profits are coming from these days. See for yourself here.

(04.03.05) I've come across another spyware/malware detector that appears to work in a slightly different way to the rest that are available. Rather than analysising threats that are actually out there, in the same way that an AV program does, it looks for source code that is published on sites that specialises in the codes themselves. Most of the threats aren't crafted by the distributer but taken from publicly accessible forums that virus writters frequent (I know - it's mad). The program uses a "command prompt" style interface, so it would be a bit scarey for most users but it seems very efficient. Click here for more.

23 file UK sharers have settled out of court for a total cost of £50k. What struck me about the story was that they hadn't shared that much stuff, probably no more than the average keen Kazaa user. Read more here.

(03.03.05) Microsoft is to end Internet registration of 20 OEM product keys. OEM's are used for bulk sales of programs and operating systems, with all the copies sharing the same PK. These numbers are used by pirates to register their fakes. People attempting to use an OEM PK will be redirected to a phone number and then asked a series of questions to ensure that it is a genuine copy. I wonder if this will have an affect on ebay sales of MS programs, they are usually OEM, will they be considered legitimate? Read more here.

A new varient of Bagle has appeared with some very odd charateristics. The subject and attachment name are random, rather than being drawn from a list, but odder is the way it spreads. Rather than sending itself out to addresses found on the computer, it uses a free port to contact another computer and downloads code to activate itself and email addresses to send to. There have been many variant found in just a few days but not that many instances in the wild, read more here.

(27.02.05) "Buffer overflow" is the ubiquitous, yet mysterious, phrase that pops up in most virus attacks and most of us only have a hazy understanding of what it means. An article on the capabilities of the latest AMD and Intel chips when run on XP SP2 systems (they stop viruses from executing but crash the computer) has an excellent plain English explanation of what a buffer overflow does, click here to read it. (The article is on the Washington Post site, so it will probably require registration in a couple of days)

(23.02.05) Memory speeds up Samsung has unveiled their DD3 memory prototype which they hope will go into production early next year. Initially it will running at speeds between 800Mbps to 1.06 Gbps, which is four times the average of modern computers and about 8 times the NAIDC computer. Not only is it much faster but runs at a lower voltage and promises longer battery life. Read More here.

Security through key strokes, Biopassword has licensed research from  Louisiana Tech and Penn State Universaties which records the timing of keystrokes. Combined with a password, it claims to offer the first Internet biometric security as the way we type is as unique as our fingerprints. Read more here and visit the company website here.

(21.02.05) A global blogger day has been called by the self styled "Committee to Protect Bloggers" to support Iranian blog writers locked up for their writings about the country. The organisation seems genuine enough and see its self as an online version of Reporters without Borders but it is a curious conincidence that out of the many many countries that have locked up bloggers, it's the one that is the current target of American ire that was chosen. I'm probably wrong but the current Whitehouse has a long history of using third party organisations to promote its policies and attack enemies. Read more here. 

In another conspiracy, the supposed smoking gun has turned out to be less than a water pistol. When the satiric website "Back Blair" was removed by it servers it sparked a huge round of stories speculating that it had been done at the behest of the Labour party and not even the hosts explaining it was due to the website posting an animation that was draining the server due to being poorly written. Read more here (I haven't done it justice).

(16.02.05) MS has announced IE7, which it promises will be safer than previous versions and come with various protection features, such as pop-up stoppers. Of course this is exactly what they promised with IE5 and every update since. It should be with us by the summer, read more here.

Intel has developed a way of sending laser signals through silicon, heralding much quicker internal computer data streams and possibly faster chips in the future. Read more here.

(15.02.05) Pharming, not phishing, is the future for Internet scams if the risk fulfils it potential. Rather than conning people into visiting an imitation website, it redirects people attempting to connect to a website by spoofing the DNS system itself. If this really happens it will mean the end of the secure Internet, no more bank, paypal, amazon and much more. Read more here.

(10.02.05) Blackberry's have seen an unseasonable return to the news, first as a result of Alistair Campbell (Grrrr) using his to mis-send an email to Newsnight (haha) and then with the Speaker of the House of Commons banning them from the chamber. But what are they? Well, they're a cross between a PDA and a phone and the makers of pulled of the neat trick of marketing them to organisations, hence the two main parties using them in the Commons and else where to keep there flocks in line. They allow the user to pick up text alerts and email on the move, as well as send them out. Read more here.

IBM & Intel have unvieled the cip that they first designed for the next Playstation but now intent to market to any equipment with imbedded chips. The new processor has 9 cores, 1 central and 8 slaves (I think) and the early models are capable of reaching speeds of 4Ghz. PS3 will be something to see and one wonders what that means for Xbox 2. Read more here.

