A team of researchers from an Australian university has developed a new DVD technology that could someday boost disc capacity by 10,000 times beyond today’s standard 4.7GB DVDs, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne, said the technology, dubbed Multiplexed optical recording, can create a “fifth dimension” of recording using polarization and gold nanorods to reflect light, boosting data density beyond 1012 bits per centimeter. The team was able to store 1.6TB of data on a disk with the technology, and said that someday the technique could yield up to 10TB on a single DVD-type disk.
“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity without increasing the physical size of the disc,” said professor Min Gu, one of the three researchers who co-authored the paper on the technology.

The most highly advanced optical storage platters today use three-dimensional technology, where bits burned into the substrate material can be read both on the surface as well as throughout the platter. Three-dimensional technology uses a single color laser beam or light wavelength to read the data in the form of bits on a platter. By using nanotechnology in the form of small gold rods that reflect light, the researchers from Swinburne University, were able to create a spectral or color dimension in addition to a polarization dimension, adding two dimensions beyond 3D.

To create the color dimension, the researchers inserted gold nanorods onto a disc’s surface. Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc location.

The polarization dimension was created when researchers projected light waves onto the disc and the direction of the electric field contained in the light waves aligned with the gold nanorods. That allowed the researchers to record different layers of information at different angles.

“The polarization can be rotated 360 degrees. We were, for example, able to record at zero degree polarization. Then on top of that, were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarization, without them interfering with each other,” said researcher James Chon.

Even a 1TB disc created with the technology would provide enough capacity to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.

One hurdle facing the researchers is a lack of suitable recording medium that would afford the speed needed to write to the discs. However the researchers are confident the discs will be commercially available within five to 10 years.

The team also said the technology is likely to have immediate applications in a range of fields, such as storing extremely large medical files like MRIs, and could be a boon in the financial, military and security arenas.

Dubbed Klingon Anti-Virus (KAV), the software is actually a tweaked version of Sophos’ Threat Detection Test translated into the language spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe.

Downloads of KAV have been “through the roof,” said Carole Theirault, a senior security consultant with Sophos. “It’s been huge. I’m just shocked.”

Sophos’ description of KAV uses considerable humor to pitch the product. “Our routine monitoring of sub-space transmissions alerted Sophos that the loss of the Klingon battlecruiser Klothos was not due to Romulan incursion into the Khitomer system, but a result of trying to remove VBS/PeachyPDF-A from the battle computer using M’swoN’kar after Commander Kor opened an attachment from the system S’cam-419,” the company said on the site promoting KAV.
“Use Sophos’ Klingon Anti-Virus to quickly perform an on-demand scan and find viruses, spyware, adware, zero-day threats, Betazoid sub-ether porn dialers and Tribbles that your existing protection might have missed,” the site continued.

Even the system requirements got in on the act. “Runs on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. This software has compatibility issues with the version of msxml4.dll used by cloaking devices on Romulan-modded D7-class battle cruisers. Installing this software on such vessels is punishable by ordeal of Ginst’a'Ed,” said Sophos.

It’s just a fluke that KAV went public at all, Theirault said. Originally, Sophos had been asked by a potential customer to see whether it was possible to translate their software into Klingon; it was never intended to be offered to the general public. A partially-finished Web page, however, was discovered by users, and after the word began to spread, Sophos cleaned up the site and made it official.

“We didn’t expect to make it available to the outside world,” said Theirault.
Sophos hired a Klingon translator — Theirault identified him as “naHQun,” a Dallas man who is a member of the Klingon Language Institute — to translate the software’s text from English. “He translates all kinds of things,” said the clearly-amused Theirault. “He’s done some Shakespeare plays, I believe. And his next project is the Kama Sutra. Really.”

Threat Detection Test, which Sophos has offered as a free download for 18 months, is simply a scanner: Unlike full-featured antivirus software, it doesn’t scrub a PC of malware. Sophos, said Theirault, uses it to give potential customers an idea of how its antivirus engine compares with other vendors’ software. “It allows people to see what ours catches that their own antivirus doesn’t,” she said.

Theirault swore that Sophos didn’t sync the release of KAV with the debut of the movie Star Trek. “I wish I could say we had,” said Theirault.

