A tiny portion of the 48th Mersenne prime, a number more than 17 million digits long. Written as text, the entire number is a 22.5MB file.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has scored its 14th consecutive victory, discovering the largest prime number so far.

The number, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, is a digit that's 17,425,170 digits long. That's big enough that if you want to see the full text, you'll have to brace yourself for a 22.5MB download.

GIMPS, a cooperative project splitting the search across thousands of independent computers, announced the find yesterday after it had been confirmed by other checks. At present, there are 98,980 people and 574 teams involved in the GIMPS project; their 730,562 processors perform about 129 trillion calculations per second.

The project has a lock on the market for mongo new prime numbers. The discoverer of this particular prime is Curtis Cooper, a professor at the University of Central Mi... [Read more]

If you've been waiting to jailbreak your iPhone 5, or any device running iOS 6 and higher, today is your lucky day. A new tool called evasi0n was released just this morning.

The new tool is very simple to use -- in fact, it's easier to use than the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak tool I covered last year. Taking far less time, and only a few steps, if you're comfortable clicking a few buttons on your computer and tapping an icon on your iOS device, you're more than prepared to use evasi0n.

A required warning, however: At times things go wrong while jailbreaking a device. Apple never intended for this kind of stuff to happen. As such you should be comfortable troubleshooting any issues you run into, including completely restoring your device through DFU mode.

Now that that's out of the way, let's start the jailbreak process.

• Before you start, make sure you have a current backup of your iOS device. You can back up through iTunes or use iCloud. The choice is yours. This is a crucial step to ensure you don't lose important data should something go wrong and yo... [Read more]

Even though the prevalence of threats for the Mac remains relatively minimal, malware on OS X has raised its ugly head a bit in the past few years. Some in the Mac community have been affected by threats such as the Flashback malware, DNSChanger, and the MacDefender Trojan, among others. As a result, while the most effective way of keeping a Mac secure is to follow safe browsing and computing practices, you may also be considering using anti-malware utilities. But which ones perform best?

Recently, Mac security analyst Thomas Reed attempted to tackle this question in part by putting a number of popular antivirus utilities to the test. To do so, Reed took a collection of 128 malware samples that included both recent active malware threats and extinct threats, and ran a number of popular antivirus utilities to see how they managed this collection. Arguably, the sample size of 128 might not be enough to give a complete assessment of these programs' capabilities, but it should be adequate enough for comparative purposes.

The antivirus tools used in the tests included a number of free and paid scanner packages from Avast, VirusBarrier, Sophos, Dr. Web, ESET, Kaspersky, F-Secure, ClamXav, Norton, MacKeeper, and its included Avira engine, among others. How did each of these do?

While most utilities were able to detect many of the threats run past them in the tests, the difference... [Read more]

MacTech has just published an extensive benchmark comparison of the latest versions of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. The article outlines in great detail the performance of each, not just regarding running popular programs and boot times, but also on file I/O, optimal host configurations, Retina display support, and a number of other important performance considerations for the virtualization packages.

While bigger may be better in some things, faster arguably takes the cake when it comes to computing. Be it booting a system or sheer number crunching, if you can do more of it at once or do it in less time then you likely have the edge.

Benchmarks have always been the standard for comparing different set-ups, but often when new products hit the market, their benchmarks include only a basic overview but often don't detail every aspect of the system's capabilities.

In addition to the standard graphics and CPU comparisons, MacTech offers a look at other details like file I/O, where the performance differences are a lot more subtle (click for larger view).

(Credit: ... [Read more]