petehead writes "The LA Times reports on regulations expected to pass in 2009 that will not allow energy-inefficient TVs to be sold in the state. 'State regulators are getting ready to curb the growing power gluttony of TV sets by drafting the nation's first rules requiring retailers to sell only the most energy-efficient models, starting in 2011... The regulations would be phased in over two years, with a first tier taking effect on Jan. 1, 2011, and a more stringent, second tier on Jan. 1, 2013.'" According to the Energy Commission's estimates, purchasers of Tier 1-compliant TVs would shave an average of $18.48 off their residential electric bill in the first year of ownership.

KingofGnG writes "AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released last September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools' effectiveness against unknown threats in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines." The best in show (of 16 anti-malware packages evaluated), Avira AntiVir was able to find 71% of the unknown malware it was exposed to in the first week, dropping to 67% after the fourth.

Manequintet writes "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."

Croakyvoice writes "Datel has finally released the Games n Music Homebrew cart for the Nintendo DS, this mass market entry level cart features a 128mb Micro SD card and comes with a 25 game CD of the best of DS homebrew games." Games 'n' Music contains everything you need straight out of the box. It even comes bundled with a 25-game CD, offering some of the best games the DS home brew scene has to offer, as well as a video conversion program."

virusfree tells us about a new algorithm that has been developed that the author claims can sort a linked list up to 10 times faster than MergeSort. "BitFast," a member of the Hash algorithms family, is available in C and C++ under the GPL.