NATO, US ARMY WEB SITES ATTACKED BY HACKERS

Hackers have taken down two high-profile targets as they continue their ongoing Web attacks in support of Palestine, defacing Web sites run by the U>S> Army
and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The attacks on Thursday took down the Web sites for The United States Army Military District of Washington and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, according to Zone-H, a Web site that tracks defacement activity.
The NATO site is now back online, but the U.S. Army site was still offline Friday morning. A version of the Web page cached by Google reads: "Stop attacks u israel and usa ! you cursed nations ! one day muslims will clean the world from you ! "(Defacement images shown above) NATO didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Most other U.S. Army sites do not appear to have been affected by that attack. The U.S. Army Military District of Washington is an army command, based in Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.
Using what's known as a SQL injection attack, the group also defaced the Web site of the Joint Force Headquarters of the National Capital Region, which handles military incident response for the Washington, D.C., area, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. A U.S. Army spokeswoman was unable to immediately comment on reports of the hacks.
All of these attacks are credited to a Turkish hacking group called Agd_Scorp / Peace Crew.
This group has claimed many Web hacks over the past few months, including Microsoft's Web sites in Canada, Ireland and China; Shell; Harvard University; and the U.S. National Basketball Association, Warner said in a blog posting.
"Although the group is now calling themselves 'Peace Crew,' the same membership was calling itself 'Terrorist Crew' as recently as December," Warner wrote.
As tensions in Gaza have intensified over the past few weeks, loosely organized hacking groups from countries such as Morocco, Turkey and Iran have defaced thousands of Web pages. This latest wave of attacks has mostly focused on Israeli sites, particularly easy targets belonging to individuals or small businesses. However, some high-profile targets have been hit too, such as news site Ynetnews.com.

MORE DETAILS ON SUPERSPEED USB 3.0

Intel's Jeff Ravencraft, who is also president of the USB Implementers Forum, discussed more details about USB 3.0 today at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas.
The focus of the new spec is three-fold: Retain backward compatibility, increase speed, and provide better power handling.
"USB has been the most successful interface in history of personal computing," Ravencraft noted. "Over 6 billion products are in the market, and over 2 billion ship a year now."

Compatability
Backward compatibility shows up in the new standard. USB 3.0 maintains the extensive device class driver infrastructure of USB 2.0, and a USB 2.0 devices will work via a 3.0 connector.

Performance
Performance improvements are notable, too. "We have research that shows that after 1 minute, 1.5 minutes waiting for a transaction, users get impatient.," says Ravencraft. "The transfer times have to get much faster." Hence the evolution of USB SuperSpeed's Sync & Go concept.
SuperSpeed USB 3.0's 5Gbps data rate (compared with Hi-Speed USB 2.0's 480Mbps) should help--and with very clear real-world advantages. For example: A 25GB HD movie will take 13.9 min to transfer with USB 2.0, and 70 seconds with USB 3.0, says Ravencraft.
Practically speaking, the implications are tremendous. Imagine not having to wait hours on end for your full-drive data backup to complete, or not having a lengthy delay when off-loading 32GB flash memory cards from your digital camera.

Power
As for power consumption, "power today is king for portable devices. It is the pinnacle, the focus for the PC, the notebook, and all devices. All of these new specs had to be optimized for power efficiency," says Ravencraft.
For example, there's no longer any device polling, so connected USB devices can enter a virtual sleep mode; more power will be able to go to the device (which will hopefully eliminate some of the power issues we see today with portable hard drives that require extra power from a second USB port); and USB 3.0 will no longer broadcast information to all connected devices, thereby saving power, too. Plus, when a device's battery is drained, it will now still be recognized by a laptop, for example, so you can charge it (this doesn't work with USB 2.0).
The intention is for SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to provide headroom for the next five years.

COMMERCIAL GAMES FOR DOWNLOAD AS FREEWARE

Who wants scads of commercial PC games for free? No, I don't mean the kind you download illicitly, silly. I'm talking about older but as well a few newer games, including the occasional award-winner, that publishers have made available over the years and on the house.
Games like Richard Garriot's pre-Ultima RPG Akalabeth (1979). Revolution Software's Beneath a Steel Sky (1994). The original Command & Conquer Red Alert (1996). SSI's Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993). Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999). Sierra's Tribes 2 (2001). Even S2 Games's just-last-January Savage 2 (2008).
No comment on Wikipedia's value as a repository for factual data, but its "List of Commercial Games Released as Freeware" is both convenient and verifiable. It's an alpha-sorted collection of older and some not-so-old titles with links to their Wiki pages, which in turn link to each game's freeware storehouse.
Have a look. There's Abe Lincoln Must Die! (2007), the fourth in the recently released gonzo Sam & Max series -- obviously bait for the other five episodes outstanding, but worth a look just the same.
Remember Bungie's pre-Halo Marathon Trilogy? Yep, all three, available gratis (and the first one's a whole 4.7MB!).
Pick of the litter? Possibly Virgin's SubSpace. It's a simple two-dimensional multiplayer space shooter, easy to learn, challenging to master, and pathologically habit-forming. It was also still being updated, according to Wikipedia, through 2007.