A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free.

Source: IsraCast (via slashdot)

Maxtor Corp. said Monday that it too had entered the half-terabyte storage market, announcing drives for the PC, CE and enterprise markets.

Seagate also recently announced its own 500-GB drives, which are currently shipping. Maxtor said only that its drives would ship during the current fourth quarter.

In the PC, Maxtor’s new 500-GB drives will be available as either the DiamondMax 11 or as part of an Ultra16 upgrade kit, which will retail for a suggested price of $349.95.

All of the new drives include a 16MB buffer and are available with 3.0-Gbit SATA II features including native command queuing (NCQ), staggered spin up, hot-plug and asynchronous signal recovery.

Source: ExtremeTech

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Skype, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS or to compromise a user’s system.

The security bug in the Skype for Windows user client has been identified and fixed.

Skype can be made to execute arbitrary code through a buffer overflow when Skype is called upon to handle malformed URLs that are in Skype-specific URI types callto:// and skype://.

In addition, Skype can be made to execute arbitrary code during importation of a VCARD that is in a specific non-standard format.

Another flaw that was fix could cause Skype to be remotely forced to crash due to an error in bounds checking in a specific networking routine.

Security company Secunia rated these problems as Highly critical.

The following Skype clients are vulnerable to these flaws:

Skype for Windows:
All releases prior to and including 1.4.*.83

Skype for Mac OS X:
All releases prior to and including 1.3.*.16

Skype for Linux:
All releases prior to and including 1.2.*.17

Skype for Pocket PC:
All releases prior to and including 1.1.*.6

Skype has released fixes to these vulnerabilities and advise people to download the latest version

Less than a month before Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 hits store shelves, International Business Corp. revealed details of the microprocessor that powers the long-awaited video game console.

The IBM-built chip features three customized PowerPC computing engines that can each handle two simultaneous tasks at clock speeds greater than 3 gigahertz. It was customized for Microsoft in less than 24 months from the original contract.

“Working with IBM gave us the flexibility to design a processor to give game developers the kind of targeted power they need to make great games,” said Todd Holmdahl, Microsoft vice president of Xbox hardware.

The original Xbox, released in the fall of 2001, used an Intel Corp. 733-megahertz Pentium III microprocessor. In 2003, Microsoft decided to switch to a different vendor for the next-generation system.

Source: AP

iMesh relaunches Tuesday as the first formerly unregulated peer-to-peer network to turn itself into a paid music service. iMesh reopens with ‘label approved’ P2P

The software supposed to identify and block virtually any copyrighted song being downloaded from peer-to-peer networks.

The new iMesh looks and acts a bit like the old file-swapping service, but it’s designed more with the successes of Apple Computer’s iTunes and the explosively popular MySpace social network in mind.

As before, the core of the service is searching for music. The vast majority of songs that are returned by any search are from iMesh’s “premium” service, which means they will be available only by paying the $6.95 monthly fee, once the promotion period ends, or by buying them individually.

The new iMesh

Like the basic subscription services from Yahoo, Napster and others, those downloaded songs will be locked to PCs, and cannot be transferred to iPods or other devices. A future version will let the songs be taken to some Windows-compatible devices.

The software also searches the Gnutella peer-to-peer network, often finding results on other people’s hard drives that aren’t legal to download. Those are identified and blocked as they are downloaded, but some songs from independent or unsigned artists can still be traded freely.

The service still will allow downloads of video, but only of files 15 minutes in length, or 50 megabytes in size, far too small to support a Hollywood movie or even a television show.

Source: News.com

VeriSign has settled a breach-of-contract lawsuit accusing the organization that oversees the Internet’s addressing system of delaying new domain-name services, the company announced Monday.

VeriSign, which manages the .com and .net domains, had sued Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), accusing it of overstepping its contractual authority and dragging its feet on allowing VeriSign to offer new services such as a wait-list service and internationalized domain names. VeriSign had complained that the ICANN approval process could drag on for an indefinite time.

In the settlement, VeriSign and ICANN reached an agreement on a framework that establishes processes and guidelines for the introduction of new services and provides business clarity for top-level domain name registry operators and for registrars, VeriSign said. ICANN agreed to make a decision about proposed new services within 90 days, said Mark McLaughlin, senior vice president and general manager of VeriSign’s Naming and Directory Services business unit.

VeriSign and ICANN also agreed to extend the .com registry agreement through 2012. VeriSign contended that ICANN, the nonprofit corporation responsible for allocating Internet Protocol address space, violated the terms of a 2001 agreement that gave VeriSign the authority over the .com domain registry.

Source: ComputerWorld