Griffin Technologies' iTrip iPod add-on is illegal in the UK, British distributor A M Micro has said. "The iTrip connects to an iPod and transmits songs by FM radio to any radio receiver in the vicinity. While its operation in the US is permitted by the Federal Communications Commission, over here the device contravenes the UK Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949."

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Broadcom introduced on Wednesday a 10 gigabit (Gb) Ethernet multi-layer switch designed to meet enterprise network needs. "The company's BCM5673 switch offers wire-speed delivery over CX4 copper for Layer 2 through 7 switching and routing. The single-chip device is aimed at the stackable 24- and 48-port Ethernet device market, the company said."

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FirewireDirect.com on Wednesday debuted the StingRay 800, a dual-interface, high-speed desktop storage system that it said was the first in a series it plans to roll out this year. "The StingRay 800 connects to Windows- or Mac-based machines via either the USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 port. The latter allows data transmission speeds of up to 800Mbps, said FirewireDirect, and users should see sustained reads from the storage device of more than 50MB per second and writes of around 40MB per second."

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Consumer electronics giant Sony Corp said on Tuesday it would recall 340,000 Trinitron televisions in Japan due to defective parts. "Sony said problems with capacitors could cause loss of the power supply to the TVs, and it would repair them free of charge."

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ATI introduced its latest workstation-oriented FireGL cards today, the X2-256 and the T2-128. "The former is based on the Radeon 9800 Pro core - branded the FGL9800 in this case - and comes equipped with 256MB of DDR video memory and twin DVI-I interfaces. The card's graphics chip provides eight parallel rendering pipelines and four parallel geometry engines, along with ATI's latest programmable vertex and pixel shader technologies."

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An 802.11g-compatible wireless widescreen notebook was introduced Monday by eMachines. "The $1,199 M5310 incudes an AMD Athlon 2400+ processor, 15.4-inch LCD screen, 40 GB hard drive, 512 MB DDR memory, CD-RW/DVD combination drive; weight is 6.5 lbs. The notebook measures 1.36 x 14 x 10-inches."

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U.S. Robotics has released the 802.11g Wireless Turbo family, powered by "accelerator technology" that the company says increases performance levels up to 100 Mbps on a single channel. "The Wireless Turbo portfolio includes a router, multi-function access point, PCI adapter and PC card."

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Microsoft has just released its new DirectX 9.0b API, and from early reports, there haven't been any corrupted hard drives yet. However, as usual, if any of you decide to install it, feel free to email me with your experiences.

Download the web update here, and the redistributable version here.

NVIDIA Delivers Quadro FX Go700

NVIDIA today introduced the NVIDIA Quadro® FX Go700 mobile workstation graphics solution. "Designed for professional users who demand exceptional performance and flexibility, the NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700 is the first mobile workstation solution to bring the power of full programmability to market--allowing engineers and artists to accurately represent real-world material characteristics, such as corrosion between metals or highlighted human hair, in real-time within application software."

Read the entire press release here.

IBM to ax low-end storage products

Big Blue announced on its Web site earlier this month that it will stop taking orders for its TotalStorage NAS 100 and TotalStorage NAS 200 products as of Aug. 29. IBM will not replace the Windows-based storage units with newer products, company spokesman Clint Roswell said Tuesday. ""The lower-end NAS boxes serve a segment of the marketplace very well, but one that does not appeal to many IBM customers," Roswell said."

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Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from 1 minute 41 seconds. "The method involves using large lookup tables to match encoded passwords to the original text entered by a pereson, thus speeding the calculations required to break the codes. Called a time-memory trade-off, the situation means that an attacker with an abundance of computer memory can reduce the time it takes to break a secret code."

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Squeezing, twisting, nodding and drawing shapes with fingers are some ways that users may interact with portable computers of the future. "A team of researchers at Sony's Interaction Lab in Tokyo is looking at bending as a way of interfacing with credit card-sized computers."

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Japanese electronics firm NEC has announced a water-cooling system for notebooks, desktops and servers that promises less noise and greater cooling power compared with standard air-cooling. "It is hoping to make its water-cooling module a de facto standard within the computer industry when it is licensed to manufacturers in two years' time, said the company."

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Pasta for dinner? At a touch of a button, LG's glossy Internet-equipped refrigerator will display a mouthwatering dish with a recipe. An automatic inventory will show what's inside without opening the door. "It's a fridge with a brain that can place orders to the nearest grocery store when you are running low on tomato sauce. Not only that. Its 15-inch flat door-mounted screen can turn into a television, a stereo or even a digital camera."

More information is available here.

Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it has fixed another security flaw in its Internet Passport service. The flaw could allow hackers to hijack some older accounts. "Microsoft senior manager Jeff Jones said he believes no Passport account has been stolen. He declined to say how many people were at risk, but said the flaw affected only a small number of users who had created their accounts more than four years ago. As part of its repair efforts late Monday, Microsoft briefly prevented some Passport users from manually changing their passwords."

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SiS releases 661FX chipset, first to support single-channel DDR 800MHz FSB

Taiwanese chipset maker Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) on July 1 released the SiS661FX, the first integrated Pentium 4 motherboard chipset supporting a 800MHz FSB (front-side bus) and single-channel DDR.

More here at DigiTimes

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