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A SENIOR ARCHITECT from the Power PC division of IBM will unveil technical details of a 64-bit Power PC chip at the Microprocessor Forum in October this year. Peter Sandon will say that the processor is an eight way superscalar design supporting symmetric multiprocessing, has vector processing, and will use 160 specialised vector instructions, delivering a 6.4GB/s system interface. If this 6.4GB/s relates to the memory bus, it could mean the chip will use dual channel DR 400, and it may also have Altivec, or an alternative vector version of Altivec. Will it be an easy matter for Apple to...

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Microsoft Corp. has agreed under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission to tighten the security of its popular Passport Internet service and endure two decades of government oversight into how it operates the service, people familiar with the decision said Thursday. Responding to a formal complaint by privacy groups, the FTC determined that Microsoft made deceptive claims and misrepresented the security surrounding the design and use of Passport, which promises consumers a single, convenient method for identifying themselves across different Web sites. Marc Rotenberg, the head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy...

The ultimate in miniaturization is the atom -- there are 10 million billion of them in a single grain of salt. The scientist Richard Feynman suggested several decades ago that it would be possible to use single atoms to store bits of data. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have taken a large step toward making the idea a reality with a prototype that uses single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. Practical atomic-scale memory would increase the amount of information that could be stored per square inch of recording material by several thousand...

Security researchers have warned of a flaw in communications software that could allow attackers to take over computers running Windows, Unix-based operating systems and Mac OS X, as well as Kerberos authentication systems. The problem is widespread because it affects some implementations of XDR (external data representation) libraries, used by many applications as a way of sending data from one system process to another, regardless of the system's architecture. The affected libraries are derived from Sun Microsystems' SunRPC remote procedure call technology, which has been taken up by many vendors. The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), a security network...

Cell, a radical new processor designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and dubbed a 'supercomputer on a chip', could enter production in 2004 . Collaborating engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba have wrapped up the design for the inner workings of a mysterious new chip called "Cell." The new multimedia processor, touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on the way to completion, IBM says. The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design will be seen in future server chips from IBM. Cell has nearly "taped out" -- an industry term meaning...

Exploiting design flaws in the Win32 API for privilege escalation. Or... Shatter Attacks - How to break Windows. By Foon - ivegotta@tombom.co.uk Introduction This paper presents a new generation of attacks against Microsoft Windows, and possibly other message-based windowing systems. The flaws presented in this paper are, at the time of writing, unfixable. The only reliable solution to these attacks requires functionality that is not present in Windows, as well as efforts on the part of every single Windows software vendor. Microsoft has known about these flaws for some time; when I alerted them to this attack, their response was...

Intel says nothing these days THE EDITOR of the High Tech Strategist claims that AMD's Hammer chips will give the firm as much as a three to four year lead over competing technology from Intel. Fred Hick is quoted in the the August 5th edition of the Wall Street financial weekly, pushed out by Barron's. His argument is that the AMD Hammer family is backward compatible with 32-bit applications as well as having the ability to run specially compiled 64-bit code. Intel's Itanium, by contrast, has a special instruction set and while it will run 32-bit instruction code this is...

Japanese supercomputer dwarfs U.S. machines LIVERMORE - U.S. supercomputers have been the world's most powerful since the first high-performance machines analyzed virtual nuclear blasts, climate change and the makeup of the universe. Now, one built in Japan with an "old" design runs five times faster than the previous record holder, a machine that simulates nuclear tests at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer hasn't quite rattled the United States like the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. But it does highlight some drawbacks of recent U.S. machines - and it has made more than a few scientists...

AMD's new chip can help it gain on Intel--Barron's Last Updated: August 04, 2002 02:49 PM ET NEW YORK, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N is hailed as having the "next big thing" with its upcoming eighth-generation microprocessor, and this could make the depressed stock a long-term winner, Barron's said. The Aug. 5 edition of the Wall Street financial weekly cites Fred Hick, publisher of the newsletter High-Tech Strategist, as saying AMD's next line of microprocessors, code-named Hammer, can give AMD a multiyear lead on arch-rival Intel Corp. INTC.O . AMD's edge could lie in the move...

Aaron and Rosie Winters lived in a dirt house — okay, a hole — near Las Vegas. One day in 1881, a visiting prospector told them about a valuable white mineral he was in search of. He described a simple chemical preparation for the ore that, if ignited, would burn green, the telltale flame of a borate compound. Aaron thought he knew where such a mineral could be found but kept it to himself until the prospector left. The next day, he set out for Death Valley, retrieved a sample, performed the test, and exclaimed, "She burns green, Rosie. We're...

