Tuesday Tech News

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Citigroup said Monday that personal information on 3.9 million consumer lending customers of its CitiFinancial subsidiary was lost by UPS while in transit to a credit bureau -- the biggest breach of customer or employee data reported so far.

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Samsung actually had a license to produce these types of memory. Under the terms of that agreement, the company was obliged to pay Rambus royalties unless a court invalidated the patents, according to now former Rambus executives. So far, courts have generally upheld the patents. The license was set to expire at the end of the month. Rambus did not explain why it terminated the license agreement and sued now. Ironically, Samsung was more vocal in promoting RDRAM, a type of memory designed by Rambus, than any other major memory manufacturer.

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Called the Universal Torah Registry, the system works like this: A synagogue mails in a form with their contact information and the number of Torahs they want to place in the system, and the registry sends back a computer-coded template for each scroll. The 3.5- by 8-inch template resembles an IBM punch card, with eight holes arranged so their position relative to one another describes a unique identification number in a proprietary code.

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According to numbers released by French Web metrics company XiTi, Firefox accounted for 14.08 percent of browsers used to access a large sample of Web sites that use XiTi measurement software. That's up from 13.31 percent in April and 11.60 percent in March.

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The change will provide a power and performance boost for computer users, analysts say, but could cause headaches for software developers adapting programs. Another challenge could be preventing bootleggers from creating copies of Apple’s new Intel-adapted OS X operating system for non-Apple computers

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The MSN Web site, http://ilovemessenger.msn.com/, contained a so-called cross-site scripting flaw, a Microsoft representative said on Monday. In its initial review of the issue, the company found that an attacker could use the vulnerability to obtain "cookies" from Hotmail users by getting them to click on a malicious URL. That could then grant access to those e-mail accounts, the representative said.

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Hard-drive manufacturer Maxtor aims to find out. With so many consumers snapping digital photos and storing music files, Maxtor executives said they are enthusiastic about the company's next-generation Serial ATA, or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, hard drive, which can store up to 500GB, or half a terabyte of information.