CISPA Passes The House

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Information and Security Protection Act late Thursday despite concerns over user privacy, the specter of SOPA/PIPA, and a veto threat from the Obama administration. The idea behind CISPA is to empower the government and corporations to work together to better protect American infrastructure from foreign attacks. But many civil liberties groups say the bill is too broad and threatens user privacy.

The Center for Democracy and Technology said it is "disappointed that CISPA passed the House in such flawed form." And the Electronic Frontier Foundation condemned the vote, saying it "would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government."

There's little doubt that online security is a serious issue for large corporations. Recent reports of online security breaches have involved such high-profile targets as Google, security firm RSA, Verisign, and credit card processing company Global Payments. But whether CISPA is the right legislation to tackle those concerns is hotly debated.

So what is CISPA? Should you be concerned about this legislation? Here's what you need to know.

What Does CISPA Do?

CISPA allows the government to share classified information about security threats with select American companies. These corporations can then use that information to better protect their infrastructure such as computer networks containing intellectual property and trade secrets. The bill also allows corporations to share information relating to cyber security with the authorities and protects those companies against privacy lawsuits. Critics say an Internet Service Provider would be free to share a customer's private communications such as e-mail and instant messages without a court order if the information related to a cyber security concern.

CISPA allows this information to be used not only to protect against cyber attacks, but also to protect individuals from bodily harm, protect children from sexual exploitation, and for general American national security.

[RELATED: How To Encrypt Your E-Mail]

CISPA would shield companies from privacy-related lawsuits brought by customers. And corporations could share information relating to cyber security with each other without fear of the government bringing an antitrust suit against them.

Who Supports the Bill?

CISPA has broad support in the House of Representatives (you can find the CISPA vote count here), and many well known tech companies and trade associations also support the bill including AT&T, CTIA, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon. You can find a list of CISPA supporters here.

What are the Critics Saying?

Most critics are concerned that CISPA, if it became law, would allow for widespread surveillance of online personal communications. The American Civil Liberties Union says "CISPA gives companies the authority to share [private and sensitive] information with the National Security Agency or other elements of the Department of Defense, who could keep it forever."

The Center for Democracy and Technology raised concern over two core issues in CISPA: "the flow of information from the private sector directly to NSA and the use of that information for national security purposes unrelated to cyber security."

What Do Supporters Say?

CISPA allows U.S. Companies to "better protect themselves from dangerous economic predators," according to a statement from the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"We can’t stand by and do nothing as U.S. companies are hemorrhaging from the cyber looting coming from nation states like China and Russia,” Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) said. “America will be a little safer and our economy better protected from foreign cyber predators with this legislation."

What's Next?

Now that CISPA has passed the House it moves on for review in the Senate, which is also considering its own legislation on cyber security. It's not clear what kind of reception CISPA will there. Attempts by PCWorld to reach several senators for comment were unsuccessful. However, one congressional staff member, who declined to be identified discussing CISPA before it reaches the Senate floor, says lawmakers were caught off guard by the outcry over the SOPA/PIPA online anti-piracy legislation earlier this year. Public reaction to CISPA could have a big impact on the Senate vote, the source said.

If CISPA were to pass the Senate it could also be stopped by President Obama. On Wednesday, the Obama Administration issued a statement [PDF] saying the president's advisers recommend he veto the bill. "Legislation should address core critical infrastructure vulnerabilities without sacrificing the fundamental values of privacy and civil liberties for our citizens,"by ian paul ,pc world

AMD Launches Radeon 7700M, 7800M, and 7900M GPUs

AMD pushed out the first of their Southern Islands GPUs for the desktop, the HD 7970. Around the same time, AMD also announced their first 7000M mobile GPUs. Since then, AMD has gone on to launch the HD 7950, the HD 7750/7770, and the HD 7850/7870. Meanwhile, on the mobile front we’ve had to sit back and wait…and wait. Today, the waiting ends, at least for one of the parts: the HD 7970M is now shipping in select notebooks, and the other GPUs will likely start showing up in other laptops and notebooks over the coming weeks.

As is customary for AMD and NVIDIA, new GPUs debut on the desktop, and after a while they trickle down into the mobile world. NVIDIA actually pulled a fast one with GK107 actually coming out ahead of the desktop GK104, which may be a sign of the changing times, but AMD’s GCN is sticking with the traditional route of using lower clocked power optimized versions of already launched desktop chips for their mobile parts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that from a business standpoint, but it does make laptop users feel like second class citizens. Before we continue the discussion, let’s list the specs.

