In Depth: Catching cyber-thieves: the future of net scams
A few years ago, me and my friends had an ongoing joke. When a movie franchise had run out of ideas, it would try and contemporise itself with the following plotline: "CYBERTERRORISTS take over THE INTERNET, and THE HERO has to GO INTO THE INTERNET and KILL THE CYBER-TERRORISTS." We decided it was going to form the story for the next pre-Craig James Bond adventure, or the next Bourne film, or even Jaws 5: Sharks on the Internet.
We were a little surprised when CYBERTERRORISTS showed up in Die Hard 4.0 – although John McClane didn't have to GO INTO THE INTERNET. He did, however, have to do all manner of ridiculously stupid things that surely no 52-year-old body is capable of.
Fast-forward three years after the release of Die Hard 4.0 and CYBERTERRORISM isn't really an issue, but CYBERCRIME is. I'll stop with the Caps Lock now. In fact, attacks, hijackings and drive-bys are becoming so common that the online world is basically a version of Grand Theft Auto with more realistic porn.
What's more is that cybercrime has become a huge business. Recently three men were indicted in Chicago for selling 'scareware', which convinces users that they have a virus on their PC, then offers them a conveniently expensive way to make it go away.
This kind of scam has been around for a few years, but what's really surprising is that the three men generated $100 million a year with their software. It's an epically huge amount of money, which gets laundered in much the same way as money from prostitution and large-scale drug deals.
Preying on the weak
Cybercriminals are also finding new ways to exploit humble, clueless internet users. The latest of these is the 'copyright violation scam', which scans the user's PC for illegally downloaded material and then gives the user the opportunity to pay off the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) to the tune of $400 to avoid being taken to court.
Of course, the RIAA and MPAA have nothing to do with this latest scam. "These organisations are known for their hardball tactics, so it's almost plausible that they would do something like this," said F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hyppönen. "And we know there were people who paid up. There were several people on the PirateBay forums who said, "Oh yeah, I paid up."
With the zeitgeist of tightening copyright control haunting many torrenters, the idea of a quick and easy way to avoid appearing in court appeals to unsuspecting users.
Scarier still is the threat to online banking. Zeus is an advanced keylogger that sits silently in the background of your PC, and a recent estimation by security company Trusteer suggests that it currently infects one in every 3,000 PCs. Like herpes, you won't know you've got it until it's too late.
Over logging
"Zeus is a highly advanced keylogger/banking trojan combo," Hyppönen goes on to say. "It's able to penetrate most of the safeguards built into online banks. Even if you have one-time passwords in your online bank, or if you have challenge responses or a physical device to log in, there are trojans that will sit on your computer, wait for you to go to an online bank to pay bills, and then it will modify the bills as you pay them. You want to pay 50 bucks to the electricity company, you type that in. Zeus changes that to 500 bucks to a completely different account. But you won't see the change on your screen."
CYBERWAR: F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hyppönen
The threat to online banking gets even worse with a new scam in Brazil, as Hyppönen says: "You go to Banco Bradesco – the largest bank in Brazil – and [the virus] waits for you to login. So you give your authentication, and you're now logged in. It then shows you a fake page, which is very well designed.
It tells you that there is a special promotion, running for this week only, which lets you open a new special investment fund, which gives you interest of 3.9 per cent a year, which is plausible. It also says that all the users who sign up with at least €1,000 today will receive a free Nintendo Wii. And you can invest your money in this account by moving money from your account to this account number. It's a good deal, you get a nice return, and you get a free Wii."
Where do these new scams and viruses come from? It's a complex system that parallels the traditional legal software development process. One guy devises a scam, another designs the virus to do it, and he then sells it on to criminals who implement it in the real world. After all, designing a virus is completely legal, but then going on to use it to generate cash is very illegal.
"Zeus is a very good example, because the guy who writes it, Bishop, a Russian guy, isn't doing anything criminal," says Hyppönen. "He is simply selling the tool himself. So he writes the tool that can only be used to steal money from online banks, but he isn't stealing the money himself. He sells it in forums for $700. Other criminals buy the tool from him, and do the actual crimes."
