IBM has unveiled its strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm fabrication process.

The company is adopting a technique called ‘computational scaling’ in order to manufacture circuits small enough to deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices.

While current chips such as Intel’s are manufactured using a 45nm process, vendors are already looking ahead to succeeding generations.

Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations.

IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit.

A serious new flaw was disclosed on Thursday that affects the latest versions of Apple’s QuickTime and iTunes applications.

The National Vulnerability Database entry CVE-2008-4116 describes a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability within Apple’s QuickTime 7.5.5 and iTunes 8.0 programs.

To infect a computer, a maliciously coded long-type attribute within a QuickTime tag might be placed on a Web page, or within a .mp4 or .mov file. This could allow remote attackers to crash the applications (known as a denial of service) or possibly execute arbitrary code on a compromised computer.

The announcement comes one week after Apple patched nine security flaws in its media player and fixed Windows Vista problems within its recently updated online music service.

At the moment, there is no recommended workaround or patch available for the code exploit.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Bush administration on behalf of AT&T customers to halt what it called the “massively illegal” warrantless surveillance of Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.

In addition to suing the National Security Agency, the nonprofit Internet advocacy group also names President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as well as others.

“For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T’s domestic networks and databases of customer records,” senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement. “Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible.”

The EFF said the evidence it would present is the same evidence central to a class-action lawsuit it filed in 2006 accusing AT&T of opening up its telecommunications facilities to the NSA for use in spying on the phone calls and e-mails of “millions of ordinary Americans.” Such a practice violates free speech and privacy rights spelled out by the U.S. Constitution and also runs afoul of federal wiretapping law, the EFF claimed.

PLEASANTON, Calif.,The coming IEEE 802.11v standard will introduce new power savings features that will “green up” wireless LANs. This important advance will be explained at the InterOp New York conference by Matthew Gast, Trapeze Networks’ principal engineer, office of the CTO, and the chair of Wi-Fi Alliance Wireless Network Management and Security Technical task groups.

Work on the 802.11v standard began early in 2004 and is expected to be finished in 2010, but enough information about the standard has emerged that Gast will be able to describe some features that will help drive down the energy consumption of wireless networks. These features include:

• Wireless Network Management Sleep Mode, a further extension to base 802.11 power savings that will allow for longer power-off times for 802.11 radios. It will be used in conjunction with new Traffic Filtering Service to enable access points to deliver only specified frame types.
• “Wake on WLAN” capabilities that let network managers “wake up” wireless computers and other appliances.
• Proxy ARP that will let an access point respond to ARP requests enabling stations to power down for longer periods.
• TIM Broadcast that will distribute traffic indication maps so stations do not need to receive every beacon frame.
• Flexible Broadcast / Multicast services that will send broadcast / multicast frames at the highest data rate for the group of receivers thereby reducing power-on time for radio interfaces and allow for higher data rates that improve performance of multicast applications.

The 802.11v standard will include more than power saving features. According to Gast, it will include station management features that will give network managers a much more detailed view of network performance and new location features that will offer more accuracy for services like RFID and emergency services.

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said Thursday that he has a gene mutation that increases his likelihood of contracting Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that can impair speech, movement and other functions.

Mr. Brin, who made the announcement on a blog, says he does not have the disease and that the exact implications of the discovery are not clear. Studies show that his likelihood of contracting Parkinson’s disease in his lifetime may be 20 percent to 80 percent, Mr. Brin said.

Mr. Brin, whose personal fortune was recently pegged at $15.9 billion by Forbes, ranking him as the 13th richest American, said that he may help provide more money for research into the disease.

An American blogger has been sentenced to three months’ jail for accusing a Singapore judge of “prostituting herself,” he told

“I think I will appeal,” Gopalan Nair, 58, said in a brief telephone interview with AFP.

An official with the Supreme Court did not provide details but confirmed the sentence, which was issued Wednesday.

Local newspapers said Nair was given until Saturday to settle his affairs before he is taken to prison.

“I’m going to serve the sentence,” Nair said, adding he has no regrets. “I only wrote a blog. I didn’t go out and kill anybody.”

In his blog, Nair had criticised a legal hearing at which Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, testified in a defamation case they filed against an opposition party.

Nair was charged with insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean by saying she was “prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders,” a court document said.