AMD Radeon HD 7900M, 7800M, and 7700M
	Radeon HD 7900M	Radeon HD 7800M	Radeon HD 7700M
Core Name	Wimbledon	Heathrow	Chelsea
Stream Processors	1280	640	512
Texture Units	80	40	32
ROPs	32	16	16
Z/Stencil	128	64	64
L2 Cache	512KB	512KB	512KB
Core Clock	850MHz	800MHz	675MHz
Memory Clock	4.8GHz	4.0GHz	4.0GHz
Memory Type	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth	153.6GB/s	64GB/s	64GB/s
PCI Express	3.0	3.0	2.1

Starting at the high end, AMD will have the 7900M series. Note that there will be more than one part for each family, but AMD is currently providing the configuration for the highest performance parts in each category. At the top, the HD 7970M uses a fully enabled Pitcairn core. The GPU clock is 850MHz compared to 1000MHz (stock) on the desktop HD 7870, but surprisingly AMD is going whole hog on the RAM and featuring 2GB of 4.8GHz GDDR5. That makes the 96GB/s bandwidth of NVIDIA’s GTX 580M/675M positively pale in comparison, and we’d wager the GPU performance will easily reclaim the mobile performance crown—at least until NVIDIA launches the inevitable GTX 680M, but we don’t know when that will be. Going by the core clocks, the HD 7970M should be about 15% slower than the HD 7870, and given the fact that no consumer laptops have yet shipped with an LCD resolution above 1920x1200, you can look at our HD 7870 benchmarks and subtract 15% to get a pretty good idea of how the HD 7970M will perform. AMD was also kind enough to provide a comparison slide with their own benchmarks, showing performance relative to the HD 6990M:

HD 6990M was certainly no slouch as far as mobile gaming is concerned; you can see how it stacked up against the GTX 580M in our Alienware M18x head-to-head in both single- and dual-GPU configurations. The quick summary is that across the eight games we tested last year, SLI GTX 580M averaged out to approximately 8% faster than CrossFire HD 6990M; for single GPUs, the result is more in NVIDIA’s favor: the GTX 580M was 8% faster at our Ultra settings, and 17% faster at our High settings. Assuming AMD’s numbers are correct (and given the amount of memory bandwidth and GPU cores we’re looking at, we see no reason why they wouldn’t be), it looks like HD 7970M will be around 45% faster than the HD 6990M on average, or about 25% faster than a single GTX 580M. AMD also presented some data showing their estimate of performance results for HD 7970M vs. GTX 675M, which you can see below, though it appears that information was simulated using desktop hardware (Core i7-2600K). Now we can wait for NVIDIA’s inevitable response with a high-end mobile Kepler.

The other two GPUs are an interesting pair. Both use the Cape Verde core, but where the 7800M is a fully enabled 640 core part, the 7700M disables a couple compute clusters and ends up with 512 cores and 32 texture units. AMD also clocks the 7700M lower, most likely to hit lower TDP targets for laptops rather than because of inherent limitations with the chips. Compared to the desktop parts, the (presumed) HD 7870M will run the core at 800MHz vs. 1000MHz on the HD 7770 GHz Edition, and memory is at 4GHz effective compared to 4.5GHz on the desktop parts. For the (again presumed) HD 7770M, the core will run at 675MHz compared to 800MHz on the desktop HD 7750.
There’s one other big difference between the HD 7700M and the HD 7800M: PCI Express 3.0 support will not be present on the 7700M. Before anyone gets too upset, we need to put things in perspective. First, while PCIe 3.0 has improved performance with HD 7970 on the desktop, for the HD 7700M we’re looking at a part that has only one fourth the compute power. Second, remember what we just said about HD 7700M being clocked lower most likely in order to hit TDP targets? We asked AMD about the removal of PCIe 3.0 support (given both families use Cape Verde, the potential is certainly there), and their response confirmed our suspicions: “The Cape Verde die itself supports PCIe 3; the reason we chose not to include it in our 7700M is because it mostly targets platforms where power saving is king, and the sacrifice (though not huge) in that regard would not have been justified by the small performance gain going from gen 2 to gen 3.”
And for the curious, once again AMD provided an estimate of performance for the 7870M vs. the GTX 560M (simulated using desktop hardware). Results are at 1920x1080/1920x1200 with a variety of quality settings, so take the following with a grain of salt.by jarred walton