Earlier today, Graham Cluley, another security analyst at Sophos, said that the company had received “a rather hard-nosed communication from a certain party seemingly trying to bully us into removing the Klingon Anti-Virus software from our site. We think that’s daft, so we won’t be doing it.”

Klingons, and others, can download KAV from Sophos Web site.

The botnet, known as Torpig (AKA Sinowal), is one of the most sophisticated networks that uses hard-to-detect malicious techniques to infect PS-s and subsequently harvest data such as mail passwords and online banking details.

The researchers were able to monitor more than 180,000 hacked computers by exploiting a weakness within the command-and-control network used by the hackers to control the computers. It only worked for 10 days, however, until the hackers updated the command-and-control instructions, according to the researchers’ 13-page paper.
Still, that was enough of a window to see the data-collecting power of Torpig/Sinowal. In that short time, about 70GB of data were collected from hacked computers.

The researchers stored the data and are working with law enforcement agencies such as the U.S. FBI, ISPs and even the U.S. Department of Defense to notify victims. ISPs also have shut down some Web sites that were used to supply new commands to the hacked machines, they wrote.

Torpig/Sinowal can pilfer user names and passwords from e-mail clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Eudora while also collecting e-mail addresses in those programs for use by spammers. It can also collect passwords from Web browsers.

Torpig/Sinowal can infect a PC if a computer visits a malicious Web site that is designed to test whether the computer has unpatched software, a technique known as a drive-by download attack. If the computer is vulnerable, a low-level piece of malicious software called a rootkit is slipped deep into the system.

The researchers found out that Torpig/Sinowal ends up on a system after it is first infected by Mebroot, a rootkit that appeared around December 2007.

Mebroot infects a computer’s Master Boot Record (MBR), the first code a computer looks for when booting the operating system after the BIOS runs. Mebroot is powerful since any data that leaves the computer can be intercepted.

Mebroot can also download other code to the computer.

Torpig/Sinowal is customized to grab data when a person visits certain online banking and other Web sites. It is coded to respond to more than 300 Web sites, with the top targeted ones being PayPal, Poste Italiane, Capital One, E-Trade and Chase bank, the paper said.

If a person goes to a banking Web site, a falsified form is delivered that appears to be part of the legitimate site, but asks for a range of data a bank would not normally request, such as a PIN (personal identification number) or a credit card number.
Web sites using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption are not safe if used by a PC with Torpig/Sinowal, since the malicious software will grab information before it is encrypted, the researchers wrote.

Hackers typically sell passwords and banking information on underground forums to other criminals, who try to covert the data into cash. While it’s difficult to precisely estimate the value of the information collected over the 10 days, it could be worth between $83,000 to $8.3 million, the research paper said.

There are ways to disrupt botnets such as Torpig/Sinowal. The botnet code includes an algorithm that generates domain names that the malware calls on for new instructions.

Security engineers have often been able to figure out those algorithms to predict which domains the malware will call on, and preregister those domains to disrupt the botnet. It is an expensive process, however. The Conficker worm, for example, can generate up to 50,000 domain names a day.

Registrars, companies that sell domain name registrations, should take a greater role in cooperating with the security community, the researchers wrote. But registrars have their own issues.

“With few exceptions, they often lack the resources, incentives or culture to deal with security issues associated with their roles,” the paper said.

Windows 7 RC, which Microsoft Corp. will officialy launch tomorrow, leaked two weeks ago, with copies first appearing on BitTorrent tracking sites on April 24.

Some of the pirated builds include a Trojan horse, numerous users said in message forums and in comments on BitTorrent sites such as Mininova.org.
“Just a warning for anyone downloading the new RC builds of Windows 7. Quiet [sic] a lot of the downloads have a trojan inbedded [sic] in the setup EXE,” said someone identified as Frank Fontaine on a Neowin.net discussion thread. “The Setup EXE is actually a container, it appears to be a self-extracting EXE. There are 2 files inside, Setup.exe and codec.exe.”

Fontaine’s antivirus software identified the “codec.exe” file as a generic Trojan.

“Suspicious codec.exe!” reported someone labeled as “UltimateGTR” on Mininova, commenting on one of the 32-bit builds.