Previously cybercrime has had no impact in the 'real world', unless you're a fi ctional reluctant hero played by Bruce Willis. Until now, that is - and the results are potentially terrifying, as Hyppönen attests.
"One of the best examples of the real-world connections is what happened with hosting.ua, which is a Ukrainian hosting company operating in Kiev – it's very large, has thousands of websites running on it. It's not a criminal operator, but they did have quite a few criminal customers on their network, including illegal forums, phishing sites, stuff like that.
"But [hosting.ua] changed their policies, they did a spring clean in March, and they threw out at least a dozen criminal sites. And that's great, that's exactly what we want ISPs to do. The problem was, two weeks later they had a major fire, they lost almost all connectivity, their data centres, and they were offline for about six or seven weeks. Coincidence? Maybe. Possibly.
"We have no evidence linking these two incidents. But you can sort of see the connection, and it's probably more about showing the example to other ISPs: 'you don't want to throw us out.' And you can see how after something like this other ISPs would be much more inclined to just look away. That's probably the worst development I've seen."
Flame war
Obviously the moment events like the fire at hosting.ua occur they fall into the jurisdiction of real-world law enforcement, and in the UK the anti-terrorism act covers some naughty internet shenanigans. But it's rare in other countries.
REAL-TIME ATTACKS: Coolest thing in F-Secure's labs: a real-time map of computer attacks in the world
"There's nothing like that in Russia, there's nothing like that in Ukraine," says Hyppönen. "And even if there were, the interest from law enforcement to hunt these guys is pretty limited, unless there's a clear case of showing big [financial] damages. International law enforcement has been built to fight things like smuggling and money laundering and drug trafficking, which are multi-million dollar crimes.
Online, one victim typically loses a couple of hundred, or maybe a thousand euros. But there's tons and tons of victims, and it's a completely different scenario. It's a type of crime we didn't have at all ten years ago, and it's completely exploded. The resources that international law enforcement have haven't changed at all."
The surprisingly dramatic world of cybercrime is dangerous and ever-changing, and despite Luis' advice to the contrary, it really may be worth installing some sort of anti-virus software on your PC, even if it is the free stuff. At least until someone can actually go into the internet and kill the cybercriminals Tron-style.
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Review: Pioneer SC-LX83
Back in 2008, Pioneer launched the SC-LX81 and we liked it. We liked it so much, in fact, it won awards and everything. It used ICEpower Class D amplification developed by B&O and it was the best-sounding implementation of the technology we had heard. It scooped all the Oscars for style and was festooned with must-have widgets, too. A year later came the equally good and stylish SC-LX82, but by this time the peer group had caught up in sound quality and surpassed it on sheer features. 'Righty-ho', said Pioneer's engineer's (albeit in Japanese), 'prepare to be blown away by 2010's SC-LX83.'
Out with the black
At just shy of £2K, the SC-LX83 is not cheap, but you know you have bought something special. It is a huge, superbly appointed box, and is still the most alluring AV beast on the market, even if its once piano black fascia is now a more conservative brushed satin.
The core power amplifiers remain unchanged, being the same Direct Energy HD ICEpower devices as its forebear. This is no bad thing, as Pioneer's implementation of them not only sounds great, but also claims to use a frugal amount of electricity – about a third of traditional Class A/B amps, in fact.
The brand's PQLS anti-jitter system has been further advanced and now works on bitstream signals, as well as LPCM multichannel and plain old, standard stereo PCM. With a compatible PQLS Pioneer Blu-ray disc-spinner, digital jitter over the HDMI interface is all but eliminated, resulting in a cleaner and more accurate audio transfer from player to amp.
Add to this a new suite of 32-bit DACs prior to amplification and the LX83 has all the potential to be a sonic diva with high-resolution material. Even if you are listening to compressed formats such as MP3, WMA, A2DP transfer Bluetooth audio or even old school, DVD-based Dolby Digital or DTS (ah, how passé…), Pioneer's latest Sound Retriever Air system is on hand to rekindle some depth and vibrancy to the sound.
And it comes as no surprise that this baby offers the full gamut of HD-audio decoding, 3D-compatible V1.4a HDMI connections and upscaling of any video to 1080p. Interestingly, it remains a stoically seven-channel amplifier, even though it features Dolby ProLogic IIz decoding for front height channels.
