Chad Weirick
Chad Weirick
Recent posts
There is a growing concern that public Wi-Fi might not be the best investment, especially with WiMAX around the corner. Regardless, some cities and large public areas are still planning on using existing Wi-Fi technology: “But to Norm Bogen, director of networking research at In-Stat, suggesting that public Wi-Fi...
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The TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration) has recently run a survey of the IRS to determine how well the agency would respond to a little old fashioned social engineering.TIGTA callers posed as helpdesk representatives and requested assistance changing a password. The results are quite surprising: “In 61 of 102 cases,...
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If you’ve registered for almost any type of online service in the past few years, then you’ve probably run into a Human Interface Proof (or HIP for short). HIPs are those strings of letters and/or numbers that look like they came from some malfunctioning typewriter.They’ve proven to be quite useful in cutting down the number of bot-generated...
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As we reported earlier, technical difficulties at a transformer substation caused Korean memory factories owned by Samsung to go shut down until the situation could be resolved. It seems that issues have now been resolved and the plants running again are ramping up to full production as quickly as they can.The outage has come a particularly...
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Carlos Slim, Mexican billionaire, is planning to donate several hundred thousand laptops to Mexican children and some lucky salesperson at his favorite computer store is about to become employee of the month. “Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world, recently announced his plan to offer "hundreds of thousands"...
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In 2003 AMD released the Opteron and followed it with the Athlon 64, bringing the dream of 64-bit computing to the masses. The dream would mean the end of the 4 GB memory limit, as well as other potential performance benefits.Fast forward to mid-2007, and 64-bit is still the other flavor of Windows. So what’s holding 64-bit back on the windows...
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Former Take-Two CEO, Ryan Brant, has pleaded guilty to the illegal backdating of stock-options. What kind of penalty did he get?A few million dollars, 5 years of probation and national media attention that will probably embarrass him in a way that few people ever get to experience. “Brant was the first of three officials convicted at the...
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Two years ago the Nopir-B worm was out "in the wild" and deleting MP3s on infected machines, and now it’s W32.Deletemusic’s turn to try doing the same: “The worm spreads via removable flash drives, reminiscent of the way viruses spread via floppy disks decades ago. That may be an attempt by the authors of the worm to bypass e-mail filters...
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Bank hacking is up, despite new & improved security measures and growing public awareness regarding internet security: “SecureWorks reported that between June 2006 and December 2006, they blocked attacks from about 808 hackers per bank per month. From the beginning of this year through June, there's been an average of 1,462 hackers launching...
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Eminem’s management and their legal team are taking on Apple, in what may be the first battle of many against Apple. The problem isn't actually between Eminem and Apple, but rather Eminem and his label. Stopping music sales on iTunes is the first step in changing the way record labels award royalties for songs sold on iTunes. The...
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One of the most significant blows dealt to Rockstar's Manhunt 2 came when the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) banned the sale of the game in the UK. Now Rockstar is appealing that decision, but it’s not known whether or not they’re offering to change the game to get a new rating, or if they’re simply using a new argument....
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Halo 3, due to be the last installment in Bungie’s wildly popular franchise, is going to support 4 player cooperative play mode: “So you were probably wondering why we didn’t want to commit to two player co-op online over Xbox Live. We certainly got plenty of mail asking, no, demanding that we make it happen. Of course we were working on...
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If you’re in the market for a new PSU, and the warranty is figuring heavily into your decision making process, then you might want to reconsider the Cooler Master Real Power and Real Power M series. “As part of our total commitment to quality, Cooler Master is pleased to announce that we will be extending the warranty period of our Real...
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Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has plans for an open source search engine that he believes will rise up to challenge Google. Considering the dominance Google has in the online search field, it seems like Mr. Wales is taking on a monumental task. “Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Friday he is putting the building blocks in place...
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Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has decided to back a new firm called Hotswap. Hotswap specializes in video compression technologies, and they are currently offering technology that focuses on making digital media file sizes smaller thus enabling shorter uploads while increasing both image and video quality.The potential applications...
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An interesting collection of rumors and speculations about the next completely new AMD CPU has surfaced.AMD hasn't officially announced the chip yet, so anything can change between now and the target launch date sometime in 2009. AMD plans to launch its third-generation Opteron platform in 2009 with the Sandtiger octal-core processor. Beneath...
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EBay has been ordered to take stronger measures to prevent cases of certain types of fraud by the German Federal Supreme Court.All this trouble started with customers selling fake Rolex watches with starting prices under 800 Euros. Whatever happened to caveat emptor? “The ruling by the German Federal Supreme Court came in an appeal by plaintiffs...
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Google has finally started detailing the specific details of their plan to filter copyrighted material from their video service, YouTube. Hopefully this will appease media giants such as Viacom, who have filed suit against Google.The plan will take effect in September, and will use digital video fingerprinting to help ID copyrighted material....
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At least one customer hasn’t been too thrilled with some of the battery issues with the new iPhone from Apple.Jose Trujillo, irritated customer, has filed a class action law suit against Apple: “One iPhone customer wasn't happy at all with the iPhone's battery life or the two alternatives to replacing a defective battery and filed a class-action...
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The next-gen disc format wars have been going on for quite some time, with no clear winner as yet. In fact, the wars have dragged on so long that there is a growing concern that neither format will win, and we’ll have to wait another few years for something worthy of a few hundred of your hard earned dollars.With that said, it’s easy to understand...
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Early rumors about FB-DIMMs claimed that they were going to offer better bandwidth, power/heat efficiency, all adding minimal latency. Theory and reality don’t always end up being the same thing, and FB-DIMMs are great at some tasks, but there’s a fairly large latency penalty. Add to that the fact that the FB-DIMMs are significantly more...
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If you're a Sam & Fax fan, rejoice: a new season is en route for this fall. If you're a person who likes gaming in small, affordable doses, then you might also want to rejoice. After several games announced plans for episodes, only a few have delivered. Some, like SiN have outright cancelled plans for episodic gaming. Others are waiting...
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