When people think of PC cases you often get an image of a plain beige (or more often black) box with little or no style, the opposite may also hit you, a box with an over abundance of blue and red lit fans windows and more glowing tubes than a weekend rave. Is there a middle ground? Well we have talked about SilverStone and their commitment to class and style but Charles Harwood and Nils Papke have taken that one step further. Charles is the creator and artist behind the murderbox.  

If you have not heard of or seen this work of art yet you really should.  Quite simply it is one of the most elegant creations in computing I have seen. Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud of the way Charles has combined form and function in a stylish (almost minimalist) creation that is the murderbox. It is a system that could be a center piece in almost any room. You can give your eyes a treat here.
Now with the success of the original murderbox (and really how could it not be a success) Charles and Nils have expanded to provide the basic parts used to create the murderbox. These building blocks can be found at their new venture, murderMod.com. Here you can find the base components to build your own murderbox.  As of today you can grab the fully modded TJ07 case, just about all of the internal components to mod your own TJ07. But the murderbox Duo are not leaving out the rest of the case world and are working on developing universal parts and pieces for use in other case mods.  Also in the works are sleeving kits, cable management kits and mounting kits.murderMod is setup to provide these parts to both Europe and the Americas (North and South America)
If you are like me, and many others, that want a system that not only works but has a sense of style then you certainly need to drop by murderbox and murderMod to take a look. I am sure you will find something to stare at longingly before you purchase. In the coming months as murderMod grows I am sure Charles and Nils will find a way to bring style and class back into the increasingly gaudy world of the PC case outside the SliverStone arena they currently work in.

Links
murderbox

murderMod

Ok maybe not, but it would seem that there have been some issues with a very limited number of 38xx series cards coming from one OEM and those made by another company.
Diamond Multimedia is the company in question and it seems that perhaps as many as 20,000 38xx series graphics boards that it distributed could be defective.
According to the information available at the time of writing, the problem appears to be related to the actual boards and not the GPU at all. Reports show that the root causes are cold solder joints, bad resistors, improperly coded BIOSes and under rated power supplies.  

The issue revolves around Alienware, it would seem that they found a large number of failures with the Diamond supplied 38xx cards ( with up to 10% failure rate for X2 cards) they returned all of the cards bought from Diamond between January and July of this year, and ended their relationship with Diamond.
But Diamond is only partially to blame, they do not build their AIBs, these are made for them by other companies (as is a very common practice Leadtek gets their cards from Foxconn).  The company that made the defective batch of cards would seem to be ITC (more commonly known as GeCube). The issue also appears to have been aggravated by power supplies used by Alienware that did not deliver enough power; many of these PSUs were rated at 750 watts but were only delivering in the 500-600 Watt range.

Although some still want to point the blame at AMD for not catching these issues during qualification, the fact that many AIB manufacturers make changes that are never submitted to AMD make this really a stretch.

Now for some perspective and soda;
If numbers are correct there are roughly 2 million 38xx cards in play.
Diamond shipped roughly 20,000 potentially defective cards or roughly 1% of the total cards out.
If we go with the high of a 10% failure rate of that 20,000 (2000 cards) we see that the actual number of defective cards is only .01% of the total out.

Compare this to the numbers of defective green GPUs out and you will see some staggering differences.
Also unlike the green guys, Diamond will replace any defective card free of charge.
 

Links
TGdaily
The Inq

Discussion

MAC:  Hi, I’m a MAC
PC:  And I’m a PC…
PC:  What’s wrong MAC? You look a little ill
MAC:  Well PC, you see I am not as cool and together as I would like to mislead consumers to think.
Steve, you know my Dad… well um he and his gang has had to stitch me up to fix some problems I have… *mumbling* fourth time this week….
Wouldn’t we all like to see that ad?
It seems that at Apple even their fixes are no fixes; no sooner had they patched up QuickTime and OSX when a new Heap Overflow Vulnerability was discovered.  This hole in the coolest OS allows for the execution of remote code and can be used to crash browsers and applications using the QuickTime plug-in. 

