| Best PC Part I Ever Spent My Hard Earned Cash On Contest Posted: 05 Aug 2011 04:51 PM PDT Earlier this week, we asked y'all to send us photos of the best PC or PC-related item you've ever spent your hard earned cash on. Well, after much time sorting through all the entries, sizing photos, uploading photos and randomly picking a winner, we've got the list of the things you readers are most pleased to have purchased, with the original reader captions included. Here they are - the sixty-one items that you, our readers, can enthustastically point at and proudly say you're glad you spent your ultility/grocery/bail money on. Apparently, lots of you own (and fanatically love) your R.A.T. mouses, and some of you shell out plenty of skrilla on your displays. The winner of the ThermalTake Shock One Gaming Headset is in there too - many hearty congrats to Rafi Jarjous (please send the webmaster your address Rafi!). Click through to see what else made it in! 
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| Facebook Says "Smoking Gun" Evidence Proves Ceglia to be Fraud Posted: 05 Aug 2011 02:29 PM PDT  When New York resident Paul Ceglia made the shocking claim last year that he owned half of Facebook, there was a palpable mixture interest and disbelief on the Internet. After some legal wrangling, Facebook has now said they have the "smoking gun" proving that Ceglia fabricated the claims. As for what it is, Facebook isn't saying.
Ceglia was ordered last month to hand over his computers to Facebook so they could be examined. Ceglia claimed to have emails and contracts proving that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg signed over control of the company to him. It was the data on his computer that has convinced Facebook's investigators that Ceglia is a fraud. The next hearing is scheduled for August 17, where Facebook will seek to make the evidence public. Facebook is valued at nearly $70 billion on the private market. Do you think Ceglia will see any of that? |
| Pwnie Awards Handed Out, (Most) Winners Cover Face In Shame Posted: 05 Aug 2011 11:57 AM PDT  The Black Hat conference is a great place to go if you want to learn how to, say, hack an insulin pump or get around the traffic-shaping practices of your ISP. But Black Hat's about more than a sharing of ideas; it's also a time of celebration. Well, maybe not if you're one of the companies who win one of those non-coveted Pwnie awards, but for everybody else, at least. Can you guess who won the Pwnie for the Most Epic Fail of the past year? C'mon, sure you can.
Yeah, you're right. Sony won the award in a landslide! In fact, after watching the PlayStation Network burn down and continue smoldering for close to a month, TG Daily reports that no other company was even up for the award. All five nomination slots went directly to Sony. Unsurprisingly, nobody from Sony stepped forward to claim the award. They hand out Pwnies for other things, too: Yahoo! News reports that the Iranian nuclear program-halting Stuxnet – which got mentioned in one of our features yesterday – won the Pwnie for Epic Ownage, pulling ahead of a fierce group of nominees that included Anonymous, Lulzsec and Bradley Manning of Wikileaks fame. RSA won the Pwnie for Lamest Vendor Response after they told their customers that it wasn't a big deal that their SecurID tokens were compromised. Famous iPhone and PS3 hacker Geohot won the Pwnie for Best Song for the rap he posted on YouTube after finding out he was being sued by Sony. Check it out if you want. The awards were unveiled on August third; you can check out a more complete list of winners on the Pwnies website. |
| How To Remove Your Personal Information From Background Check Websites Posted: 05 Aug 2011 11:28 AM PDT After our social media background check, are you afraid of what a future employer may find out about you? Rest easy as we have some tips to help you remove your personal information from more than a dozen online background check websites. 