Instead, the rear-back output can now be assigned to front height duty, and there is a 9.1 channel line-level output suite should you fancy going for the full complement of rear-back and height channels.
Like its forbears, this is a top-spec THX Ultra2 Plus certified machine, complete with all the associated post-processing suites, and is fine tuned by Air Studios. But this receiver really excels on its controls and connections.
App control
Yeah, everyone does Ethernet and USB networking, but the LX83 adds a fully A2DP-compliant Bluetooth dongle for wireless music streaming and control. Pioneer's genuinely revolutionary iPhone/iPod/iPad iControlAV App will also operate the bulk of this receiver's day-to-day functions. Moreover, it does so with a grace and animated style that makes traditional remote controls look like objects for the Antiques Roadshow.
The iControl AV software is inspired and allows your i-whatever to speak to the LX83 either directly over the Bluetooth dongle, or via your Wi-Fi router and hardwired Ethernet to the amplifier. Either way, it works seamlessly, offering genuine two-way communication, has informative videos and is simply the coolest thing in AV since Ice Age 3.
And that isn't all. The supplied standard remote control is not only well equipped with a backlit reversed LCD display, it is also an RF device. As radio frequency goes through walls to some extent, the amplifier can be hidden away in a cupboard or even a different room and still accept inputs from the remote.
Moreover, as well as being programmable to control the brand's and other makers' kit via IR, the manufacturer has then thoughtfully supplied two IR magic eyes for any other kit you might want to hide away. Top marks!
And, if you've still not had enough control magic, take note that the SC-LX83 offers full RS232 integration, plus IP control and a web browser interface as well. Not only does this ensure that it can be integrated with any IP-based custom install system, it also allows you to spy on it and see what it is up to while you are at work.
I suppose I am a little surprised that the LX83 doesn't have built-in Wi-Fi , but for serious networking (including critical firmware updates) you really do need a hardwire connection anyway.
More equal than others
Running the Pioneer's incredible MCACC setup and Room EQ software is a walk in the park and the beast is quickly ready to party. MCACC not only does all the usual parametric EQ balancing, but it also offers full band phase, reverb and standing wave control.
Just add a PC to download the graphs and perhaps a degree in systems engineering to fathom it all out, and you have a very comprehensive EQ system at home.
Thankfully, the full-auto mode works a treat and takes the sweat out of it. Given that the beating heart of the SC-LX83 is almost a facsimile of its predecessor, it is no surprise that the sound is just as clean and fast.
Bass effects have a crispness and dynamic attack that takes your breath away and the top end simply soars without getting harsh or acerbic. The midrange is buffed so clean and smooth it almost sounds a little laid back, but in reality this simply translates into an incredibly natural sounding dialogue.
The overall sound is hugely open and spacious, and effects from big explosions to ambient information are starkly detailed. The peculiar sound of the alien weapons firing in District 9 is fuelled with crackling electrical power, and the ensuing explosion of human targets is rendered suitably wet and squidgy.
The pod ship taking off under its own thrust is a cornucopia of audio effects – engine roar, the building collapsing, the wave of sand heading toward by-standers – and the Pioneer doesn't flinch at painting an incredibly detailed and defined picture.
Switching between full MCACC with phase control on and then all off reveals just how much mid-bass room bloom alone that the system eliminates. Switch the EQ back on and the soundstage simply swells in every direction, allowing each facet of the audio better definition and space.
The Blu-ray of AC/DC: Live at Donnington reminds me just what I found wanting on the old LX82: a bit of passion. However, it only does this because I think the new 32bit DACs have given back some much needed verve.
Given a handful of volume, the LX83 allows Brian Johnson to power into the room while keeping a tight reign on Chris Slade's enthusiastic use of the hi-hat back in 1992. As the disc progresses, the Pioneer really gets into the rock concert groove. While it's never going to throw the TV out of the window or drive a Rolls Royce into your pool, it does now wear denim jeans and a leather jacket when required.
The SC-LX83 builds on the strength of the predecessors in its winning stable, but it's packed with wow-factor features and sounds even more potent and exciting than its forbears. Detail, power, passion, cool iPhone widgetry and sumptuous style. What's not to love?
