Kees stuurde een link naar Nu.nl waar gemeld wordt dat hackers binnenkort een nieuwe encryptietechniek van NEC mogen verwachten. Hieronder een gedeelte:

Een nieuwe versleutelingstechniek, deze week door NEC gepresenteerd op het Encryption and Information Security Symposium in Japan, bevat twee ingrediënten die potentiële krakers het leven zuur moeten maken. De nieuwe techniek voldoet aan de Data Encryption Standard (DES), die is vastgesteld door het Amerikaanse ministerie van Handel.

De nieuwe techniek, genaamd Cipherunicorn-A, creëert een aantal valse sleutels naast de enige juiste. Daardoor zal een kraker mogelijk enkele dagen bezig zijn met het kraken van een sleutel, om er vervolgens achter te komen dat hij weer van voren af aan kan beginnen. Bovendien is de techniek gebaseerd op een 'dynamische' versleutelingscode met sleutellengten die variëren van 128 bits tot 256 bits.

Meer info bij Nu.nl.

Over bij T-Break kun je een review vinden van de nieuwe Microstar K7 Pro (voorheen MS-6195) moederbord vinden. Hieronder wat meer info over deze Athlon plank met AMD Irongate chipset:

The ATX form Motherboard is indeed a good design. It's got 1 x AGP, 6 x PCI and 1 x ISA slots giving you plenty of room for expansion. It also has Creative's CT5880 (Same as the Soundblaster 128 PCI?) chip onboard with inputs for your CD/DVD-ROM drives. All of the connecters, including the power, the Floppy and IDE devices as well as the three SDRAM sockets are located in front of the CPU, not allowing any room for the cables to clutter. Behind the CPU, you've got your usual 2 x PS/2, 2 x Serial, 2 x USB and One Parallel port. The Sound Input/Output as well as the MIDI/Gamepad connectors are located right along with these. There are also three separately placed fan connecters, giving you plenty of flexibility for cooling as well. Finally, there is a connecter that allows two additional USB ports for your system which makes sense considering the number of USB devices available today. However, there is only a connecter provided - not the actual ports which is a shame.

One last thing worth mentioning in the layout is what Micro-Star calls D-LED; four tiny lights on your motherboard that are either off, red or green during boot-up. These LED's can help you troubleshoot and let you know exactly what state the motherboard is in at a particular time including Memory Detection Test, Initializing Keyboard/Floppy/Hard Drive Controllers, Initializing Video Interface and some 10+ other functions. This is indeed an amazing feature that can save you plenty of time.[break]De Microstar K7 Pro krijgt nu net als de Asus K7M ook een reeks overclocking features mee:[/break] The K7Pro offers a good selection of FSB settings. You can chose between 90, 95, 100-125, 133,140 and 150Mhz. You can also adjust the CPU voltage between 1.40 and 1.75 between .5 increments. I decided to start with the default speeds of 100MHz FSB and 1.60 Voltage. The following table shows my selected FSB speeds and voltages, the corresponding speed the BIOS reported, the corresponding Internal and External speeds WCPUID reported and the FPS I got at Quake 3 running on it's Fastest Mode settings with the Creative Labs GeForce PRO.

Bij AGN Hardware staat wel een interessant stukje over de VSA-100 chip van 3dfx, die straks 1 of meerdere keren op de nieuwe Voodoo4 en 5 kaarten geplant zal worden. AGN vroeg een aantal fansites (waaronder Voodoo Extreme) in 10 vragen wat zij nou eigenlijk van de VSA-100 vonden. Hieronder vast een klein gedeelte:

1. VSA-100 and the new Voodoo4\5 series of video cards. Their performance looks great on paper, with 3dfx even claiming to break the gigapixel barrier on their top of the line offering, the Voodoo5 6000 AGP. They will also finally include 32-bit color support, as well as the T-Buffer technology. Do you see their decision not to include a hardware Transformation & Lighting engine as a good one? If so, why?

Dave 'Octane' Morrison (VE) - Not including T&L on the next-gen VSA cards will not be as big of deal as people are making it out to be. With CPU's getting so much faster these days, T&L will have to just keep getting that much faster as well to keep up. 3dfx chose (IMHO) the right bottleneck to address with the VSA-100.

