China claims supercomputer title

China has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's supercomputers, according to the BBC.

The title has gone to China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second. To reach such high speeds, the machine draws on more than 7 000 graphics processors and 14 000 Intel chips.

The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation, which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.

Current laws and organisational policies are outdated and ill-designed for the digital age, and actively prevent law enforcers effectively fighting cyber crime, according to a former FBI chief information officer, reveals V3.

Zalmai Azmi explained at a TechNet conference run by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association that there are three main challenges for those tasked with tackling cyber crime.

"Our laws are 100 to 200 years old, and don't apply to the digital world," he said. "They are slowing us down."

Microsoft cheered its investors when it posted better-than-expected revenue and earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal 2011, states The Register.

The always-important consensus of the Wall Street moneymen was that Redmond would report revenue of $15.8 billion and earnings of $0.55 per share. Microsoft beat those numbers with revenue of $16.2 billion for the quarter and earnings per share of $0.62.

That $16.2 billion in revenue represented a 25% increase over the same quarter last year. Net income, at $5.4 billion, was up 51% year-on-year.

Adobe is warning users that it has detected attacks on a zero-day flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash applications, writes V3.

No patch exists as yet for the flaw, but the company has issued a workaround for IT administrators to implement to ward off intruders. Danish security analyst firm Secunia rates the flaw as “extremely critical”.

“This vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system,” said Adobe in a security advisory.