How Do These Sites Get My Information? There are hundreds of online background check websites that gather information on people. In the US, these online databases are populated with information from public records like real estate transactions, arrest records, court cases, marriages, divorces, etc. Before the Internet, investigators would have to go to the local town hall or the state records office and request this public information in person. Now with databases a dime a dozen, most of this information is readily accessible if you know where to look. A background check website will both mine these public databases and obtain demographic information from marketing companies. If you're young, you're paper trail is likely small, but if you're older, the amount of publicly available information can be staggering. What They Know About You Most of this information is not as salacious as those party pics from the Bahamas, but you may not want your future boss finding out you recently went through a messy divorce. Before you start the removal process, you'll need to find out what information these companies have, if any. We used Social Intelligence for our background check, but there's a dozen or more big players that focus primarily on public information and not your social networks. It's these public databases that we'll look at here. You'll need to go to the following sites and search for your name, address, and age. * Intelius.com * Acxiom.com * MyLife.com * ZabaSearch.com * Spoke.com * BeenVerified.com * PeekYou.com * USSearch.com * PeopleFinders.com * PeopleLookup.com * PeopleSmart.com * PrivateEye.com * WhitePages.com * USA-People-Search.com * Spokeo.com * PublicRecordsNow.com * DOBSearch.com * Radaris.com Compiled by pibbman, these sites are considered the major players and have information that is scraped by smaller sites. Once you confirm a site has your information, mark it off and prepare to move onto the next step which is the removal process. How Do I Purge My Information From These Sites? Here's the hard part. Removing your information won't be easy as there's no one place that'll remove everything for you. Each site has different contact information and different procedures for removal. Some require you to fill out an Internet form, others require you to call and some even ask you to fax your driver's license to confirm your identity. If you send in your driver's license, make sure you black out all information except your name, address and DOB. Only give these companies the bare minimum they need to identify you and nothing more. This contact list compiled by LawyerCT will help you get started. Be prepared to spend a lot of time pouring through these websites, compiling the information they need and sending it to them. They don't make it easy and you'll be irritated by emails that bounce and fax numbers that don't answer. Relax and drink a cold beer while you do this, it'll help. If you can't stand this process, there are record removal companies that'll do this on your behalf for a fee. These companies may not be 100% effective, though, as some background check websites won't honor a removal request from a third-party. You and only you can ask for your information to be removed. I Did It, It's Done, Now What? Breathe easier knowing you have erased some, if not all, of your public information from these aggregators. This is only the beginning, though. You'll need to keep checking back to make sure new information does not appear. Try to keep yourself out of their radar. Don't get arrested or fight a legal battle. And if you get married, be ready to start this process all over again. 
Gizmodo is the world's most fun technology website, focused on gadgets and how they make our lives better, worse, and more absurd. |
| Several US ISPs Hijacking And Redirecting Their Customers' Search Queries Posted: 05 Aug 2011 11:18 AM PDT  What do you expect to come up when you search for a term in Google or Bing? Page after page of relevant results, right? Wrong, buster – at least if you're a customer of an ISP that engages in search query redirection. Late last night, a report surfaced that reveals that several ISPs, with the help of a company called PaxFire, have secretly been hijacking your traffic when you search for a certain major keywords. Why? Revenue, of course.
NewScientist broke the news, and the EFF has chimed in with tons of additional information. Hints of redirected traffic first surfaced earlier this year, when two research papers pointed out that all or most of the traffic directed at Bing, Yahoo! and Google were being redirected by some ISPs. Two separate investigations, conducted by the EFF and the ICSI Networking group, unveiled that HTTP proxies operated "either directly by Paxfire, or by the ISPs using web proxies provided by Paxfire ," are the ones behind the deed. The redirecting only kicked in when major keywords, like "Apple," "Dell" and "Bloomingdales," were searched for. According to the reports, Paxfire selectively hijacks the traffic and redirects it to a marketing company, which instantly reroutes it to the homepage of the retail company being searched for. It happens without notification or consent of the user, and everybody along the chain gets a cut of the advertising commission – again, except for the user. If you search for "Kindle," you're sent to Amazon – no matter what the intent behind your search is. And Paxfire's privacy -- ha! -- policy says that may retain records of a users' queries. Does that apply for people who don't know their traffic is being hijacked? Want names? We got names. The EFF and ISCI identified the following ISPs as actively involved in search hijacking: Cavalier, Cincinnati Bell, Cogent, Frontier, Hughes, IBBS, Insight Broadband, Megapath, Paetec, RCN, Wide Open West, XO Communication, Fuse, and DirecPC. Additionally, Charter and Iowa Telecom hijacked search traffic in the past, but stopped within the past year. The shady ISPs have several million customers between them. Edit: Ars Technica is reporting on a similar finding by a Microsoft/Polytechnic Inst. of NY team. They've added Spacenet, Onvoy and SDN to the list of offenders and say that 2 percent of all US Internet users are affected by the nefarious practice. The EFF calls out several of the marketing affiliates profiting from the search hijacking: "The affiliate programs involved include Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, and Ask.com." Note that the Google Affiliate Network isn't Google itself – in fact, NewScientist says Google complained to ISPs about the traffic hijacking earlier this year. Check out the NewScientist article and the EFF post for lots more information about the issue, especially if you're a customer of one of those ISPs. The EFF recommends running a Netalyzr test to see if you're affected by the problem. They also recommend installing the HTTPS Everywhere extension if you're a Firefox user; the encryption will prevent selective hijacking from occurring. By the way, today, Reese Richman, a NY law firm, filed a class-action suit against both Paxfire and one of the offending ISPs, NewScientist reports. |
| Cool Site of the Week: Zooniverse Posted: 05 Aug 2011 10:58 AM PDT  Playing host to an infinite number of cat videos, game demo downloads, poker portals and celebrity gossip sites as it does, it's easy to forget that the internet can also be a bastion of knowledge, education and innovation. Fortunately for web surfers interested in leveraging the online universe for more than rocking a fews choice memes, Zooniverse has got you covered.
