Advanced Micro Devices on June 23 announced plans to build a new chip manufacturing plant in New York state.

The chip maker, which has seen market share gains of late against rival Intel, said it would build the new plant—or fab, in industry parlance—in Saratoga County, in upstate New York near Albany.

The plant is part of a multibillion-dollar plan by AMD to speed up the introduction of new technology.

The new 300-mm wafer plant, which will make chips based on a 32-nanomter process, will take about $3.2 billion in capital to build.

Source: eWeek

The Navy has begun a criminal investigation after Social Security numbers and other personal data for 28,000 sailors and family members were found on a civilian Web site.

The Navy said Friday the information was in five documents and included people’s names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Navy spokesman Lt. Justin Cole would not identify the Web site or its owner, but said the information had been removed. He would not provide any details about how the information ended up on the site.

Source: AP

Hackers are trying to lure people to a malicious Web site using cell phone text messages, a security company has warned.

The blended attack uses social engineering techniques in its attempt to trick people to the site, security vendor Websense said in an advisory. An SMS text message is sent to the targets’ cell phones, thanking them for subscribing to a fictitious dating service. The message states that they will be automatically charged a fee of $2.00 per day via their phone bill, unless their subscription is cancelled online.

Once victims visit the purported dating site to unsubscribe, they are prompted to download a Trojan horse program.

Source: News.com

As more people turn to Web applications for everyday tasks like e-mail, friendship and payments, cyber criminals are following them in search of bank account details and other valuable data, security researchers said.

Users of Yahoo Inc.’s e-mail service, Google Inc.’s Orkut social networking site and eBay Inc.’s PayPal online payment service were among the targets of attacks in recent weeks. All three companies have acknowledged and plugged the security holes.

Source: AP

They may not have roofs over their heads, but some homeless people are toting around old laptops and trading tips on the best hot spots. Some are even blogging.

Source: wired

Microsoft plans in August to publicly release the privacy rules its employees have to follow when developing products.

The move, which offers a look behind the scenes at Microsoft, is meant to give the industry an example of what the software giant sees as best practices in customer privacy, said Peter Cullen, the chief privacy strategist at Microsoft.

Source: News.com

A free Web browser that bills itself as a tool for privacy protection is, in fact, a click-fraud engine for pornographic Web sites, security vendor Panda Software warned today.

Browsezilla, whose name and Lizard-like mascot are reminiscent of the open-source Mozilla browser products, claims to help surfers cover their tracks when visiting pornographic sites. It does not use browser history or save data to a cache, and it allows users to save their bookmarks on a remote server, according to the product’s Web site.

However, Browsezilla also secretly installs adware that boosts the page view counts on certain pornographic Web sites, according to J.J. Schoch, director of marketing with Panda. “It’s being used deceptively to get more hits on their site,” Schoch says. “This adware opens a series of adult web pages, although they are not visible to the user.”

Source: AP

In a blow to Microsoft, Belgium’s government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is to be the standard format for exchanging documents within the government, according to a proposal that is expected to be approved by Belgium’s Council of Ministers on Friday. The plan increases the pressure from governments worldwide on Microsoft to embrace open standards.

From September 2008 on, all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian government will have to be in an open, standard format, according to the proposal. ODF is the only accepted standard in the proposal. Earlier drafts of the Belgian proposal had put ODF and Microsoft’s own Open XML format (which is to be included in Office 2007) on equal footing.

Source: News.com

The latest version of Xandros desktop Linux has arrived, continuing the operating system’s mission to welcome Windows users–a mission that’s led some in the Linux community to dismiss it as “Linux with training wheels.”

Xandros 4.0, the first version of the operating system in 18 months, includes features to read and write Windows-formatted drives and import user settings from Windows installations. It’s based on v3.1 (”sarge”) of Debian, with improvements from the Linux Standard Base (LSB), thanks to the DCC Alliance’s Common Core.

Xandros’ distinctive feature is its effort to carve out a commercial niche as an easy replacement for Windows. “The target audience of Xandros is primarily corporates looking to switch their workstations from Windows NT/2000 to Linux,” commented one user on a Debian discussion board. “They’ve gone to great lengths to mimic the look and feel of Windows for this reason.”

Source: News.com