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Sony Computer Entertainment America has made the cut. The consumer entertainment-device maker cut the price of the popular Sony PlayStation 2 gaming console by 25 percent on Tuesday.

Beginning April 1, the Sony PlayStation 2 will be priced at $99.99. Sony hopes to tap into a market of gamers who weren’t born when PS2 was launched in 2000, according to John Koller, director of hardware marketing.

“In the gaming industry, the typical life cycle for a console is around five years, but because we build each of our platforms for a large and diverse consumer base, we design our platforms differently,” Koller wrote in a PS2 blog post. “With the original PlayStation and now PlayStation 2, we’ve proven that consumers can rely on our platforms for their gaming and entertainment needs for at least a decade.”

Just as PS2 has reached a decade of being on the shelves, Sony Entertainment President Jack Tretton believes PlayStation 3 will have the same success. “We believe PlayStation 3 offers the same promise by helping secure the Blu-ray format and delivering unprecedented value as the total home entertainment solution for the next decade,” he said.

Mixed Reactions

Sony also made the cut to reach a group of users unable to afford the gaming console at its full price, and that led to some happy consumers, including someone with the screen name Monsignor.

“YES!!!! I’ve been waiting for this price to drop below $100 for over eight years,” said the poster on Sony’s blog. “Finally, I can now go out and buy it and see what all this fuss is about. Thanks, Sony.”

While a minority of posters were happy with the price cut, a majority of comments from gamers indicated disappointment. Users had hoped for either a price cut for the PS3 or new firmware.

“The PS2 is a system…

Boston, MA, March 31, 2009 — Core Security Technologies, provider of the CORE IMPACT family of comprehensive enterprise security testing solutions, today announced a new partnership with Patriot Technologies. The addition of Patriot Technologies to Core Security’s Value Added Reseller (VAR) Program will allow the software maker to extend its ability to provide comprehensive security testing solutions to federal and commercial entities, and also enable Patriot Technologies to broaden the depth and breadth of their offerings.

“Based on Patriot’s experienced and dedicated field sales professionals, their reputation as a trusted advisor within the security space and their history of offering services concentrating on information security and information technology, we felt that this was a perfect fit for the CORE IMPACT family of products,” said Jeff Clark, vice president of business development of Core Security Technologies. “With this new partnership, together we will be able to help more government organizations to comply with IT security regulations and lock-down their systems and infrastructure.”

CORE IMPACT Pro has proven itself as an extremely valuable asset in helping organizations meet specific security testing requirements (e.g., standards including FISMA, PCI and NIST), and in helping organizations prove that other prescribed defense mechanisms and policies are functioning properly. By taking a comprehensive, real-world approach to security testing, CORE IMPACT Pro helps organizations meet the letter of the law, and embrace the underlying spirit of compliance regulations.

“Integrating the CORE IMPACT family of products into our solutions will help us take our security offerings to the next level,” said Bruce Tucker, president and founder of Patriot Technologies. “We look forward to demonstrating to our customers how Core Security offers a unique insight into their security posture.”

As a respected leader in the federal space, Patriot Technologies has multiple contract vehicles that allow agencies to benefit from pre-negotiated pricing. Patriot’s federal contracts…

Intel has taken the wraps off a new quad-core Xeon 5500 processor that the chipmaker is calling its most important server product launch since the Pentium Pro came to market in 1995.

“Simply put, the Xeon 5500 is a technological marvel — the most spectacular processor that Intel has ever produced and that the industry has ever seen,” said Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger.

More than 100 applications were released Monday that have been optimized for the new Xeon chip, which is based on Intel’s Nehalem microarchitecture. “This is the most that Intel has ever had for a server launch,” Gelsinger said.

Performance Enhancements

The Xeon 5500 integrates QuickPath technology under which each processor core has its own integrated memory controller and high-speed interconnect for linking processors and other components, which speeds up applications. The new processor also integrates Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which enables all active processor cores to intelligently clock themselves up in increments as long as the CPU is operating below its maximum power, current and temperature specs.

“We can turbo up all the cores if there is thermal headroom; then, when a lighter workload is detected, shut off cores and turn up the remaining cores, with this done dynamically and detected in real time,” Gelsinger said.

The new chip for servers and workstations also receives a big multitasking boost from hyperthreading technology capable of supporting up to 16 threads. Also on tap: a multi-level shared cache that reduces latency to frequently used data, together with Intel’s 5520 chipset and related technologies.