Intel SSD Affordable SandForce

We reported on Intel's SSD 330 weeks ago, but today is the official announcement of the drive and its availability in the channel. Unlike previous 300 series drives, the 330 isn't based on Intel's own controller - it's the second SandForce SF-2281 drive in Intel's lineup.by anand lai shimpi

Intel SSD Comparison
	Intel SSD 520	Intel SSD 510	Intel SSD 330	Intel SSD 320
Capacity	60 / 120 / 180 / 240 / 480GB	120 / 250GB	60 / 120 / 180GB	40 / 80 / 120 / 160 / 300 / 600GB
Controller	SandForce SF-2281	Marvell 9174	SandForce SF-2281	Intel X25-M G3
Interface	6Gbps SATA	6Gbps SATA	6Gbps SATA	3Gbps SATA
Random Read Performance (Up to)	50K IOPS	20K IOPS	42K IOPS	39.5K IOPS
Random Write Performance (Up to)	60K IOPS	8K IOPS	52K IOPS	23K IOPS
Sequential Read Performance (Up to)	550 MB/s	500 MB/s	500 MB/s	270 MB/s
Sequential Write Performance (Up to)	520 MB/s	315 MB/s	450 MB/s	220 MB/s
Warranty	5 years	3 years	3 years	5 years

The 330 differs from the SandForce based Intel SSD 520 in a couple of key areas. The 330 uses lower p/e count NAND (still Intel 25nm MLC) compared to the 520, reducing Intel's rated lifespan from 5 years of 20GB of writes per day to 3 years under the same workload. Intel's ratings have historically been conservative, so I'd expect that the 330 would last much longer than 3 years for the vast majority of workloads - particularly based on previous calculations on the topic. With a 3 year usable lifespan rating however, Intel dropped the limited warranty on the 330 to 3 years as well.
All of this results in a significant reduction in price compared to the 520:

SSD Pricing Comparison
	60/64GB	120GB/128GB	180GB
Crucial m4	$79.99	$154.99
Intel SSD 520	$109.99	$184.99	$289.99
Intel SSD 330	$89	$149	$234
Kingston HyperX 3K		$169.99
Samsung SSD 830	$94.99	$174.99
OCZ Vertex 3	$98.99	$159.99
OCZ Vertex 4		$179.99

In fact, the Intel SSD 330 appears to be the cheapest SF-2281 drive on the market today. Interestingly enough it's only available at three capacities (60, 120 & 180GB), while the Intel SSD 320 was available in far more models going all the way up to 600GB.
Performance ratings are down compared to the Intel SSD 520, although it's not clear whether these are artificial limits or not:

Intel SSD 520 vs. 330
	Intel SSD 520 120GB	Intel SSD 330 120GB
Capacity	120GB	120GB
Controller	SF-2281	SF-2281
Random Read Performance (Up to)	25K IOPS	22.5K IOPS
Random Write Performance (Up to)	40K IOPS	33K IOPS
Sequential Read Performance (Up to)	550 MB/s	500 MB/s
Sequential Write Performance (Up to)	500 MB/s	450 MB/s
Warranty	5 years	3 years
Price	$184	$149

Presumably Intel's SSD 330 uses a similar custom firmware solution to the SSD 520, which should hopefully keep it safe from any SF-2281 related BSOD or other instability.

Intel SSD 330
Capacity	60GB	120GB	180GB
Controller	SandForce SF-2281	SandForce SF-2281	SandForce SF-2281
Interface	6Gbps SATA	6Gbps SATA	6Gbps SATA
Random Read Performance (Up to)	12K IOPS	22.5K IOPS	42K IOPS
Random Write Performance (Up to)	20.5K IOPS	33K IOPS	52K IOPS
Sequential Read Performance (Up to)	500 MB/s	500 MB/s	500 MB/s
Sequential Write Performance (Up to)	400 MB/s	450 MB/s	450 MB/s
Warranty	3 years	3 years	3 years
MSRP	$89	$149	$234