A bastion of citizen science, discovery and education, Zooniverse invites individuals from all walks of life to take part in scientific endeavors that stand to benefit us all. After signing up for an account, users have the opportunity to assist scientists from a wide variety of disciplines to wrangle the massive amounts of data they deal with as part of their work. Currently, research topics include searching for planets outside of our solar system, mapping our galaxy, recovering weather data from the turn of the 20th century, attempting to capture a supernova on film and transcribing 1000 year old writings of the citizens of Oxyrhynchu. If those sorts of things won't make for some interesting dinner conversation, nothing will. 
All that's required to take part in most of the citizen science projects hosted by the site is a willingness to offer up some of your free time and the desire to take part in a search for knowledge that in the days to come could help to shape how we understand our world, or even our universe. Be sure to check back every Friday for another edition of Maximum PC's Cool Site of the Week. |
| XFX Radeon HD 6990 Review Posted: 05 Aug 2011 10:37 AM PDT Just how good is this rare beast of a card? When we took a look at the reference version of AMD's Radeon HD 6990, we found a board that was impressive on a number of fronts, though not all the impressions were positive. The HD 6990 builds in two full Radeon HD 6970 GPUs onto a single board, each with its own 2GB of frame buffer. In our initial testing, performance looked to be very fast, but the reference board was also pretty noisy under load. So we waited to get a shipping board from one of AMD's many board partners in order to formally review a real product. And we waited. And waited some more. (Bear in mind that availability of Nvidia's GTX 590 isn't much better.) At last, XFX shipped us an actual retail Radeon HD 6990, so we're finally able to render a verdict on AMD's killer card. Before we dive into benchmarks and observations, it's worth recapping the specs and features of the card, and its GPUs. 
This card packs two HD 6970 GPUs, 4GB of fast GDDR5, and one noisy cooling fan.
The Radeon HD 6990 has five total display connectors, though it does cut back on the variety compared to the HD 6970, with four Mini DisplayPort connectors and a single dual-link DVI connector. XFX includes a pair of Mini DP–to–single-link DVI adapters (one passive, one active) plus one Mini DP–to-HDMI adapter in the box. With two GPUs and 4GB of GDDR5, this is a big card—over 12 inches long. It also requires two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. It's also worth looking at core clock differentials. Nvidia reduces the core clock speed of its dual-GPU GTX 590 card by more than 20 percent, from 772MHz to 607MHz. By contrast, AMD lowers the core clock speed of the HD 6990's GPUs by only about 6 percent. It could be that AMD's GPUs are more power efficient, or simply that AMD is being more aggressive about its overall design. Given the HD 6990's noise level under load, we suspect a little of both. As with the reference card, the XFX card has that overclocking mini-DIP switch that allows you to push the clock speed up to 880MHz—the same core clock as a single-GPU HD 6970 card. However, XFX puts a giant yellow caution sticker over this switch. Given that rather dire warning, we tested the card at its default 830MHz clock speed. Now that we understand a bit more about the key features, let's look at performance. AMD's HD 6990 wins seven of our benchmarks, ties in one, and loses to Nvidia's GTX 590 in the remaining three. The 6990's maximum power draw is marginally lower. All of the games we tested support CrossFireX; if you're running an older game that doesn't support AMD's dual-GPU technology, you'll only see the performance of a single HD 6970. However, AMD's done a ton of work with its drivers, and all the current-generation games we've tested get a solid performance boost. On the other hand, the XFX HD 6990 is considerably louder at full throttle than the GTX 590. Clearly, AMD has some work to do with its cooling solution to reduce noise levels. Or maybe AMD is just pushing those 40nm-based 6970 chips a little too hard, even at the lower clock speeds. As you might suspect given the fan noise, the HD 6990 gets quite hot at full load, so you'll definitely want a case with robust airflow. The bottom line: XFX is shipping the fastest graphics card you can buy—that is, if you can find one. Availability is still very tight, and if you order one, expect it to be backordered for several weeks. It's also quite hot and quite loud, so be aware of that before buying. And all that performance comes at a price—the HD 6990 is also the most expensive card you can get, with prices ranging from $700-$800 depending upon the seller. Still, if you're really looking for raw speed in a single graphics card—noise, heat, and price be damned—the HD 6990 is the frontrunner. $700-800, www.xfxforce.com |
| Nvidia Confirms Kepler GPU Delayed Until 2012 Posted: 05 Aug 2011 10:21 AM PDT  Nothing gets PC gamers drooling like the prospect of a new and improved GPU. If that's true, Nvidia fans must be suffering from a serious case of dry mouth. It's been almost a year since the company announced a GPU road map that promised to launch the new 28nm Kepler in the second half of 2011. Well, it's the second half of 2011, and we haven't heard much about Kepler since. Maybe it was an embarrassed silence; today, the company confirmed that Kepler won't be hitting the shelves until 2012.