Marco 'BigWop' Chiappetta (Voodoo3.net) - Of course it wasn’t a good decision from a gamers standpoint. Even without a single game to truly exploit hardware T&L, our minds are already made up “WE WANT IT!”. If you think about it, if 3dfx had implemented hardware T&L, this article would be about Nvidia, and whether or not we think their next product could compete. The hard truth is that 3dfx simply doesn’t have hardware T&L ready. I’m sure they could have implemented it somehow, but we’d be waiting until the fall to get out hands on it.

Mazi Bahadori (3D Wars) - It's a bad move, big time. Lets look at in the big picture. The Voodoo5 6000 AGP costs around 600 dollars. Needless to say, that's a whole
lot of money to spend on a video card. If someone buys that card, they are looking to keep it for around two years, if not more. In one year, T&L support in games will be a pretty big feature in games. It's going to be quite a bust for those users who dished out over 600 bucks for a card that won't even support a feature in games, one year from now.

Hier vind je de rest van de 10 vragen.

Alex Ross, webmaster van Sharky Extreme heeft zijn review van de Razor Boomslang 2000 muis online gezet. Deze muis is vanwege zijn erg hoge gevoeligheid erg precies. Je betaalt er ook precies $99 dollar voor. Hieronder een gedeelte:

One of the nicest luxuries in mousing technology is undoubtedly the scroll wheel. It has simplified web browsing, made document editing easier, and of course, has added a valuable method for rotating weapons in Quake III. Our relationship with the Boomslang's scroll wheel was a love/hate drama, due to the design of the scroll wheel. As far as responsiveness, the Razer's wheel had a firm click and felt much tighter than either the Intellimouse Pro or the Intellimouse Explorer. Unfortunately, the wheel button required a significant amount of force to depress, making it difficult to work with while gaming.

As you may have noticed, the shape of the Razer Boomslang is anything but conventional. While this may be kärna's way of introducing a product that won't get mixed up with any other mouse, it also introduces a level of uncertainty, since the shape strays from the tried and true feel of most mice.

We tested the mouse's comfort factor by putting it through a side-by-side comparison to the Intellimouse Pro and Intellimouse Explorer. In order to deliver the most objective opinion possible, we asked several college students which mouse they felt most comfortable with and the results were overwhelmingly in favor of the Intellimouse Explorer. Complaints about the Boomslang ranged from "I don't know where to hold it," and "the middle button is hard to reach," all the way to "I wish its butt glowed like the silver one [in reference to the Intellimouse Explorer."

AnandTech heeft een review van de AOpen AX6C en AX6C-L online gezet, een i820 plank met respectievelijk 2 en 3 Rambus sockets. Naast de gebruikelijke hoogwaardige kwaliteit die we van AOpen mogen verwachten heeft dit bord voor overklokkers een aantal erg interessante features, waaronder een flinke sloot busspeeds en de unieke mogelijkheid om de Rambus snelheid onafhankelijk van de busspeed te tweaken:

The AX6C does carry a very impressive set of overclocked FSB settings which are a part of the following supported frequencies: 100 / 105 / 114 / 120 / 124 / 128 / 133 / 138 / 143 / 148 / 150 / 152.5 / 155 / 160MHz.

The setup for clock multipliers and FSB settings is controlled entirely within the board's Firmware Hub (FWH), which is driven by the AWARD 6.00PG BIOS Setup. However, the truly unique feature of this jumperless setup is the ability to control the RDRAM clock multiplier manually.

For those of you that aren't aware of it, the RDRAM on an i820 motherboard operates at a multiplier of the FSB setting. The way the i820 chipset determines the available RDRAM clock multipliers is by looking at the FSB setting and unlocking certain multipliers and locking others. For example, if you set your CPU to run at a 100MHz FSB setting, the only RDRAM clock multipliers that will be available to you by default will be the 3.0x and 4.0x multipliers (3.0 x 100MHz = 300MHz = PC600 RDRAM and 4.0 x 100MHz = 400MHz = PC800 RDRAM). At the 133MHz FSB setting you get a different set of multipliers, the 2.0x, 2.66x and 3.0x.