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Guide: How to build the ultimate media centre
There are a scary number of ways of playing back your library of movies and music through a TV screen. You can stream them over the LAN via a games console, play them directly from the cloud on an Internet ready TV or simply hook up your laptop via an HDMI cable. You can even play directly off of your iPod. Many go down the route of least resistance and opt for a do-it-all entertainment on demand set-top box, such as Sky+ or BT Vision, paying a monthly subscription so they never have to get their hands the slightest bit dirty with an extra cable or two.
Nothing, however, has yet displaced building your own media centre to sit at the side of your TV as the ultimate symbol of home hackery. Since the days when phrases like 'digital home' still sounded far reaching, we've been inundated with devices that are supposed to make media streaming easier, but they all add either an extra layer of complexity or force you to relinquish some important level of control.
In the case of a set-top streamer, for example, you still need a separate server, running up your electricity bill and presenting a low to medium fire hazard, somewhere in the house or garden.
Set-top PVRs such as Virgin's V-Box are great, but they are limited for storage space and there's not a lot you can do with recordings once they're made.
No, the only truly efficient, flexible way to get the right setup is to put together a tiny PC to sit by your TV and make it the centre piece of a hi-def audio and video set-up that puts you in complete control of what you watch and listen to. Just don't be surprised if friends call you a geek, because you have to wait for it to boot before they can watch the footie.
So you've decided to build a media centre? Where do you start? It's fairly obvious that your first decision is going to be the case. There are few lounges that have room for a PC tower, even a diminutive mid-rise one, and any large chassis that runs quietly enough is going to be huge.
At the other end of the scale, small-form factor Mini-ITX cases aren't just for low-power Via CPUs any more, you can squash a top-end system into one if you try. Gigabyte even has a board based on Intel's H55 chipset for Core i3/i5/i7 processors that includes USB 3.0 support.
Barely the size of a Nintendo Wii, it gives you the potential for putting a supercomputer in a matchbox. Unfortunately, you'll still need a full-size ATX power supply for the desktop chip, and there's not a lot of room inside a Mini-ITX for a graphics card and internal TV tuners.
For the heat issues alone, we're going to avoid them. Instead, we're sticking with a full-size ATX case, but one of the many that have been designed for living room use (in this instance by Zalman). That means it looks good and some thought has been given to keeping it quiet too – although we're going to improve its acoustics by replacing the two small case fans with a 12cm one.
Kitted out with components
The Zalman case means is that we have plenty of room for extra storage, a twin-tuner TV card and a discrete graphics processor to speed up video encoding. Even with the quad core Intel i5 750 CPU that we've chosen as our processor, it can take a long time to rip a DVD to file using Handbrake.
If you're looking to save money, a dual-core i3 CPU and integrated graphics will still outperform many media centres of yesteryear and is more than capable of pausing live TV and recording two streams at once.
In our extravagance, we've added a small SSD drive to act as our system disk. That should help our media centre boot up or restore from hibernate quickly, and keeping a separate drive for our recordings makes it easy to swap in or add extra capacity later on.
There's a terabyte and a half in there to start, mounted in a silent hard drive from Quiet PC. An alternative option would be to forgo a large internal drive altogether and dump all your audio and video files onto a NAS box for easy streaming anywhere. You'll still need some space for working with video files locally, just not as much.
Inside the media machine, you'll also need an optical drive. We've gone for a combined DVD and Blu-ray burner, which means HD movies and lots of back-up space. It's a corner you can cut by just going for a regular DVD-RW if you like.
Quiet your noise
The final internal component worth noting is the power supply. In the last few PC builds I've put together, the power supply has consistently been the noisiest component, while at the same time being the one you can't do anything to shut up (I'm not brave enough to go prodding around the capacitors inside a 700 to 1,000W PSU).
Silent PSUs, on the other hand, are notoriously unreliable. There's no way you can run a large transformer without generating heat – so we've opted for an intelligently cooled Zalman model, which should provide enough juice for the other components without drowning them out.
Outside of the case, Logitech is the undisputed master of living room peripherals with its awesome, yet relatively inexpensive, Z5500 surround sound system and the excellent Dinovo Mini keyboard controller.