(09.02.05) If you thought DVD's could store a lot of data, think again, the bar has been raised. Manufacturers have got together to form the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance to standardise the new format, which is capable of storing as much as 200Gb of data. Even the most basic disc will hold 29Gb, enough to store 13 hours of full screen TV broadcasts. It's amazing to think that it will possible to have a CD that can store all the data from the larger of today's hard drives. Read the technical details here.

(04.02.05) Spam could set to increase exponentially if SpamHauses prediction is correct. They report that a new program that makes it appear as if spam comes from a legitimate address and so will be undetectable by them or any other detection service. In my experience, and I don't use a filter, spam has fallen in total volume over the last 6 months and is holding steady at around a quarter of the amount that was arriving in mid 2004. Read more here. 

(03.02.05) UFO's have popping all across the UK according to documents released by the MOD under the freedom of information. Some are really intriguing, such as the boomarang shaped object that hovered over a power station whilst being circled by a plane, although it would have been even more intriguing if the report had been from the planes pilot. Other's are slightly less, erm, convincing. Read more here. I know this isn't really an anorak story but I could hardly put it on the Science page could I?

(02.02.05) Mobile phone operators O² are to be the first to adopt HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), the enhanced 3G standard which runs at 3.5mb download speeds. It'll trial on the Isle of Man first and if that is successfull, be rolled out across the mainland network next year. Japan has enjoyed this kind of speed for some time and O² will be the first to introduce it to Europe. Perhaps this should have been on the broadband page, technologies are interchangeable these days! Read more here.

(01.02.05) Hot on the heels of the news of the Google - Firefox link up, MS has gone live with it's new MSN search. It's a new toolbar, similar to the already available Google or Yahoo bars but it promises a lot more, as you see from the article in the Register here. I've tested it and don't think it's up to much despite the fancy features. Test it yourself by clicking here (there's also a link in the Reg article but that takes you to a promo, this one goes to the download).

(31.01.05) Tim Berners-Lee has been voted the "Great Britain Year" by a panel of judges in recognition for his work in not only creating the Internet but also speaking for the interests of those that use but don't profit from it. He was one of the first people to send an email of support when I started this site, amazing when you think of the number of email requests he must receive.  Read more here.

If Microsoft is worried about Firefox's progress over the last few months, they must very scarred by the prospect of a hybrid google/firefox browser. Google has been thinking of launching it's own browser for a while and has recruited a number of notable people to develop it. The combination of firefox's reputation and google reach is a potent combination and a the first real threat to Internet Explorer's dominance. Read more here.

Google's desktop toolbar, which intergrates web searches with searches of your personal computer got a poor press when it was first launched last month. I reported suspicions that it was reporting back to google with details of what people where searching for on their own computers and as such could be viewed as spyware. However more recent evaluations suggest that the feature criticised when it first came out are easy to disable and a reader has recommended it as a very useful tool, so maybe it's worth giving it another look. Read more here and thanks to Pat of sitemaker1.com for the tip. 

(28.01.05) If you thought kids were wasting their time playing computer games maybe you should think again if the career of John Weltham is anything to go by (it's probably not). He's the world number one e-sportsman and has won 6 of the thirteen world gaming tournaments in the last year, probably winning in the region of £100k in the process. Not only that but he has a 12 year sponsorship deal with Creative Labs to endorse and help develop products. Makes you sick, and he's only 23. And he could be the first of many, as TV companies are showing increasing interest in these virtual contests. Read more here. 

(19.01.05) How much is a new passport going to cost? Quite a lot if responses in Parliament regarding the new biometric passports and ID cards are anything to go by. The new system is due to come into being at the end of this year and not only will the passports cost around £80 and only last 5 years but people applying for one will have to attend offices in person. So, unless they plan to put one in Oban, which I doubt, it's going to involve a trip to Glasgow. All this for something for which there is not shred of evidence that it will work. Read more here.

(18.01.05) MS's new spyware detecter is receiving mixed reviews. The general concensus is that it does it's job well and is easy to use but on the downside it's repair facility will have unwanted affects on a computer. It will reset your default browser to Internet Explorer, even if you use another browser and your homepage to MSN. It's cache cleaner only works on the IE too. Still, this is just the beta version.

(16.01.05) 80% of spam originates from computers infected by viruses. This is now the commonest affect of infection, viruses no longer disable or destroy a computer, rather they hijack them to send out spam email, typically of the scam type. This means that the victim might not be aware that they have been compromised and only notice that their internet connection has slowed down a bit. Another good reason to keep subscriptions up to date!