Gaming PC Build Under $1500

After finishing our gaming PC builds for $500 – 1200 I wanted to jump ahead to the $1500 build where for an increased budget of $300 we’ve made some significant changes not only to the functionality of our gaming PC, but also the performance.
Graphics Card:
For our Graphics Card I suggest nVidia fanboys go with the GTX 570 and Radeon fanboys stick with the HD6950 as the performance improvement for the money at that level simply isn’t worth it (based on the G3D Mark). If you want an upgrade beyond that level, then consider the HD7950 or two HD6850′s.Another viable option for Intel users that don’t upgrade their CPU beyond the i5-2500k is to upgrade to the GTX 580.
CPU
For CPU we’re going to recommend that you go with the i7-3820 which gives you a better overall bang for your buck than the i7-2700k. AMD builders should stick the the FX8150. With a less expensive CPU this should give them some additional flexibility on their GPU and other options.
Motherboard:
AMD Builders stick with the GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 and Intel Builders go with the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD3 which is compatible with the i7-3820. If you’d rather stick with a GEN3 Z68 board and something like the i7-2700k for future standard Ivy bridge compatibility, then stay with our previous motherboard, the Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN or for slightly less the P8Z68-V/GEN3.
Ram:
Here we’ll stick with 16GB of Vengeance or XMS3 memory.
HDD:
For speed we’re going with the Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB – model WD2002FAEX.
SSD:
For solid state drive we’re going with the inexpensive, but effective, Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2
Case:
For case I’ll recommend the Cooler Master Storm Enforcer USB 3.0 Mid Tower ATX Case (SGC-1000-KWN), but there are a lot of really good options out there. Make sure to get one with USB 3.0 in the front I/O. You can also go here for a look at more of the best gaming cases.
PSU:
The OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W should still be fine here.
CPU Cooler:
Cooler Master Hyper 212, the Zalman CNPS9900LED on the higher end, and for water cooling the Corsair Cooling Hydro-Series All-in-One High-Performance CWCH60.
$1500 Gaming Computer Build Part Overview:source gamingpcbuilds.com

Windows 8 Consumer Initial Impressions

 

 

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is only just becoming available to the public, but we’ve had the opportunity to use it for a few days on a Samsung slate nearly identical to the one we sampled at the BUILD conference for developers last year. While the device we’re using is nearly the same, the operating system itself has undergone a lot of refinement since our initial report last September.

We can’t wait to install the Consumer Preview on a wide variety of current PCs and tell you all about how well it does or does not work, as well as provide tips and tricks for those of you installing it for yourselves. We know you don’t want to wait, so we offer our initial impressions of the release based on several days with a Microsoft-provided, Samsung-built slate running the same release the public will download. There’s only one major difference: the Store is not yet functional, so these impressions are based only on the apps built into the Windows 8 Consumer Preview itself.

Jason Cross says:
This is definitely not the flaky, feature-light version of Windows 8 released for developers last year. It’s dramatically smoother and more responsive. Apps snap open, and flipping between them is immediate. The People and Photos hubs are there, showcasing Windows 8’s integration with multiple services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Using these new apps and hubs with a touchscreen is a joy. They could all use a little polish and a few more features, though. It needs to be easier to save photos locally from Facebook or Flickr in the Photos hub, for instance. Everything is big, bright, smooth, and beautiful. I confined myself to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for awhile, and the experience is definitely diminished.
The Windows 8 Photos hub integrates pictures from several online sources.That’s not to say the keyboard and mouse experience is bad, mind you. I’m actually quite delighted at how well the whole Metro-style interface works with them. Microsoft has made some very welcome tweaks to accommodate the hundreds of millions of users with no touchscreen. It’s just so...new. I spent a good hour just discovering how to do things I’ve known how to do in Windows for over a decade. It’s usually a good feeling, because when I figure out how Windows 8 does something differently (like display all installed programs), I’m usually impressed by its speed and elegance. Let me say that again: I’m impressed by the speed and elegance of a Microsoft interface. Really!


Unfortunately, I think it’s going to get rough welcome. People often don’t like change at first. Just look at the way every little tweak to the Facebook interface is received. It takes a little time, and a little trial and error, to discover where everything is, how it works, and how to get around. Then it takes a little more poking around to get really fast at it. We all know how the Internet works: there are people who will use something for two minutes (or not at all) and spend the rest of the day complaining about it on forums, comments, message boards, and social networks.
I can sympathize. It’s unsettling to see such basic tenets of the Windows user experience shifted so dramatically. Windows 8 wants me to do a lot of things through the Metro interface that I used to do on a desktop interface, and there was some natural resistance to that at first. I only had to look for something in the wrong place once to become frustrated, and it took a little time to unlearn all I had learned since Windows 95.

The Messaging App is one of the least useful - until more services are added.The good news is: there’s a payoff for sticking with it. It doesn’t take long, and before you know it you’re using new shortcuts and flying around the OS like an old pro. I can’t wait for the Store to launch, because much to my surprise, I find myself really valuing the Metro-style applications and they way they operate, even when using a keyboard and mouse. I want Metro apps for Spotify and Evernote, a great Twitter client and a native Facebook app. I want a Metro-style front end for Steam. I have some concerns about how well everything scales to a large monitor, but more and more, as I spent time with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, I just wanted the OS to be done and on the market already. So I suppose that’s “mission accomplished” for the folks in Redmond.

