Hitachi has announced plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB. They hope for this to be available by 2010.

Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.

The space will be achieved using 'current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance', or in short, CPP-GMR.
CPP-GMR pushes data density above 1TB per square inch, a long-awaited threshold that promises drives many times larger than those available today.

View: TechRadar

Intel expects to see Moore's law continue for the near future and also plans for its x86 processor architecture to extend across everything from small embedded devices right up to supercomputers, according to the head of its Digital Enterprise group, Pat Gelsinger. However, programming techniques are going to have to evolve to make better use of many-core chips.

Speaking at a briefing to mark Intel's 40th anniversary, Gelsinger gave his predictions for the future of computer technology, focusing on the key areas of Moore's law, many-core chips, the Intel architecture (IA), and visual computing. Gelsinger said that Moore's law would continue to extend into the future, and said that Intel has a roadmap for 32nm, 22nm and 10nm chips.

"I can recall in the past we thought reaching 1 micron (1 micrometre) would be hard," he commented, adding that as each milestone was reached, the way ahead became clearer, despite predictions that Moore's law was running out of steam.

View: The full story @ vnunet

The BPI has written to 800 Virgin Media customers warning them to stop sharing music files or risk losing their broadband connection. The letters came in an envelope marked: "Important. If you don't read this, your broadband could be disconnected." But Virgin told Radio 1's Newsbeat that the phrase was a mistake and the letters were part of an education campaign. Virgin said it was not making any kind of accusation and that it was possible someone other than the account holder was involved.

When the Virgin campaign was revealed last month the company assured us that the letters were not part of a "three strikes" process. The BPI has pushed ISPs to warn users three times for copyright infringement before cutting off their broadband

View: The full story @ The Reg

Nvidia has uncovered a problem with some older graphics chips that shipped in "significant quantities" of laptop PCs, the company said Wednesday. Nvidia hasn't determined the exact cause of the problem but said it relates to a packaging material used with some of its chips, as well as the thermal design of some laptops. Modern processors generate considerable amounts of heat.

To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the "thermal stress" on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.

View: The full story @ PCworld

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to introduce its first Energy Star rating for servers by the end of the year, although a more comprehensive system that measures actual workloads will take longer to develop.

The Energy Star program is designed to make it easier for customers to identify the most energy-efficient products on the market. It is already offered for more than 50 kinds of products, including desktop PCs, monitors, ceiling fans, and even windows, but the rating system for servers has been much harder to develop.

"This server program is one of the most complicated we've tried to deal with," said Arthur Howard, an associate with ICF International, which provides technical consulting to the EPA for its Energy Star programs.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Following the recent launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 GPUs, AMD plans to introduce the high-end dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 by the end of July, according to sources at graphics card vendors.

Evaluation samples are schedule to be available in mid-July, and AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.

View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Secunia researchers detected numerous security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Firefox 2.0x Web browser, many of which enable malicious attackers to hack into vulnerable systems and either shut down or take complete control of a user's computer. Researchers at Secunia, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based security company specializing in vulnerability assessment and management, issued a security advisory Wednesday, warning users of multiple errors they deemed "highly critical."

If exploited, the critical vulnerabilities could potentially allow remote attackers to conduct cross-site scripting and spoofing attacks, bypass security restrictions, disclose sensitive or system information, potentially compromise a user's system, access a user's system or launch a denial of service attack, according to the advisory.

View: The full story @ CRN

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries. "The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen" said Marketing head Paul Kim. Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".

The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted. Mr Kim told the BBC: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. "It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world."

View: Full Article @ BBC News

Google has confirmed that personal data of US employees hired prior to 2006 has been stolen in a recent burglary.

Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human-resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on 26 May. An undisclosed number of employees' details and those of dependents, such as names, addresses, and social security numbers, were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.

It is still unclear how many more of Colt Express's clients were affected by the breach. US employees of CNET Networks (publisher of ZDNet.co.uk) were also affected by the burglary, with around 6,500 employees' details stolen.

