Apple launching... something next week

Apple special events are nothing new. The company will send out an invitation, rumor sites will post images of the invite, Mac users everywhere will speculate about what's going to happen and what Apple will announce, and on the day of the event, news sites faithfully report on the special event.

Apple has just such an event planned for the last day of February, but with a twist: in invitations sent out to journalists, the company says journalists are invited to "come see some fun new products from Apple" without giving hints as to what they might be.

Fears over new Mac OS X trojan unfounded

Compared with their Windows-using brethren, Macintosh owners have enjoyed a largely malware-free existence during the life of the Internet.

On Friday, we found about a new trojan spotted on macrumors.com. Dubbed Leap-A, the trojan passes itself off as being composed of screenshots from the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The file itself is called latestpics.tgz, and actually getting your computer infected with it takes a fair amount of work. First you have to double-click to decompress it. After doing so, you'll be left with two files, one of which bears the icon for a JPG file. That's the executable. According to a post on Ambrosia's forums, the worm will make a copy for you and then attempt to send copies of itself to people on your local Bonjour! buddy list via iChat.

It's a fairly harmless bit of code, and some have described it as a proof of concept. In fact, antivirus firm Symantec designated it a "Level 1" threat, which is at the bottom of the scale for malicious code. Despite the trojan's harmlessness, a number of sites are seizing on this, calling it the first Mac OS X virus to be discovered.

New MacOS 10.4.4 hacked for non-Apple x86 PCs

Those who wish to tempt fate will find a hacked version of Mac OS 10.4.4 available to run on Intel-based PCs other than the ones approved by Cupertino.

If you're willing to download illegal software and know your way around a kernel, you can find links to the modified patches in the Mac OS X86 forums.

The hacker who claimed to have developed the patches said that it was still a "work-in-progress." But "Maxxuss" also passed along this humorous limerick said to be found inside the OS.

"Your karma check for today:
There once was was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc."

Nvidia's new graphics chip rings up 'Quake'

Nvidia's latest graphics processor for high-end mobile phones, unveiled Monday, can take 10-megapixel pictures and decode high-resolution video, marking another step toward turning mobile phones into powerful handheld entertainment devices.

The company touted the GoForce 5500 chip at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Nvidia is best known for its powerful PC graphics processors. But over the last few years, it has taken steps to recreate sharp graphics on mobile phones and handhelds. The company sells standalone graphics chips for mobile phones and licenses its graphics technology for other chipmakers to incorporate into their products.

Handheld-device designers looking to cut costs tend to pick all-in-one chips that can handle basic applications such as processing, graphics and voice calls. Chips like the GoForce 5500 are designed for expensive handsets that let consumers watch movies, play PC-style video games and even pick up digital television

Motorola, Microsoft team up for mobile music

Motorola announced on Monday that it had signed a deal with Microsoft to integrate Windows Media technology in a new range of music wireless phones.

Motorola will launch between one and three Windows Media phones in the second half of 2006. Motorola, which launched its first iTunes phones last year, will keep Windows Media phones as separate products.

The new phones would be PlaysForSure compatible, allowing consumers to use them with a wide variety of music services.

Users will be able to connect their phones to Windows-based PCs via USB 2.0 and automatically synchronize the music on their computer with their phone.

Intel to go four-core

News reports are hitting the wires that Intel plans to release a four-core processor for two-socket systems in late 2006 or early 2007. The quad-core chip, codenamed Clovertown, will bring lower end systems into the eight-core realm. A later quad-core chip, codenamed Tigerton, is planned for higher-end four-socket systems.

The accelerated introduction of a quad-core design will put Intel on track to match AMD in the all-important "number of cores per chip" metric that is replacing GHz as a single, consumer- and press-friendly number that can be easily used for meaningless horserace-style comparisons. You can get a taste of that in the coverage at SFGate and Reuters. The Register, on the other hand, calls it correctly in pointing out that Intel's much delayed next-generation frontside bus, called CSI, is MIA for 2007.

Qualcomm, Atheros team up for dual-mode phones

Qualcomm is teaming up with networking silicon vendor Atheros Communications on a reference design for dual-mode cell and Wi-Fi phones, the companies announced Friday.

The design, which the companies expect to ship to handset makers starting in June, combines an Atheros single-chip Wi-Fi client with Qualcomm chipsets for cellular networks in both the GSM and CDMA technology families. The vendors expect handsets based on the reference design to ship by the end of this year.

