Self-Assembling Nanometals May Improve Fuel Cells, Microchips

Metal nanoparticles can be very useful, especially when they become usable nanostructures without outside stimulus.

Self-assembly is a relatively new development in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology. Though the idea has been kicked around for many years, manipulating particles less than a nanometer in diameter is still a difficult task. As the interest in nanotech grows, research is opening up new ideas and new methods for exploring the microscopic worlds nanoparticles inhabit.

News Source: DailyTech
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Software Group To Promote Macs In The Enterprise

A consortium of five companies has announced the creation of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA) to promote the deployment of Macs in the enterprise. The five founding companies — Centrify, LANrev, Atempo, GroupLogic, and Parallels — are all focused on integrating the Mac operating system and infrastructure with Windows and PC-based network infrastructure for enterprise-level companies.

With Apple’s introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch, along with enterprise tools for these devices, Apple is capturing more market adoption in business, making the creation of an organization like EDA very timely, says Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research.

News Source: InfoWorld
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Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook’s Board Of Directors

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning and the former CTO of AOL, is adding a new notch in his belt: he has joined the board of directors of Facebook, two sources close to the company confirmed to us (speculation about Andreessen possibly joining the Facebook board started last month on the Boomtown blog). The company should be announcing it shortly, perhaps this week.

Andreessen will join Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thieland Jim Breyer on Facebook’s board.

At first glance, the move isn’t a fit for competitive reasons - Andreesseen is involved full time at Ning, a platform for the creation of social networks and arguably a direct competitor to Facebook. But Andreessen is known to be a mentor to Zuckerberg, who calls on him often for personal advice. It isn’t surprising that Zuckerberg would ask Andreessen to have a formal involvement with the company.

News Source: TechCrunch
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EBay Ordered To Pay €38m To LVMH

EBay has been ordered to pay €38.6m to French luxury goods group LVMH over the sale of fake branded replicas on its auction site.

LVMH was seeking €50m after claiming that eBay was negligent and had not done enough to prevent users selling fake versions of its products.

The luxury goods company alleged that nine out of 10 LVMH-branded sunglasses, perfume and bags for sale on eBay in 2006 were counterfeit.

News Source: vnunet.com
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New OS X Trojans

Two Trojan horse samples targeting the Mac have caught the attention of F-Secure.

The first, which F-Secure detects as Backdoor.Mac.Hovdy.a, is an exploit for the recently revealed and unpatched privilege escalation bug in Apple Remote Desktop. The Trojan does not appear to be in the wild at present.

The second Trojan was originally found by Intego and is detected by F-Secure as Trojan-PSW:OSX/PokerStealer.A. Like the large majority of Windows malware, it relies on social engineering. It comes with the filename PokerGame.app (180Kb). Once executed it puts up an error message claiming that the preference file is corrupted and asking for the user’s password. Once it gets this password, it uses it to create an SSH back door on the system, through which an attacker can issue commands. It’s a Mac bot.

News Source: PC Magazine
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Rogers iPhone 3G In-Store Activation Process Gets Detailed

The supposed procedure that Rogers will be following for the launch of the 3G iPhone has been anonymously posted to an online discussion forum. Included is a link to what is said to be an advanced version of iTunes v7.6.3b4 that will allow the stores to “unbrick” the iPhones for in store activation. Apparently the new version of iTunes 7.7 due to be released on July 11 will include this activation mode. In addition there are a whole set of launch week rules.

News Source: GearDiary
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Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, IBM And Juniper Networks Form Security Consortium

Five IT vendors have formed an organisation called the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet.

Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks and Microsoft have formed the not-for-profit group to address multi-product security threats in increasingly complex IT infrastructures.

The Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (Icasi) said it will focus on combating wide-reaching worms and viruses as well as more sophisticated stealth attacks targeting multiple products or shared protocols in multiple products.

News Source: ComputerWeekly
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Microsoft Trying To Live Up To Interop Pledge

Microsoft on Monday announced a series of moves that it says back up its February pledge to make it easy for others’ software to interoperate with its own products.

The news is mostly incremental. Microsoft is making more documentation available on how its older binary Office formats work as well as a final version of the protocols used in Office 2007. What caught my eye, though, were two new projects.

News Source: C|Net News
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Hyper-V Alert: Beware Of The Broadcom Nextreme II

Ever since I first installed my Dell PowerEdge 2900 with Virtual Server I have been experiencing issues with the Broadcom Nextreme II Gigabit adapter also known as the BCM5708C. After my latest disaster at a client with Hyper-V RTM with the same network adaptere in an HP Proliant ML 370 G5, I think it’s time to send out an alert.

In my case I the two hosts I was installing with Hyper-V ended with corrupted network stacks on Virtual Machines and hosts that initially worked flawlessly and all of a sudden caused strange error messages. This in the end forced me to completely reinstall all systems from scratch.

News Source: Ray’s XPWorld
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Google Gets Social With New iGoogle

Select users are now being treated to the next version of the company’s portal, which integrates social networking characteristics into the site.

As things currently stand with iGoogle, users cannot do much more other than add widgets and customize the look of the page. This essentially makes Google’s offering no more compelling than the dozens of other available portal sites out there — and some may argue from the page’s bland design any more appealing.

However, with the company throwing its support behind OpenSocial and the increasing popularity of social networking overall, this new version of Google’s personalized portal may make it stand out.

News Source: BetaNews
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