AOpen takes the RDRAM speed tweaking one level further, allowing you to select all of the available RDRAM multipliers independently, regardless of the FSB setting. This means that you can use the 2.0x, 2.25x, 2.66x, 3.0x, 3.55x, and 4.0x RDRAM clock multipliers regardless of what FSB setting you pick. AOpen doesn't list the multipliers as being RDRAM frequency multipliers, rather they list the end result which would be the RDRAM speed. Since RDRAM transfers on both the rising and falling edges of the clock, simply double the aforementioned clock multipliers to get what AOpen refers to as the RDRAM Ratio in the BIOS setup.

insane stuurde een link richting de PIII-550E review van GamePC. De PIII-550E blijkt dankzij de 100MHz bus en de lage energieopname een erg overklokkersvriendelijke CPU te zijn, die met de recente prijsdaling bovendien redelijk betaalbaar is geworden. Het exemplaar van GamePC liep stabiel op kloksnelheden tot 632MHz:

Using a standard BX motherboard (Abit BE6 II), we were able to run stable at 632 MHz using a 115 MHz front side bus speed. The processor would boot and run Windows all the way up to 682 MHz, but would fail to enter any benchmarking suites like 3DMark or start Quake III. Of course, this is just with our particular chip, which you can see the stepping codes below for. Many people have been able to reach above and beyond 733 MHz with these chips.

Many people are reading this information and whipping out their credit cards as we speak to find one of these chips online, but unfortunately, getting your hands on one of these chips may be tougher than it seems. Intel announced as of this Thursday (26th), that only the 550E chips (not any other chips in the FC-PGA lines will be delayed for at least a month while "design issues" have been worked out with the chip. As far as we can tell, the already shipped versions of the 550E are perfectly fine, although we can't be sure, since Intel didn't find the time to mention what these design flaws are. So if you can find a 550E chip on the market right now, you're in luck.

Rivastation heeft een fotootje gepost van de nieuwe Abit Siluro TNT2 videokaart:

Betanews schrijft dat de software nieuws site ActiveWindows door Microsoft is gedwongen zijn naam te veranderen in ActiveWin. ActiveWin opereerde al 2 jaar onder de naam ActiveWindows, maar werd pas door Microsoft aangepakt nadat het beschuldigd werd van het posten van Window Millennium screenshots:

Site administrators at ActiveWin speculated that their site may have been referred to the Microsoft legal department after a beta coordinator at Microsoft accused the site of posting screen shots of Microsoft’s Millennium beta, a charge that ActiveWin denies.

[...] Initially, Microsoft lawyers demanded that ActiveWindows remove the Windows "flag" logo and change the name from "ActiveWindows" to "ActiveWin." ActiveWindows agreed to remove the trademark from the site, but continued to disagree about the name "Windows" in the site name.

Microsoft responded to the initial changes in another letter, which says, "A review of your web site confirms that Microsoft's Flag Logo has been removed. Thank you for your cooperation in making this change. We must also ask that your web site be revised to remove all prominent, trademark type references to "ACTIVEWINDOWS.""

Overclockers Australia brengt ons een review van de GlobalWin VOS-32, een cooler die in Plus versie wordt geleverd met een extra 8cm fan en plastic buis waarmee de hete airflow direkt vanuit de heatsink naar buiten de kast weggezogen kan worden:

Yes, it's a cooler. Yes, it's "we're not kidding anymore" huge. Yes, it weighs a lot and pushes a lot of air around. What is it? It's GlobalWin's new VOS-32 cooler for P3's, P2's and Athlons. That's right, you can put it on either an SECC1 processor such as a P2 or an Athlon, or with a flick of the wrist (well, several), you can use the included clip kit to mount it on your SECC2 (normal slot1) P3. But, in the fine tradition of info-mercials, that's not all! In this "Plus" setup you get an 80mm fan which sucks the hot exhaust from this cooler out of your case via a folded plastic duct! And, you get a tube of thermal paste! This is not really just a cooler - this is a cooling kit. In fact, it comes with 3 pages of instructions!

Dutch Power Cows zijn weer een plaatsje gestegen, en staan nu op plaats 36 van Distributed.net!

We zijn Team Koffie voorbij gegaan, en daarmee zijn we nu het hoogst genoteerde nederlandse team!

