Free Republic

<p>A founding member of the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois met in New York City tonight with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p> <p>Jodie Evans, who co-hosted Obama's first major fundraiser in Hollywood in February 2007 just after Obama announced his candidacy and is a top fundraiser and donor to Obama's campaign, led a delegation of leftist anti-American groups that held a private meeting near the United Nations. The stated purpose of the meeting was to "serve as an opening for diplomatic resolution" to prevent war between Iran and the United States.</p>

Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptopAt the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, supreme prophet of digital connectivity, revealed a strange tent-like object. It was designed to change the world and to cost $100. It was a solar-powered laptop. Millions would be distributed to children in the developing world, bringing them connection, education, enlightenment and freedom of information. The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval. And then some of them tried to kill it. Microsoft, makers of most of the computer software in the world,...

Intel Corporation is presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12 that describes features and capabilities of its first-ever forthcoming “many-core” blueprint or architecture codenamed “Larrabee.” Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications. The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based...

(Intel is a sponsor of SVW)Intel announced plans for a new business group manufacturing system-on-a-chip (SOC) semiconductors. SOCs are souped-up microprocessors that are tuned for specific types of devices, such as mobile internet devices, smart phones, or medical devices.Intel's SOC chips combine a microprocessor with memory, graphics, and embedded software plus specialized chip and software functions.SOCs can shrink almost an entire board of chips into just one or two chips. This makes digital products more reliable and less expensive to make.Intel predicts that within a few years there will likely be billions of digital devices connected to the Internet. Most...

Security researcher and author Kris Kaspersky plans to demonstrate how an attacker can target flaws in Intel's microprocessors to remotely attack a computer using JavaScript or TCP/IP packets, regardless of what operating system the computer is running. Kaspersky will demonstrate how such an attack can be made in a presentation at the upcoming Hack In The Box (HITB) Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during October. The proof-of-concept attacks will show how processor bugs, called errata, can be exploited using certain instruction sequences and a knowledge of how Java compilers work, allowing an attacker to take control of the...

DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. has chosen Intel Corp. to supply chips and other technology for its big computer-animation operations, a shift that will cost Advanced Micro Devices Inc. one of its most prestigious customers. The pact is expected to replace the studio's computing hardware -- which now includes 1,500 Hewlett-Packard Co. server systems and 1,000 workstations that use AMD microprocessors -- with new H-P systems that use Intel chips. DreamWorks Animation said the resulting increase in computing power would substantially shorten the time needed for many computing chores and aid the studio's planned shift next year to 3-D animation. "For...

Excerpt - PCW: Can you share any funny, interesting, or unusual anecdotes about the 8086 that we haven't covered already? SM: I always regret that I didn't fix up some idiosyncrasies of the 8080 when I had a chance. For example, the 8080 stores the low-order byte of a 16-bit value before the high-order byte. The reason for that goes back to the 8008, which did it that way to mimic the behavior of a bit-serial processor designed by Datapoint (a bit-serial processor needs to see the least significant bits first so that it can correctly handle carries when doing...

If Congress needed a kick in the pants to get moving on intelligence reform, this is it: A San Francisco judge ruled Wednesday that the federal government’s program to spy on terrorists and their affiliates is not protected by the “state secrets” privilege. This means that government officials and companies that helped to implement the program may be forced to testify about its structure and operations. If those aren’t state secrets, what is?

Intel Corp. disclosed that an internal team has been working on technology for use in solar panels, and now is spinning off that effort to form a new company. The chip maker said the company, SpectraWatt Inc., will make photovoltaic cells, the primary component in solar panels that use sunlight to generate electricity. It will receive $50 million in initial funding from a consortium including Intel's venture capital arm, Goldman Sach's Cogentrix Energy subsidiary, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund, and Solon AG, a German solar-panel maker. Intel's move is the latest in a scramble among Silicon Valley companies to...

Korea Fines Intel $25 Million for Antitrust Violations Steven Schwankert and Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service Wed Jun 4, 11:10 PM ET The Korea Fair Trade Commission has fined Intel a reported 26 billion won (US$25.42 million) for abusing its dominant position in the microprocessor market, by offering rebates to South Korean computer makers in a way that unfairly harmed its rival Advanced Micro Devices. Intel said it was unhappy with the ruling and indicated that it will appeal it to the high court in Seoul. Bruce Sewell, Intel general counsel, said Intel believes the Fair Trade Commission did not...

