News on Wireless Skype, Verbatim's USB drive,
AMD Quad Core and more
IT industry and Personal Computer (PC) news November
2005
Wireless Skype The Big news this month is that Skype and Linksys have partnered to
provide a cordless phone that will let you make free Skype calls using
the Skype to Skype contact list, even when you're not in front of your
computer. It's called the Linksys Internet Telephony Kit and is now available
through many retail chains in the world. It utilises a USB base station
that allows the transfer of the information. Like so many VOIP devices
though, the lag time might be a little longer if you've got to go through
a base station as well. Also, you'd better have plenty of Ram!
Apple iTunes now available in Oz The online music store has finally opened its doors in Australia, offering
over 1,000,000 songs and over 1000 music videos.
Verbatim's Store 'n' Go A 1GB USB drive has been released by Verbatim that uses a new system
called U3. It allows users to run programs from the drive without needing
them to be installed on computers. Well, that's great that Verbatim have
taken the pain out of having to set that kind of system up ourselves!
XPS is here Microsoft Office 12, or Microsoft Office 2006, will feature a Save
As option for making many types of Microsoft documents into a stand alone
format. The new format, XPS (XML Paper Specification), may require a plugin
to print it but it would not require the full program. So if you're a Mac
user and someone sends you a Word document saved in XPS format, and you
don't have Microsoft Office, you'd still be able to print it. This is Microsoft's
attempt to compete against the very popular Adobe format.
Watch out for Spear-Phishing Originally, we had phishing, whereby unscrupulous operators would spam
billions of email addresses with tactics designed to extract personal information
from unwary readers. Now there's spear-phishing, which is the more strategic
approach of getting detailed information of someone who may have better
access in a company, then emailing people under them, using their details
so that unsuspecting users would reply. For example, johnsmith@greatcompany.com
may work in the accounts department. So a spear-phisher would send emails
to joeuser, freida and tom, dick and harry saying that it's from johnsmith
and could they please send back their details for his records. The spear-phisher
then uses that information to create bogus identities or to break into
bank accounts. So, now, don't give personal information to anyone at all
ever!
AMD Quad Core plans Well, you've heard of dual core. How about quad? AMD hopes to release
quad core chips in 2007, just in time for Windows Vista. Development is
currently under way and late 2006 could see the first quad core chip available
for testing.