According to Intego, this the new flaw has collateral affects to all applications in OS-X that use the QucikTime plug-in such as Mail, iTunes, Safari, FireFox,, etc. The attacker could simply put a QuickTime media file on their website that would enable them to execute arbitrary malicious code on affected systems.
Proof of concept code was presented by a blogger know as “securefrog” which could potentially could be used with this flaw.
To make matters worse this was discovered after Apple released a patch covering some 34 vulnerabilities in OSX 10.5.5 and additional patches and updates for both QuickTime and iTunes.

Linky

Discussion Link

Well it was bound to happen, but it looks like Google is going to be the first search company to introduce a form of speech recognition for audio to allow for faster searches. This will not only allow for faster searches for audio and video clips but, faster searches through the actual clips themselves.
This little piece of technology was quietly launched by Google and has been dubbed GAUdi by the ad giant. As of right now it is limited to political speeches found on YouTube but should gradually become more widespread. 

While this little bit of tech looks cool on the surface I would like to throw the conspiracy buffs a bone to chew on. Speech recognition is often used by intelligence agencies to clue off on word in conversations during surveillance. Now this might seem to be nothing but remember that Google is developing a phone. Anyone want to wager that it might be setup eventually to index your conversations and push ads you way based on what you say?

But all of that aside one humorous note. Gaudy, the phonetic match of GAudi means tastelessly ornamented

According to Merriam Webster

Links
TGdaily
The Inq
Google Labs

Discussion Link

We have previously talked quite a bit about Google and their ambitious plans to rule the universe from a new and horrible and privacy invading browser (here, here, and here) to rumors of an OS and other software and hardware; but now it seems that there is a possibility that Google may be grabbing up Valve, but not for their game developers simply for their content distribution service Steam.

Most people are familiar with Steam, probably one of the best content distribution sources out there. If this happens what does this mean for you and me? Well to me it means the end of the great service we have gotten used to with Steam, if Google follows normal patterns they will try their best to put in methods to track everything about your gaming. From how long you play to what you do and say while playing. I imagine you can also expect to be bombarded by more and more adds in the games you get from Stoogle (Or as Charlie calls it Voogle). In short Google will simply destroy Steam as we know it and will, in the end, loose as those of us who have come to view Google with a Jaundiced Eye will steer well clear of this new threat to our security and privacy.

Steam is dead, Long live Steam maybe uttered soon by gamers.
 

Discussion Link

More Bad News for Chrome.
In what has got to be the worst launch of any piece of software (at least one that had positive Hype) Google’s new browser Chrome keeps popping up with new bad news.
From the day of its release as a Beta Chrome has been through the gamut. Many sites initially claimed it was the second coming before having to retract when news of major security flaws and privacy issues surfaced around the web. Now it would appear that Google has not only borrowed parts from Apple, FireFox and Opera but also from Microsoft.

Yes buried beneath the shiny surface researchers have found Microsoft’s Windows Template Library Version 8.0. This little nugget was discovered by none other than Microsoft’s Senior Program Manager, Scott Hanselman. There are some speculated reasons behind Google’s use of this code but it would seem that with WTL you can product executables without the need for the MS Foundation Libraries. This should enable you to write applications that are small and quick.
But there is more, According to Hanselman “The Chromium authors may have disassembled part of the Windows Kernel in order to achieve this security feature under Windows XP SP2,"
This, if true, is a violation of US copyright laws and could be bad for Google, although Hanselman did say it appears they did this to enable DEP and for other security reasons.
It makes me wonder if there was more to this reverse engineering as my investigations have found that Chrome is able to read and write directly to the System Volume Information folder. But that is for another article…

Link

Google’s Chrome            
A few days ago I published an article on some disturbing issues with Google’s new browser Chrome. Many people feel the issues that I (and many others) have raised are not a big concern due to Chrome only being a BETA. But the issues that have been uncovered this far are only the tip of the iceberg. After a few days of testing I have discovered some very disturbing items about Chrome.

