With the new Windows 7 Public Beta now being freely distributed to millions of people until Jan 24 when they pull the plug, Ars Technica has provided a full insight which talks about its features, progress and overall characteristics which should help many of you determine whether or not you'd like to grab a copy yourselves and give it a whirl.

The full review can be located here.

A group of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have found a cure for one of the most insidious botnet worms out.

Called the Storm Worm Botnet, this devious little bit of code turned millions of systems into drones. Even after a concerted effort to remove this bug there remains hundreds of thousands of systems still infected.

The team basically reversed engineered the code from infection down to transmission of commands.

Following in our paranoia and big-brother vein today we find an interesting and potentially scary article over at Fudzilla.

It seems the Jobs Mob wants to put tiny hidden cameras on all of their equipment. These cameras could be turned on remotely to view the person sitting at the system.

On the surface Apple is claiming this is a theft deterrent. Under the surface it is very concerning. It would be possible for malicious code to turn this on also. This means that a hacker could sit back and take pictures of you or video of what you are doing. I think this one should go in the "Bad-Idea" drawer.

The Home Office of the UK Government has a new plan to protect its citizens from the boogieman.

Under this new plan ALL (yes all) e-mails sent and received by everyone would be stored by individual ISPs for a period of one year. Logistically this means that ISPs will need to add additional storage to cope with the extra data.

Realistically this means (considering the fact that 90% of e-mails are spam) that ISPs will have to maintain Spam e-mails sent and received for one year.

President Elect Obama is still clinging to his blackberry despite the potential security risks.

For some odd reason he feels the need to maintain a publicly controlled communication device that can be tracked by not one but three spate methods. In addition to being able to pinpoint its location by the unique GPS transceiver in the device you can also use cell tower pings and radio frequency triangulation to nail him down. In fact using Cell Tower Data Pings is a proven method for tracking criminals and finding their patterns. Not good for a President.

This is in addition to the insecure RIM network that opens all of his emails to the hackers out there.

Whilst in attendance at CES, a storage mob by the name of pureSilicon made it big by introducing the world's largest capacity solid state drive released to date; a whopping 1TB model dubbed part of the new Nitro series.

The 1TB Nitro SSD is the most compact SSD per gigabyte: 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor -- at least three times greater than any other SSD on the market. This high density in a small form factor has been achieved through innovative engineering techniques coupled with advanced industrial design that yields an exceptionally thin enclosure.

Cooler Master invited us to their suite in the Palms Hotel and Casino along with 200 or so of their closest friends. Among the products on display were the new V10 peltier assisted CPU cooler and various pieces from the new Sniper Collection.

Chad Sebring is anxiously waiting on the first V10 sample to arrive at the TweakTown Lab and a preview should be ready by the middle of next week. The cooler was so impressive that our pictures didn't turn out so you will just have to wait on Chad's exclusive preview.

When you are going to do something, you might as well go and do it right. That tends to be the idea around here anyway.

So, our lovely friends over at Patriot Memory sent over four of their fast 128GB Warp II SSD drives and our equally cool friends at Areca also sent over one of their impressive ARC-1231ML RAID controller cards. That's a recipe for tremendous speed. Just how fast? Check out this screenshot from HD Tune Pro - it is with the four drives in RAID 0.

Most of the memory industry is in a steady state with little to no new products forecast due to low profit margins. Instead of standing still Crucial has taken the opportunity to refresh their Ballistix Tracer product line.

Crucial has already had a special edition Ballistix product in red for several months but has now made a standard red that is accompanied by blue and green. Crucial did not have a set of Ballistix Red on hand when I was at the event but TweakTown will have some in house for testing in the coming weeks.

Systemax and AMD teamed up again this year at CES 2009 to co-sponsor the 12th Annual "Build Your Own PC Race For Charity." Hosted by TigerDirect and CompUSA, this year's event was held at the fabulous Wynn Resort in Las Vegas on January 8, 2009, and will was highlighted by a race between 30 of the top technology journalists from major media outlets like CNBC, PC World, Network World and TweakTown. The objective of the race is to determine who can assemble one of Systemax's state-of-the-art computers with an AMD Phenom™ processor in the fastest time.

"Build Your Own PC Race" is a fun charity event for the PC editorial community supporting elementary and secondary schools and promoting Systemax PCs based on AMD Phenom™ CPUs. Public Relations opportunities for sponsors' products are created by matching them up with members of the related trade press giving the opportunity for exposure and story pitches.