CPU bugs are a bisg problem that now people are debatingn seriously. Theo de Raadt's blog calls the Core 2 CPU line ‘buggy as hell’ and promises that the problems being patched are not innocuous bugs but security issues that will be exploited, and from userland code at that. This means that an exploit may require local access to run code, but not privileged access.

Intel's ‘Specification Update’ on these processors contains an errata section that has many of the bugs fixed. de Raadt refers to some of the errata as scary. They could lead to processor hangs or ‘unpredictable system behavior.

The fixes are in the form of microcode for the processors. Updates to the CPU microcode can be loaded at run-time, although they are not persistent. The usual way they are applied is by the BIOS at boot time, and therefore the CPU updates can be delivered as BIOS flash updates.

But updates can also be applied by the operating system, and in this case Microsoft has done just thatWriting a patch like this isn't something that companies like Microsoft can do on their own.
 
Microcode is not like regular code, and it's apt to change between different versions of the processor or even steppings. Microsoft likely got the various updates from Intel and packaged them up in a single program.
You're still better off exploiting whatever Microsoft patched last month.

Security researchers are warning users that a malware writer is infecting computers by hiding a Trojan horse inside an animated video that is being e-mailed around the world.

According to an advisory from Sophos, the Troj/Agent-FWO Trojan plays the popular 'Yes & No' Shockwave video created by the Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto. The video only plays, though, after embedding itself on users' computers and downloading other pieces of malicious code.

The video has been making its way around the globe for the past several years with people forwarding it to friends and colleagues. Now, a malware writer has begun taking advantage of the trend, sending out a copy of the video that has the Trojan hidden inside.

Sophos also sad that the Trojan drops its malicious payload in the Windows System folder, and is designed to create registry entries to run on startup. It also has the ability to inject code into system processes to hide itself.

The 'Yes & No' animation was first posted on the Internet by Bozzetto in 2001. It's a funny take on how obeying the rules of the road can cause its own set of problems. According to Sophos, it's estimated that hundreds of thousands of people have watched the online video.

Sophos researchers reported that the Trojan plays the animation as a smokescreen to hide the fact that it's silently infecting Windows computers.

Microsoft has released interim release between Beta 3 and Release Candidate 1. Beta 3 has already been downloaded over 200,000 times in the two months since its release.

The June Community Technology Preview of Windows Server 2008 it may represent a minor update, but it brings to the table a major new feature: the addition of IIS7 as part of the Server Core installation option.

According to Microsoft, IIS7 is a powerful Web server that allows IT administrators to increase Web site and application availability while lowering system administration costs.

More importantly is that the company has decided to put all of its weight behind IIS as a competitor in the Web server space; some Microsoft employees had previously suggested the Redmond company would replace the complex server with a minimum-overhead WS, standards, compliant solution.

Windows Communications Foundation the end product of the Indigo project, is and may always be directly dependent on IIS, which he called ‘the glue’ that fits all Web interactions together in the current Microsoft model.

The Windows Server 2008 June CTP is available today to MSDN and TechNET subscribers, as well as Microsoft Connect beta testers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is aiming to get over the IBM’s Blue Gene.
The design provides 21 million floating-point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 PFLOPS. IBM already has a 3 PFLOP version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the No. 2 spot.

Sun's Constellation will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.

The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec., and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.
The benefit of a big switch is that interswitch cables and the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.
It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.
According to Sun the Constellation could scale to a 2 PFLOP system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay, though.

IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.

It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 PFLOP and could be configured to reach 3 PFLOPS.IBM suggests that a home user would need a 1.5-mile-high pile of laptops to have the equivalent of 1 PFLOP of computing power.
 

A free beta of Plaxo online contact program has been released recently.The new program has been added an address book that can suck from, and send data to, a host of sources.

The Plaxo 3.0 address book can synchronise between numerous stores including Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail and Calendar, AOL AIM, Mac OSX Sync Services, Mozilla Thunderbird, mobile phones and LinkedIn. Synchronisation tools are based on the SyncML open standard.

Other features include a Sync Dashboard and revised address book with mashups that allow mapping and voice calling, and a new calendar that includes weather alerts and photo storage, again via mashups. A Pulse tab adds RSS-style syndication features so users can view content from peers.Plaxo can be accessed over the web, via mobile phone or client software for Windows and Mac.

A free 30-day trial allows users to try the program and this includes the paid-for option that includes backup and recovery and technical support, although this requires users to enter card details.