Coming soon to a country near you! If you thought ISPs throttling Peer To Peer (P2P) file-sharing was intrusive, I don’t think you’ll want to hear what Japan’s doing to police illegal file-sharing. Organizations that represent copyright holders simply identify IP addresses of users sharing their content to the ISPs. That’s easy to do. You just join the service and look around. If they find some content they hold rights to being shared, first the users would get a warning by e-mail. Then they’d get a temporary

Security researcher Charlie Miller attended the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacker challenge hoping to make a little money, I’m sure. But I doubt even he had any idea that he could compromise a MacBook Air laptop in two minutes flat and collect a $10,000 prize. Maybe Apple should stop using the picture of the fruit as a logo, and go with an “Easy Button” instead. The contest, which pits security researchers against three fully patched computers—VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, Fujitsu U810 running Windows Vista Ultimate

Microsoft's brand power has been in sharp decline over the past four years, an indication the company is losing credibility and mindshare with U.S. business users, according to a recent study by market research firm CoreBrand. Looks like the Mac versus PC ad campaign is really working!

According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study , which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand.

The high-definition format wars are over and you won: Dell customers can now get a Blu-ray laptop for under a $1,000. Available today on dell.com, movie buffs can pick up the Inspiron 1525 with optional Blu-ray disc playback starting at $879.

The award-winning Inspiron 1525 laptop features a 15.4-inch high definition wide aspect display with 720p resolution. It also includes an HDMI port for easy connectivity to high resolution displays and HDTVs. The Blu-ray player disc drive is fully backwards compatible, and will play as well as burn traditional DVDs and CDs. Consumers can also chose a Blu-ray burner drive, which is great for backing up and storing important files like digital photos, videos, financial records, etc. A Blu-ray disc will hold up to 50 GB of data, vs. 8.5 GB available on the typical DVD disc. Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops with Blu-ray disc drives incorporate Broadcom Media PC technology that allows PCs with integrated graphics to play high definition video. The high-definition video playback is enabled through a built-in dedicated accelerator located in a mini-card slot.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song — the oldest-known audio recording — made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit” (“By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied”) — part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings. It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

ntel is delaying the launch schedule of its P45 chipset from originally in May to mid-June, according to sources at motherboard makers. The delay of the chipset is due to problems over compatibility between the chipset's PCI Express x16 port and graphics cards, noted the sources, adding that Intel has notified them that the problem should be solved and ready to launch 2-4 weeks behind the original launch schedule.

Some motherboard makers pointed out that the delay will give them more time to clear up their P35 inventory, however, the comparability problem will surely damage Intel's image over technological development. Intel will now announce the P45 chipset during Computex 2008, however, actual motherboard shipments will not begin until mid-June, noted the sources.

NEW INTEL SERVER PROCESSORS: FEWER WATTS, HIGH PERFORMANCE SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 25, 2008 – Intel Corporation has further increased its energy-efficient performance lead today with the introduction of two low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) processors for servers and workstations that run at 50 watts, or just 12.5 watts per core and frequencies as high as 2.50 GigaHertz (GHz). The Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor L5400 Series takes advantage of Intel’s unique 45nm manufacturing capabilities and reinvented

While everyone is still “oooohing” and “ahhhhing” at the raw power and efficiency provided by 45nm chips such as Intel’s Penryn lineup, TSMC was looking forward to the next big thing: 40nm.“Following successful tapeouts and customer announcements of its 45nm process technology in 2007, TSMC has moved forward quickly and developed an enhanced 40LP and 40G process that delivers industry-leading performance with 40nm density. The 45nm node provided double the gate density of 65nm, while the new 40nm node features

With 1GB of GDD3 memory and a healthy dose of overclocking, does the Palit GeForce 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic have what it takes to knock out the legendary 8800 GTX? Read on as we take a pair of Palit GeForce 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic graphics cards and run them in SLI against three GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards on a Dell 30″ monitor at 2560×1600! If that isn't enough we also overclock these already overclocked cards to the bleeding edge, which is something you'll want to see.

Never being ones to shy away from poking a bit of fun at excessive censorship, we’d like to posit that China will ban the kitchen sink sooner or later.  Thus far The People’s Republic of China has banned pornography, YouTube (several times only to be unblocked later), freedom of speech on forums and e-mail, and now mapping web sites.“Eight government agencies, including the foreign ministry, are to tighten supervision of geographical information available online, the official China Daily reported.There