Maxtor has announced a new storage solution for PCs that can be purchased with apacities up to 1TB (terabyte). The company said the new Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition will ship in either a 600GB or 1TB capacity point, at $549.95 and $899.95, respectively, beginning in December. There is a small catch, however; the OneTouch storage solution is a small array of two drives, which can be striped in either a RAID 0 array or mirrored in a RAID 1 array. Striping the data across the two disks essentially doubles the capacity, although it leaves both drives vulnerable to lost data should one drive fail.

Chinese authorities have blocked a pro-democracy Weblog after it was nominated for a freedom of expression award by a German radio station, a press freedom group said Thursday. The blog, titled Wang Yi’s Microphone, dealt with "sensitive subjects" and was maintained by a teacher from Sichuan province. China’s communist government encourages Internet use for education and business, but blocks material deemed subversive or pornographic. Dissidents have been arrested under vaguely worded national security laws for posting items critical of the government. One of Wang’s most recent posts dealt with a campaign by peasants in the southeastern province of Guangdong to remove a village chief accused of corruption.

Recently, researcher Andrey Bayora revealed that it is possible to fool antivirus scanners into thinking that a file under scan is one kind, when it is in actuality something entirely different. The exploit prepends a header byte that convinces the scanner the file is not the type the suffix averred it was. Because routine prepended data can be of variable length it is extremely difficult (or impossible) to locate the original start offset of a file. It would seem the only way out of this is to scan the entire file for headers, which would greatly decrease the throughput of the virus scanner. There seems to be no workaround, save a total redesign of how scanning engines work.

Though the mainframe has established itself as an entity with staying power, its code has not. And whether the problem lies in the trend toward application modernization, its rapidly aging user base or with universities that hardly ever teach mainframe skills, the fact is that if Big Iron hopes to maintain its place in the enterprise IT community, its code has to come along for the ride. There are currently 250 billion lines of legacy code, 200 billion of which are written in COBOL, on the mainframe. A legacy systems modernization company, OGM enables clients to capture the original intent and logic embedded in legacy systems–especially the mainframe–left behind by programmers who have since either left the company, retired or are planning to retire. OGM rewrites code in a modern software language, such as Java, develops specifications for third-party software and does it all remotely so customers don’t have to shut down mission-critical IT applications during the process.

IBM announced that it has purchased iPhrase Systems, its 15th software acquisition since 2001 in its information as a service strategy. iPhrase provides search technology to improve e-commerce sales, online service and support, and call center productivity. The technology will broaden IBM’s information management portfolio with enterprise search and content management. According to IBM, iPhrase’s technology is compliant with IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture. It will be used to help customers and partners discover inherent meaning from a wide variety of data.

Two days after a Senate oversight committee in Massachusetts questioned the authority of the state’s IT department to standardize on formats for storing public documents and demanded that state officials take more time to study the potential impact of setting the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a standard, an economic stimulus bill that goes before the Massachusetts Senate has been suddenly amended with text that, if passed, would essentially subjugate all IT procurements and IT department decisions including standard setting to a special task force. Based on the way the amended text makes specific reference to document formats and technology selections for state workers with disabilities, it turns the stimulus bill into a bomb that could easily blow up ODF’s already weakened chances of becoming a statewide document standard.

IC Soft announced the release of icTracker V6.5, the company’s project management, task management, and bug tracking software. icTracker is a compact, easy-to-learn tool set that helps any business or work group define projects, assign tasks, streamline work flow, communicate among team members, assure accountability, track problems, store documents, take notes, schedule events, keep records, and generate reports. icTracker offers a sleek, affordable alternative to overblown project management software products. The new release will allow an administrator to customize each department to set what project fields it can see in the Project View.

IBM is bringing Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology to its xSeries servers. The two companies announced that IBM will deploy Neterion’s Xframe II Ethernet adapters in its x366, 260 and 460 servers. The combination of 10GE technology, PCI-X 2.0, and IBM’s X3 Architecture–designed to improve the performance of the vendor’s Intel-based servers–will give customers additional options for server consolidation and virtualization in their data centers.

Chip makers are making clear that they intend to continue to explore advanced technologies such as virtualization and multicore processors to help solve thermal problems and push the performance envelope. At the Fall Processor Forum last week, Fujitsu and Advanced Micro Devices shed some light on technology that will appear in their respective chips next year. In addition, Intel, which is expected to launch its dual-core Xeon MP chip, said it is delaying the release of "Montecito," its first dual-core Itanium processor, until mid-2006 and revamping its Xeon road map.

The sudden appearance of a rootkit file in a spyware-laden IM worm attack has set off new fears that malicious hackers are sophisticated enough to launch a fully automated worm attack against instant messaging networks. In the most recent attack aimed at users of America Online Inc.’s AIM network, the "lockx.exe" rootkit file was bundled with a new variant of the W32/Sdbot Trojan to create a nasty mix of hidden malware.