In a not-so-surprising move Apple has removed the suggestion that Mac users use an Anti Virus solution to protect themselves. They now claim that bulliten was old and that Macs are "safe right out of the box". This comes after the same recomendation was widley reported on.

In an article over at CNET, Elinor Mills says that "There are no known viruses in the wild that exploit a vulnerability in the Mac OS" This flies in the face of what is really going on out there though as yesterday Intego.com reported on a variant of the DNSchanger Virus for OSX, OSX.RSPlug.E Trojan Horse.

Apple has been under fire for never properly fixing an exploit in the way it handles DNS requests after this Virus was released earlier this year.

For owners of 8800/9800 and G200 series graphics cards, you may like to check out NVIDIA's new Graphics Plus "Power Pack #2" which was made available earlier today.

A quick heads up for potential buyers of Razer gear; in happy christmasy fashion they have decided to offer free shipping on any goodies purchased from razerzone.com until the end of the year.

Further to their feelings of generosity, if you spend $100 or more they will automatically ship you an exclusive razer super-swag pack, free of charge.

There are times when I wonder about the intelligence and indeed the sanity of groups that are anti-something. These groups claim to oppose this or that yet draw attention to the very things they want to stamp out.

The Inq has an example of this up today in the form of a Christian Gamer buying guide. The guide is being paraphrased from the original published by the The Timothy Plan. Although the guide is intended to warn parents to the dangers of the games they list, it seems to only serve to highlight the things that would excite a kid about the game and draw more attention to them.

Of course parents could just read the ratings on the game boxes and use some sense in letting their children play games above their age or maturity level; but that might be too much to ask for.

In the war against piracy we, the consumers, end up being the ones on the losing side. The game companies get to charge more, they bundle DRM that restricts our usage and in some cases adversely affects our systems like common Malware. While the Pirates sit back and laugh at them happily breaking the latest and greatest DRM with apparent ease.

According to Techinhiding.com, Gabe Newell (Co-founder of Valve) sees this DRM infection as "dumb" and that is reduces the value of the games. He goes on to say that the strategy of game development companies should be to increase value and not inflict the consumer with broken DRM policies.

Take a look at this interesting article here

There has been a lot of controversy about Google in the last few months.

Everything from its new Chrome Browser hoarding personal information (and screen shots of bank pages) to privacy issues over Street View.

Now after the tragic incident in Mumbai India it has come to light that the persons responsible used Google Earth to plan the attacks. Google Earth provides Satellite maps of..., well the whole Earth or pretty close to it. Many feel that Google is trampling on personal privacy and even National Security by providing a large amount of satellite and even ground level intelligence to anyone that wants it.

As many of you would now know, NVIDIA plans to give its G200 series a refresh in the near future by moving to a 55nm GT200b graphics core. Expreview learns from a photo of an early sample that cores marked with G200-103-B2 confirm they are 55nm chips.

The first graphics cards to hit the market with the new cores will be GeForce GTX 260s and are expected to see light of day as early as January next year. All other specs (clock speeds, stream processors etc.) are said to remain the same.

ASUS' new Rampage II Extreme for Core i7 showed immense promise right from the get go, giving extreme overclockers and enthusiasts a flawless base with a massive array of tweaking abilities to push the platform to its limits.

A Japanese overclocker who calls himself "Duck" seems to have nailed it with his Rampage II Extreme setup, taking a Core i7 CPU to world record speeds of 5510.9MHz. The validated CPU-Z screeny below gives confirmation of his latest feat :-

Intel and Hitachi have joined forces to confront the Enterprise SSD market.

The pair (both big companies in their own right) will develop new SSDs (SAS and Fibre Channel) for the enterprise market together with Intel manufacturing them and Hitachi selling the final product.

This union should product some very nice products indeed.

Yesterday the internet was flooded with rumors about the Core i7 being plagued by a similar TLB bug that killed performance (not to mention sales and reputation) on AMD's Phenom.

Well it seems that the people releasing the stories jumped the gun and did not do enough research, nor follow up with Intel. The lines in the Spec Update do not refer to the Nehalem (Core i7) at all but refer to a Core 2 (Conroe) bug that has been long since fixed.

Considering the number of reviews, tests, Overclocking, follow-ons, etc. that have been published on the i7 (all without having seen this error) I am not surprised to find out this turned out to be a false rumor in the end.