Another Mininova commenter, “WuNgUn,” identified the malware as the “Falder” Trojan, which downloads fake security software, dubbed “scareware,” to PCs and installs a rootkit to hide from legitimate antivirus products.

Microsoft, which has cited potential infection as a reason to steer clear of unauthorized downloads, jumped on the news. “This unfortunately shows that there are those out there who see the significant interest in something such as Windows 7 as an opportunity to try to take advantage of others,” said Alex Kochis, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Windows anti-piracy technology group, in a post to a company blog on Friday.

Windows 7 RC is not the first leaked software found to harbor attack code. In January 2009, for example, security experts warned that pirated copies of Apple Inc.’s then-new iWork ‘09 suite contained a Trojan horse that hijacked Macs.

Microsoft will let the general public download Windows 7 RC on Tuesday, but has not said what time it will make the upgrade available. Subscribers to TechNet and the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) have been allowed to download the RC since last Thursday.

The Cybercrime Response Unit is a one-of-a-kind online center designed to help consumers fight cyber-crime. Launched last week by McAfee Inc., an Internet security company, with the help of leading national experts and resources from the Federal Trade Commission and WiredSafety.org, the site helps individuals and small businesses determine whether they are victims of ID theft without knowing it or are at high-risk of becoming victims.

It also guides users through steps recommended by security experts to reclaim a stolen ID, report problems associated with ID theft and assists those who have not yet been victimized keep it that way.

And here’s the best part: all of it is offered for free, just visit www.mcafee.com/cru.

The service directs identity-theft victims to appropriate law enforcement, credit agencies and other resources to address their situation — including the FTC, authorities of at least 20 major banks and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.

The site employs specially trained “Cybercrime Response Unit” agents who are available (also cost-free) to assist victims by telephone in the most serious cases. The phone number to contact them, however, is only provided to site visitors who have used the available forensic scanning tool to scan your computer and found potential “red flag” problems. I found the scanning process takes about 15 minutes, and you do not have to provide personal information.

In addition to ID theft, the site also helps users combat crimes associated with online financial fraud and cyberbullying. Parents who believe their child is being maliciously targeted online can find help here. For tips, go to the main page www.mcafee.com/cru and select “Keep Your Family Safe Online.”

Obviously, the problem McAfee is trying to tackle is big. Consumers in the United States have lost close to $8.5 billion over the last two years to cybercrime, according to Consumer Reports.

“With traditional crime, you have physical evidence such as broken glass, broken locks. But cybercrime is a lot less obvious, particularly for the untrained user,” said Pamela Warren, McAfee’s Chief Cybercrime Strategist. “The CRU is meant to be an ‘online 911′ resource. Doing triage helps both the victim and law enforcement because it puts the bad guys out of business.”

How it works: The site’s online scanning tool assesses whether an individual has malware running on his or her computer, has visited malicious Web sites that may have stolen personal information, or has possibly had a computer hijacked by fraudsters. Pornography and gambling sites, for instance, are notorious for these problems. Other dangerous sites include those set up to take advantage of searchable hot news items, such as those related to swine flu or President Obama. Avoid spam on such topics and clicking on unfamiliar sites that pop up during an online search.

Specifically, the Cybercrime Response helps people to:

Determine the likelihood that their computer may be linked to cybercrime via the scanning tool.

Report an online crime to police or government agencies

Protect themselves, by guiding them to use security and privacy settings on social networks like MySpace of Facebook.

Work with the right financial institutions and creditors, like your bank’s fraud department, or setting up fraud alerts with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Avoid being a victim of cyber-crime by offering prevention advice and tips. Among them: don’t open email attachment from unknown entities and keep your software updated for our browser, operating system and anti-virus programs; and be sure to back up important files frequently.

The unit can help businesses contact the right authorities in cases of intellectual property theft or copyright infringement, including the U.S. Depart of Justice and the state Attorney General.

Another tip: Businesses should learn to recognize possible warning signs, such as slow-running computer systems on office networks, unusual pop-ups and unsolicited e-mail, and unexplained or suspicious activity on financial accounts.

“Most users don’t realize they are enablers to the problem,” Warren said. “We want to help them become enablers to the solution.”

