Months after an investigator with the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA) was arrested for having child pornography images on his state issued lap-top, prosecutors dropped the charges when a defense-sponsored forensic investigation showed that his poorly configured laptop that had become riddled with malware was to blame.

Michael Fiola’s troubles began when he was given a badly configured replacement laptop running Windows XP with SP2 in November 2006. He was fired from his job in early 2007 when his IT department found the illegal pornographic images on his hard drive. After he was charged in August of last year, Fiola lost his friends and family; his wife however stood by his side.

Tami Loehrs, a forensic investigator hired by Fiola’s lawyers and president of Law2000, said that Microsoft’s Systems Management Server (SMS) software on the laptop was the first red flag that should have been noticed by DIA’s IT team.

“When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him,” Loehrs explained.

“In the SMS software, they forgot to change the user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed. So the day he walked out with the laptop, the SMS logs were red. If the IT department would have taken a single look at it, they would have seen that it was red and wasn’t connecting to the server. It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field,” she added.

Fiola used a Verizon wireless card that was constantly, connected wirelessly to the Internet, set up for him by DIA. With undermined security, the laptop was letting all sorts of malware and infections to continue operating - including some that could literally take over the computer’s behavior without the user knowing.

“What I found is, he would log in to the state’s Web site, he’d be on for five or 10 minutes and during the exact same time that he’s filling out a form, an image shows up, out of nowhere. No typed [Uniform Resource Locator], no search, no Web site activity, just bam, a cached image shows up on his computer,” Loehrs said. The offending images were located in the laptop’s browser cache directory.

“He’d have 40 Web sites hitting his computer in a minute — who’s the IT guy who looked at this and said, “Wow, this guy is pretty active on the Internet?’” Loehrs said. “It’s physically impossible!”

Loehrs found a script file that was set to go out and run its own searches on foreign Web sites, she said. “And once you get into some of these foreign sites, you’ll get all kinds of stuff you don’t want to see.

“Actually, the child pornography was just a very small portion of it. The majority was just bizarre porn. He was being hit with everything,” she added.

It does raise pretty big concerns about government security. Why a state-run IT department has the neither the care nor inability to ensure their own equipment is secure – what can he average home computer user do to protect themselves.

“All of the technical people know you can get spammed with pornography; viruses can bring up stuff you don’t want. And while people want to think you can’t possibly be hacked, of course there are Trojans and ways for people to get into your computer,” Loehrs said.

“Trojans are written by tech-savvy people. What’s the first thing they are going to do? They’re going to disable the protection,” she added, noting that Fiola’s Symantec-based logs were missing from the compromised laptop.

“Clearly, something went in and whacked the virus protection. So, if you’re not a technically savvy person, how do you even know that it’s working? I don’t know - from what I’ve seen, how anyone can really protect themselves,” she noted.

Yesterday two major providers released their latest Graphic Processing Unit’s (GPUs); Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 200 line and AMD’s FireStream 9250.

The company claim that Nvidia’s 200 series offers PC gamers fifty percent better performance over Nvidia’s previous GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU and 9800 series GPU.

The GPU features parallel and multi-threaded architecture, and is aimed primarily at the series enthusiast, according to Nvidia.

Intended to boost performance for DirectX 10 games, the chips are the first to use Ageia’s PhysX technology. PhysX is a nifty bit of middleware which is designed to allow ‘physical responses’ during gaming, for example a car getting shot by a bullet would respond in the same way as the real world.

The company is also about to unleash its GeForce PhysX technology very soon, according Jason Paul who is the senior product manager at Nvidia.

“Within a couple weeks, we’ll be rolling out our GeForce PhysX driver, which is going to allow the GPU to basically do a PhysX simulation to bring a whole new class of gaming effects on to the processor,” he said

Featuring twice as many transistors as the GeForce 9800 GPU line, the GTX 200 series uses the bulk of its 1.4 billion transistors to perform the necessary mathematical calculations for 3D rendering. The chip uses the 280 million transistors remaining to help boost the number of cores on each processor from 128 to 240 (on the GYX 280) and 192 (on the GTX 260).

This extra power enables GeForce GTX 200 chips to not just enhance graphics and gameplay, but when combined with Nvidia’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), allows developers to design high calculation computing applications that run using a GPU.

“One of the things we’re doing beyond gaming is introducing a whole new set of non-graphic applications that are running on the GPU using the compute architecture inside the GTX 200, as well as our CUDA technology,” Paul explained.

For example, Folding@Home is a distributed computation program created at Stanford University that gathers computing power from millions of consumer’s GPUs to perform complex calculations.

