The number of successful attacks on .au domain names has increased over the past 12 months, according to the latest Cyber Hack Update 2008 report from TippingPoint.
The report, released at the AusCERT conference revealed that Australia is second in APAC in terms of the number of successful cyber attacks annually; up one position from last year’s third ranking.
Korea Republic domain names which were previously most attacked in 2006-2007 fell below Australia and are now in third place. China is now leading the pack in APAC with 32,128 successful hacks in 2007-2008.
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To offer the enthusiast’s market an ultimate CPU cooler for extreme overclocking, the innovative Swiss cooling solutions provider ARCTIC COOLING today unveiled the Freezer Xtreme, adding an Intel and AMD compatible product into their highly credible CPU cooler product line.
The unique twin tower heatsink consists of 102 fins, which significantly increase the heat dissipation area to distribute massive amount of heat faster and more efficient.
The 120mm PWM fan which combined with 8 heatpipes (4 double-sided) and the twin tower heatsink not only transfers heat from the CPU, but it also cools the RAM, north bridge and voltage regulators. Together with the pre-applied MX-2, the Freezer Xtreme offers performance far beyond stock coolers and achieves 160 Watts cooling capacity – an excellent thermal management that boosts overclocking to a new level.
More Info: Arctic Cooling
Cooler Master proudly announces the world’s first-ever 80 Plus Silver Certified high wattage power supply, the highest rated 80 Plus power supply to-date by achieving a 88% efficiency; with the introduction of UCP 900W (Ultimate Circuit Protection).
Cooler Master has long built a strong reputation based on industry-leading designs in coolers and computer cases, while its power supplies have often been over-shadowed.
Today, marks a new era in the company’s foray into the market of power supplies. With the UCP 900 reaching new 80 Plus specifications, Cooler Master now owns the title of having the industry’s most energy efficient high wattage power supply.
The UCP has achieved this previously unheard of efficiency level with innovative circuit board layout and superior components. For example, it first-rated soft-start circuits, a huge amount of solid capacitors and continuous active clamp forward switching technology combined with the DC to DC VRMs circuit design and more.
More Info: Cooler Master
NEC has unveiled a new space and energy-saving server that promises to halve the power consumption used by conventional servers.
NEC claims the server, which has been dubbed the Eco Center, occupies 50 percent less space and is approximately 58 percent lighter than conventional servers.
The Eco Center incorporates batteries that require 20 percent less electrical power than conventional batteries. Furthermore, its server components are optimally located to maximise cooling airflow, which reduces the system’s temperature and amount of electricity required to operate.
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If you’re a Firefox user and fed up with adverts on websites, you can now replace them with tasteful art.
A new add-in for Firefox removes the advertising found on a page and replaces it with curated art.
Addart will work with the Adblockplus. While Adblockplus replaces each advert with a less annoying blank space, Addart will connect to an online database of artworks and dump them in the space.
The picture database will be updated every two weeks and include the work of contemporary artists.
Security firm BitDefender claims to be the first to issue an update to protect against a new vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.
Researchers issued a signature update to protect users against a flaw in the way IE7 parses web pages in preparation for printing.
The bug could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim’s machine if the victim tries to print a specially-crafted web page while including a table of links.
The vulnerability was discovered by independent security researcher Aviv Raffon, who also released proof-of-concept code.
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Google has pledged to adopt a more open approach with the formula for its hitherto fiercely guarded search algorithms.
Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, made the announcement on a corporate blog as part of a “renewed effort” to open up the company’s secrets.
Manber claimed that competition and attempts to prevent abuse have been the main reasons for Google’s historic secretive stance.
Google has kept its search ranking formulas a closely guarded secret to make it more difficult for people to “game the system”, he wrote.
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Search engine giant Google could be interested in going geothermal, according to Israeli newspaper reports.
Google is apparently in discussions with an Israeli firm called Ormat Technologies, which already has a geothermal plant set up in the Nevada desert in the USA.
