Nvidia

Late last week, NVIDIA confirmed that the database for its forums web site had been broken into by unauthorized third parties, with data from more than 400,000 registered users affected. A hacker group calling itself “Team Apollo” has now claimed responsibility for the breach which caused NVIDIA to take the site down. As proof, they have published email addresses and password hashes for approximately 800 users from the database on Pastebin, with more, apparently, to follow. If the data proves to be genuine, NVIDIA’s statement that the password hashes were salted would be contradicted: the database excerpt includes the hash b018f55f348b0959333be092ba0b1f41 three times in the list, the result of md5('nvidia123'). ...

The H-Online: A new version of NVIDIA’s proprietary UNIX graphics drivers for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD fixes a security vulnerability (CVE-2012-0946) that allowed attackers to read and write arbitrary system memory in order to, for example, obtain root privileges. To take advantage of the vulnerability, an attacker must have access permission for some device files – which, for systems with these drivers, is typically the case for users who can launch a graphical interface as 3D acceleration and some other features cannot be used otherwise. ...

Mashable: We know that a number of Android tablets are coming in the next couple of months. But will these devices be able to compete with Apple’s iPad, which is currently dominating the market? According to NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, not only the new Android tablets will be competitive, they’ll be better than the iPad in many areas. Many of the upcoming tablets will be using NVidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, which will “give you the benefit of higher performance and much, much better multitasking and better graphics”, Huang said in an interview with Cnet. ...

Chinese website eNet has filled in some missing information – notably TDP and TMU count. The TDP of GeForce GTX 580 is at 244W, slightly lower than the GeForce GTX 480. The texture fillrate had been viewed by many as one of the bottlenecks for GF100, and eNet reports that GF110 effectively doubles the TMU count to 128 TMUs. Apart from this substantial improvement in TMU, the GF110 is a “full revision” and fixed version of GF100. ...

Just last week NVidia distributed a beta version of their Forceware drivers 260.89. The main feature was support for their recently launched GeForce GT 430, and although a few other improvements were mentioned there was nothing really outstanding. This time around the company offers the final release of these drivers with pretty much the same improvements, plus support for playing back Blu-ray 3D discs when connecting your GPU to a 3D TV through HDMI. ...

While NVidia’s big news may have been its upcoming budget-range GeForce GT 430 1GB cards which leaked out earlier this month, it seems that the company has been hiding another secret: the GeForce GT 440 range. Quietly detailed on the company’s website, the NVidia GeForce GT 440 range of cards is designed to offer OEMs a DirectX 11-compatible card for adding in to their mid-range machines. According to the reference specifications, the GT440 cards feature a 594MHz graphics clock, 1,189MHz processor clock, and either 800 or 900MHz memory clock, along with 144 CUDA cores. Interestingly, NVidia will be offering at least two different models: a budget-friendly version featuring 1.5GB of GDDR3, or a high-end model with 3GB of GDDR3. ...