News about what is happening in technology today!

Two Hollywood video game store owners (ACME Game Store) and a third man who were charged in December for allegedly pirating video games and installing them on modified Microsoft Corp. Xbox consoles were indicted on Thursday, according to the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

The men installed mod-chips and larger hard drives into Xbox consoles to allow them to play pirated games. The group was caught when private investigators working for the Entertainment Software Alliance conducted a sting during which they bought a modded Xbox for $265, complete 77 pirated games and a mod-chip.

The three have been accused of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and face up to 17
years in prison.

They are scheduled an initial appearance in United States District Court in Los Angeles on Jan. 30.

A colleague of mine just pointed out that Nikon UK has posted a press release here indicating that they are all but ending production of their 35mm film cameras, medium- and large-format lenses and enlarging equipment. The F6 35mm SLR will remain in production and be available in Europe and America, and the all-mechanical FM10 will be available outside of Europe. A handful of manual lenses will remain in production as well. Film in general isn’t going away any time soon as digital cameras cannot replace medium and large format cameras, but this is clear evidence that the resolution and popularity of the digital medium have surpassed that of the 35mm format. 35mm took another step into the grave.

eWeek reports a rootkit-like ‘feature’ in Symantec’s Norton Systemworks, discovered by the Mark Russinovich, who was also responsible for blowing the whistle on Sony’s DRM rootkit. The cloaked directory is intended to prevent users from accidentally deleting important files, but could compromise a system by serving as a hiding place for malware, as was the case with Sony’s rootkit. Russinovich says Symantec had good intentions, but they were right to post an update to fix this hole.

Every year the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is sure to produce a few interesting products. Many companies wait for CES to unveil their new toys but also with all those companies displaying items it is impossible not to see things which you have not seen before. For me, one such item was the picoPSU, what turned out to be the smallest 12V snap-in ATX DC-to-DC power supply ever.

Pictured above is the complete power supply unit. It uses a standard ATX 20-pin connection along with two 4-pin molex connections and a FDD power connection. The picoPSU-120 is fully ATX compliant and can produce up to 120W of power.

Pictured next to the quarter you can see just how small the unit is. It uses (patent pending) HyperWatt technology in order to be able to put out an impressive 120W from its tiny footprint. No enclosure or cooling is needed. Part of the reason why it is so small is because it is a DC-to-DC power supply. This means that it will have to be used with an external AC-to-DC power converter as do almost all Mini-ITX power supplies.

Read more

Two years on from Bill Gates’ promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn’t noticed this?