Posted 03/03/10 at 10:14:05 AM by Paul Lilly

ASRock recently stated it wanted to start targeting the enthusiast crowd, and making good on that intention, the company will start slapping a new UCC chip onto its motherboards.

So what's the big deal? UCC stands for Unlock CPU Core, and as you might have guessed, it's designed to make easy-work out of turning AMD's triple-core processors into unlocked quad-core parts. All you do is go into the BIOS, enter one of the options, and if the parts play nice together, you'll be sitting pretty with four cores where previously there were three.

The best part about this is ASRock said it intends to plop the UCC chip onto entry-level motherboards too. This tactic of putting high-end features onto lower-priced parts has helped ASRock build a following, and something like this could go a long way in upping the company's geek cred.

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Posted 02/04/10 at 10:00:00 PM by David Murphy

One of Mozilla Firefox's bigger advantages over Google Chrome has just been wiped away and, dare we say, Google Chrome has actually one-upped its rival in terms of overall usability and ease-of-installation. We're referring, of course, to Greasemonkey. You might have heard this name echoed across tech and tweak sites far and wide. As well you should have--the functionality you can achieve by this upgrade to your surfing experience is simply unsurpassed in its depth or scope by any conventional add-on or extension.

It's quite simple, really. You install Greasemonkey to gain access to a gallery of add-ons that benefit your browsing experience just as much as your favorite official "add-ons," if not more. By add-ons, we mean "scripts." In its conventional format, Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that grants you the ability to automatically integrate new Javascript-based modifications to a site whenever you load up the page. You don't have to design these modifications yourself--a huge gallery of scripts (more than 40,000!) have already been written for a wide swath of functions and locations. Consider Greasemonkey scripts to be analogous to extensions for Greasemonkey--itself an extension for your main browser.

Sound good? Because now, Google Chrome users have the ability to tap into Greasemonkey scripts as much as any other browser user. You don't even have to install a separate add-on, since scripts work natively in the browser! 

But here's the catch: not all Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in Google Chrome. The running estimation is that roughly 20 percent of what's out there is currently broken for Google's browser. That's not great news for a person who's easily frustrated by failure. However, here's where Maximum PC comes into the picture. We've run through a large swath of awesome Google Greasemonkey scripts to achieve two key goals: to see what works and to see which scripts, of the 40,000+ available, are awesome tweaks for your browser. Click the jump for a look at some of the top Greasemonkey scripts you could (or should) be slapping into your Google Chrome browser right now.

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Posted 02/04/10 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Wh...what's this? A piece of open-source software from Microsoft that adds speed and portability to the standard Windows 7 installation process? It almost sounds too good to be true, but it's not! There really is such a utility, and it really has been delivered by the Windows 7 manufacturer itself, and it really is open-source!

I might sound a little too excited about this entire concept, but that's just because this tool--the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool--is actually a great replacement for what is otherwise a semi-complex (and hard to remember) series of console commands. If you think I'm exaggerating just for the sake of fashioning up a fun article to read, you're wrong. I couldn't tell you off-hand how to create a bootable USB drive with a preloaded Windows 7 disc. I usually just turn to this series of steps as a general walkthrough.

While the Microsoft tool isn't perfect, in that it won't automatically rip the contents of your Windows 7 CD and fashion a bootable USB key out of that, it's still an awesome way to automate this entire process using a friendly GUI. But don't think that you can just use this tool to make bootable USB keys of any ol' ISO file sitting around on your hard drive. In fact, you can't even rip the Windows 7 DVD and use the subsequent ISO file as the basis of your bootable USB key. Not without some tweaking, that is...

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Posted 02/01/10 at 07:13:51 AM by Paul Lilly

Stealing Internet service is serious business, especially when you've made a business out of allowing others to hop online for free. That's what 26-year-old Matthew Delorey of New Bedford, Mass., is accused of doing, who was arrested for allegedly selling hacked cable modems that gave customers free Internet access. Charged with one count each of conspiracy and wire fraud, if convicted, Delorey will face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Delorey's undoing was when he sold a pair of modified modems to an undercover FBI agent, according to authorities. The U.S. Department of Justice says Delorey ran a website called Massmodz.com, where he allegedly sold cable modems that had been modified to spoof the device's MAC address.

But that isn't all that has Delorey in hot water. He's also accused of posting instructional videos on YouTube titled "How to Get Free Internet Free Cable Comcast or any Cable ISP -- 100% works" and "Massmodz.com How to bypass Comcast registration page with premod cable modem SB5100, SB5101."