The obvious temptation is to go for a traditional looking remote control, rather than this tiny Bluetooth keyboard with built-in mouse pad, but the thinking here is that if you plan to use your media centre to do anything other than watch TV – such as surf the web or read an email – then a remote won't be enough.
The Dinovo Mini is a gorgeous compromise that does keyboard, mouse and remote in one and folds up to a discrete compact style when not in use. Again, though, it is pricey so if you want to shave £50 or so off of our build price any wireless keyboard and mouse will do.
As far as software goes, the main choice concerns what operating system to use. Windows 7 is excellent for a media centre box, not just because it has good driver support and a TV-style menu screen built-in, but because it's just about the only OS that has effective DPI scaling.
Having a 'ten foot interface' so that the main media menu is usable from the couch is one thing, but in Windows' Display control panel you can compensate for the lack of pixels on a large TV screen by scaling the desktop rendering up so that web pages and dialogue boxes are visible too.
Bill of materials: Cash or card, sir?
Zalman HD501 - £115, quietpc.com
Asus P7P55-M - £66, uk.asus.com
Intel Core i5 750 - £157, www.intel.com
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 - £18, quietpc.com
4GB Patriot DDR3 - £90, www.patriotmemory.com
Zalman ZM500-ST - £51, quietpc.com
Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB - £210, www.kingston.com
Samsung Spinpoint Eco Green F2 1.5TB - £80, quietpc.com
Plextor PXB940 - £170, www.plextor-europe.com
HIS HD5550 Silence - £60, www.hisdigital.com
KWORLD PCI-E PE355-2T - £50, www.novatech.com
Logitech Dinovo Mini - £100, www.logitech.co.uk
Logitech Z5500 Digital - £235, www.logitech.co.uk
Total: £1,352
1. Debox the motherboard
We're going to assemble some basic components before we put them inside the PC case, because it's a hell of a lot easier to do it now before things start to get cramped.
2. Slip in your CPU
Open up the processor socket by lifting the metal retaining arm and folding back the rectangular cover. Hold the CPU by its edges, there are two notches on the sides.
3. Easy tiger, don't force it
The notches on the CPU match up with the shape of the plastic socket. Sit the chip gently on the pins, taking care not to bend any, so that the notches on the socket and processor match up. It should ease neatly into place, allowing you to fold over the metal cover and push the retaining lever back without exerting any pressure.
4. RAM it in (gently now)
Memory modules use the same method of matching up notches to make sure chips can't be inserted the wrong way round. Align the notches and open up the clip on the edge of the port.
5. The second channel
As you gently push the memory module into place, the clip should slowly lock down on itself securely, holding the chip down. To ensure that you get dual channel performance, you'll need two sticks of RAM, in this case they are slotted into similarly coloured ports – although be aware not all motherboards use the same colour coding.
6. Get primed for the heatsink
Before we fit the motherboard into the chassis, we need to attach the plastic mounting bracket for the heatsink. Use a pair of long-nose pliers, if you have them, as you will need to push the white plugs into the middle holes and lock them in place with the black pins.
7. Two fans – bad, one big'un – good
Now you need to open up the chassis. Make sure you put the lid to one side where it won't get scratched. We're going to remove the two small fans located at the back of the case. We're going to place one much larger 12cm fan in the side mount above the CPU, which will provide just as much airflow with a lot less noise..
8. Shields up, gentlemen
With the fans out of the way, take the RF shield (it should be in the mobo box) and push it through the slim rectangular hole beneath the case fan slots. The shield is the metal strip that's pierced with cutouts for the rear ports. Make sure it goes in the right way up…
9. Mount the motherboard
With the RF shield in the right way round, it's time to slide the motherboard into place. The board must not touch the case or you'll create a short and bork the board, so you'll have to move the brass risers into the holes in the tray that match up with the pattern of pre-drilled holes in the motherboard.
10. Stop, Hammer time
If everything has been aligned correctly, the motherboard should simply drop into place and slide into the holes in the RF shield. Check all the risers match up one last time and screw the motherboard into position with the large screws supplied with the case.
