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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Dell may be offering Linux PCs

Dell considering reintroducing Linux desktops and notebooks, but wants to wait until there is a clear winner among the various distributions of the open source operating system.

Dell currently sells Precision workstations with the option of having Red Hat Linux installed. These computers are used to run industrial applications, such as those used by designers in manufacturing, or in the making of animation or movies. Dell has not offered a mainstream computer with Linux since 2001.

If the market rallies around a couple of Linux distributions, and Dell sees a strong enough demand to make a profit, then the company will start offering Linux computers again.

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Friday, February 23, 2007

Google to filter YouTube videos

Due to recent complaints about piracy from various organizations, Google will start filtering videos and other content on YouTube for copyrighted materials.

Google will use technology from Los Gatos based Audible Magic to help them filter material. The system works by comparing the audio fingerprint of a video to a large database of copyrighted material.

Earlier this month, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 videos, including clips of shows like SpongeBob Squarepants, posted on its site. NBC Universal and News Corp. also have requested that YouTube take down clips.

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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

No control over the internet

The man widely recognised as the "Father of the Internet" has claimed the Internet has grown too big for anyone to play nurse.

"It is a huge, new democratic opportunity and beyond any one agency's political control," says Vinton Cerf, who is at present the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Nations had tried to control portions of the Internet for their own national goals, but the Net is too ubiquitous for any single agency to control.

Cerf believes the jump to the next version of the Internet Protocol IPv6 is "desperately needed if we are to reach the world's 4 billion people, who are now untouched by the Net."

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Virus makers caught in China

Chinese police have arrested a virus maker and five others in connection with the spread of a online virus named Panda Burning Joss Stick that has caused millions of computers in the country to crash.

Internet authorities said Li Jun wrote the virus program and let it loose on the internet last October. Li confessed to selling the virus to 12 people for 100,000 yuan (USD 12,887).

The virus, which infects program files and flashes a picture of a panda holding three joss sticks, has been spreading through the internet since December last year. It has infected millions of computers nationwide, police said.


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Monday, February 12, 2007

Intel unveils 80 Core Chip

Intel is scheduled to unveil details of a research project into large scale multi-core processors, an 80-core chip that will be used to guide further developments.

The CPU is a research project designed to develop an understanding of how a processor with large numbers of cores will handle calculations and, in particular, communications between the various cores.

The chip also contains an interface capability that would make it possible for Intel to package a memory chip stacked directly on top of the microprocessor in the future. Such a design would make it possible to move data back and forth between memory and processor many times faster than today's chips.

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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Vista users may be out of luck with iTunes

Apple has posted a message on its website warning that computers running Windows Vista may experience compatibility issues with iTunes.

iTunes 7.0.2, the latest version may work with Windows Vista on many typical PCs but Apple advices that customers wait to upgrade Windows until after the next release of iTunes.

Apple has already identified several compatibility issues with iTunes 7.0.2 and earlier versions. These include among others:

iTunes Store purchases may not play when upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 or XP

Cover Flow animation may be slower than expected;

Contacts and calendars will not sync with iPod.

A Microsoft spokesman commented that more than 1.5 million hardware and software devices currently work with Vista.

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Potential Vista speech recognition security issue

There has been a recent discovery that the speech recognition system in Windows Vista could be hijacked to delete files or perform other unauthorised actions to users computers.

Vista contains an updated speech recognition technology which prompted security researchers to see if it was possible to create MP3 files on websites or audio tracks to issue spoken commands which take control of computers running Windows Vista.

Microsoft said the exploit is technically possible but unlikely to be much of a threat in practice even though a number of security researchers have already tested the approach and were able to delete files and visit arbitrary websites even though it was very hard to do so.

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