News Inventory

The computer revolution has been powered by chips that operated at ever-higher frequencies. From the Ataris and Commodores of the late 1970s, which ran at roughly one megahertz, to today's devices that run at nearly four gigahertz, one year's star at the electronics store was typically outdone by higher speeds in the next year's model. But that era of progress may be drawing to a close. Today, Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is revealing details about a new chip that seeks to improve performance ... Read More

George Ledin teaches students how to write viruses, and it makes computer-security software firms sick. In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers—they're students in a computer-security class at ... Read More