Acer U.K. CEO Bobby Ryan said the company plans to begin selling Windows 7-powered systems on Oct. “23 October is the date Windows 7 will be available,” said Watkins, in an interview with the site.

Watkins also said Acer is expecting Microsoft to launch a free Windows 7 upgrade program at least 30 days before the ship date so that consumers shopping for PCs during the September back-to-school season can purchase a Vista-based machine without fear of it becoming obsolete in a few weeks.

Publicly, Microsoft has said only that Windows 7 will be available about three years after Vista’s debut. Vista launched in January 2007.

Beyond blog reports, there are other signs that Windows 7 is ahead of schedule.

Microsoft on Friday released a near-final version of the OS, Windows 7 Release Candidate, to its TechNet and MSDN professional subscribers. A public version of Windows 7 RC is slated for availability on May 5th.

If Microsoft is following a timetable similar to that employed for Vista development, then reports of a September or October release date for Windows 7 appear credible.

The first version of Windows Vista RC dropped in September 2006, about five months before the final version shipped. A similar five-month incubation period for Windows 7 RC would point to a commercial release this fall.

Microsoft needs Windows 7 to be a hit. Vista, the company’s current operating system, has failed to catch on with mainstream computer users, while businesses have shunned it outright. Many users have complained about Vista’s hardware requirements, intrusive security measures, and lack of compatibility with older applications.

Microsoft last week reported that Windows sales fell 16% in the most recent quarter.

While a new poll out this week by Compete found that 73% of iPhone owners operate their devices for personal purposes, 59% of other smartphone users view their BlackBerry, HTC, and Nokia handsets as business devices.
The behavior patterns have remained similar over the past several months even as Apple opened up its App Store with more than 35,000 applications. Significantly, the games category has the largest number of applications in the Apple store.

Compete’s Smartphone Intelligence Report provides insight not only into the types of applications that are most in demand, but what smartphone users will pay for them. The survey is understandably skewed in favor of the iPhone because its application store is significantly more advanced than the offerings of other smartphone manufacturers, which are working to catch up with their own online applications stores.

Compete found that 24% of iPhone users said they have spent between $10 and $50 for a single application, and another 28% said they have spent between $5 and $10 for an application.

The most commonly downloaded applications for the iPhone were games, 79%; entertainment, 78%; weather, 57%; and music, 55%. In terms of usage, iPhone users said they used weather-related applications the most, followed by Facebook and games.

Only 2% of iPhone owners said they haven’t downloaded a single application, while 27% of the entire smartphone population said they haven’t downloaded any applications. The survey found that 41% of all smartphone users said they don’t see any reason to add applications.

“When asked how they decided which applications to download to their phone, 60% of all smartphone owners said they spend time looking through all the applications to discover them on their own,” said Compete.

In another survey out this week, advertising researcher Greystripe found great support for games among iPhone users. Greystripe said 80% of those polled said they would consider downloading additional iPhone games.

The biggest marketing trumpet for virtualization has been monetary savings–physical-to-virtual conversions reduce capital expense by consolidating many servers onto fewer hosts. Additional potential savings can come from reduced management costs, less downtime, and lighter staffing.

As energy prices have fluctuated widely during the past year, CFOs are punching new holes to tighten corporate belts ever further, looking for savings wherever they can. Power and heating and cooling costs are surfacing as areas of opportunity.
That’s all good for a company’s bottom line. But in addition to freeing up floor and rack space, large-scale server virtualization can result in significant reductions in electrical and cooling needs. And since most of our power comes from burning fossil fuels, it’s safe to say that each server is responsible for tons of carbon dioxide annually. General assessments are 4 to 12 tons of CO2 per server per year. Are swimming polar bears starting to haunt you yet?

The stats associated with virtualization vary widely, depending on who’s making the pitch. For example, Oriel Technologies, an Australian VMware channel partner, proposes that paring 45 servers down to five host servers through virtualization can keep 506 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

I have a hard time visualizing 506 tons of CO2, so Oriel provides equivalents: planting 2,228 trees, offsetting the annual emissions of 113 cars, or, because they’re Australian and it’s humorous (and true), offsetting the annual emissions of 219 cows.