WASHINGTON - A turf war is being waged in the closed world of U.S. intelligence agencies that could disrupt how spy operations are carried out around the world, according to former and current CIA officials. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which for the past four years has overseen U.S. intelligence agencies, is angling for more power over and insight into spy operations worldwide. At stake is the authority of the CIA's legendary station chiefs, who for 60 years have enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in overseas intelligence operations. In 2005, the director designated an intelligence officer...

The U.S. is its own worst enemy when it comes to the desperately important task of recruiting immigrants as spies, analysts and translators in the war on terror, new Americans are telling intelligence officials. The government's policies raise suspicions and fear in the immigrants' home countries and disturb potential recruits here who might otherwise want to help. The U.S. knows it needs the help. At the heart of a Friday summit with immigrant groups was a stark reality: The intelligence agencies lack people who can speak the languages that are needed most, such as Arabic, Farsi and Pashtu. More importantly,...

The technological and economical development of Scandinavia (including Finland) is today more groundbreking than anywhere else in the world. The investments being made in relation to population size is mind-boggling. Despite a mere population of 25 million inhabitants, the combined GDP of the Scandinavian countries today ridicules that of a Russia often viewed to be a "reborn" super power "on the go" (combined Scandinavian GDP is actually 125% that of of Russia - and the gap is widening!!) But, let's focus on telecommunications here; Five bidders have paid €226 million ($346 million) for fourth generation (4G), super-fast mobile telephony licences,...

As Intel and AMD near the end of the discovery process in their US antitrust battle, the two companies have begun fighting over whose testimony will make it to the big dance. In a legal filing, AMD has pointed to the employees at some of the technology world's biggest names - HP, Dell, IBM and others - who it thinks will help make its case. Intel has responded in kind, and it's now up to a judge to decide on the strength of the vendors' arguments. Following a dispute over the number of depositions allowed in the case, Special Master...

In a move that could have broad implications for the high-performance computing (HPC) market, Intel and Cray have announced a broad collaboration that will see engineers from the two companies work together on future products and projects.With the first Intel-Cray products appearing in the 2010-2011 timeframe, it's clear that three Intel technologies have caught Cray's eye: the native 32nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) scheme, and the forthcoming discrete, x86-based graphics product, codenamed Larrabee. Cray will plug all of these components into its SeaStar interconnect fabric, and when combined with Cray Linux they'll make for an HPC and...

FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. — One of the most experienced interrogators in the Defense Department looked straight into Ahmed's eyes and asked him for the third time: "Ahmed, what insurgent organization do you belong to?" Sitting in the room with no windows, Ahmed refused to answer the interrogator's questions. He was stoic — similar to many al Qaeda insurgents the interrogator had questioned at the detention center at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But, this time, things were different. Ahmed, who uses an alias, was practicing as an advanced interrogation student at Fort Huachuca, the nation's largest intelligence-training facility...

The United States has agreed to provide Israel with access to its BMEWS (ballistic missile early warning system). The half century old system uses radars and satellites to monitor the planet for ballistic missile launchers (specifically ICBMs, but any large missile launch is detected.) Twice before, in 1991 and 2003, the U.S. allowed Israel to plug into BMEWS (to get warning of Iraqi missile launches). This time around, BMEWS will give Israel warning about any Iranian ballistic missiles headed west. Early on, BMEWS consisted of long range radars that could spot warheads coming over the north pole (from Russia). When...

FBI chief blames Britain’s laws for the ‘dark hole’ in terror intelligence 13th April 2008 The war on terror is being hindered by restrictive British law which has created a "dark hole of intelligence", the director of the FBI has claimed. Robert Mueller, America's top counter-terrorist official, said in an exclusive interview that he sometimes felt "frustration" at MI5 and Scotland Yard's inability to obtain critical information from suspects. He blamed Britain's banning of plea-bargaining – which, in America, means suspects can receive much lighter sentences in return for revealing everything they know about other members of their cell and...

