FOUR MORE critical bugs have been found in three of Symantecs security products.
The four vulnerabilities affect Norton Internet Security 2004, Norton Internet Security 2004 Professional, and Norton Personal Firewall 2004.
Security firm eEye Digital Security spotted the flaws but is refusing to issue too many details until Symantec gets around to issuing patches.
Three faults were remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to compromise default installations of the affected software and gain access of the host machine.
The fourth is a remotely-exploitable vulnerability that allows an anonymous attacker to execute a severe denial-of-service attack against systems running default installations of the affected software.









NVIDIA released Geforce 6800 Ultra with some rather impressive specs. With the GPU clock at 400MHz and memory clock at 550MHz NVIDIA promises the following compared to NV35/38:



* 4-8x floating-point shader power



* 4x shadow processing power



* 4x occlusion culling efficiency



* 2x vertex processing power



* ~2x frame buffer bandwidth



You can find here benchmarks and full specs:



http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-02.html











New chipsets arrived for the AMD platforms.
Nvidia released the nforce3 250. ast fall, NVIDIA let us down. Despite great on-paper features and design, the nForce3 150 for the Athlon64 was inferior-albeit slightly-compared to the competing K8T800 from VIA.
Soon the talk was of the nForce3 250, which was expected to boost the HyperTransport bus width from only 8 bits and 600 MHz to a more suitable 16 bits and 800 MHz. And truth be told, the nForce3 250 Gb is now equipped for operation at 1 GHz, which will become a reality with the new socket 939 in a few weeks. Don;t forget that it will have to compete with the K8T800 manafactured by via and the rather impressive SIS 755.

On the other hand via finally decided to support athlon xp processors with a competing chipset so the KT880 became reality. A dual ddr controller and some impressive specs do give the oportunity to compete as equal with the nforce2 u400. Better late than ever!







As it appears soon AMD will anounce the new Athlon 64 2800+ processor. By the time these come to market, they should be priced about where the P4/2800 is, give or take a handful of dollars. If you care, it is a 1.8GHz 512K cache mode.For the time being AMD released Athlon64 3000+ running at 2000Mhz with 512Kb of L2 cache. It is a significant attempt to make 64 bit approachable as its price does not exceed 250 euros. At the same time the company introduces athlon64 3400+ at 2200MHz and in short time the new high-tech weapon called Athlon64 FX53 will enter the market. All this happens while AMD started from Feb 30 to manafacture 90nm Opteron processors.

















An all-64-bit-computing world just took a significant step forward, and your upgrade path to that world just got a lot less risky. Why? Intel's new Xeons and future Prescott-based CPUs will support the same 64-bit software as AMD's existing Athlon 64 and Opteron chips. And like those AMD chips, the new Intel CPUs will continue to support your favorite 32-bit apps, as well. Another potential selling point for early adopters: If Intel follows AMD's lead in terms of pricing, you won't have to pay much--if any--premium for better-performing 64-bit desktop systems over comparable 32-bit-only PCs.












Fewer than six weeks into the new year, ATi is waking the mobile gaming community up from its state of winter hibernation with a new mobile DirectX 9 chip, the MR 9700. ATi's goal: nothing less than to close the performance gap between notebook and desktop graphics performance. Unlike its predecessor, the MR 9600 is also immediately available in notebooks upon launch.



















Ati released Catalyst drivers version 4.4. Company promises many improvements. Download them here: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers



















Microsoft has unveiled the first Windows XP security rollup, a collection of 22 previously-available patches for that operating system. ''Update Rollup 1, which has been in beta testing for the past month, is being positioned by Microsoft as a more convenient way for users to deploy patches they might have missed when the original vulnerabilities -- and associated security bulletins -- were posted on the company's Web site." At the same time the No2 service pack for Windows XP is expected soon to bring lots of bug fixes and new capabilities as the company's new operating system Longhorn is not expected soon.


















February 2, the moment of truth has come: Intel is launching three new desktop processors. Pentium 4 at 3.4 GHz, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.4 GHz and the highly anticipated Prescott processor that has fueled rumors for months. The big surprise is that Prescott is not positioned to be the flagship product, but a mainstream processor. The 3.4 GHz version is thus not available yet.

When the name Prescott was first heard, people started to assume Pentium 5 was coming, as there are a number of changes differentiate Prescott from the Northwood core: 90 Nm process, 1 MB L2 cache rather than 512 KB, the L1 data cache that was doubled to 16 KB, 13 new instructions referred to as SSE3 and the new pipeline that was extended from 20 to 31 stages, officially part of Intel's NetBurst architecture. The concept sounds familiar, but has its downsides. More on that later.

Deciding against designating Prescott as the next Pentium generation may be because substantial architectural changes are within store in the near future that will be more becoming of a Pentium 5 handle. After CeBIT, socket 478 will be replaced by socket 775 as well as new chipsets that support DDR II memory and PCI Express. In addition, Intel CEO Paul Otinelli recently initiated a new discussion about possible 64 bit extensions for future Intel desktop processors.





















Zalman, mainly known as a CPU and VGA supplier, has entered the audio market. Its first audio device, the ZM-RS6F, is also the first 5.1 headphone. The innovative ZM-RS6F is designed for gamers and home cinema enthusiasts who want to enjoy the rich sound of multi-channel technology without disturbing the neighbors.