Intel on Friday confirmed it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for notebooks, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, later this year.

The quad-core chips will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter, Intel officials said.

Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process.

The chip will be released after Intel’s Centrino 2 platform, code-named Montevina, is launched in the second quarter. Montevina is an upgrade to the current Centrino mobile platform that puts WiMax and Wi-Fi networking capabilities on a single chip. Montevina will include processors based on the Core 2 microarchitecture and the quad-core notebook processor could be included in the platform.

In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD Standards Board) declared: ‘BD , unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.’ Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again.

According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market.

The folks at Canonical are asking the faithful to get their bird on with the release of Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron.

Both the desktop and server versions of the LTS (long-term support) operating system have been put up for grabs. In addition, you’ll discover beta versions of the various Ubuntu offshoots such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and Mythbuntu.

The Canonical staff highlighted Ubuntu Server’s use of AppArmor profiles, which place more security restrictions around the resources that an application can grab. Ideally, this helps servers withstand attacks from new exploits.

In addition, the new OS blocks “direct access to system memory through /dev/mem and /dev/kmem, and the lower 64K of system memory is no longer addressable by default, changes which help to defend against malicious code. Many applications are also now built as Position Independent Executables, making it harder for application security vulnerabilities to be exploited.”