Trojan horse found in OpenSSH Several versions of OpenSSH contain a Trojan horse that can allow an attacker to take over a system running the free network connectivity software, the makers of OpenSSH warned in an advisory yesterday. OpenSSH is distributed for free by the OpenBSD project. The SSH protocol is widely used for secure remote terminal connections and file transfers between a client and a server running Unix and its derivatives. The Trojan horse was discovered in OpenSSH versions 3.2.2p1, 3.4p1 and 3.4. The compromised software was first made available on an official download server on July 30 or...

Freepers, your help please. I am looking to buy a CHEAP notebook/laptop computer that I can cart around in my briefcase. Don't need to have a lot of bells and whistles as I will use it primarily for word processing, but I want to be able to access the internet. Any suggestions for reputable resellers of reconditioned equipment? Also, I am requesting recommendations for brands/models.

When Dreamcasts Attack White hat hackers use game consoles, handheld PCs to crack networks from the inside out. By Kevin Poulsen, Jul 31 2002 5:26PMLAS VEGAS--Cyberpunks will be toting cheap game consoles on their utility belts this fall if they follow the lead of a pair of white hat hackers who demonstrated Wednesday how to turn the defunct Sega Dreamcast into a disposable attack box designed to be dropped like a bug on corporate networks during covert black bag jobs. The "phone home" technique presented by Aaron Higbee of Foundstone and Chris Davis from RedSiren Technologies at the Black Hat...

WASHINGTON--Hewlett Packard has found a new club to use to pound researchers who unearth flaws in the company's software: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company's Tru64 Unix operating system. In a letter sent on Monday, an HP vice president warned SnoSoft, a loosely organized research collective, that its members "could be fined up to $500,000 and imprisoned for up to five years" for its role in publishing information on a bug that lets an intruder...

AMD confirms IBM DB2 Hammer support Corporate migration easier, says IBM By Mike Magee: Tuesday 30 July 2002, 20:58 IBM'S DB2 DATABASE for Linux will be supported on AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors, confirming benchmarks posted on c't magazine a few weeks back. AMD confirmed the story in a release which said a DB2 database using SuSE Linux was successfully ported to X86-64 technology in just a few days. The news is good for AMD and indicates positiive application software support for its Opteron servers, due to be launched next year. The chip firm said that using X86-64 architecture will mean...

From The Low Beyond. ©1996-©2001 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.  All rights reserved. The address of this document is http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html. If you found it elsewhere, please visit the foregoing link for the most recent version.   Created:  11/18/1996   Updated:  05/27/2001 The short version:If computing speeds double every two years,what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?Computing speed doubles every two years. Computing speed doubles every two years of work. Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months -...

WHEN the hordes of volunteer programmers who make up the open-source movement met this week for their annual convention in San Diego, one constituency was conspicuously absent: entrepreneurs. Many start-ups that tried to make money from open-source software have already gone bust, and many of those that have survived are in a sorry state.This is not all that is worrying open-source advocates. Microsoft is leading an increasingly nasty campaign against programs such as Linux, the free operating system, and has even been putting it about that such programs make it easier for terrorists to hack into computers. Worse, Linus Torvalds,...

Man Hijacks al-Qaida Web Site Maryland Man Hijacks al-Qaida Web Site for FBI Use, but Agents Pass The Associated Press W A S H I N G T O N, July 30 — When Web operator Jon Messner gained control of one of al-Qaida's prime Internet communication sites, he offered it to the FBI to use it for disinformation and collecting data about sympathizers. What followed, he says, was a week of frustration.FBI agents struggled to find someone with enough technical know-how to set up the sting. By the time they did, the opportunity was lost as militant Islamic...

Breaking Performance Bottlenecks of SMP Systems with Opteron By Spencer Kittelson Date: July 29, 2002One of the most wonderful performance enhancing features of the forthcoming [AMD] Opteron (Hammer) are the multiple independent direct memory channels that are built into each CPU.  This is a huge, huge difference from the shared memory (actually, shared everything) approach of Intel symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems.  Given the limitations of today's memory technology, this was an exceedingly smart move on the part of AMD and will likely change the way we design some of our applications in the very near future. Intel SMP systems exhibit...

Why would an uneven coating of gold on a silica surface excite any interest, much less earn cover-story honors in a respected scientific journal? This uneven coating - nanoparticles of gold in a layer that changes from very dense to very sparse across a surface of selected molecules - will allow improvements in a wide range of processes and devices. And it's the decreasing concentration of the coating and overlaying particles, the designed-in gradient, that has chemical engineers and physicists taking note. "This material promises to be the first in a series with many applications in electronics, chemistry and the...