De DPC Hitparade Top 10 van 28 januari 2000

1. Teampje KOHA(8, Gisteren:17,000, Totaal:563,873)
2. Ferion Power!(192, Gisteren:9,294, Totaal:36,993)
3. jgroot(136, Gisteren:7,168, Totaal:57,281)
4. [eNeRGy](21, Gisteren:6,396, Totaal:259,048)
5. HarryB(14, Gisteren:5,676, Totaal:365,833)
6. Harm Uenk(314, Gisteren:4,685, Totaal:15,469)
7. sienema(2, Gisteren:4,108, Totaal:924,319)
8. Chainsaw(18, Gisteren:4,091, Totaal:269,425)
9. Jorma(4, Gisteren:3,620, Totaal:753,701)
10. hugo.plaisier(211, Gisteren:3,417, Totaal:31,031)

En de kanshebbers:

11. Katsov(22, Gisteren:3,384, Totaal:256,948)
12. misser(41, Gisteren:3,267, Totaal:170,934)
13. Nasty(9, Gisteren:3,174, Totaal:513,410)
14. Sueno(89, Gisteren:3,149, Totaal:86,800)
15. Nosferatu(19, Gisteren:3,122, Totaal:264,952)
16. Lox(368, Gisteren:2,957, Totaal:11,324)
17. Richard Zuidhof(30, Gisteren:2,676, Totaal:194,652)
18. DPC Division Apeldrecht vs Heteren(78, Gisteren:2,498, Totaal:97,254)
19. Marius (RAiDEN)(15, Gisteren:2,335, Totaal:299,602)
20. Vossie(13, Gisteren:2,299, Totaal:385,988)

De Top 5 teams van 28 januari 2000

1.( ) Slashdot.org (670,871)
2.( 1) Russian Team (662,767)
3.( 1) AnandTech (644,619)
4.( ) #DeathMatch (542,950)
5.( 1) HackZone Team -- Combined power of Russia and exUSSR countries (506,163)
13.( ) Dutch power cows (237,807)
60.( 2) The #koffie Team (56,543)
69.( 11) HIT2000 Linux, Hack & Crack event of 1999, the Netherlands (51,009)

Teams om ons heen(total stats):
32.( ) SwissTeam (Tot:36,102,846, Gis:73,502)
33.( ) BOFH@Chalmers (Tot:35,394,090, Gis:64,076)
34.( ) Winbiff Users Group (Tot:33,660,945, Gis:52,768)
35.( ) Michigan State University (MSU Spartans) (Tot:33,162,646, Gis:116,105)
36.( 1) Dutch power cows (Tot:32,389,327, Gis:237,807)
37.( 1) The #koffie Team (Tot:32,376,390, Gis:56,543)
38.( ) Japan Celeron Users Group (Tot:30,179,753, Gis:66,375)
39.( ) Team HP (Tot:29,902,572)
40.( 1) #DeathMatch (Tot:28,988,582, Gis:542,950)
(Teams waarvan de score van gisteren ontbreekt, hadden geen score in de top 100!)

Dutch power cows is vandaag 13e en heeft een kans van een op 148 om de sleutel te vinden!

Het ANP schrijft dat UPC overweegt om onze kabelheld Dodo_Devil voor het gerecht te halen. Dodo_Devil is verantwoordelijk voor het FuckUPC proggie, waarmee de upstream snelheid van de door UPC gebruikte Lancity omhoog getweakt kan worden. UPC is bang dat een massale toepassing van dit proggamma het complete UPC netwerk plat kan leggen:

UPC wil de software zo snel mogelijk onbruikbaar maken. Wel verandert FuckUpc nogal wat instellingen in de computer. UPC denkt dat het mogelijk is dat de mensen die het programma hebben geïnstalleerd, straks helemaal niet meer kunnen internetten. Of de kabelaar die mensen dan helpt de originele instellingen terug te zetten, weet ze nog niet.

Het is nog onduidelijk wanneer en op wat voor gronden UPC de programmamaker aan gaat pakken. ,,Het is niet verboden om een dergelijk programma op internet aan te bieden. Maar we kunnen hem wel aansprakelijk stellen voor de gevolgen'', aldus de zegsman.

AMD brengt duidelijkheid wat betreft het standpunt dat het inneemt ten opzichte van de voorgebakken Athlon overclocking kits. De eenzame thuisoverklokker die ergens in zijn/haar zolderhokje een Athlon naar hogere kloksnelheden tracht te bewegen mag wat betreft AMD naar hartelust te werk gaan. Minder positief staat het tegenover bedrijven die gemodificeerde Athlons verkopen:

"We are concerned about people that resell our product when it's overclocked". One reason was that AMD is concerned that users who buy such products would blame the company if the technology failed after overclocking techniques were applied.