Whatever your view on the IT benefits of virtualization or whether you want to argue with the specifics of the assumptions in these estimates, it’s tough to argue with the basic premise: Virtualization yields fewer physical servers in your data center. No matter what virtualization host platform you choose, fewer boxes equals less electricity consumed. Less electricity consumed equals fewer emissions.

VMware has taking green savings one step further. Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a new feature of its Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) module of ESX (and soon to be part of vSphere.) Relying on VMotion and DRS, VMware clusters can selectively shut down physical hosts as load requirements decrease, further consolidating running virtual machines to a subset of hosts. As loads ratchet up again, offline hosts power back up via wake-on-LAN, and VMs redistribute as more capacity is required. VMware projects an additional 20% power and cooling savings thanks to DPM.

A year ago, after the deal closed, Google said it would sell the unit, to avoid the appearance that it sold search result placement through search marketing services, and also announced the layoffs of about 300 of DoubleClick’s 1,500 employees.

These days, Google’s giving rather than taking away. On Friday, Google unveiled DoubleClick Studio, a platform for designing rich media ads using Flash and Web technology. It includes a rewrite of the DoubleClick ActionScript API, an interface for verifying ad-related events, media previewing, reporting, and ad distribution.

Rich media ads make use of motion graphics, audio, and interactivity. This is what sets them apart from display ads — banners, for example — and text ads that can only be interacted with through a click. If well-designed, they’re more engaging to viewers and lead to better results than their less-flashy brethren.
But rich media ads are difficult to design well. Google hopes to change that.

“With DoubleClick Studio, we hope to make it easier for our existing users to produce rich media ads and to expand the number of advertisers that can make these useful formats part of their marketing strategy,” Shamim Samadi and Ari Paparo, from Google’s rich media team, explained in a blog post. “This is also a good thing for Internet users; rich media capabilities make advertising even more useful, letting a viewer interact with an ad and learn about a brand without having to leave the page they’re on.”

It’s not for everyone, however. Would-be users have to submit information to Google requesting access. But for those allowed in, Google’s new rich media toolset should make ad creation a bit easier to manage and perhaps less expensive.

Mark Simon, VP of industry relations at Didit, a search engine marketing firm, believes Google’s new tool will be welcome as ad agencies try to be frugal. “DoubleClick Studio is significant insofar as its simplification of the rich media creation and workflow management process is likely to enhance productivity within ad agencies,” he said in an e-mail. “Being able to ‘do more with less’ is crucial right now, and we are impressed with the capabilities of this toolset, especially in respect to how simple it makes the creation of complex rich media applications.”

With previous versions of Windows, Microsoft used a transition period when old and new versions of Windows were available to help corporate customers manage their transition to the new version of the operating system.

This time Microsoft aims to put the ghosts of its Vista troubles to rest as soon as possible, and could stop selling Vista as soon as Windows 7 is released.

“We are still not sure if [computer makers] will be able to ship Vista once Windows 7 is made available. Having said that, an enterprise customer that purchases a PC with Windows 7 pre-installed is allowed to downgrade to Vista should they desire, similar to what we have today on Vista to XP,” wrote Richard Francis, general manager and Windows client business group lead at Microsoft Asia-Pacific, in an e-mail.

Microsoft will stop supporting all versions of Vista in April 2012, Francis said.

The launch of Windows 7 could take place within a few months from now. Last week, the company released the final beta version of the software, one of the last steps before locking down the code and sending the finished operating system to computer makers.

Microsoft had high hopes for Vista, but users found the OS sluggish on some computers and they complained about the number of permission prompts required for some tasks. Dissatisfaction with Vista kept user demand high for Windows XP, but many companies — including Eastman Chemical and Continental Airlines, among others listed on Microsoft’s Web site — decided to roll out Vista within their organizations.

Microsoft appears to be betting that Vista won’t be missed once Windows 7 is released.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a version of Windows that will actually run better [than the previous version] on the hardware that most customers have,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Windows product management group at Microsoft, during a conference call with reporters last Thursday.

Compared to Vista, Windows 7 will be faster and work better on systems such as netbooks, which have less powerful processors and less memory than other computers, he said.

While Microsoft hasn’t detailed plans for Vista after the launch of Windows 7, Nash said Windows XP will continue to be available on netbooks for one year after the launch of the new operating system.