Rumors about a delay have been swirling around the Internet for a while now. We reported on it early last month, in fact. At the time, the rumored-but-now-confirmed delay was chalked up to poor production yields. Today brings word of an official delay. "Although we will have early silicon this year, Kepler-based products are actually scheduled to go into production in 2012. We wanted to clarify this so people wouldn't expect product to be available this year," Nvidia spokesman Ken Brown told X-bit Labs. So what else does Nvidia have to say about the pushed-back date? Nothing. Ken Brown didn't touch on the production yield rumors or offer any other sort of explanation. Delays seem to be par for the course for Nvidia's new GPUs – Fermi, Kepler's predecessor, suffered from repeated delays itself. Could pushing back Keplar have much of an effect on the scheduled 2013 release of Maxwell, the next GPU on Nvidia's road map? |
| TDK Announces Upcoming Launch of Industrial SSD Line Posted: 05 Aug 2011 09:36 AM PDT  TDK is evidently stoked about its SDG3B solid state drive line, so much that it's announcing the launch of these industrial SSDs a month before release. Dubbed SDG3B, these SATA 3Gbps SSDs come equipped with TDK's GBDriver RS3 controller ICs. The focus here is on data reliability instead of balls-to-the-wall performance, and underscoring that point is the complete absence of cache.
Even without any cache, TDK says the SDG3B line supports an effective read speed of 160MB/s. Write speeds are even more pedestrian, with versions using single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory rated at up to 60MB/s, and multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory-based drives just 25MB/s. What the SDG3B drives lack in performance, they make up for in other areas, such as auto-recovery functions, a power interruption tolerance algorithm, ECC function scalable to 44-bit/sector, an auto refresh function to defend against power supply problems, an advanced static wear leveling function and data randomizer (both developed by TDK), SMART support, and 128-bit AES encryption. These drives are intended for industrial equipment and embedded devices, such as thin client PCs, tablets, automotive applications, office equipment, karaoke machines, and so forth. Image Credit: TDK |
| Mach Xtreme Tries Selling Street Cred with Urban Series DDR3 Modules Posted: 05 Aug 2011 09:16 AM PDT  If Ali G had any interest in owning a computer, we'd be willing to bet ten pounds of bling he'd insist on Mach Xtreme's new Urban Series DDR3 DRAM, if not for his PC than at least fashioned into some sort of jewelry. These funky looking modules sport regular sized heatsinks with graffiti style graphics, and if you're into that sort of thing, this will probably be the coolest memory you've ever seen.
Mach Xtreme's Urban Series ship as 4GB modules, either individually or part of an 8GB dual-channel kit. They're rated at 1333MHz at 1.5V with 9-9-9-27 timings. Getting back to the graffiti style heatsink, Mach Xtreme claims it's made of "specially imported top grade Japanese aluminum," as opposed to, well, we're not entirely sure. Maybe all those RAM kits using non-imported top grade Japanese aluminum that have a tendency to, well, we're not sure of that either. In any event, Mach Xtreme says it hand tests each module, where the benefit is a bit more obvious (less chance of receiving a dud). No word on price or availability. Image Credit: Mach Xtreme |
