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Tech News: AMD Proposes New Standard

AMD to Help Enable Broad Adoption of Small Form Factor PCs

SINGAPORE, Jan. 10, 2007 –– AMD announced development of DTX, an open standard specification designed by AMD to enable the broad adoption of small form factor PCs. The DTX standard will be designed to empower OEMs, ODMs, and component vendors to deliver innovative solutions to market that are smaller, quieter, and desktop-friendly, while leveraging commonalities within the ecosystem that benefit both customers and end-users. The DTX standard will take advantage of the existing ATX infrastructure and benefits, including cost efficiency, system options and backward-compatibility, to allow for ground-breaking PC design. A review copy of the DTX specifications is planned to be made available by AMD in Q1 2007.
by Daniel Lim.

BitTorrent accelerator chip to power home media devices

Star Semiconductor and the Taiwan-based IAdea Corporation have announced the world’s first BitTorrent accelerator chips, the STR9810/20. The two new processors share an ARM-based design that works sort of like a TCP/IP offload engine, but it’s specifically intended for accelerating BitTorrent traffic on embedded devices like media centers, NAS products, and mobile hardware.
by Jon Stokes.

Adult film industry embracing HD DVD

Like consumers, the adult film industry has a choice to make when it comes to HD DVD and Blu-ray, the two formats vying to be the successor to DVD. A couple of stories on the subject have surfaced recently; the first claims that Blu-ray disc manufacturers don’t want the porn industry releasing content on Blu-ray, while a second story says that adult filmmakers have decided to cast their lot with HD DVD.
by Eric Bangeman.

BackupHDDVD, a tool to decrypt AACS protected movies

kad77 writes “It appears that, despite skepticism, ‘muslix64’ was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release ‘Serenity.’ Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here’s a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?”
from slashdot.

All-New Airport Extreme Base Station

Unannnounced but available to order today is the new Airport Extreme Base Station.
The new Airport Extreme Base Station costs $179 and is scheduled to ship in February. It uses the 802.11n protocol.
from MacSlash.

Third HD standard gets an outing
CES 007 HD-FVD shows up

BOTH TAIWAN AND CHINA want their own HD standards, and the common denominator between their competing standards is the fact that they’re more aggressive on the processing side, than on the capacity of the physical medium.
by Theo Valich.

The anatomy of a covert wireless security assessment

January 12, 2007 (Computerworld) –– Maybe I’m a little old for it, but I do enjoy the change of pace a big wireless security penetration project provides. Once or twice a year, I get to put down my thrill-a-minute governance frameworks, quit rockin’ out policy advice, and make like the black hats for a week or two.
by Jon Espenschied.

Make Wget cater to your needs

Most Linux users are familiar with using GNU Wget to download single files by passing the URL as an argument to the wget command, but you can also use Wget with desktop applications. It requires a little preparation, but it’s easy to integrate Wget with your favorite browser and other desktop applications. You can also use Wget in scripts to categorize batch downloads and make them fault-tolerant. Here’s how to get Wget to sit up and beg for you.
by Aleksey ‘LXj’ Alekseyev.