Geothermal energy, which harnesses energy generated by heat under the Earth’s surface, from the atmosphere and from oceans, is becoming an ever popular alternative energy source.
It involves pumping water underground, leading to increased rock permeability, which therefore allows for the release of more heat.
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AMD today announced the first commercial implementation of Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5 (GDDR5) memory in its forthcoming next generation of ATI Radeon graphics card products. The high-speed, high-bandwidth GDDR5 technology is expected to become the new memory standard in the industry, and that same performance and bandwidth is a key enabler of The Ultimate Visual Experience, unlocking new GPU capabilities. AMD is working with a number of leading memory providers, including Samsung Semiconductor Inc., Hynix and Qimonda, to bring GDDR5 to market.
Today’s GPU performance is limited by the rate at which data can be moved on and off the graphics chip, which in turn is limited by the memory interface width and die size. The higher data rates supported by GDDR5 – up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4 – enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips.1 AMD’s senior engineers worked closely with industry standards body JEDEC in developing the new memory technology and defining the GDDR5 spec.
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Expanding on its popular portable storage offerings, WD today introduced its new Mac-formatted My Passport Studio Portable Drives. The newest members of the My Passport family are designed for Mac users on-the-go and are equipped with both FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 interfaces, a clever capacity gauge, and include a soft drawstring carrying bag for protection from scratches and dirt. Available now at select retailers and at WD’s online store (www.shopwd.com), the My Passport Studio portable drives are offered in capacities of 320 GB and 250 GB.
Weighing in at less than 5 ounces, the My Passport Studio portable drives make it easy to securely carry office files, thousands of songs, videos or photos and back up a Macintosh laptop using Apple Time Machine backup software utility. With an elegant silver metallic finish that perfectly complements other Mac products, these portable drives feature a shock-resistant enclosure to provide protection from the bumps and jars of everyday life on-the-go. Ultra portable, these drives are USB-bus powered which eliminates the need for an external power adapter.
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Microsoft Corp. is offering customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite.
The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.
When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.
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Samsung has unveiled a 1TB “eco-friendly” hard drive designed to minimise power consumption.
The company claims that the EcoGreen F1 provides a 15 per cent power saving compared to other low-powered 1TB hard drives, and a 50 percent power reduction against traditional 1TB hard drives.
The device incorporates 5,400rpm rotational speeds, 3Gbps Sata interface, native command queuing and a 32MB buffer memory.
The EcoGreen F1 can be used as an external hard drive or as an internal drive for desktop PCs.
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Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling “incredibly wellâ€, he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today.
“Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,” the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, “45 percent of all of new business PCs”. Which is enlightening, since business users are about the ony buyers of new PCs that get a choice.
Ballmer, speaking at a press conference at Microsoft’s new Strategic R&D centre in Herzeliya, said overall, Vista, “has had a good unit volume market reaction.” He said he was happy with sales of the product to date.
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Telstra is taking aim at cash-strapped small business owners with the launch of $0 upfront laptop packages that come bundled with the telco’s Next G broadband service.
The launch comes as a response to Australia’s growing mobile workforce, which the telco estimates has exceeded more than three million Australian mobile workers.
“Building on the success of the $0 upfront mobile phone offers that really took off in the 90s, we’ve decided the time is right to extend the same deal to mobile broadband,†said Cathy Aston, executive director of Telstra business.
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A research posting to the Debian security list last week has led to the confirmation of a serious hole in two flavours of the Open Source Linux operating system.
Frederick Lee, a researcher at insecurity company Fortify, said that the flaw, which affects Ubuntu as well as Debian, had been “seriously underestimated ” as it makes the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) of the two Linux sustems vulnerable to malicious attack.
“We’re calling this vulnerability ‘insecure randomness’ since it allows an attacker to predict the SSL cryptographic keys used for supposedly secure online transactions,” he said.
Lee reckons that the flaw, which tinkers with the randomness engine used to encrypt secure transactions, could be used to intercept traffic between a user and supposedly secure connection between a user and, for example, an online banking site.