Intel 'will survive US recession' By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini says increasingly faster chips will drive the use of Wimax wirelss broadband. Intel will ride out any US recession and make a success of Wimax wireless broadband, the firm's chief executive Paul Otellini has told BBC News. He said: "People turn to computers to improve productivity during downturn, because at the end of the day the computer is a tool for productivity." Intel is the world's largest chip maker for desktops and laptops. Answering BBC News users' questions, he said Intel's developing world...

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq, March 19, 2008 – Multinational Division Center formed in spring 2007 as part of the U.S. troop surge. The progress made since then has been well-documented, as soldiers have built a network of patrol bases covering the “belts” of suburbs and agricultural communities surrounding southern and eastern Baghdad. What is less well-known is the surge in support required from other U.S. government agencies in bringing about those gains. In Multinational Division Center, one of the most significant of those surge partners is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The NGA – a Defense Department support agency and a member...

Intel Corp. today announced that it expects to ship a six-core processor to resellers in the second half of this year. With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel's new 45 nanometer technology, according to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group."The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," Gelsinger said during a press briefing today about the company's product road map and its upcoming Intel Developer Forum, slated to be held next month in Shanghai....

A new study commissioned by the Pentagon has reviewed over 600,000 documents captured in the invasion of Iraq, and the analysis shows no evidence of operational ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. It did find operational ties and more between Saddam and other terrorist groups, however, which will likely be lost in an avalanche of I-told-you-sos: An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this...

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices in order to "re-architect it". The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMD's x86 license is a non-transferable one... Indeed, shareholders of AMD are hardly pleased with the company's performance in the recent quarters as well as issues with the launch of quad-core microprocessors and the release of DirectX 10 graphics processing units. Nevertheless,...

The problem is not merely that someone who is himself so clearly a "rabid ideologue" might have been responsible for vetting the Iran NIE and then letting a skewed declassified summary of it out the door. Given how recently Immerman took his job, his precise role in the fiasco is unclear, although it is suggestive that his direct supervisor is Thomas Fingar, one of the authors of the controversial document. The real problem is that someone like Immerman, nakedly contemptuous of the administration in which he nonetheless sought a job, was appointed to a position of such high responsibility--or any...

Intel Corp. may release six-core microprocessors as early as in the second half of this year, according to a number of media reports. However, if those claims are correct, then it may mean not only another powerful central processing unit for Intel and a threat to chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but also a further delay in unification of Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon platforms. Intel needs a chip to update its multi-processor (MP) enterprise server platform this year as no Nehalem-based microprocessor for the MP market segment is planned for 2008... However, it seems like unified Quick Path Interconnect...

Last week Microsoft rolled out three prerequisite updates to prepare users computers for the first service pack for Windows Vista. However, one of these updates apparently caused serious issues among some users, prompting Microsoft to quickly suspend automatic installations of KB937287 after customers complained that their PCs wouldn't boot up properly once the update had been applied. For affected users who already received the update, the only solution is to reboot their computers, boot from their original Vista disc and restore their computer to a state several days prior. However, some users have reported hardware and hard disk problems after...

European Union antitrust regulators expanded their investigation of Intel before the world's largest chipmaker had a chance to answer pending charges, the chairman of Intel's board said on Thursday. Asked whether he was surprised that the European Commission had raided Intel in a new probe while still pursuing it on other charges, Craig Barrett said: "You have to ask the EU why they are expanding it at this stage." ...The Commission this month raided Intel offices in Munich and retailers in Germany, France and Britain, seeking evidence they acted illegally to exclude rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices... Also on Thursday,...

For those who crave more performance than what four processing cores and a single graphics card can deliver today, Intel Corporation has introduced the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Formerly codenamed "Skulltrail," this is one of the first enthusiast desktop platforms to support two Intel quad core processors for a total of eight processing engines and a choice of multi-card graphics solutions from either ATI or NVIDIA. "When it comes to delivering innovation to the ultimate enthusiast, our new 8-core desktop platform is a winner," said Jeff McCrea, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home...

