Gigabyte Debuts New Motherboards

Gigabyte just announced their new slate of motherboards that will support AMD’s A75 series chipsets and the latest AMD A-Series APUs or Llano. The new A75 based motherboards are said to offer DIY PC builders and developers a higher level of 3D and multimedia performance that is scalable and said to offer the best value upgrade path imaginable.

Gigabyte’s VP of Service and Marketing Henry Kao is quoted as saying that the new boards were new and exciting as AMD new APU’s were “ground breaking” APU technology. As well as bringing AMD A-Series technology to DIY users who demand excellent gaming and multimedia performance on a budget, these motherboards also offer a compelling upgrade path that includes Dual Graphics configurations.

The A75 motherboards from Gigabyte feature an AMD A75 ‘Hudson’ chipset supporting the latest 32 nanometer AMD A-Series APUs. That said, these chips are the first ever to combine a DX11-capable, high performance graphics processor with the option of a dual or quad core CPU on one silicon die, offering a 3D gaming and multimedia experience which is similar to a discrete graphics configuration.

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Twitter Security Lagging,Says Experts

The fast-growing microblogging site Twitter is lagging behind some other Internet services in using methods to help secure the accounts of users, security experts say.

Weaknesses in Twitter’s security became apparent on the U.S. July 4 Independence holiday as a still unidentified hacker took control of a Fox News Twitter account and tweeted falsely claiming that U.S. President Barack Obama was dead.

While the hijacking of Twitter accounts is not new, the false Tweets about Obama generated headlines around the world.

The Secret Service is investigating the matter. Fox News has said does not know how the attacker gained control of its account, but complained that it took Twitter more than five hours to return control of the account to Fox.

“What Twitter needs to do now is to commit to a thorough review of their security practices,” said Daniel Diermeier, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “For Twitter this is a very serious problem.”

Security experts said the attack might have been prevented if Twitter had offered two-factor authentication technology to secure its accounts.

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New MacBook Includes Faster NAND Chip

The soon to be released new version of Apple’s MacBook Air, will feature NAND flash memory with up to 400Mbps performance, about one and a half times faster than its current technology, according to a recent report.

Unlike many notebooks, the MacBook Air has no hard drive or optical drive and instead uses a slim flash board for its internal mass storage device.

Citing an “Asian electronics component company person,” the blog site Macotakara stated that Apple will use flash memory chips that includes the new Double Data Rate (DDR) 2.0 interface. While the rumors could not be confirmed, the upgrade would come as no surprise, since Apple’s next MacBook Air, which originally used Toshiba’s Blade X-gale NAND flash board, has moved to using Samsung’s flash memory. The MacBook Air’s current Samsung flash sports read rates of 261Mbps and write rates of up to 209Mbps and is based on DDR 1.0 technology.

DDR 2.0 provides a tenfold increase over the 40Mbps Single Data Rate (SDR) NAND flash in widespread use today.

In May, Samsung announced that it was producing DDR 2.0 multilevel cell flash chips. Samsung’s flash chips are made using its smallest circuitry, only 20 nanometers wide. The chips boast a performance improvement of three times over its previous technology.

DDR NAND flash comes in two forms: Toggle Mode from Samsung and Toshiba; and ONFI NAND, from the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) working group. The ONFI protocol is used by flash manufacturers, including Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Hynix and Spansion. In March, the ONFI working group announced its 3.0 specification for the DDR 2.0 interface, which also has up to 400Mbps throughput but with only half the number of pins, for a significant reduction in size.

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“TDL-4″ Botnet Is Practically Indestructible

A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million computers is “practically indestructible,” software security experts say.

“TDL-4,” the name for both the bot Trojan that infects PCs and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is “the most sophisticated threat today,” said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.

“[TDL-4] is practically indestructible,” Golovanov said and others agree.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfectly indestructible, but it is pretty much indestructible,” said Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks and an internationally-known botnet expert, in an interview today. “It does a very good job of maintaining itself.”

Golovanov and Stewart based their assessments on a variety of TDL-4′s traits, all which make it an extremely tough character to detect, delete, suppress or eradicate.

Because TDL-4 installs its rootkit on the Master Boot Record (MBR), it is invisible to both the operating system and more, importantly, security software designed to sniff out malicious code.

Further,what makes the botnet indestructible is the combination of its advanced encryption and the use of a public peer-to-peer (P2P) network for the instructions issued to the malware by command-and-control (C&C) servers.

“The way peer-to-peer is used for TDL-4 will make it extremely hard to take down this botnet,” said Roel Schouwenberg, senior malware researcher at Kaspersky, ”The TDL guys are doing their utmost not to become the next gang to lose their botnet.”