Author: Sean Kalinich
Published: September 11th 2008
Type: Editorial (Comment)
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Gaping Security Flaws:
Although many seem to be heralding Google’s Chrome as secure and akin to the second coming a quick survey and look around the Internet finds that most of the security community feels otherwise. It would seem that Chrome is as full of holes as Apple’s Safari 3 and is prone to just about the same exploits.
Now, before you shout about its BETA status, let me remind you that these issues are like to not go away; they are fundamental flaws in the way Chrome works at its core.  The metal beneath the Flashy Chrome appears to be brittle and poor quality. 

Push updates:
Another hot item is the fact that Chrome pushes updates invisibly to the user. I was shocked while testing other items in Chrome to see the Google Update service pop up spawning five separate threads (at least it is efficient) and start to install items onto my test system. I was not warned this would happen. I was not given the option to stop this. It just chattered away installing whatever Google was sending. Given this invisible operation and the likelihood that Chrome is vulnerable to most of the Safari 3 exploits this opens up a whole new world of potential risks and threats to your systems security and gives the hackers, script kiddies and many others a handy way to take over your system.

HDD Indexing:
This is a tough one and the jury is still out, but if you want to check this issue out for yourself simply open up Chrome and browse to any page. Once there let it sit idle for a few minutes. You will see your HDD go crazy. Chrome will spawn one to two additional threads and start intensive read and write operations on your system.  As you can see from the images below it was a significant jump.
I am working with others to track down exactly what Chrome is doing here but whatever it is it cannot be good.

Does anyone have a good explanation for Chrome writing to the system volume information file?

Owned by hackers
Ah here is one of the most disturbing things about Chrome, and I will make this short and plain.
While looking for information on the security issues listed above; I found a comment that simply said the hacking community already “owned” Chrome. To me this means the holes that are there are well known ones and easy to take advantage of. Scary thought if your new browser has built in holes for a malicious individual to use…

All this adds up to a serious issue and one that Google must address. For most users they will see Chrome as a new Google tools like Desktop and Toolbar, they will not look into or read online to make sure their privacy or security is being taken into account. Instead once this is released in full and pushed by Google on the unsuspecting masses we could very well see a new level of threat to personal and business systems. In fact these disturbing issues and questions have already lead to a drop in Chrome’s interest and use.
 

This is a question that many people are asking right now. After months of denial Google finally released its Chrome browser. Many thought this was one of the best things since the invention of Linux. There were multiple articles praising the browser for the wonder that it is. Then, after a very short honeymoon some very disturbing information started to surface. It seems that the folks over at Google put a nice caveat in their EULA (something that most people do not read). The following text is enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. 

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

With this small bit of information I (and many others) began to wonder where Google would get this information from. I began to speculate that they must be caching pages somewhere that could be retrieved later.  This is almost like what they have been doing in China but now they are doing it to everyone and putting it in writing that they are doing it.

Less than 24 hours after this little part of the EULA was unearthed Google made an announcement that was posted on Ars Technica.

"Google’s Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, now tells Ars Technica that the company tries to reuse these licenses as much as possible, "in order to keep things simple for our users." Ward admits that sometimes "this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product" and says that Google is "working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

This begs the question “how can you apply one ToS to a completely different product and not catch these things?”
Yes Chrome is still new but I do not think for a minute that this was an accident. I will be looking very closely at the language Google uses in the new ToS.

But that is not all, later that same day it was uncovered that Chrome indexes all pages viewed, including HTTPS/SSL pages. This means that once you are in your browser and you visit, say your bank, Chrome is going to index all of that information: charges credits, account numbers etc. This information can be called up later through a simple search in the Chrome browser or by parsing the index files stored on the local machine.
Now the argument can be made that you can turn this off or open an incognito browsing session where pages are not indexed or to clear personal data but how many novice users know how to do that?