<p>The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has detained at an unknown location a former Sudanese Air Force pilot who may have been planning to hijack an airliner and fly it into a target in the United States, U.S. officials told CNN on Friday.</p>

Excerpt - DALLAS (AP) — Dell Inc. has stopped selling many computers with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on its Web site, although it will continue selling some through retailers. The news was a setback for AMD, which wooed Dell for years before breaking the computer maker's exclusive supplier relationship with Intel Corp. in 2006. Intel still made the processors used in most computers sold on Dell.com. But AMD raised its profile in the chip field by being inside some Dell machines. Shares of Dell rose 2 cents, to $19.45, while AMD shares fell 25 cents, or 3.8 percent,...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2008 – The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency gave the Senate Intelligence Committee an assessment of military threats confronting the United States during testimony before the panel yesterday. Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples told the committee that several global military trends concern the U.S. armed forces. He then went on to delineate specific threats to the United States, its allies and its interests. General threats include proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, more mobile and accurate ballistic missiles, improvised explosive devices and suicide weapons as weapons of choice for terrorists, and the continued development of...

You horrible cynics out there looked at Intel's mushy Montvale chip and scoffed. "That's the end of the Itanic." Ah, but there's a fresh monster on the horizon known as Tukwila, and systems based on that puppy should fly if its brand new QuickPath interconnect arrives as expected. Next week Intel will disclose details on QuickPath at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. [It's like the Folsom Street Fair - Google at your own risk - but with more brain and less testicle torture - Ed.] What will Intel say? Well, according to the conference program, showgoers...

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday that his office has subpoenaed documents and information from Intel Corp. in an antitrust probe into whether the semiconductor giant tried to coerce customers to exclude rivals from the marketplace. In a press release, Mr. Cuomo said the subpoena is seeking documents and information concerning Intel's pricing practices and possible attempts to exclude competitors, including its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., through Intel's dominate position in the market, "Our investigation is focused on determining whether Intel has improperly used monopoly power to exclude competitors or stifle innovation," Mr. Cuomo said...

LAS VEGAS (MarketWatch) - Intel Corp. demonstrated that its commitment to WiMax, a next generation wireless technology, has not wavered even after the collapse of a important partnership between Sprint and Clearwire - two of the technology's strongest proponents - in November. At the Consumer Electronics Show, the Santa Clara chip maker used a small fleet of cars to drive the press and other guests around to demonstrate the power of the wide-ranging wireless technology. WiMax, which has a much larger range than the popular Wi-Fi standard, can be used in rural environments, congested cities with skyscrapers, and mountainous regions....

“BLOWBACK” is an intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Some in the intelligence community have been working with liberal journalists and Democrats on Capitol Hill to embarrass President Bush and to stymie his foreign policy initiatives. The most successful of these covert operations was the Valerie Plame affair, in which White House officials were falsely blamed for “outing” a CIA undercover officer who was not in fact undercover. (It was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Sixty years after transistors were invented and nearly five decades since they were first integrated into silicon chips, the tiny on-off switches dubbed the "nerve cells" of the information age are starting to show their age. The devices - whose miniaturization over time set in motion the race for faster, smaller and cheaper electronics - have been shrunk so much that the day is approaching when it will be physically impossible to make them even tinier. Once chip makers can't squeeze any more into the same-sized slice of silicon, the dramatic performance gains and cost...

Already new materials are creeping into modern chips. As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip. To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium. The material's development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s. But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger...

Everyone always claims to be the fastest in X or Y. We know that and accept that. Such was not the case with the Pentium 4, or at least for one small group of people. They opted to take Intel to court because Intel's claims of performance boosts weren't quite factual. Then again, anyone who used the Pentium 4 through its various iterations remembers how dismal it was in the beginning. Was it really worth suing over? Now, years later, a judge has said no. Or, at least, he has said that a lawsuit against Intel for "misrepresenting" the speed...

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- IBM announced two major scientific achievements Thursday, both in the field of nanotechnology. Researchers said the breakthroughs will enable scientists to further explore the building of structures and devices out of ultra-tiny components as small as a few atoms or molecules. In the first report, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., describe major progress in identifying a property called magnetic anisotropy, which determines an atom’s ability to store information. That research, said IBM, could lead to storage of as many as 30,000 movies in a device the size of an...