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Samsung Asks ITC To Ban Apple Products

Samsung requested that the U.S. International Trade Commission ban the importation of Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods, ratcheting up its fight with Apple.

The filing, dated Tuesday, states Apple’s iPhone, iPod digital music player and iPad tablet infringe on five of Samsung’s patents involving telecommunications standards and user interface inventions.

Samsung also filed a fresh patent lawsuit against Apple in a Delaware federal court on Wednesday.

The complaints are the latest salvo in a growing legal battle between the two electronics giants.

In April, Apple sued Samsung in a California federal court, claiming the South Korean firm’s Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablets “slavishly” copies the iPhone and iPad.

Samsung then countersued in California, and Apple last week filed another lawsuit in South Korea. An Apple spokesman could not be immediately reached on Wednesday.

As well as its own phones and tablets, Samsung manufactures microchips for Apple’s gadgets, a business that brought in about $5.7 billion in revenue for the South Korean company last year.

Before banning the importation of Apple’s popular devices, the ITC would first have to agree to look into Samsung’s allegations, a process that could be quite lengthy.

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Skype Debuts Video Calls For Android

Skype, which is being gobbled up by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, debuted a new service on Thursday allowing users of Android phones to make free video calls to Skype contacts, including those on Apple iPhones.

The company whose name has become synonymous with Internet calling said its updated Android app would initially support video calling on selected HTC and Sony Ericsson Phones, with more devices to follow shortly.

“We are committed to bringing Skype video calling to as many platforms as possible,” Skype’s product and marketing chief Neil Stevens said in a statement.

The move will help makers of phones based on Google’s Android software compete with Apple’s FaceTime video-calling service launched last year for the iPhone and now available on its iPad 2 tablet and Mac computers.

Video calling could also help new Skype owner Microsoft promote its Windows Phone smartphone platform, which it is merging with Nokia’s in an effort to become competitive with Android and Apple.

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Apple Website Is Ripe For Hacking

According to the Ethical Hacking group YGN, Apple’s website for developers is virtually wide open and gives the opportunity for hackers to introduce malware such asphishing attacks to gain access to subscriber’s vital personal information.

One group known as Networkworld identified three holes on Apple’s website that arbitrary URL redirects, cross-site scripting and HTTP response splitting. That said, these holes could allow hackers to arbitrarily redirect to other websites and make phishing attacks against developers login credentials more successful.

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AMD’s Bulldozer Overclocked To 4.63 GHz

It appears that those techies toying around with samples of AMD’s FX-8130P were able to overclocked this processor to a remarkable 4.63GHz.

That said, Bulldozer appears be AMD’s fastest offering where the eight cores run at 3.8GHz, or up to 4.2GHz with AMD’s Turbo Core 2.0. The processor 8MB of L2 cache, 8MB of L3 cache, supports DDR3 1866MHz and is said to have a 125W  TDP.

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HP To Debut 7-Inch Tablet In August

The 9.7-in. TouchPad debuting on July 1 from Hewlett-Packard (HP) will be quickly followed by a 7-in. tablet from HP in August, according to an anonymous source.

Taiwan Economic News on Friday cited an unnamed subcontractor for Inventec Corp., a PC manufacturing company in Taiwan, for information about the smaller tablet. The story said Inventec has “received big-ticket orders for tablet PCs from HP,” for both the 9.7-in. TouchPad and a 7-in. model launching in August.

The announced TouchPad runs WebOS, but no other details were available on the 7-in. model.

Inventec and HP have so far not commented on this story.

HP has not announced a 7-in. tablet, although that form factor is becoming fairly common alongside tablets with screens close to 10 inches in size.

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Pentagon Practices Cyberwar

A mock Internet where the Pentagon can practice cyberwar games — complete with software that simulates human behavior under multiple military threat levels — is due to be up and running in a year’s time, according to a published report.

Called the National Cyber Range, the computer network mimics the architecture of the Internet so military planners can study the effects of cyberweapons by acting out attack and defense scenarios, Reuters says.

Planning for the Cyber Range was carried out by Lockheed Martin, which won a $30.8 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant, and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which won $24.7 million.

Cyber Range plans call for the ability to simulate offensive and defensive measures of the caliber that nations might be able to carry out. DARPA wants the range to support multiple tests and scenarios at the same time and to ensure that they don’t interfere with each other. “The Range must be capable of operating from Unclassified to Top Secret/Special Compartmentalized Information/Special Access Program with multiple simultaneous tests operating at different security levels and compartments,” according to DARPA’s announcement of the project.

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