“The full cadre of the technology I have been talking about have given power efficiency gains — not just at the processor level but also at the platform level,” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger also said Intel has set 30 new server performance benchmark records using the Xeon…

In a 10-month investigation into Chinese cyber espionage against Tibetan institutions, researchers found that hackers tapped into foreign embassies, ministries of foreign affairs, and international organizations.

Security investigators from the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), a public-private venture between a Canadian think tank and an academic group at the University of Toronto, found a network of 1,295 infected hosts in 103 countries. The investigators were asked by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Government in Exile, and others to investigate computer systems.

GhostNet Found

Researchers revealed a malware-based cyber espionage network called GhostNet. The discovery showed insecure, Web-based interfaces to four control servers that let operators send information to and receive information from compromised computers, according to a 53-page report. Audio and video hardware were also controlled, according to the report.

Although the network is small, the concentration of high-value systems is significant.

Nearly 30 percent of the computers being controlled belonged to ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Taiwan, Tibet and several other countries; the Asian Development Bank; and unclassified computers at NATO headquarters.

Principal investigators Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski said their research serves as a world wake-up call on how easily someone can create a spynet and shows how policymakers and the information-security community need to come to terms with the problem.

Path Leads to China

Security researchers were able to confirm that computers were being controlled in real time from commercial Internet access accounts on the island of Hainan, in the People’s Republic of China.

They were, however, not able to confirm whether the hackers intentionally penetrated the hosts or if the sensitive information to which they had access was exploited for commercial or intelligence value.

IP addresses assigned to the People’s Republic of China have linked with connections to infected computers, but the IWM said that isn’t enough to point fingers at China because…

WALTHAM, Mass., March 30, 2009 – An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs. The study conducted by Black Duck Software, a leading provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software (OSS), points to the dramatic efficiencies and cost savings of open source code reuse.

In the review of well-known open source projects, Black Duck examined instances where reusable binary components from one open source project were included in the downloadable release of another project. GNU Automake leads the list of the most-re-used code, appearing as a component of 12,469 other project releases.

To conduct the analysis Black Duck selected 1,311 popular open source projects, a small fraction of the roughly 200,000 open source projects catalogued in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. Projects in the study contained about 491 million total lines of software source code. With an approximate reuse rate of one percent in each of the hundreds of thousands of reuses, developers were able to avoid writing some 1.4 billion lines of source code.

Black Duck spiders the Internet collecting open source and other downloadable code into a repository called the Black Duck KnowledgeBase; a repository of more than 200,000 open source projects with tens of billions of lines of code from over 4,100 unique Internet sites. The Black Duck KnowledgeBase is the largest and fastest-growing repository of open source code in the industry.

The table below lists the top reused open source projects in the Black Duck survey.

Component Name: GNU Automake
Reuse Count: 12,469

Component Name: Autoconf
Reuse Count: 6,621

Component Name: X Free 86
Reuse Count: 5,925

Component Name: Foxtrot
Reuse Count:…

For eager Apple fans, it’s an excruciating seventy-three days until the much-anticipated Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) opens at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco. The wait won’t be much easier for tech journalists, who face 10 weeks of stubborn silence from the Apple press office and a rumbling herd of rumors to track down.

The main categories of rumors are well defined, in descending order of likelihood: Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a new iPhone, CEO Steve Jobs, and the as-yet-mythical Apple touchscreen netbook. Many of the rumors constitute a wish list for fans and journalists alike, but at least a few are grounded in practical realities: Apple’s consistently higher prices, relatively small market share, and somewhat uncertain corporate future, given Jobs’ forced sabbatical for health reasons.

Need versus Preference

Undoubtedly, there are many things that Apple would like to announce at the upcoming WWDC, but the much more interesting question from the tech industry point of view, is what Apple needs to announce. Put another way, when developers and journalists fly home on Saturday, June 13, what is the most important thing they will have heard?

Greg Sterling, an industry analyst and founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, listed two possible answers to that question.

First, he said, “Apple needs to announce upgraded iPhone hardware that adds new speed and perhaps video and/or other capabilities, beyond the 3.0 software upgrade that was already unveiled.”

The iPhone has proven enormously successful, even more than Apple predicted. Consumers have purchased 17 million iPhones in a little more than a year. However, Apple’s smartphone accounts for just eight percent of the smartphone market, with Nokia (43 percent) and RIM (17 percent) both ahead by comfortable margins. And Apple will face growing pressure from Android-based phones in the months to come.

Additional iPhone features, some of which…