The reason, he said, was because the overclocking technology meant that the Slot A casing of the Athlon was broken, and this implied regulatory and warranty breaches which AMD did not like.

He said that while AMD USA had sent out letters to companies re-selling overclocked Athlons, the legal department at the company had confirmed that it had not issued cease and desist notices, nor had it threatened them with litigation.

Fiets voor meer info richting The Register.

Windows 2000 is nog niet officieel gereleased of ome Steve heeft al een patch klaar liggen. Het probleem blijkt, hoe verwonderlijk, te liggen in de beveiling van de Win2k webserver (thanks Jorrit voor de tip):

Microsoft posts first Windows 2000 security fix

Three weeks before Windows 2000 is slated for widespread availability and it already needs a security patch. Microsoft Security Bulletin MS00-006 describes the patch, which fixes two vulnerabilities that affect Microsoft Index Server in Windows NT 4.0 and Indexing Services in Windows 2000. The vulnerabilities could allow a malicious user to read files on an NT/2000 Web server under certain conditions and reveal where Web files are located on the server. [break] Voor meer info over het Index Server probleem kun je terecht in dit artikel van ZDNet: [/break] The more dangerous of the two problems, dubbed the "Malformed Hit-Highlighting Argument Vulnerability" by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), was spotted by David Litchfield of Cerberus Information Security on Jan. 17 and immediately reported to Microsoft security. The bug allows attackers to view files stored on a target Web server and represents a major threat, according to Litchfield.

"Of course, ideally you make sure there's no sensitive data on your Web server, but this can be incredibly difficult," Litchfield said.

"It's not for us to assess the seriousness of this problem, because we take all security risks seriously," said Microsoft Security Manager Scott Culp. "The important thing now is that the patch is out, and that it fixes the problem. All of our customers should check out our security site."

However, Litchfield's investigation of the bug suggests that the majority of Windows-based servers are at risk. He confirmed that at least six banks and three major computer manufacturers were affected by the bug.

The Register meldt dat Intel, in een desperate move om toch nog ergens processors vandaan te toveren, besloten heeft om de voorhistorische PII-400 weer op de markt te brengen:

One peculiar side effect of Intel's current problems with supplying processors is the sudden availability, once more, of the Pentium II 400MHz processor.

Distributors have been told over the last few days that there is now wide availability of the processor, which actually entered the chip gulag many many months ago.

[...] It also begs the interesting question of just where Intel found these components which ought to be part of the chip dinosaur's fossil record.

Dank aan Hilko voor dit wonderbaarlijke nieuws.

AMD heeft op de Platform 2000 conferentie in San Jose door laten schemeren dat de AMD 760 en 770 next generation Athlon chipsets vertraagd zijn naar 2001. De singleprocessor 760 en multiprocessor 770 chipsets maken gebruik van een 266MHz bus en ondersteunen PC2100 DDR SDRAM, ATA100 en Lightning Data Transport bus. EBN Online heeft een verslag van de AMD presentatie (thanks vsmb@superweb.nl" rel="external">ovs voor de tip):

Aimed respectively at one- and two-processor systems, the 760 and 770 chipsets will feature interfaces to PC2100 and PC1600 double-data-rate memory, four Universal Serial Bus connections, plus a “future storage interface,” which observers say most likely will be ATA-100.

AMD's chipset group is uniquely designed within the company to serve not as a profit center but an enabler, according to division marketing manager Byran Longmire. AMD is thus more open about licensing its technology, the company explained, and already has licensed its chipset technology to Acer Laboratories Inc., Silicon Integrated Systems Corp., and Via.

“That's not to say we're going to do it for free,” Longmire added. “But we're an enabler, and high royalties are a disabler. We also have the option of doing an IP exchange in some cases.” One technology Huff indicated that AMD might license is its Lightning Data Transport bus, the isochronous bus designed for future multiprocessor systems, including the AMD-770. In a dual-processor system, the LDT will be used to connect the north and south bridges at up to 3.2 Gbytes/s. In an eight-way system using a different, forthcoming chipset, two Athlons will each connect to a north bridge, which in turn will be connected to each other via an LDT bus. Additional LDT links will be used to transmit data throughout the server.