Gmail for domains in beta

Manage e-mail for an entire domain? Google hopes to entice you into moving your whole operation to their services while they ramp up to providing another challenger to the big workgroup solutions.
Google late friday revealed their plans to offer Gmail service for third party mail servers. Currently in beta, the service will allow mail server operators to essentially hand the reigns over to Google's Gmail cluster.

MP3 Inventor Develops Tool to Fight Piracy

Fraunhofer Institute has developed prototype technology to help curb the sharp rise in online music piracy, which, ironically, has been enabled through another invention of the renowned German research group: MP3 audio compression.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute have successfully tested a software system, based on the group's own digital watermarking technology, for tracking pirated audio files in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

The system lets content providers, such as music studios, embed a watermark in their downloadable MP3 files. Watermark technology makes slight changes to data in both sound and image files. For instance, the change could be a higher volume intensity in a tiny part of a song or a brighter color in a minuscule part of a picture. Even the best trained human eyes and ears, according to Kip, can't detect the change.

Songbird makes Mozilla sing.

The new Songbird media player promises to make some noise with its extensible architecture and support for multiple file formats and multiple music stores. Is it going to be next iTunes?

IBM unveils new BladeCenter

IBM Corp. Wednesday rolled out a new BladeCenter chassis and several blade servers, including a blade based on the Cell processor IBM is developing with Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. that is used in Sony's PlayStation game console.
IBM's new chassis, dubbed the BladeCenter H, increases the amount of I/O bandwidth available to blade servers, which allows data to travel some 10 times faster than in previous systems. The BladeCenter also comes with a new management tool, the Advanced Management Module, which integrates with IBM's Director and Tivoli products to help IT managers install and manage their systems from one central location. The BladeCenter H and Advanced Management Module will be available in March.

Rollable OLED color display unveiled

The full-color, foldable display is a reality—in prototype, at least. Universal Display Corporation (UDC) has presented a prototype of a long hoped-for rollable display with full-color and full-motion. The screen measures 4 inches on the diagonal and consists of a flexible metal foil with an active-matrix OLED (or AMOLED) display. The whole thing (minus any support gear such as power supply, drive electronics, etc.) is about .1 mm thick and has a mass of less than 6 grams.

This flexible, full-color AMOLED prototype highlights several key advantages of the Company's proprietary OLED technologies over conventional liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Flexible OLED displays are significantly thinner and lighter weight than existing LCDs. The use of metal foil, instead of the glass that is typically used in LCDs, also offers significantly enhanced thermal and mechanical durability. These features may offer important advantages for today's cell phones, PDA's and lap-top computers.

Higher clock speeds in IBM's Power6

IBM Corp. Tuesday detailed new circuit design techniques that it says will double the clock speed of its forthcoming Power6 processors over the speed of its Power5 processors without dramatically increasing power requirements.

Gmail gets Google Talk integration

In an announcement made early today, Google revealed a number of new Gmail features that provide integrated instant messaging support for users of Google Talk. The aanouncement could be seen on the login page of Gmail. The new features—which include buddy status notification within the Gmail interface, support for instant messaging right inside the browser, and support for integrated chat logging—may stimulate interest in Google's somewhat flat instant messaging service. Google Talk is generally considered to be 'less feature-packed' than the more popular competing services provided by companies like Microsoft and Yahoo. But before you run off to play, note that all of these new features are not yet deployed yet, and will be made available to all Gmail users over the next few weeks.

Skype and Google invest in universal WiFi

A Spanish start-up company called Fon has attracted a $21.5m investment from investors including Skype and Google to build a worldwide internet access sharing programme.

The service aims to build its service by having consumers share their broadband internet access with other individuals.

Users are required to download a special software application to their WiFi router or purchase a router with the software pre-installed. The software only supports the Linksys WRT54GL, WRT54GS and WRT54G routers. The company expects to add support for additional routers in the future.

The firmware upgrade creates a second separate network that operates independently from the user's home network to prevent any security issues. The shared network is configured to use no more than 50 per cent of a user's bandwidth.

JPEG patent to be reviewed

The US Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to review the lucrative and controversial JPEG patent held by Forgent Networks. Is this the beginning of the end for an oppressive patent?