Earlier this year Microsoft released a major security update for Windows XP, which was designed to strengthen the operating system’s defences against attack from viruses and hackers. One major part of the update was an improved version of its firewall software. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus firm Sophos, said the latest Bagle variants are designed to attack and disable Microsoft’s new firewall application.

Intel is expected to release a faster version of its powerful but expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor this week, alongside the introduction of a chip set that uses a faster front-side bus to connect the processor and the memory. The Extreme Edition is basically the same as the Pentium 4, but features 2MB of Level 3 cache instead of 1MB. It's also extremely expensive: $999.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its Media Center OS, which turns a PC into a Tivo-like device and digital jukebox. While the last version only came pre-installed on rather expensive hardware, there are already vendors lined up with some less expensive (and pretty cool) hardware this time around. Read more in this Mercury News article.

The annual Southern California Linux Expo will take place on February 12-13 2005 in Los Angeles. Organizers are making a call for papers, if you'd be interested in participating.

According to Distrowatch an evaluation edition of the Lycoris Desktop/LX 1.4 has been released. The edition only contains GPL components and the license prevents its use after the initial 45-day evaluation period. Get more information via their press release here and their sneak peak page. Update: 100 Lycoris screenshots.

The second beta of Arch Linux 0.7 code named Wombat has been released for public consumption and testing. Kernel 2.6.9 is included. Get it from the download mirrors.

Release announcement of the FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 release available here.

Here's the only recent and still valid book for Mono: "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" by Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein. The book is under O'Reilly's "notebook" series, which are meant to be books mainly consisted by notes. Here's our quick review.

According this article Solaris 10 beta7 aka. build 69 available for download from Sun Microsystems.

The NetBSD project has chosen their new logo. High-res version available too.

The long anticipated update to Portable.NET has been released. The new version features important patches and fixes for Serial I/O, threading support, sockets and many more - read the full announcement for details or download the source code now (binaries will be available shortly).

The Darwinports project recently announced the 2000th package has been added to its collection.

When on Unix/Linux I mostly use Gnome, and so here are some of the best third party GTK+ applications around I have found.

Viruses could stop you getting cash from an ATM Cash machine networks could soon be more susceptible to computer viruses, a security firm has warned. The warning is being issued because many banks are starting to use the Windows operating system in machines.