How many are going to get sucked in and install this because they use Google everyday and upon seeing a new Google browser will go ahead and install it? The answer is simple; millions, just as many as get caught by spammers, phishsers and viruses every year. Next up on the list of things wrong is the finding made by CNET about Google tracking browsing habits.

"Provided that users leave Chrome’s auto-suggest feature on and have Google as their default search provider, Google will have access to any keystrokes that are typed into the browser’s Omnibox, even before a user hits enter.
What’s more, Google has every intention of retaining some of that data even after it provides the promised suggestions. A Google representative told CNET News that the company plans to store about 2 percent of that data–and plans to store it along with the Internet Protocol address of the computer that typed it."

This to me has reached the level of unacceptability. Google is showing themselves to be a very unsavory company.  They have been leading up to this for sometime, they have tracked search habits of Google Desktop users, have tracked Google Toolbar, and instituted tracking of browsing habits by IP in China (just to get the business there) Google has been involved in people actually being arrested for the websites or searches they visited (Google provided IP information to the Chinese Government), now we see they are bringing this to the rest of the world.
Personally I am not going to be installing this browser ever and I know these glaring issues have prompted more than one enterprise to ban its installation on corporate systems one has even made it grounds for dismissal.

I think Google has a rather large amount of explaining to do and without some major changes their shiny new Chrome browser may tarnish and pit in the coming months.

As a foot note to this; Google has donated money to the campaign of Senator Barack Obama I think it is no coincidence

that Senator Obama’s running mate Joe Bidden also wants to have the government take over prosecution of P2P file sharers from RIAA and the MPAA. As well as institute a tax on internet usage. He has a legacy of trying to reduce people’s privacy on the net.

Discussion Link

Although many had lambasted me and have called the Inq and Charlie Demerjian everything under the sun that means liar and FUD spreader. It is interesting to note the nVidia has now released a new PCN.
This time for the G92 and G92b (almost all 65nm and 55nm parts), I think with the PCN for the G84 and G86 and now this PCN for the G92 we can safely say that nVidia is not being honest.

Author: Sean Kalinich
Published: August 28th 2008
Type: Editorial (Comment)
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Some of the more interesting points are the list of affected GPUs. Some 30 odd GPUs are affected by this change from High Lead to Eutectic Solder.
The change order is almost identical to the one for the G84/G86 with the exception of the dates, this one has a submittal date of June 14 2008, a planned implementation date of July 28 and a proposed first ship date of August 17. These dates are significant as they are just over a month from introduction. Yet the proposed shipping date has just past a few days ago. This means that if you ave one of the affected parts you probably have a life limited dud.
The article goes on to state that failure rates for the 55nm and 65nm parts are coming higher than expected (in the teens) and that nVidia made this change before launch but still has sold parts with high lead and are going to do so until inventory is depleted.
I have said this for some time now, the problem is there, now we have to see how deep and how bad this goes, the ominous line from nVidia’s 8-K filing comes to mind “There can be no assurance that we will not discover defects in other MCP or GPU products.”

Meanwhile nVidia continues to tell everyone that will listen there is nothing wrong and it is a small batch of parts.

It seems that in a complete reversal of their previous stance nVidia has announced at the last minute of NVISION 08(Macworld Jr) they will allow the new X58 chipset to support SLI natively… But what does this mean in the long run?

Author: Sean Kalinich
Published: August 28th 2008
Type: Editorial (Comment)
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Now I do not know about you, but many companies already have demo boards out and have stated they were not going to implement SLI on them. To me this would seem that they (the OEMs) are not aware of this new change of heart.  It also brings up the question of why would nV do this? It could be that they really are getting out of the chipset business as I and other reporters has postulated, it could also be in preparation for a quick sale to Apple. But whatever the reason I think they may miss the first generation boards unless Intel an get the OEMs to change their designs last minute..

Of course it goes without saying that this is good news for end-users as they will now be able to use the Intel Chipsets and and have a larger choice for use in Dual GPU setups.

PCperspective

Discussion Link