11. Heatsinking the CPU
While there's still room in the case we'll fit the CPU heatsink. Screw it on top of the plastic bracket we fitted in step six, taking care not to disturb the square of thermal paste.
12. Start your fans please
Attach the fan power supply to the CPU fan header pins and move on to the hard drives – you'll find an adaptor for the slimline SSD drive in the case accessories. The drive sits inside and is locked into position with small screws.
13. Strip out the caddy shack
Now remove the hard drive caddy in the chassis by releasing the large thumbscrew. There's space for three regular drives – more if you're using SSDs. For now, fix the SSD into its adaptor and put it into one of the removable trays before putting the caddy back into place.
14. Swappable shoppable
Our largest drive, the Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB is going to go in the hotswap bay in the front of the chassis. To fit it, just open the lower door on the front and pull out the plastic tray. The hard drive should fit snugly in the retainers. Note: before you put the tray back in, we'll need to fit the Blu-ray drive.
15. Blu-ray me so fa
Remove the optical drive and hotswap bay by loosening the thumbscrew inside the front of the chassis and the bolt on top. Like the hard drive caddy, it lifts out for easy access. Slide the Blu-ray drive into the top bay until it clicks, then screw it into position.
16. Exhaust port
With the caddy out of the way, pop off the side of the case nearest the processor by releasing the plastic clips on the inside and unscrewing the back, then slide the 12cm fan into place behind the grill. Make sure that the fan is oriented to blow air out of the case, not to suck it in (or you'll be in for a surprise), and bolt it down from the outside.
17. Hook up and shut up
You can hook the fan power cable up to the chassis fan header on the mobo or the throttled controls behind the hotswap bay – it's your choice. Now push the side of the case back on.
18. Buckle it down, buddy
After you've put the caddy back in, you can slide the hotswap drive back through the front and begin cabling all three drives up. Just take a SATA cable for each and attach it to the ports on the motherboard. The hotswap drive port is on the back of the caddy.
19. Fit for PCI positioning
To fit the GPU card and the TV tuner, you'll need to remove two of the silver expansion covers from the back of the case. Take out the cover that lines up to the top 16 lane PCI-e port, and one that lines up with a smaller slot lower down.
20. TV and video in
Push the two cards firmly into the expansion ports on the motherboard and secure them with screws at the rear of the case. Don't worry about the half-height adaptors that are included with both. You won't need them for this build.
21. Supplying the power
The final component is the power supply. This fits into the space beneath the motherboard so that the three-pin connector is facing out the back. Align it so that the holes in the rear match the pattern around the slot, and bolt it into position from the outside of the case.
22. Pinning the power supply
You'll need to connect the motherboard's 2-pin ATX power supply as a second four-pin adaptor near the CPU socket. Now string a SATA cable to the optical and SSD drives – the hot swap drive and fans will need four-pin Molex connectors attached to the rear of the bay.
23. Front panel fun
Finally, all that's left to do is attach the front panel connectors. This can be a bit fiddly, but if you follow the guide in the motherboard manual you should be able to hook up the power switch, indicator lights, audio and USB connectors without too many problems.
24. The turn of the screw
With all the cabling done and tucked away neatly, it's now time to close up the chassis by sliding on the lid and doing up the thumbscrews at the rear. Now you need to hook up your peripherals, power leads and your monitor. You may need an old cabled keyboard for the next part of the build.
25. Installing Windows
Installing Windows is simple. On the first bootup press [DEL] to get into the BIOS and navigate to Boot > Boot order. Now set the Blu-ray drive as your first boot device, put your Windows 7 DVD in and just follow the onscreen instructions. Make sure that you install the Windows operating system to the smaller SSD drive if you're using it.
26. Install the drivers
Install the drivers for your keyboard, mobo and and graphics card. Don't use the Quick Setup program for the TV card – we'll be using Media Centre, so launch 'E:\Driver\Setup.exe'.
27. Set up the software
Now you can start up Windows Media Centre. On the first run through, it'll want to set up your hardware. This is a pretty straightforward process, and you will need to give it control over both tuners in your TV card. It can take a bit of time, though – don't panic if nothing seems to be happening.
