TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

I’m really pleased to present to you our new design and face for the years to come. Built around the strengths of our old layout, the new design brings some much needed changes and improvements, both from a visual and functional perspective.

The new design was thought out to be cleaner and more modern from the inside out. The new base code no longer relies in tables but is fully drawn from CSS/XHTML, which should result in faster loading pages, and for us, an easier way to control how content is displayed. Kudos must go to Mike Rohde, formerly of Makalumedia, for his creative artwork, and Evan Agee, who worked on coding. Thanks a lot guys!

In total we spent around 8 months planning, designing and implementing the new design. Of course, we couldn’t dedicate in full to it but this played to our advantage as we had plenty of time to test many different things, and experiment with what ultimately became the new revamped TechSpot.

Even when a sizable amount of time was spent checking for browser compatibility, we don’t expect this first phase of the implementation to go 100% bug free, so please let us know if you find something that is not working for you. You will notice that a few new things have been added like news channels, improved tabbed navigation with clickable sub-menus, tabbed search for different site sections and Google search in one click, a load of new sub-sections (e.g. most popular downloads) and things like Top Stories. We recommend you browse around and find what’s new.

At the same time, there are a few features that are still pending to be coded like a new poll system, so please bear with us in this respect. Most notably, our forums are not yet converted to the new layout. Rest assured that comes next in our list of priorities, in fact, as I was typing this we already received a lot of positive feedback from you guys in our boards. Thank you.

We also understand that not everybody welcomes change as widely as we wished for, however we truly believe the new design is a huge step forward and as has been the case before, in a matter of weeks or even days most of you will feel at home again as you get used to the new colors and organization of the site.

As always, thank you for your continued support and look forward bringing more and better content your way, soon.

Two of the most well-known alternative browsers received security updates recently. On Thursday, Opera released version 9.51, focusing mainly on stability and security issues. The latest version of the browser resolves problems with search engines when upgrading from Opera 9.2x and a stability issue when printing. It also fixes a previously undisclosed arbitrary code execution vulnerability and delivers various performance tweaks detailed in Opera's release notes.

The release of Opera 9.51 follows an update to Firefox issued earlier this week that resolves a dozen bugs found in version 2 of the open source browser, including a few remote-execution vulnerabilities. Users are advised to upgrade to version 2.0.0.15, or better yet move to Firefox 3.0, which is not affected by these particular bugs and offers improved performance, stability, and memory usage.

McAfee recently conducted its S.P.A.M (Spammed Persistently All Month) experiment in which 50 people from around the world surfed the web, filled forms, and responded to unsolicited emails for 30 days. Over the course of the month McAfee was able to make some groundbreaking discoveries: spam is linked to cyber crime and spammers are as active as ever – that was sarcasm by the way.

The test subjects accumulated 104,000 spam messages, or roughly 70 per day per recipient. Many of the spam messages received were phishing e-mails, some carried viruses and others allowed malware to be silently installed on the computers by redirecting participants to unsafe websites. United States participants topped the spam count, receiving 23,233 junk messages over the course of the experiment. Brazil followed with 15,856 while Italy ranked third with 15,610.

Other findings show financial spam was the most popular type of spam followed by solicitations for unwanted products and services, health and medical spam, and porn spam. You can read more about the study as well as the 50 guinea pigs’ experiences here.

Microsoft plans to ship four security updates next Tuesday as part of its monthly patch cycle. All four were labeled “important” (the company’s second-highest ranking), even though one of the bugs being addressed poses a “remote code execution” risk, something that would normally merit a critical tag.

This remote code execution flaw, which affects Windows Vista and Server 2008, was apparently given the less-severe rating because it doesn't work without the user first taking some extra actions or adding special software or drivers – though no specific details were provided.

Of the remaining bulletins, two repair vulnerabilities found in Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server that could be used by an attacker to obtain elevated privileges on a targeted system, while the fourth one deals with a potential spoofing attack. More details on the upcoming patches can be found in Microsoft’s pre-alert here.

Toshiba’s HD DVD format may be dead and forgotten, but the Japanese company just isn’t ready to surrender against Blu-ray and start manufacturing players for the format. Not only are they working on DVD up-scaling technology that will supposedly deliver quality video comparable to that of Blu-ray, but apparently the company is also looking into adding other HD DVD-derived features to DVD players.