(12.01.05) Apple has unvieled a cut down version of the i-Mac which will retail at around the price of a basic PC. It will come with CD burning capabilities and a cut down version of Office. Not only cheap, it's also very small, about the size of a CD box set and will plug into most monitors, keyboards etc. It's an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the i-Pod and to challenge the dominance of the Windows based PC. Read more here.

(11.01.05) IBM is releasing 500 of its software patents into the wild, in affect making them open source. It will still hold the patent themselves but has pledged not seek any royalties from products developed from them. This generosity should been seen in the light of the fact that IBM holds 40 000 thousand of the things, more than any other company and was granted over 3000 last year alone. Even so, like its support of Linux the move can only be welcomed. Read more here, thanks to Dr Zog for the tip.

(09.01.05) Various websites and forums are reporting the news that google is indexing the raw feeds from webcams. Put in the right search terms and you'll be presented with page after page of results, some of which are so insecure that you can actually take control of them. It's the fault of the camera owners who have neglected to configure them to be invisible to google. One website reports that the new search turns up far more results than a conventional search of the google directory and the list has an element of mystery because you never know what's at the other end of the link. Read more here, thanks to Steve for the tip.

(07.01.5) The Chinese company who found some of the recent flaws in Windows has released code that exploit them. I'll pause for a moment while you take that in.........................................................
.....It's mad but true, what else can I say but read more here.

(05.01.05) Symantec is again warning of the vulnerabilities reported below on the 29th of Dec, or rather they are reporting that others are repeating their warning. Oddly the one that got the most attention is the help file flaw, rather than any of the others which sounded much more likely to catch people out. MS is even offering a helpline number for people who think there computers might have been infected.  Read more here.

AOL is reporting that they have cut the amount of spam reaching their customers by 50%, which is quite impressive in a year that saw a massive rise overall. They fail to mention the number of people who found that legitimate addresses that were caught up by their initial over zealous filtering though. Read more here.

(04.01.04) I've always thought AltaVista image search was better than google's and now I know why. Hard to believe but the reason is that the cache they work from is only updated every few months, in stark contrast to their other search engines which update every few minutes. This extraordinary fact came to light as a result of an Internet conspiracy theory.

Google has been the subject of these before due to the differences between search results carried out in different countries. As far as I can tell these have been down to them trying to comply with local law, websites that deny the holocaust will not be found by the German google for instance. The latest conspiracy was sparked by searches for Ukrainian presidential candidate Yushenko, which only found images that predated his poisoning. When the story started to circulate on the net google was forced to admit their tardiness! Read a slightly more garbled version of this here (interesting links though).

(01.01.05) MS is abandoning it's universal passport scheme and it will only be used for inhouse websites from February. I'm not sure if this is because it was unpopular or unworkable but it's being greeted as good news by various bodies in the IT world as another defeat for MS in their war for Internet domination. Read more here.

Gone Phishing: These scam emails have been on the increase over the last quarter, doubling in volume. One would think that everyone is wise to them now but it would seem not, banks and credit card companies are losing billions a year as a result of them. I've updated the forum thread on the subject to reflect this (first post) and you can read more here.

Makers of GTA are being sued by a 17 year old for including her image in a cut scene in the  "The Guy Game", a "B" movie of a computer game if ever there was one. She was filmed on a beach during spring break, a US tradition in which US college's decend on the their coastline to get drunk and worry their parents. Basically it's Ibiza. Being under 18 she couldn't give her consent to be filmed and so the game makers are being asked to withdraw all copies from the store shelves. Read more here - I wonder if she'll sue "men & motors"?

(29.12.04) Symantec is warning of a number of heap overflow vulnerabilities, where the amount of memory allocated to a task is exceeded so allowing a hacker to plant malicious code. Some are quite esoteric, such as the flaw in the help file system which would require people to agree to install a program (not that hard), others are of more concern, such the LoadImage system which handles icons and could be exploited with a specially crafted image downloaded from a website. Read more here and, as they say, be careful out there.

(28.12.04) This is oldish news but worth recording anyway. On the 22nd of December, Microsoft lost the final round of their dispute with the EU over the bundling of various programs with XP and from no on it will ship without Windows Media player etc loaded by default. I can't even remember when I gave up writing about this case, let alone when it started, so it is in way, historic. Read more here and then sit back and wait for the next one.

(23.12.04) Amazon is having its CD sales investigated by the BPI to see if the break EU regulations. The BPI suspect that Amazon retailers are sourcing their stock from outside the EU in contravention to regulations and they've identified a couple of retailers already whose CDs are suspiciously cheap. This is a great pity, I've really enjoyed juggling the prices on ebay and Amazon to find the best deal. Read more here. 