Intel Cites Breakthrough in Transistor Design By Duncan Martell SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) has devised a new structure for transistors -- the tiny switches that make up semiconductors -- in a development it said could lead to microprocessors that run at blazing speeds and consume far less power than conventional ones. The technology, Intel said, solves two of the more intractable problems facing the development and manufacture of microprocessors today as more and more transistors are packed onto each chip: power consumption and heat. In addition, as the geometries on chips become ever smaller, it ...

Big Blue researchers’ feat suggests the material could be a candidate to replace silicon in chips. IBM researchers have achieved a milestone by creating an integrated circuit out of a single carbon nanotube, a feat that makes the material a likely candidate to replace silicon as the main ingredient for making chips. Big Blue plans to detail the accomplishment in the journal Science on Friday. Long thought to be a good candidate for replacing silicon, carbon nanotube has posed great challenges for scientists who try to coax transistors out of the material and create an integrated circuit (IC). ICs are...

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips Out of order speculation By: Thursday 18 August 2005, 07:20 AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different. If it was just a Pentium M variant I don’t think there’d be such a fuss about it. Intel is portraying this as the biggest change since the original P4, yet there have been several...

AMD WILL ONLY LAUNCH the Phenom 9500 and 9600. Even though the channel already got its hands on the Phenom 9700 (2.4 GHz) part, it will have to be pulled off from the shelves. In a weird deja-vu, it turns out that the company found an errata in the TLB (Transition Lookaside Buffer), just like Intel did earlier this year with complete Core marchitecture. However, unlike Intel, that has a micro-code update function in all of its CPUs, AMD is forced to delay the introduction of the part. This comes as a huge hit to AMD, at the time that...

Japan's Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. said on Tuesday they would jointly develop 32-nanometre chips to better keep up with rivals. The companies will continue talks about jointly producing the chips, and aim to reach a decision in 2008, they said. The two had also approached Fujitsu Ltd, but spokesman Etsuro Yamada declined to comment on whether or not Fujitsu would join the group, only saying that "Fujitsu was considering various options." Chip makers are racing to halve the production cost per function of a chip every year or two. Samsung Electronics Co., IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., Infineon...

<p>Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.</p>

FORT HUACHUCA — The defense of the United States is going to require highly trained military intelligence professions, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Friday. Preparing critical intelligence providers is being done on this Southern Arizona post, said U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who assumed the chairmanship of the committee in January. Having an intelligence force that is the best will ensure the United States can counter any future enemy, he said. “It’s going to be the intelligence world that makes the difference,” he said after spending an afternoon on the post. It was Skelton’s first trip...

IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) improved their standings Monday in the newest tally of the world's fastest 500 computers, a closely watched measure of progress in the industry. The list, published twice a year by academic researchers, once again was topped by an IBM Corp. supercomputer in the Lawrence Livermore national nuclear lab. The BlueGene/L system, as it is known, was recently upgraded and showed the ability to perform at 478 teraflops - 478 trillion calculations per second. That's tens of thousands of times faster than your average desktop PC today. The No. 2 performer was an IBM supercomputer...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of processors Monday, flexing its manufacturing muscle with a sophisticated new process that crams up to 40 percent more transistors onto the company's chips. The world's largest semiconductor company expects to start shipping 16 new microprocessors -- which also boast inventive new materials to stanch electricity loss -- for use in servers and high-end gaming PCs . The most complex chips being launched Monday have 820 million transistors, compared with the 582 million transistors on the same chips built using the current standard technology. Intel's first chips,...

WASHINGTON -The U.S. government spent $43.5 billion on intelligence in 2007, according to the first official disclosure under a new law implementing recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell released the newly declassified figure Tuesday. In a statement, the DNI said there would be no additional disclosures of classified budget information beyond the overall spending figure because "such disclosures could harm national security." How the money is divided among the 16 intelligence agencies and exactly what it is spent on is classified. It includes salaries for about 100,000 people, multibillion dollar secret satellite programs, aircraft,...

The question of how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexicans entering the United States each year has become a divisive issue across the country. President Bush signed a bill last year that authorized the construction of a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, which would cost billions of dollars. Related Stories Mexican President Felipe Calderon has called the idea of building the fence "deplorable," and said today on "Good Morning America" that he wanted to strengthen the Mexican economy to keep Mexicans there. "Let me tell you, I think that the only way to stop migration...