Should a court ultimately find Delorey is guilty, what do you think, does the potential punishment fit the crime? Hit the jump and sound off!

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Posted 01/26/10 at 07:31:05 AM by Paul Lilly

A few of you were pretty pissed off to learn that your foul vocabulary isn't welcome on the Nexus One, and that the smartphone's built-in voice recognition automatically filters curse words. We imagine Google will eventually release an update giving you the option to disable the filter, but until then, you're #### out of luck. Kind of.

While there's currently no way to turn the filter off, there is a workaround and it comes courtesy of Neil Gaiman, who posted his method on Twitter.

"For the curious: swear into a Google & it transcribes it as ####. But if you swear and then say "dot come" it will write what you said," Neil tweeted.

Elegant? #### no, but according to Gizmodo, it works, so it will have to do until the next update.

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Posted 01/25/10 at 03:06:57 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Hackers set their sights on cracking a new video game console just as soon as it arrives. Their tenacity can usually bear fruits within months of the console's release unless the machine happens to be the PlayStation 3, which has remained unconquered for more than 3 years.

But finally, a hacker claims to have sneaked past the PS3's supposedly inviolable defenses. The PS3's ramparts may have successfully fended against hackers and the prospect of unsigned code for “3 years, 2 months, 11 days” but it took an eminent hacker just 5 weeks to come up with a hack. The man behind the crack, George Hotz, aka Geohot, has a penchant for hacking impregnable gadgets. A couple of years ago, a 17-year-old Geohot became the first person to jailbreak the iPhone.

Hotz revealed on his blog that he cracked the PS3 using a combination of hardware and software hacks. Although he claims to have gained full read/write access and the power to “make the system do whatever I want,” Geohot is in no hurry to release his hack, which is avowedly quite unstable and  needs some fine-tuning.  "If I posted what I have now, people would get fed up with it," he told El Reg in an interview.

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Posted 01/20/10 at 08:31:17 AM by Paul Lilly

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the Cookie Monster was up to when he gets his hand caught in the cookie jar, and in similar fashion, the evidence is starting to pile up against China in its suspected involvement in the recent attacks against Google.

After a series of highly sophisticated cyberattacks targeting Google and 33 other large U.S. companies in the technology, financial, and defense sectors took place last week, fingers began pointing at China, where Google says the Internet break-ins originated from. And while email accounts of several Chinese human rights activists were compromised in the attacks, there hasn't been any irrefutable proof, at least until now, sasy an American computer researcher.

Joe Stewart, a malware guru with SecureWorks, says he has figured out the main program used in the attack contained a module based on an unusual algorithm from a Chinese technical paper that had only been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites, The New York Times reports.

"If you look at the code in a debugger you see patterns that jump out at you," Stewart said.

Stewart, a self-proclaimed "reverse engineer," said that he couldn't rule out that the evidence was intentionally placed in the program by its programmers, but said such a scenario is unlikely.

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Posted 01/07/10 at 03:00:54 PM by David Murphy

I've been a relatively fortunate mobile phone owner. I've dropped various phones countless times throughout my geek life, including the extended cleaning of my first-ever iPhone by accidentally introducing it to my apartment complex's pool. I've broken countless critical features on my phones as a result of this clumsiness, the smashing of a phone against the car keys in my pocket, and the general wear-and-tear of a semi-busy lifestyle. In college, I had a flip-phone that was anything but, the exterior having been beaten up and bruised enough to transform the phone's external screen into a strobe light of-sorts whenever anyone called. Awesome for parties; useless for caller ID.

I've never lost my phone, though. And every day I board a train to head to work, sit in a taxicab, or go about my business without really paying much attention to where I last put my dialing device, I wonder: Is this it? Will today be the day that some unscrupulous person gets a hold of my iPhone and, by proxy, my entire online life?

In some ways, someone already has.

This isn't some kind of "won't somebody think of the children" scare tactic. It's a simple reality: You're hearing a lot about the wonders of cloud computing at this year's CES. And while that has different applications for the enterprise level than consumer, the practical reality of it for most PC users (and laptop users especially cough-cough-Chrome OS-cough) is that you're taking the data that would otherwise reside on a system within your control and placing it in the hands of another entity.

Cloud applications can be super-useful when you let others run the services that improve your geeky life. Your data, however, is your own--the more consumers coalesce their computing lives into access points, the more this data becomes ripe for abuse... or worse.

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