(22.12.04) Firefox, the free, open source browser has become a real thorn in the side of Microsoft and is perhaps the first program since Linux to challenge there dominance. 10 million people have downloaded it so far, the majority of users being prompted by the I.E. security issues that came to a head this year with the news that viruses and spyware could attack I.E. if the surfer just visited a website. Then there was the news of the huge number of computers that had been taken over by spyware and things just got worse for MS.

Now in a twin attack MS has bought "Giant Software", a company that specialises in anti-spyware software (which firefox already blocks) , which will be intergrated with I.E. in the near future no doubt, and one of the companies major players has questioned Firefox's own security on his weblog. He points out that plugins for Firefox are "unsigned", that is they don't require prior approval from Firefox to work. He fails to point out that this hasn't stopped many malicious programmers have created unsigned pluggins for IE in just the same way, nor that most Firefox users get their pluggins from the Firefox users get their pluggins from the Firefox website. Firefox has replied in a characteristically honest way. Read more here (MS buys), here (MS blogs) and here (firefox responds).

(20.12.04) Chip & Pin cards haven't even been fully introduced yet (January 5th I think) and already someone has pointed out how the crooks will skim them. Click here to read more.

(17.12.04) Online game players selling hard won items for hard cash is nothing new but the latest sale marks something of a breakthrough. Deathifier (they have such cool names) has bought a chunk of virtual real estate within Project Entropia, in the form of an island and is now selling off chunks of it to other players. It cost the 22 yr old £13500 and he hopes to make a profit on the deal. I remember a Far Side cartoon in which parents watched their 6 yr old glued to a computer game and out of the mothers head came a thought bubble that read "Wanted - expert game player", it seems her wishes have been granted. Read more here.

(15.12.04) Flash drives or "pen" as they are more commonly called, are dropping in price and quite dramatically too. A 128mb drive can now be had for £14.99, which is what I paid for the 64mb drives I used to give away as forum prizes, while a 512mb is available for only £34! At the top end a 2gb model costs as little as £120. You can transfer a serious amount of data with that capacity and it must mean that flash mp3 players are going to drop in price soon. Read more here.

(10.12.04) EU proposes data retention law: The EU is proposing that all electronic comunications data should be retained by service providers for a year. That's all mobile records, including location, email headers but not content and web surfing records amongst other things. How exactly this will work is not specified but it will mean that prepaid mobile accounts will now be tracked for instance. It's all in the name of security of course and the UK already has the form of the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act anyway. That's been used to access between ½ and 1 million peoples records a year according to the Home Office, so it won't that much difference to us but it is part of drift towards a more unified approach to electronic surviellance, as are the ID card proposals.  Read more here
(09.12.04) Amazon problems: Amazon customers and vendors have been suffering problems accessing the website apparently, although I haven't noticed anything wrong and I've visited several times recently. The trouble maybe ongoing and lasting far longer than Amazon cares to admit. If you experienced difficulties this report from the Register will be of interest.

(08.12.04) IBM, pioneers of PCs in the early 80's has sold the domestic wing of the company to Chinese manufacturer Levenov for $19 billion. IBM will retain a 20% interest and provide technical services. IBM had sales of £9 billion in 2003 and this seems a big moment in computing, emphasising the strength of the emerging Chinese economy. Click here for more.

(04.12.04) The BBC reports on the makelovenotspam (still down btw) saga today, basically it's the same thing I wrote about the day before yesterday. I'm only mentioning it because I don't often get the chance to say "You read it here first"! Read the BBC take on the story here (with slightly more detail I admit).

(03.12.04) Another giant leap for mankind. Not before time, antivirus companies are getting together to agree standard names for viruses. This may not seem very intersting but you have no idea how much time I can spend searching the Symantec database to see if their definitions include the latest threat reported by Sophos or McAfee, only to discover that they call it by very slightly different name.

The makelovenotspam is still not up and running by the way.

(02.12.04) MakelovenotSpam is the name of Lycos's rather wonderful idea for defeating, or at least frustrating, the purveyors of spam. A downloadable screensaver generates traffic to a spammers ISP or website, the idea being that the extra traffic will increase the costs of running the website, so attacking their profits. According to the BBC (click here) the plan was even more successful than that, websites were overwhelmed by traffic and some even collapsed under the strain.

Then the spammers hit back and hacked Lycos's screensaver website, leaving the message "stopping spam is wrong" (click here). Lycos hasn't got it up and running again yet, instead there's nice 60s style picture and request for people to "stay tuned" (click here). All in the space of a few hours!