28. TV shenanigans and aerial antics
Nine times out of ten, the first automated set-up you try won't work properly. If you click through the manual options for TV setup, there's a better chance you'll find channels, otherwise you may want to invest in a signal booster (Maplin sells them for £15).
29. Get the right drive
Before you go any further, scroll down the main Media Centre menu to Task and choose 'Settings'. Then click TV > Recorder > Recorder storage and change the drive for files to your larger data drive.
30. For your viewing pleasure
If everything has gone according to plan, you should now have a live electronic program guide in Media Centre's TV screen, from which you can click to a current channel, schedule recording and find out information about programs.
31. Pause and record
From the Media Centre screen you can go to full screen view, pause (but we advise not pausing on James May's mug that'd be horrible) and record live TV and change channel with the cursor keys. Anything you decide to record will be saved in a folder called 'Recorded TV', which is automatically linked to your library folders in Windows Explorer.
32. Sharing your favourite shows
Because everything is logged straight into you Windows Media Player libraries, you can stream shows to other devices around the house. In order to burn them to DVD, though, you'll need to convert them to DVR-MS files (Right-click the show file) first.
33. Feed me more content
You can access a fairly limited supply of online channels and TV shows from Microsoft's online video player, but for a larger number of streams you're better off installing a third party program, such as Boxee, for example.
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Review: Monitor Audio PL200AV 5.1 system
My mate Big Mick is the front-of-house engineer for Metallica and has the record for the largest sound system ever assembled. It was 1,200,000W and was for 1,500,000 people at the Monsters of Rock festival in Russia, which took place after the Iron Curtain came down. After all, speaker systems have to suit the amount of people assembled, or the space they are expected to cover; the THX Select and Ultra specifications, for instance, are all about the cubic capacity or volume of the room the systems are designed to fill.
And when it comes to cinema, the same rule applies to the space in any given room. Whether a living room in suburbia or a huge country barn extension, the size of the speakers you need will vary accordingly.
Now, I have a nice home and a lovely room that helped sell the house to me in the first place, as the fireplace has been removed and we can have a classic 5.1 system setup around where we like to sit. A Swiss chalet would go down well, especially in our lovely long garden, but I don't have that kind of cash.
So, if a set of speakers is suitable for a magnificent home, I tend to gravitate towards them. These are right on the edge of that criterion. Not because they are especially huge (they are about the size of the B&W 800 series, and the Monitor Audio Platinum Series front tower does get bigger than the one I had to play with), but because they are so lavishly and beautifully packaged.
Often it's advisable to keep cartons in the loft for future use, especially in the event of a house move, but these MDF ended, band-strapped, Velcro-sealed wonders were as heavy empty as some cartons are when full!
Once I had got over the heebie jeebies and worked out that I had to ask nicely for the boxes to be kept at HCC Towers, I unpacked some of the most weightily attractive speakers I have ever seen.
These speakers make a real statement, having been designed from the ground up, I was told, to be as fabulous as Monitor Audio can make them, both from the engineering and sonic points of view.
Animal magnetism
The design is first-rate: they have really strong gripping embedded Neodymium magnets to hold the snazzy, bent metal mesh grilles on their top-grain leather hide faces; Monitor Audio's signature branded front edges are present on the lavish cast chassis of the speaker drivers themselves; there are sexy metal trim bits on the top leading edges of the enclosures with the name engraved upon it; and the terminals are paired sets of lavishly made binding posts, complete with well engineered jumper pieces.
The latter even have a foam-lined home (in case you are going to bi-wire/bi-amp) in a box you get with the speakers. This also packs a spirit level and Allen-headed screwdrivers to assemble stands and feet.
The towers' feet themselves are delicious assemblages of precision engineering and can be used with the stubby, ovoid shiny-plated, multi-piece spikes, or else with those unscrewed and the rubbery polymer ring-grippers applied instead. These can optionally be used in a heavier-duty version under the awesomely pretty subwoofer.
The PLW15 sub has a huge kilowatt beast of an amplifier inside, and that mighty 15in cone is a ceramic metal alloy material (C-CAM) and sits under a big grille with turned metal stand-off legs.
