What do providing secret service protection for former vice presidents and going after cyber criminals have in common? (And no, Al Gore did not have his identity stolen–at least not as far as we know). They are both part of the same bill that was just passed by the Senate. Current legislation lacks the necessary breadth to go after and punish how cyber criminals do their dirty work these days. A cyber-crime bill, the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act, was introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee

Security researchers presenting information at next week’s Black Hat convention are expected to demonstrate a particularly nasty method for stealing online credentials from users on any number of websites that allow users to upload their own pictures. The exploit will work by displaying what looks like a .gif picture, but contains a Java applet that can be triggered to run after the fact in the victim’s browser. They call the file a GIFAR. The bad guys would create a profile on one of these popular Web sites

Just about a year ago, we posted a link to a trailer for id’s upcoming first person shooter / driving game hybrid dubbed Rage. Since then few details regarding the game have been released other than it would be built around a new game engine called id Tech 5 and that Rage would be the first game developed completely in-house since Doom 3. But today, straight from QuakeCon 2008, id has released the first in-game screenshots from Rage…    Acutal In-Game Screenshots from id’s upcoming game Rage As

J.D. Power and Associates has just released the results of its 2008 Digital Camera Usage and Satisfaction Study, based on responses from over 8,000 digital camera purchasers between April 2007 and March 2008. Not only does the study identify which cameras consumers liked best, but it also gives an indication of what consumers are doing with their cameras and what kind of features they want. The report breaks out digital cameras into four sub-categories: digital single-lens reflex (DSLR), point and shoot, premium

Happy August, everyone! Sapphire Toxic HD4850 Review @ OCC and other reviews from around the web can be found in our forums!

“With a card that is overclocked well above the standard version, there is usually very little overhead to push the video card even further without voltage or BIOS mods that, of course, void your warranty. With the additional cooling capabilities of the Toxic HD4850 I was able to max out the Catalyst Control Panel clock speeds on just the first go-round. 700MHz on the core and 1200 on the memory – not too shabby! Then I started to push further. But, to do so, I needed to download and use the AMD GPU clock tool. This utility allowed me to set clock and memory speeds above those from the CCC. The highest GPU core speed that was at least 3DMark06 stable was 740/1212; unfortunately, this was stable only for just the Futuremark benchmark. So, I started backpedal.ing until I finally stopped at 731MHz on the GPU core and 1206MHz on the memory. This setup was good for all of our benchmark suite, as well as an extended COD4 session just to verify that the settings were indeed “good”. The additional cooling that is offered by the Zalman cooler kept the temperatures in check, with a maximum temperature of 64 Celsius in my 27 Celsius room.”

Corsair Dominator DDR3 Memory Sets New World Record -2580MHz DDR3 Frequency Reached on Intel X48 Chipset- Fremont, CA, July 31, 2008 – Corsair,a worldwide leader in high performance computer and flash memory products, announced today that its Dominator DDR3 memory modules have again shattered the world record for frequency. The record was set using the Asus ROG Rampage Extreme motherboard (Intel X48 chipset) and Corsair Dominator memory, utilizing Corsair’s award-winning DHX technology. The world record of 2580

Corsair announced late last night that their Dominator DDR3 memory modules have again shattered the world record for frequency. The record was set using the Asus ROG Rampage Extreme motherboard (Intel X48 chipset) and of course Corsair Dominator memory. The world record of 2580 MHz was reached at latency settings of 9-9-9-24 using a Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory module. These results were achieved with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor overclocked to a breathtaking 645MHz Front-Side Bus frequency

Corsair previously announced on May 20th its world record of 2462MHz and has now raised the record up to 118MHz faster. Corsair achieved these results as part of ongoing lab experiments on the effect of temperature on memory performance. The 2580MHz memory speed was achieved with the entire test platform — including motherboard, CPU, chip set, and memory — chilled to -20 degrees Celsius.

Whoah there. That would be news. Santa Clara-based NVIDIA, makers of graphics processors that are near and dear to the heart of computer gamers everywhere, has been making quite a bit of news lately — most of it bad. On the plus side, they were rumored to be working on a deal with Apple to supply a custom platform using Intel processors. But as we told you here earlier, they’ve also been stung by a $200 million charge to replace laptop chips that were damaged by packaging material. Now Digitimes is reporting

The price of LCD screens has steadily declined and in the last few years, larger monitors are starting to become relatively affordable. This is especially evident in the 19″, 20″ and 22″ categories, where we see a significant number of products in the sub-$300 range. However 24″ and larger screens still remained premium products until very recently. In the last year or so we have seen the first 24″ screens to dip below the $400 mark appear on the market. The products in this new category of value oriented 24″

The Intel Atom and VIA Nano processors have been making a ton of noise in the market place as they are inexpensive, energy efficient and fit into sleek and sexy devices that consumers are looking for today. Armed with the VIA Nano processor and the Intel Atom processor, I can now do a direct performance comparison against two of the most talked about processors for 2008.