Cray and Intel announced Monday a multiyear agreement to develop new high-performance supercomputers with future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies. Cray will still use AMD chips
A University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs
— via Slashdot
The sharp acceleration of speculation in Internet names, a practice known as domain tasting
in which names are registered by the millions and tested for their advertising prospects, is under scrutiny
A new Australian green search engine seeking to capitalise on web surfers’ eco-guilt has been barred by Google from using its search technology and advertising platform. Ecocho.com.au, launched just a week ago, promises to buy carbon offset credits that will result in two trees being planted for every 1000 searches made through the site. It gives users the option of searching through either Yahoo or Google and serves up their ads alongside search results. But like other green search engines, it is questionable whether Ecocho really is any more environmentally friendly than regular Google search. Furthermore, Ecocho’s founder, Tim Macdonald, is also the co-founder of Found Agency, a high-profile search engine optimisation company that has been penalised by Google for breaking its rules in the past
InfoWorld confirms that Dell will sell and support Windows XP to consumers beyond the 30 June Microsoft sales cutoff date that Microsoft reaffirmed today, after comments from CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday seemingly indicated it might reconsider that decision. Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a downgrade
license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale
The FBI has called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for illegal activity
. The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad omnibus
authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well
Spammers are using an automated method to create bogus pages on Google’s Blogger service, again highlighting the diminishing effectiveness of a security system intended to stop mass account registrations, according to security vendor Websense. The spammers are sending coded instructions to PCs in their botnets, or networks of computers that have been infected with malicious software
MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicise EMI’s ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren’t allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service
Last year, one out of every 909 e-mails was infected with malicious code. In 2008’s first quarter, only one out of every 2,500 was infected. Good news? Not really — attackers have just changed tactics
Microsoft said Live Mesh, now in a limited preview, uses the Web as a hub to centrally connect people to the information, applications, people and devices they care about most
Microsoft has emailed former customers of MSN Music saying it would be turning off the DRM servers used to authorise playback of music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music store
PayPal has denied claims it plans to lock Safari users out of its online payments service as it reinforces its protections against online credit fraud. It has been previously reported that the company intends strengthening its defenses against phishing attacks. Early reports indicating Safari may be affected by the company move to block users of older or less secure browsers were incorrect
CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has been awarded a private data highway
— a 10 gigabit per second link — across the US by a major internet consortium and a US communications company
When Charlie Miller won $10,000 for hacking into a Macbook Air laptop last month, he exploited a flaw that had been publicly disclosed nearly a year before the contest. The flaw, it turns out, lay in an open-source software library called the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library, which is used by many products including Apache, the PHP scripting language, and Apple’s Safari browser, which Miller hacked to win the contest. Miller won $10,000 and a new Macbook Air last month after hacking into the laptop in a matter of minutes. The PWN2OWN contest invited hackers to try to install unauthorized software on fully patched Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers using previously undisclosed zero-day
flaws
Skype has introduced its first plan for so-called unlimited calls to overseas destinations. There are no long-term contracts — just a monthly fixed rate to dial landline numbers. Monthly packages to North America start from $3.95, Europe costs a dollar more while Asia rings in at $5.95. Consumers can choose from three types of subscriptions — 34 countries, several countries in a region or a single destination. The offering is extended to mobile calls in some countries
An Australian team of researchers is developing next-generation discs that can store the contents of as many as 200,000 DVDs. The five-year, $1 million project at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics is looking at how nanotechnology, particularly the use of nanoparticles, can be used to boost the amount of information contained on a disc
Australia will lead a worldwide revolt against new PayPal-only payment plans adopted by online auctioneer eBay at a conference in New Orleans kicking off this week. The charge is led by the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA), which consists of eBay’s elite sellers. Combined, they generate more than $US400 million ($424.88 million) in sales each year on the web site
Six Apart, a blogging-software company that offers Movable Type and TypePad, has acquired creative agency Apperceptive and launched its own advertising network and consulting services division
After 8 years of effort, InPhase Technologies is shipping the world’s first holographic disk drive next month. They showed it at this week’s NAB. With a 300GB 5.25″ disk cartridge and a 50-year media life, the Tapestry 300r is aimed at the video and film archive market — via Slashdot
The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there’s one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower’s collapse, web sites ending in the Soviet .su
domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost
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