The cones in the rest of the speakers are made of a skinny layer of this ceramic alloy on a Nomex honeycomb, which makes them unfeasibly light yet rigid.
The final cherry on the cake is the tweeter. A 'ribbon' type, it is a tiny sliver of C-CAM material, which acts as both voice coil and diaphragm, and as it weighs so little it can accelerate like a brute and can reach up to 100kHz. (And to think that at 20kHz it means 10,000 gravities of acceleration!)
But the overall finish is so lustrous and rich it made me feel guilty, as I'm not aware of any 'sustainable' Ebony plantations. If I am right, this speaker is covered in a veneer so rare and delicious, its use is obscenely unfriendly to the environment. It is quite the most luscious and beautiful speaker finish I have ever seen, and an awful lot of Monitor Audio fans will take one look and just hurt for wanting them.
But this 5.1 system offers far more than looks: the smarts are intense and that woofer is as clever as a weasel, yet without needing a room-EQ programme, microphone or boffin to set up.
I silenced the eco-conscience with the thought that, after all, this ain't no mass market product, and slid the J J Abram's Star Trek into my Sony Blu-ray spinner.
Trek-tastic
In this brilliant sci-fi, the almost religious zeal with which actors and movie makers have paid homage to all that has gone before allows multiple references for Trekkers throughout, and I love it.
I cranked it up to full reference level, while offering up silent praise to neighbours who just don't seem to mind, and as the soundtrack swelled and soared, I marvelled at the sheer scale, power and purity of the output.
It was great with the tiny details and yet had massive grip even at the zero dB level. In fact, I found it almost too loud – and for me that is quite a statement!
The bass had a real, visceral thump-in-the-belly feel to it, which is quite a feat in my thrulounge, as there is a void under the floorboards, a set of flexible (in acoustic terms) French windows and big, absorbant velvet curtains over them. That woofer, quite simply, is an animal.
Beyond the low-end, the Platinum array continues to impress. In an early scene reminiscent of the Alien movies, baddie Captain Nero is seen in his spaceship, which is wet and corroded inside. Despite the snarling and stuff going on, the dripping of water in the background was clear and crisp. Even in the midst of explosions and mayhem, dialogue is unstrained and realistic, proving that the system can hit hard in the midband, too.
Meanwhile, brass instruments in the soundtrack are great indicators of the high HF fidelity, because if you can hear the rasp of the timbre of the horns, you know you have your hands on some excellence. And these horns honked like wailing geese, with great detail, all through the sequence where James T. Kirk's dad snuffs it, while heroically saving his wife in childbirth, along with his ship's crew.
One lump or two?
And right there, barely a few minutes in, they bloody had me. I am as tough as marshmallow and wept buckets over ET and Shallow Hal alike (albeit for different reasons), but as long as the system is suitably involving, it doesn't take more than regular Hollywood guile to put a great big lump in my throat.
As Jim's dad greets his son by video phone in the last few seconds of life, the violins swell with such purity I was reaching for the tissues – a broken man.
A later scene provides a great test of a speaker system's imaging ability. When we see a young Spock at school, young Vulcans learn in groups of individual, dish-shaped classrooms, and we track across the collective, listening to the multifarious tutors teaching seven-year-olds degree-level science.
You can focus in on any one teacher, follow the voice as it goes through the soundstage, often diagonally as the camera tracks and the vocals remain clear and easy to tell apart. It's almost like one of those audio test tracks and it showed just how smart this system is.
Finally, a word on the HF drivers. In the past, I heard a tweeter called the EMIT (Electro Magnetic Induction Tweeter), made by Infinity, and while it looks the same as this C-CAM job, it is more delicate and tinkly and ethereal. I was half hoping that these tweeters might offer the same breathy loveliness, but they don't.
What they do is handle some real power, which shouldn't be possible. So while they add fabulous detail and edge, as well as incredible staging and placement to the system, they still allow truly offensive levels to be raised. I love them to bits and found that they also have a terrific linear response, which means they work just as sweetly at low levels and with music.
So, in case you hadn't realised, I reckon we have another reference grade set on our hands here. A 5.1 system of true class. And, if you really want to fill a big room, Monitor Audio also makes an even bigger set of towers that promise to knock your socks off!
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