Although there is no evidence of misuse of the data to date, the information obtained could be used by ID thieves to create fake accounts and identities.

It has only come to light now that Google was one of the companies affected. Google itself was not burgled, nor were any of its internal systems compromised.

View: ZDNet

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom's copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as "speculative" and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

View: Wired

Linux distribution maker Xandros announced today that it had acquired Linspire, developer of the Click'N'Run software distribution facility and the Linspire and Freespire Linux desktop operating systems. The company hopes to integrate Linspire's CNR technology with its own digital software distribution service to speed up Xandros' expansion into the applications space and create a "one-stop Linux solutions company," according to its press release.

"Xandros has emerged as a leader in the OEM, mobility, desktop and PC management and application business, so I'm excited to see the Linspire technology, including CNR, go to a worthy competitor that shares our vision," said Linspire Founder & Chairman Michael Robertson.

Thanks for the tip, gnuman!

In a statement to reporters today, Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics, said that Sony is seeing little or no sign of softer demand among U.S. consumers for its range of digital TVs, cameras and computer goods despite a weakening economy. "We are not seeing clear signs of softness. In the high end, it is hard to keep up with the full demand," he said of demand for Sony's pricier flat-panel TV models.

Heading into the company's current fiscal year that started in April, Glasgow said that he had taken into consideration the impact of spiraling oil prices and the housing credit crunch in forecasting Sony's U.S. growth for the coming year. "I didn't see so much good in the economic forecasts," he stated. But despite these cautious calculations, underlying demand continues to power sales of products across major categories. "Sony Electronics is growing at a substantial level in the U.S." relative to the fiscal year that ended in March of this year, Glasgow told Reuters. "We are exceeding the aggressive goals we set."

View: Full Story at Reuters

Nokia, the world's top cellphone maker and InterDigital, a wireless technology firm, agreed today to drop patent cases in the British courts against each other. The lawsuits relate to certain 3G mobile phone technology patents owned by the companies and whether they were essential to the UMTS third-generation telephony standard, InterDigital said in a statement.

The dispute began in July 2005, when Nokia filed a complaint asking the High Court in London to declare that 31 European patents of InterDigital were not essential to the UMTS mobile technology standards. In December 2006, InterDigital sued Nokia in the English High Court on UMTS 3G standard. However, the two companies are still locked in court battles in the United States, and InterDigital is also involved in a patent dispute with Samsung Electronics.

View: Full Story at Reuters

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that Circuit City will be the first to offer a new Office subscription service, first known by its 'Albany' code name and now dubbed 'Equipt'.

The purpose of this system is to convert more PC buyers into Office buyers. Typically when the average consumer buys a PC, a purchase of Microsoft Office is not the first thing on their mind, but rather security.

With this new service, Microsoft hopes to break that trend, and bundle a subscription version of Office Home and Student, along with Microsoft OneCare, for $69 per year.

Gordon said some less sophisticated users think they are getting a copy of Office as part of their PC purchase and are disappointed when they come home and find only a trial version of Office. "That's when a lot of folks will start digging through the drawer for an old copy."

In the future, Microsoft hopes to expand this service to other retailers, and via other means such as computer distributers, and online methods.

View: CNET News

The flaw focuses on IE's inline frames, often used for serving ads, which typically come from a different domain than content that appears on the same Web page. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 beta 1 appear to contain a security flaw that could subject users who visit a malicious Web site or open a malicious e-mail message to arbitrary code. U.S. CERT has published a vulnerability note indicating Internet Explorer doesn't handle document frames securely.

Document frames can be used to subdivide Web pages such that the content associated with each division comes from a different server or domain. These "iframes," or inline frames, often are used for serving ads, which typically come from a different domain than content that appears on the same Web page.

The problem, as U.S. CERT describes it, is that "Microsoft Internet Explorer fails to properly restrict access to a document's frames, which may allow an attacker to modify the contents of frames in a different domain."

Link: Secunia Security Advisory
View: Full Article @ InformationWeek