leak

Here we go again. The gadget blogosphere is abuzz Wednesday with images of what may or may not be Microsoft's next-generation portable media player, the ZuneHD.

The renderings surfaced on the Windows Mobile Power User site without attribution or the more colorful flair of the earlier images leaked to Engadget on April 10. The big debate, of course, is whether these renderings are real or not--and more importantly, whether the accompanying specs have any validity.

Based on a source from Zunited, Engadget's saying the images really are the ZuneHD, but no one's quite buying that the alleged … Read more

FBI agents have started looking for whoever uploaded to the Web an incomplete version of the unreleased movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

The film, which reportedly cost $100 million to make, was not scheduled for theatrical release until May 1 but was leaked to the Web Tuesday evening. Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said Thursday that the agency is responsible for investigating copyright infringement and allegations of piracy.

She said the bureau received a call within the last 24 hours from 20th Century Fox, the News Corp.-owned studio that produced "… Read more

Update: Lenovo says there's no actual product behind these mockups, which were of an old concept piece and just recently published on flickr.

We've seen a handful of "leaked" photos recently of a tiny laptop prototype from Lenovo. Looking suspiciously like Sony's Vaio P series, the system has an extremely wide screen, flat edge-to-edge keys, and looks to be similar in size--about the same footprint as a standard business envelope.

Those fuzzy photos have been replaced by some beauty shots on Lenovo's Flickr stream.

The device, called the Pocket Yoga, features a tablet screen … Read more

The campaign of Republican Norm Coleman, who is engaged in a fierce legal battle to keep his Senate seat from Democrat Al Franken, has warned supporters that their credit card numbers may have been exposed on the Internet.

His campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, said the office became aware of a possible security breach of the donor database in January, however an investigation found the data had not been accessed by an unauthorized party, according to a report on Wednesday in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

Supporters received an e-mail from the nonprofit Wikileaks site on Tuesday night saying the Coleman … Read more

Security experts have long cautioned about the risk posed by the use of peer-to-peer file sharing by individuals working in corporations, warning that the practice creates holes that let malware in and sensitive data out.

Their message may be having an impact in the P2P development community.

A trade group representing peer-to-peer file sharing providers next week will publish a report that finds P2P software companies are modifying their programs in an effort to make it harder for users to inadvertently share sensitive information.

For corporate IT administrators, that shift can't come soon enough. The problem was highlighted by … Read more

The first beta of Microsoft's next operating system has apparently been spotted in the wild.

Windows 7, which is expected to hit retailer shelves in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season, has reportedly popped up on torrent trackers as an ISO file. ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes also reports having a copy and has posted his first impressions of the beta.

Overall, Kingsley-Hughes wrote that he likes Windows 7, calling it "solid and fast." But he does take issue with a few new features:

On Friday, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) released photos of damage to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's flagship particle accelerator. The particle accelerator was damaged by a liquid helium leak in September, nine days into an experiment to test fundamental theories of physics by colliding beams of protons inside a 17-mile ring.

Picture 1, above, shows two of the most severely broken interconnects, which are between the magnets in LHC sectors three and four. The superconducting magnets, used to direct and focus the proton beams in the experiment, are cooled by liquid helium. An electrical fault caused … Read more

We all know that Apple is gathering the chattering classes together Tuesday in Cupertino, Calif., to unveil the latest MacBooks. But unlike many previous Apple product debuts, the Interwebs have been awash recently with reasonably believable-looking leaked spy shots of the laptops, or their component parts.

The latest comes from Chinese site MacX.cn, which purports to show the new aluminum chassis of the 13-inch MacBook. Interesting to note that the side view (pics are after the break) seems to omit the FireWire port currently found on the standard MacBook. … Read more

This time via a Chinese Web site (which is now timing out, perhaps due to heavy traffic), and reposted on MacRumors.com, Engadget, and others. Just what this photo purports to show seems a little unclear to us, but it may very well be the left side and keyboard tray (minus the actual keys) of a new MacBook Pro.

This does seem to fit in with recent rumors that the new MacBooks will be made from, if not one, then a very small number of aluminum sheets, bent into shape using a process referred to as the "brick." (… Read more