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Archive for June, 2011

Rootkit infection requires Windows reinstall, says Microsoft

J. TECH - Jun - 27th

New malware hides in the PC's Master Boot Record, fools cleaning attempts
By Gregg Keizer June 27, 2011

Microsoft is telling Windows users that they'll have to reinstall the operating system if they get infected with a new rootkit that hides in the machine's boot sector. A new variant of a Trojan Microsoft calls "Popureb" digs so deeply into the system that the only way to eradicate it is to return Windows to its out-of-the-box configuration, Chun Feng, an engineer with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), said last week on the group's blog."If your system does get infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise you to fix the MBR and then use a recovery CD to restore your system to a pre-infected state," said Feng. A recovery disc returns Windows to its factory settings. Malware like Popureb overwrites the hard drive's master boot record (MBR), the first sector — sector 0 — where code is stored to bootstrap the operating system after the computer's BIOS does its start-up checks. Because it hides on the MBR, the rootkit is effectively invisible to both the operating system and security software.

J. TECH - Jun - 24th

By Guest Writer 6/22/11 repost here 6/23/11

Have you heard that there is a much-anticipated MMO coming out this year with dynamic content, action-oriented combat, massive PvP, deep storytelling and stunning visuals? If you think we’re talking about Star Wars: The Old Republic, you’d only be half right. The other big MMO set for release this year is ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2. You may have not heard much about it with that other title taking up everyone’s attention, but join us for a look at what makes GW2 a strong contender to be a breakout hit all on its own. No more holy trinity: The concept of team play in Guild Wars 2 is a fluid one. Every one of the 8 classes can heal and team formation is more about grabbing who you can on the spot to deal with an immediate problem rather than waiting to get players who can fulfill a niche role. In other words, no more drumming your fingers in boredom for 20 minutes waiting for a healer to show up. Also, all the classes can do their job of surviving long enough to kill their opponent, each in their own way eliminating the need for a dedicated tank. The announced classes are broken down by armor type. In the glass cannon category are the Elementalists who can switch between earth, air, fire and water powers on the fly and the Necromancer with their summonable pets, life draining abilities and support skills. In the medium damage, medium armor category are the Ranger with their pets, bow and blade and traps, the Thief utilizing stealth, tricks and pistols and the Engineer equipped with guns, gadgets and grenades. Finally, the heavily armored classes are the Warrior who uses a variety of weapons, battle stances and shouts and the Guardian that relies more on enchanted weapons, wards and buffs. The eighth and last class has yet to be announced.

J. TECH - Jun - 24th

From Reuters June 23, 2011

Google found itself Thursday at the center of multiple government investigations into whether it is using its dominance in search advertising to scotch competition. At least three state attorneys general have started antitrust investigations into Google, a source familiar with the matter said. The source declined to elaborate on the details of the investigations by the attorneys general of California, Ohio and New York, as they were still in the early stages. The attorneys general investigation into Google was first reported by the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the investigations. The news of the attorneys general investigation emerged on the same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the internet search giant is about to receive the civil equivalent of a subpoena from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as part of a probe into the company's Internet search business. The company, which dominates U.S. and global markets for search advertising, has been accused by competitors of favoring its own services over rivals in its search results. Google, the world's No. 1 search engine, and the FTC declined to comment on the Journal report.

J. TECH - Jun - 24th

by Joel Hruska June 23, 2011

Tilera is a small CPU design firm that first attracted attention back in 2007, when it debuted its TILE64 architecture. The company's tech is designed to offer a grid of CPU tiles. Each tile contains a very simple CPU core, its cache, and a router. All of the processors are attached via mesh networking. Each tile has its own L1 and L2 cache. If a given CPU has a local L2 cache miss, it can reach out and search the combined L2 cache of the entire processor cluster. Tilera refers to this as a "very large, effective L3 cache." Today, the company demonstrated a 100-core processor it claims is capable of competing with the best Intel and AMD have to offer. "The reason we can go against Sandy Bridge architecture is [Intel's range] was designed for general-purpose [applications], so it has to account for single-thread performance and power-point performance and Windows," Ihab Bishara, Tilera's head of marketing, told ZDNet UK. "What we're targeting here is a very specific [high-throughput] application… If we compare our chip to Sandy Bridge in the standard enterprise application, we will not do well." Tilera's design shares a number of similarities with Intel's 2006 Teraflops Research Processor and the "Single-chip Cloud Computer" the company demo'd back in 2009. According to company executives, Intel's decision to focus near-exclusively on general purpose x86 processors make it impossible for the CPU giant to maximize performance for any given workload. The company implies that by explicitly targeting cloud computing, its own tile mesh architecture will deliver both raw performance and performance-per-watt that'll flatten the best Intel has to offer.

J. TECH - Jun - 24th

by Andrea Petrou 23 Jun 2011

Big hard drive companies are to blame for the continuing supply gap saga as they are being "too stingy." The accusation from a disgruntled distributor follow yet more worries that the hard drive supply gap is set to widen later on in the year. According to an article from Digitimes, demand is estimated to reach 180 million units in the third quarter of this year, which will be mainly due to increasing storage needs of cloud computing servers. However, the five major hard drive makers will only be capable of supplying 160-165 million units, meaning the supply storage gap will grow from 10 million units in the second quarter. The gap is unlikely to be patched up before the end of 2011. Last month the problems in the industry were highlighted with suppliers pinning problems to the tragedy in Japan, which seriously affected the hard disk industry. However, disties were none too pleased then, and are now losing their patience with what they claim are big suppliers only interested in filling their pockets.