The DVD Forum, an organization headed by Toshiba, recently approved the DVD Download DL logo – which suggests the company could add interactivity and perhaps bonus material via internet connectivity to DVDs. No official details have been announced by Toshiba, but the combination of online functionality with a significant boost in quality could (to some extent) dampen Blu-ray adoption.

One has to wonder, though, why would anyone want to spend cash on buying another DVD player with all these new features instead of just going for Blu-ray? I know cost is a big concern, but I’d rather wait for lower prices or just go the digital download route.

If you are a Halo fan playing the latest incarnation of the series and feel the need for a new map to spice things up, then Bungie has some good news for you. The game developer today announced that the new multiplayer map for Halo 3, Cold Storage, will be available for download on the Xbox Live Marketplace for free starting Monday, July 7.

The freebie comes as part of the Bungie Day celebrations, but the map will remain free past this date. In addition, Bungie also announced that the price of the recently released Legendary Map Pack will be lowered from 800 Microsoft Points ($10) to 600 ($7.50) beginning that same day. More details are available over at the Bungie website.

Following a slump in the cost of the NAND flash memory used to produce solid-state disks, Apple has decided to give a pleasant surprise to those in the market for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air by quietly cutting as much as $500 off the price for an SSD upgrade.

The 1.8GHz model equipped with a 64GB solid-state drive now costs ‘only’ $2,598 – down from $3,098. In addition, Apple also cut the price of upgrading from a 1.6GHz processor to a 1.8GHz processor on the base machine from $200 to $100. Needless to say the MacBook Air is still pricey, and despite the $500 price drop, the 64GB SSD still represents a $599 option that’s likely out of reach for most customers.

It’s always good to see prices coming down though. Hopefully, we’ll more of this in the following months as a result of increased competition in the thin notebook market and ramped up production of solid state drives.

Identify theft and the value of protecting personal data is on people's minds more today than it ever has been. The fact that laptops are small, relatively lightweight and unbelievably easy to steal makes that even more of a problem, coupled with the fact that you can get 500GB of storage into a 2.5” portable drive not much larger than a cell phone. Hence, a lot of vendors have been trying to put people's minds at ease by offering off-the-shelf encrypted storage. Buffalo is the latest among them, expanding their MiniStation drive to include a line of self-encryption portable USB hard drives.

The units, with capacities up to 320GB, aren't all that special compared to any other drive. However, Buffalo will be offering the drive for nearly the same cost as a standard drive, showing that putting stock encryption onto a drive has very little cost. This is assisted by the fact that large manufacturers like Seagate and Western Digital are making drive encryption in hardware a standard option on newer HDDs. Once a drive is plugged in, all that is really required is a password – cumbersome 3rd-party software isn't required.

I suspect features like this are going to become almost ubiquitous on every home NAS, portable drive and even flash drives in the near future.

Yahoo's plan to move the company forward involves much more than just search, and as such the company has decided to host their next Open Hack Day in Taiwan later this year in September. The event is an attempt to spur development using Yahoo's own APIs, encouraging developers to publish a web-app as fast as possible, doing all the development in a single day. Their goal is to further the Yahoo vision of a massive social platform, which they are dubbing the Yahoo! Open Strategy.

Yahoo-sponsored Hack Days have been happening since 2005, and the idea has spread to spawn other events as well. A lot of code might live and die in the few days the events take place, but the hope is to generate interest as well as fresh ideas which could give Yahoo the boost they need today.

Gone is the day when a phone was a simple analog device incapable of being compromised in any way, excluding a wire tap. These days, PDAs are running full-fledged operating systems and are potentially just as susceptible as PCs to security exploits and other issues – especially with their explosive growth in popularity. Apple, for instance, is coming under fire for failing to keep the iPhone up to date, which is powered by a embedded version of Mac OS 10.5.

According to one researcher, numerous flaws exist on the iPhone, many of which are the result of the iPhone's software packages not being kept up to date in the same fashion that patches for the desktop iteration of Mac OS X are. Not that it would be easy for Apple – software updates on a phone aren't as simple as pushing out an update and waiting for someone to reboot. It probably won't be long before monthly “patch cycles” for phones are common.

