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  • Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac?
    On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook. I wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks? Today I contacted Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about computer average selling prices at retail. That HP notebook is right on mark: ASP for retail Windows notebooks is $700. Mac laptops: $1,515. Yeah, right, they're more than twice as much. But there's more: The ASP for Mac desktops is more than $1,000 greater than for Windows PCs, and Mac desktop ASPs were higher in June than they were two years ago.

  • Former prosecutor: UFO hack looked like terrorist attack
    After the computer network at the Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey was breached and crashed just a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, investigators thought it might be part of a larger al-Qaeda plot against the United States. Investigators worked around the clock to figure out who had been in and out of the system that runs the weapons station for about five months, stealing passwords, installing remote access software, deleting data and ultimately shutting down the network of 300 computers for an entire week. That weeklong shutdown meant that for that period of time -- in the aftermath of attacks on the U.S. -- the station couldn't do its job of replenishing munitions and supplies to the Atlantic fleet. Was the break-in organized by a nation-state? A terrorist group? After throwing critical resources at the probe when the government was already investigating not only the 9/11 attacks but the anthrax killings, investigators didn't track the breach to al-Qaeda. They tracked it to an unemployed system administrator in the U.K. -- Gary McKinnon, who was subsequently charged with hacking into 92 computer systems at the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense and NASA.

  • Dutch police start notifying botnet victims
    Police in the Netherlands claim a world's first in warning victims whose computers were infected by a botnet that was shut down last week. The victims will be forwarded to a special Web page offering instructions on cleaning up their systems. The high-tech crime unit of the police started issuing the warnings on Wednesday. Users with infected systems are automatically sent a special page when they log onto the Internet. The page offers instructions on disabling the botnet, as well as a link to Kaspersky's online virus scanner and a request to file charges against the botnet herder, a 19- year-old man from the Dutch city of Sneek who was arrested last week. The page, which was created in cooperation with Kaskersky Labs, marks the first time that botnet victims have been proactively warned by authorities, said Eddy Willems, a virus evangelist with Kaspersky Labs in the Netherlands. "This might initiate other actions in neighboring countries, so we can continue doing this in a coordinated fashion throughout the European Union," Willems told Webwereld. "That would be a good way to fight these crimes."

  • Thailand bans Grand Theft Auto after taxi driver killing
    Thai authorities banned the Grand Theft Auto computer game on Tuesday, after a disturbed teenager allegedly killed a taxi driver in a copycat crime. Following news earlier Tuesday that the game's distributor would no longer stock the game, Thai police told AFP they had officially banned it because of "obscene" content. "The police are empowered to immediately arrest shopkeepers if they find any GTA (Grand Theft Auto) games on sale," Ruangsak Jaritake, a police spokesman, told AFP. "GTA is banned mainly because of its obscene content - under the criminal law article 287 that prohibits reproduction, distribution or possession of such material," he said.

  • BT slams bandwidth brakes on all subscribers
    BT is throttling all of its broadband customers' bandwidth at peak times, not just heavy users, according to independent monitoring data. Early findings from a new hardware-based monitoring project by ISP analysis outfit Samknows show that even customers who use their connection lightly have non-port 80 traffic slowed to about 15 per cent of the normal speed in the evening, when load on BT's network is high. Port 80 is used for HTTP web traffic. Samknows used tests on other ports to simulate peer-to-peer traffic, so even a casual BT downloader who grabs a TV show from BitTorrent faces the throttle.