Folding@Home and other similar applications run upwards of 140 times faster on the Nvidia processor than on traditional CPUs, Nvidia said.

“This is due to the much more highly parallel and multi-threaded nature of the architecture and the raw floating point processing power available in the architecture,” Paul said.

“The CPU is very good at doing serial instruction intensive operations. Graphics processors are very good at doing data-intensive, highly parallel operations. So, the key here is getting a good mix of graphics processor and CPU on your system to handle all of these applications that really have a combination of serial and parallel operations,” he added.

The GeForce GTX 280 goes on sale June 26th with a price of US$649. The GTX 260, priced at $399, is already available.

Let’s not forget about Nvidia’s rival AMD, and their FireStream 9250. This Processor is designed with a distinctly different architecture to Nvidia chips.

AMD’s latest chip is a stream processor designed to boost critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC) as well as more mainstream applications.

FireStream features include 1 GB of Graphics Double Date Rate 3 (GDDR3) memory and include a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation that enables 200 gigafFLOPS, according to AMD.

The compact size GPU is designed for small 1U servers, desktops, workstations and larger servers.

The FireStream 9250 and its supporting SDK (software development kit) goes on sale in the third-quarter of 2008 with a price of $999.

When Richard Saville-Smith innocently bought his eleven year old son, Comrie, a domain name for his birthday, he never expected he would involved in a legal war with one of the world’s largest law firms and UN intellectual property regulators.

A special present for the young CS Lewis fan, the £70 purchase of the domain name Narnia.mobi has pitted the family against the author’s literary estate just before the UK premiere of the new Narnia film.

Mr Saville-Smith has been accused of buying the domain name in bad faith with the aim of making money from the Narnia name – a common internet practice known as cyber-squatting.

A 128-page dossier, compiled by the New York lawyers Baker & McKenzie, arrived at Saville-Smith’s home in Edinburgh this month, urging him to relinquish the domain or face a hearing at the Geneva HQ of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), an arm of the UN which arbitrates on web law.

The domain has been frozen while the WIPO prepares to hear the case, which leaves Comrie with out his birthday present in the week of the UK release of Price Caspian, the second screen adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Saville-Smith denies any financial motive behind his purchase. He says he bought the domain legitimately in September 2006 after the expiry of a three-month “sunrise period” - a time when owners of a trademark can buy up all names relating to their name ahead of a general sale.

“We were amazed the domain name was still free and snapped it up for Comrie, who is a big fan of the Narnia books,” said Saville-Smith. “The people from CS Lewis must have realised they missed it, and now they want it back. They are trying to bully us into handing over our little boy’s present with lawyers and legal threats. But we … don’t take kindly to this kind of intimidation, we’re not backing down.”

A spokeswoman for Baker & McKenzie said the firm had to consult its client before commenting on the case.

Launched in the summer of 2006, the dotMobi phenomenon, which created sites for browsing on mobile phones, saw well-known firms scrambling to buy domain names linked to their trademarks. Domain name trading has seen large companies accused of “cyber squishing” - threatening small firms holding a domain name with legal action - and canny individuals snapping up popular site names for auction.

Saville-Smith stressed he would not back down. “It’s classic David versus Goliath stuff . We have no intention of making money out of it, it’s just for fun. To try to ruthlessly snatch away a gift intended for a young boy who loves his Narnia books is unbelievable.”

His wife, Gillian, said the Narnia address was one of several dotMobi names they had bought: “My husband bought me TheQueen.mobi and I bought him US President.mobi - so maybe George W Bush will be after us next.”

Asked what he thought of the whole thing, Comrie replied: “I think its all a bit weird.”

We know that technology is changing daily and it is not easy to get news in technology. But once we have internet facility then it is very easy to get latest Technology related News around the world. For Indian users, I have found a good website “Technews”. It provides all latest news around the world in technology. “Technews.in” is being run by Rasesh Tanna and his team from India. They work hard to put all latest news on the site and also the contents are checked by their team before they go live on the site.

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“You have about as much chance as the Hubble Telescope has of finding that at the centre of each black hole there’s a little man with a flashlight trying to find the circuit breaker.” Sheldon, Big Bang Theory

So the Hubble Telescope was outstanding in its day, but now NASA has developed – and blasted in to space – the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, to hopefully answer questions about what exactly is ‘up there’.

Launching from the Kennedy Space Centre last Wednesday, a Delta 2 rocket fired the telescope to its destination in an impressive 90 minutes. Costing $690m the telescope will pick up where its predecessor, the Energetic Gamma-ray Experiment Telescope, or EGRET, left off eight years ago. The GLAST is much faster that the previous model – scanning the entire universe in three hours, compared to EGRET’s 15 months.