If you are planning to get a GTX 260 or 280 card from Nvidia, you may want to hold off your purchase for a few days. It appears that third-party manufacturers have been complaining to Nvidia about having to charge more for their cards despite them performing almost on par with the less expensive Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, which sell for $199 and $299 respectively.

This has several of Nvidia’s board partners walking on thin ice and thus demanding price adjustments to protect their margins. Nvidia has caved in to the pressure, it seems, and agreed to cut the price of the GTX 280 by $90 and $30 for the GTX 260. Of course that is just a price cut Nvidia is handing down to its partners, which will then have to set the final retail prices. According to reports, an average 260 model is expected to cost $360 (down from ~$399), while the flagship 280 should be priced at around $560 (down from ~$599).

Meanwhile, AMD is already planning an answer to the GTX and should release the $499 Radeon HD 4870 X2 before the end of the month – if rumors prove to be true. It’ll certainly be interesting to see this dual-GPU card pitted against Nvidia’s high-end products when it debuts in the coming weeks.

Solid state disks have been a hot topic this year, with prices dropping considerably while capacity and speed claims by manufacturers continue to grab headlines. A report by Tom’s Hardware, however, has recently brought one of the often-touted benefits of SSDs to question: power consumption. While it’s almost a common belief that the solid-state approach saves power (after all, SSDs have no moving parts), their tests show how switching to SSD could actually cost you anywhere between 5% and 30% of battery life.

Their results have not gone unchallenged, of course, and today at least a couple of manufacturers have chimed in to shed some light into the matter. According to STEC, data used in the test applies to the current first-generation mass-market SSDs but not necessarily to upcoming drives, which will supposedly come with optimized drivers for better power management. Micron Technology echoed concerns that the review used legacy drives, adding that other factors should be taken into account as well, such as how an SSD-equipped computer might handle more work in the same amount of time.

All valid points, indeed, and are perhaps a reminder that sometimes is best to wait for a second (and improved) generation of any new technology. In any case, there are also other potential benefits to consider besides energy efficiency when buying a SSD, such as speed and reliability – two aspects in which solid state drives apparently excel. Check out Micron’s statement after the jump.

There are many people who want to see desktop Linux succeed, and there are many companies and independent projects working towards that goal. Linux has very strong ties to the server and embedded markets, and device for device outweighs Windows in the world. However, not everyone agrees trying to erode Microsoft desktop market share is the way to go for Linux growth, and one of those people is a chairman of Linspire.

Michael Robertson of Linspire thinks that pushing Linux onto the desktop has been a near-futile effort, claiming that the “ecosystem” of Windows on the PC is too complex to compete with. That's a far cry from the roots that Linspire came from. As many of us remember, Linspire was once Lindows, and they prided themselves on making an easy to use desktop OS that catered specifically to people coming from Windows. Instead, Robertson now feels post-PC devices, like ultra mobiles and low cost laptops, PDAs and others of their kind are where Linux needs to make its stand.

He's got a point – Linux as a kernel and a platform has been very attractive to the manufacturers of these products. Is the room for growth enough, however?

Solid state disks are slowly gaining ground on traditional hard drives, particularly in laptops, but that isn’t stopping Hitachi from continuing to push HDDs to the limit. While recent developments in the field are already yielding one terabyte units, Hitachi believes they can have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB by 2010.

The company aims to achieve this boost in capacity with write heads that use something called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR), which pushed data density above one terabit per square inch. But it seems that Hitachi isn't the only one that is considering the release of a 5TB hard disk, Fujitsu also has some plans of their own – though fewer details on the technology used to achieve this have been made available.

If you are an iPhone user and a fan of Google, you may want to check out a newly released version of Google Talk that is customized for the iPhone. The new Google Talk application is built for the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch. You can sign in from your iPhone it just by visiting the Google Talk site.

It doesn't feature quite the same functionality that the standalone clients do or that logging into Gmail accomplishes, as they admit, but should “remain true” to the Google Talk experience, as they say. It's a browser-based program so no installation is required, though I can easily see the desire for a standalone app on the iPhone as well.