Andy Patrizio

Spammers often change tactics to try and stay ahead of the curve, and the latest is image-based spam. Because spam blockers have become so efficient at detecting text-based spam, no matter how many different ways they try to spell “mortgage” and “Viagra,” the spammers have added a new weapon to their arsenal: the graphic file. […]

The CEO’s baton has been passed at Webroot Software, with David Moll, who led the company from a 10 person staff to a 300 person leader in spyware detection in just five years, stepping aside and a McAfee veteran taking the helm. Peter Watkins, former chief operating officer for McAfee , is now the chief […]

Move over, Mac Mini. AMD today announced plans for a new motherboard form factor that will make PCs smaller, quieter and more desktop friendly. The DTX standard is built on ATX, the most common of PC hardware factors, but has a much smaller footprint. ATX, or Advanced Technology Extended, is the creation of arch-rival Intel […]

Coming on the heels of SanDisk’s plans to replace hard drives with a Flash memory-based drive is the Hybrid Storage Alliance, which seeks to marry Flash memory in a platter-based drive for notebooks. By adding 256MB of Flash memory to a 2.5-inch notebook laptop, the members of the alliance — Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and […]

Microsoft’s monthly patch bundle was a lot lighter than usual, although that doesn’t mean the number of bugs and vulnerabilities has gone down. The company just has a lot more quality assurance work to do. Microsoft originally planned to release eight security bulletins covering Windows, Office and Visual Studio. However, the company cut that back […]

Intel is bringing quad core processors to the masses, sort of, with the introduction of more affordable Core 2 Quad processors and some low-end Xeons. Of course, “affordable” means an arm and a leg rather than all four limbs. The company today at the Consumer Electronics Show announced the availability of the new 2.4GHz Intel […]

Attempts at PC and home entertainment convergence have failed more often than Lyndon LaRouche’s Presidential bids. But that’s not stopping AMD, which is making some big announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas. AMD  announced several new products under its LIVE! brand, designed to bridge the gap between high-end consumer electronics […]

The bulk of PCs sold today come with integrated graphics, but it seems integrated graphics doesn’t quite cut the mustard for many users, as the add-in board market continues to grow, at least numerically. For the third calendar quarter of 2006, revenue from add-in graphics boards declined by 12.2 percent over Q3 2005 to $4.97 […]

At this point, the world may have more programming languages than spoken languages, but that’s not stopping the creation of even more. This week, Digital Mars released the D programming language, which it says addresses the issues and shortcomings of C/C++. D is the brainchild of Walter Bright, the main developer of the first native […]

Next Tuesday, January 9 is the monthly Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, with a number of fixes for both Windows and Microsoft applications. As is tradition, Microsoft does not give details on the vulnerabilities in advance of the fixes. The Office fixes could be meant to address vulnerabilities found in Word in early December but were […]

SanDisk is making the leap from portable Flash drives to hard disk replacements for laptops with the introduction of a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as an alternative to the magnetic hard disk. The drives will be on display next week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The company has […]

Several security firms have found a vulnerability in the Adobe Reader that is surprisingly easy to initiate and also very dangerous. The problem involves passing input from a URL to a hosted PDF file. The data is not properly cleaned by the browser’s PDF reader plug-in before being returned to users, so any data can […]