Nate Ralph says:
Gestures and UI elements are the same, whether you're using a touchscreen, or your keyboard and mouse.Touch has always been an interesting novelty, but I kept the slate running the Consumer Preview docked, relying on the keyboard and mouse to get around. And every so often, I found myself trying to nudge the cursor along with the spacebar, wondering where my trackpad had gone. Eventually I’d give up and use a finger to tap on the particular app I’d been trying to get to, all the while oblivious to the mouse idling beside my hands.
That’s the right sort of disorienting. Tablets imply limitations: consider Android and iOS, operating systems explicitly designed to meld well with your hands. Grids of fixed, finger-friendly icons are all but mandatory, to ensure the user experience is a fluid one.
Windows 8 abandons any such notions; the device melts away, and you’re left with a canvas that responds to your interactions. Gestures make sense, whatever your input preference: I slid effortlessly between dragging my finger across the screen, clicking around with the mouse, and tapping at the keyboard, depending on whatever made sense at the moment. This versatility is going to be key for users trying to make sense of the bold new interface.
My handwriting is generally unrecognizable; Windows converts it into a font, and treats it as regular text.And then I remembered the stylus. Windows has offered phenomenal, native handwriting recognition since the halcyon days of XP – but good luck finding an application or device to take advantage of it. Hopefully, the push for Windows 8 tablets is going to alleviate that issue. But this is yet another facet of that uncompromising design that's driving everything about the Windows 8 experience: I typed on a keyboard when the slate was at my desk, but took the stylus to meetings and wrote notes by hand.
Bizarre, that in light of all of the new features I reach for something as archaic as a stylus. But I’ve waited years for this – an operating system that works with me. The device is largely irrelevant – I happen to like taking notes with a pen, but use a combination of the touchscreen and a keyboard. Windows 8 leaves every option on the table, and that's fantastic.
I’m still a little concerned about how this will translate onto larger screens – especially once the apps start to pile on. But things are shaping up nicely-- consider me smitten.
It looks like Windows 8 is certainly going to take some getting used to. But underneath that daunting new interface are a wealth of smart decisions that go a long way towards dragging the behemoth that is Windows into the future. Perhaps most promising is the stuff we haven't looked at yet: the apps, and the way multiple Windows 8 PCs and tablets sync together. What we see here has us excited, but it doesn't have the level of polish that makes us think it's just about ready to go. Judging by the quality here, it looks likely to release this fall, though Microsoft has made no official announcement.

iPad Gets Top Marks from Consumer Reports Despite Heatgate

Apple's third-generation iPad is hot, but this time in a good way, says Consumer Reports. The consumer reviews magazine created a stir two weeks ago when it said the latest Apple tablet could get as hot as 116 degrees Fahrenheit in some spots when running games. Despite that finding, CR on Monday gave the new iPad the top spot in the magazine's tablet ratings.

CR's decision is in line with many gadget critics who have lauded the iPad for its 2048-by-1536 display, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, and 4G access. PCWorld in mid-March ranked the new iPad as the top tablet money can buy giving the tablet 4.5 out of 5 stars.

[RELATED: *New iPad vs. iPad 2: Which is the Better Deal?]*

As for that sweltering 116 degree heat Consumer Reports reported, the magazine says the "new iPad is warmer in its hottest spots than the iPad 2. But we didn't find those temperatures to be cause for concern." During the iPad's purported heat controversy, PCWorld's tests found heat levels in the new iPad were comparable to Android tablets. PCWorld's tests did find, however, that the new iPad runs "hotter than the iPad 2, [but] the difference wasn't great."

One interesting difference between Consumer Reports' findings and PCWorld's was in the device's battery life. CR said the "iPad still has longer battery life than all other tablets." PCWorld's tests, however, found the third-generation iPad's battery life couldn't match other tablets including the iPad 2, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, or the Wi-Fi only Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Similar to CR, PCWorld Labs testing also found that Apple's newest tablet charges only minimally when in use.

Apple's newest iPad is the first iOS slate to feature 4G connectivity, the device also has a dual-core Apple A5X chip with enhanced graphics capability, Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, and a 5-megapixel camera with 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second. The iPad (third generation) ranges in price from $500 to $830 depending on storage and connectivity options.by ian paul pc world