Mercury Research figures released by AMD show that the chipmaker saw its market share rise from 7.4 percent in the first quarter to 11.2 percent in the second quarter, a 51 percent jump. Revenue generated by Opteron rose 89 percent from the first quarter to the second, according to AMD.

The market share figure, which will likely be disputed by Intel and possibly contradicted by other market share surveys, represents the first time AMD has crossed into double-digit territory in server chips. Two and a half years ago, before Opteron, AMD had only a nominal presence in this market.

Source: ZDNet

Symantec issued an alert Monday that it had detected unusual amounts of scanning of a port normally associated with Microsoft SQL Server, a possible precursor to an attack.

Although there are no known vulnerabilities in SQL Server, Symantec’s alert said it was still a likely preface to an attack. “This activity likely represents active scanning by a malicious code network in an attempt to locate machines susceptible to password-based brute force attacks,” the DeepSight team wrote in the warning. “Code components designed to accomplish the above task are publicly available, and have been included in a number of active worms, including Spybot and Gaobot.”

Symantec’s analysts recommended that administrators block access to port 1443 at the perimeter, and within the network, limit access to the port to trusted hosts.

Source: TechWeb

Danish police and Internet suppliers are planning to introduce a national child porn filter.

The filter will make it harder for Danish paedophiliacs to access child porn on the Internet.

It will block access to most child porn sites while at the same time informing people who try to enter these sites that they are breaking the law.

In Sweden, a national child porn filter was introduced in May with great success.

Source: DR Nyheder

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Source: mosnews.com

Outbound spyware transmissions from infested machines accounted for up to eight per cent of total outbound web traffic in pilot tests of a new managed spyware screening service. UK web security firm ScanSafe said the volume of traffic observed during a 10 week pilot test of its Spyware Screening service showed that spyware applications are becoming more and more stealthy in their ability to hide their outbound ‘covert’ channels among normal web traffic. That’s bad news because data sent when spyware “calls-home” can include confidential and even privileged information.

Source: The Register

Japan has plans to start building a supercomputer next year that can operate 73 times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer, the government said Monday.

The American Blue Gene/L system supercomputer developed by International Business Machine Corp. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, currently holds the title of the world’s fastest. That machine is capable of 136.8 teraflops, or 136.8 trillion calculations per second, according to Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Blue Gene/L (source)

Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene, an official of the ministry said on condition of anonymity.

Source: AP

Microsoft Corp. said on Monday it would launch its new Xbox 360 game console in Japan and Europe in time for the year-end holiday shopping season.

Microsoft, which unveiled the Xbox 360 in May, had already announced plans to launch the console this year in the United States ahead of the holiday season, which begins in late November.

It had previously said Japanese and European launches would follow within six weeks.

Source: Reuters