“We live in a universe in which we don’t understand what 96 percent of the matter is,” explained Peter Michelson, principal investigator of GLAST’s Large Area Telescope. “GLAST may give us important clues as to the nature of that dark matter.”

In addition to the dark matter, GLAST will seek to explore the universe’s most extreme environments. The telescope will search for a better understanding of the invisible high-energy bursts known as “gamma rays”.

EGRET did find hundreds of possible sources of radiation, but the majority of them were never identified. If the new telescope does find where those explosions originated, it would still only scratch the surface of what the scientists involved hope to learn.

“Cosmic rays are probably one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics,” Michelson said. “The origin of where those particles come from and what is responsible for accelerating them at very high energies is really the question.”

GLAST could give us even more insight in to the origins and evolution of our universe.

“Understanding that is part of understanding our role,” Michelson noted. “GLAST will allow us to do that.”

The telescope will scan the universe for five years, but researchers could extend this to nearer ten. The telescope will also be re-named after NASA held a contest online to come up with something better than GLAST – more than 12,00 entries were submitted.

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We know that dealing with documents and information can be one of the most challenging aspects in any business. It also takes times to handle it. But there is some software in the market which can handle this things and it is known as Document management software. I found USA based company Ademero’s software Content Central™. The Content Central™ document management solution will improve the process of information which helps to improve your business. It also eliminate wasted time searching for paper and replacing lost documents and also saves paper which might be costly.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin was clearly not satisfied with just looking at the earth via satellite as the millionaire has put done a $5m deposit on a flight to space, through a new program called Space Adventures.

Brin is the first person to reserve a spot, leaving 5 places available in Space Adventures’ new Orbital Mission Circle, which allows individuals to reserve seats on future orbital spaceflights.

“I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space,” said Brin. “Space Adventures helped open the space frontier to private citizens and thus pave the way for the personal spaceflight industry. The Orbital Mission Explorers Circle enables me to make an immediate investment while preserving the option to participate in a future spaceflight.”

In 2001, Space Adventures launched into space Dennis Tito, the world’s first privately funded spaceflight participant. Since then, the company has also launched Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth as well as Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi.

The company’s advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin; Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot and Charles Walker; Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott; and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

Visits to the International Space Station (ISS) will soon be within reach of more private citizens through Space Adventures’ new arrangement with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA), its long-standing partner. Also announced on Wednesday, the arrangement calls for the launch of the first private mission to the ISS in the second half of 2011.

The trip in October will be a fully dedicated mission of the Soyuz-TMA spacecraft, with two seats available for private space explorers, along with a comprehensive package of mission services including science, education and media program options.

Budding space adventurers will have to undergo the same training as other private space explorers have, but the mission is open to not jut individuals but businesses, organisations and institutions, Vienna, VA-based Space Adventures said.

With the new arrangement, Space Adventures will contribute to increasing launch capacity to the ISS. “This method for growing our commercial partnership with Space Adventures is beneficial for all parties,” said Alexey B. Krasnov of the FSA.

“This private mission, flying two Space Adventures’ clients at once, will not interfere with the implementation of the ISS program or the obligations of the Russian space agency; on the contrary, it shall add flexibility and redundancy to our ISS transportation capabilities,” he said.

Indeed, that is a key point, Harry Lambright, a space policy expert at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, said.

“As long as they are expanding the capacity and not preventing the use of the Soyuz for some other, public purpose, I think it’s great,” Lambright said. “It’s in everyone’s interest that we use space as much as possible and make it as popular as possible for those who can afford it.”

James Oberg, a retired rocket scientist who is now an author and full-time media consultant, said: “There have always been plenty of options for the Russians to keep making money off of private spaceflight, and this is only one of several”.

“There are already four Soyuz vehicles slated for launch in 2009, compared with the normal launch rate of only two per year”, said Oberg. With the new plan, a fifth one would need to be added by 2011.

Each one takes about 30 months to build, Oberg added. “We’re already in a situation where there are at least four vehicles in various stages of fabrication on an assembly line that used to handle two. This is a significant staffing challenge.”

The key question now is, “can they safely ramp up to this production rate?” Oberg said. “That issue is being seriously questioned in light of the back-to-back failures in the last two Soyuz landings.”

Assuming the production challenges are handled, however, adding a fifth one could help further depress the price of any single Soyuz, and “might even save NASA some money,” he said. An additional benefit could also be derived if the new, special Soyuz is used to transport cargo for NASA or the European Space Agency, for example. “That could help them recoup their launch costs,” he explained.

Overall, Oberg concluded, “I consider this a very positive development.”

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