J. TECH - Jun - 22nd

Long-running superhero MMO set to make the switch later this year.
By Mike Sharkey Jun 22, 2011

Seven-year-old superpowered MMO City of Heroes is the latest subscription-based online game to make the transition to a free-to-play model. Paragon Studios and NCSoft have announced that City of Heroes Freedom is now in development and set for launch later this year. Promising to redefine the long-running super hero MMO on the cornerstones of content, rewards, and choice, Paragon said it has been working on its hybrid F2P model for City of Heroes for over a year in an effort to improve the overall customer experience. "Freedom is about getting more content into the hands of our players, whether they are subscribing or playing for free," Brian Clayton, Executive Producer at Paragon Studios, said in a statement. "To do this, we've looked at City of Heroes from the ground up and focused on three ways to enhance the experience by giving our players more choices, greater rewards and the best content we've ever produced. And for the first time ever, players can choose to enjoy more than seven years of content for free."

J. TECH - Jun - 22nd

Sales of violent video games directly tied to a decrease in lower crime rates.
By Mike Sharkey Jun 22, 2011

In the video games and violence debate, the steadily declining crime rate in the United States has often been cited by gamers as evidence gaming does not, as some would lead you to believe, turn youths into violent killers. Now a group of professors has added a level of validity to the correlation, publishing the results of their research in which they conclusively state, "violent video games lead to decreases in violent crime." A BBC article entitled "U.S. Crime Figures: Why the Drop?" cites 10 possible reasons why, over the past 20 years, FBI figures show a consistent drop in murder and robbery rates. Among those reasons is the study by University of Texas at Arlington and Baylor University professors and the Centre for European Economic Research, "Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime." "Regulation of the video game industry is usually predicated on the notion that the industry has large and negative social costs through games' effect on aggression," the study states. "Many researchers have argued that these games may also have caused extreme violence, such as school shootings, because laboratory evidence has found an abundance of evidence linking gameplay to aggression. Yet few studies before this one had examined the impact of these games on crime." By looking at the sales volume of violent video games on a weekly basis and comparing those sales to weekly aggregate violent crime incidents from the National Incident Based Reporting System, the researchers found that the number of criminal incidents recorded by law enforcement actually decreased in conjunction with violent video game sales.

J. TECH - Jun - 22nd

By Lawrence Latif Jun 22 2011

CHIP DESIGNER AMD has left the benchmarking consortium Bapco, claiming that its Sysmark 2012 suite does not represent real world usage. Nigel Dessau, CMO at AMD announced that AMD has pulled out of Bapco and will not be supporting Sysmark 2012, claiming, "BAPCo chose to ignore the opportunity to promote openness and transparency." Dessau said that the score delivered by Sysmark 2012 is generated by seven applications, incorporating tasks such as optical character recognition, which "an average user will rarely if ever do". Dessau's announcement follows similar decisions by Nvidia and VIA to part ways with Bapco, leaving the benchmarking outfit with reduced credibility. Jan Guetter, head of communications at AMD told The INQUIRER, "Sysmark 2012 was the tipping point," and that AMD's decision to leave Bapco "was not an easy one and was the final step". Guetter admitted that the decision to leave Bapco was fuelled by AMD's A-Series Llano accelerated processing unit (APU). Guetter said, "Sysmark [2012] ignores APU acceleration," and reiterated Dessau's views by saying, "Sysmark 2012 does not reflect real user scenarios at all," adding, "Sysmark [2012] is not representative of real world performance." If you thought that was hard, then Guetter continued the demolition job on Bapco by saying that firms "would be ill-advised to use Sysmark 2012" for buying decisions, as "it is not functioning". Ouch.

J. TECH - Jun - 22nd

By UPI.com June 22, 2011

A computer developed by two Japanese companies is the fastest in the world, attendees at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference in Germany heard. The "K computer" system, developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, has 672 computer racks equipped with a total of 68,544 CPUs and has a calculation speed of 8.162 petaflops, a release from the companies said Wednesday. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Although only half completed, the system measured the fastest in the TOP500 ranking of the world's supercomputers, a ranking updated twice a year in June and November. When configuration of the computer is complete in 2012, it is designed to achieve a performance of 10 petaflops.

J. TECH - Jun - 22nd

By Tony Bradley, Jun 22, 2011

Firefox 5 was launched as planned and on schedule this week–and also marked the "end of life" for support of Firefox 4. Mozilla's rapid release schedule, and the strategy to essentially make each new release a requirement to continue support paint Firefox into a corner where only loyal hobbyists can reliably use the browser. The latest flagship version of the Mozilla Web browser comes a mere two months after the official release of Firefox 4, and also marks the end of official support for Firefox 4. From Mozilla's perspective, the "security patch" for Firefox 4 is to upgrade to Firefox 5. We can assume that in another couple months when Firefox 6 emerges, that Firefox 5 will suffer the same fate. Were you hoping for a patch or update to address the security concerns with WebGL in Firefox? Well, if you are using Firefox 4, don't hold your breath. The "fix" for the WebGL issues in Firefox 4 is to upgrade to Firefox 5.

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Archive for June, 2011