An anti-cheating mechanism deployed by Blizzard Software for use by players of their popular game, World of Warcraft, has been discovered to collect information about gamers' running Windows environment, and report that back to the server. If gamers were warned in advance - albeit with very fine print - does that make it exempt from privacy concerns? Read more
A simple functionality boost in the feature set of Google's existing Search Appliance tool - a 1U server component it's sold for years - will enable users to query sensitive corporate data held in proprietary relational database formats, including Oracle and SAS. Is Google changing the game for search and retrieval (again), and should Microsoft respond...somehow? Read more
Microsoft announced the final names and basic ingredients for its six upcoming versions of Windows Vista. Media Center and Tablet functionality will be built into the new Vista Home Premium edition, while Enterprise users will enjoy the capability to run UNIX software, and to keep their hard drive contents encrypted. Read more
The Communications Research Network (CRN), composed of researchers from Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that VoIP networks could conceal botnets. Thousands of remotely-controlled computers - sometimes called bots or zombie computers - could be concealed and controlled through VoIP's distributed network. Read more
Do you want a quick Core i7 system, but don’t feel confident sticking to Intel's spec and using the DDR3-1066 memory supported by the processor? We benchmark the most relevant memory speed and timing combinations to check the benefit of going faster. Read more
Dead Space is an excellent sci-fi survival horror title, and one of the few games that Nvidia supports with its new driver's ambient occlusion feature. We put the game through our usual image-quality and performance tests to see what we could learn. Read more
Intel's fastest Core 2 Duo, the E8600, runs at 3.33 GHz. But if you're a performance-hungry power user, we found that you can actually increase the chip's efficiency by overclocking it, thanks to 45 nm manufacturing and plenty of built-in headroom. Read more
Memory vendors put a lot of effort into drumming up excitement over high-end memory kits, but many of those products turn out to be vaporware. We test six DDR3-2000 kits that enthusiasts can actually buy today, and push them as far as they'll go. Read more