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Submission + - Mobile Radiation Affecting Birds (indiatimes.com)

Submitted by
damitr
damitr writes: "A ministry of environment and forests expert committee says that the (Electro Magnetic Radiation) EMR is largely responsible for the bird's declining numbers in the cities. The panel found that EMR being a newly recognized pollutant, not much research is available on the subject, making it difficult to do comparative studies. Most studies are on EMR affects on humans. Some studies have shown long-term impacts on health and environment reporting negative consequences on immunity, health, reproductive success, behaviour, communication and coordination in animals and birds. One of the studies carried out by Centre for Environment and Vocational Studies, Punjab, 50 eggs of house sparrows were exposed to EMR for 5-10 minutes. It was found that all the 50 embryos were damaged."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 8 Turns 1 PC Into 5, 10, or 5000 (infopackets.com)

Submitted by nandemoari
nandemoari writes: Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will allow users to create multiple virtual machines on a single computer. It's a feature that's previously only been available on Microsoft's server version of Windows.

The tool, which is referred to as Microsoft's "Hyper-V," allows users to make virtual copies of PCs — all within 1 PC (hence, it's "virtualized"). Virtualization, more importantly, addresses major security issues in that it separates the host hardware (your computer) from the operating system (Windows) and the applications which run within Windows.
Security

Submission + - 20GB of emails stolen via doppelganger domains (net-security.org) 1

Submitted by dinscott
dinscott writes: Typosquatting is a well-known phenomena on the Internet. Most users have — at one point or another — misspelled the URL of the site they wanted to visit and were sometimes faced with sites mimicking legitimate and popular ones in order to perpetrate a survey or a phishing scam.

But, according to two researchers from the Godai Group, there is a particularly easy-to-execute type of scheme that is likely already being perpetrated by individuals located in China. It consists of using so-called "doppelganger domains" and mail servers for intercepting emails sent by mistake to them.

151 of the Fortune 500 companies profiled by the two researchers are potentially vulnerable to this kind of attack, including IT companies such as Yahoo, Dell, Cisco, IBM, HP and IBM.
News

Submission + - Bletchley Park Hut Threat Triggers Everest Trek (thinq.co.uk) 4

Submitted by Blacklaw
Blacklaw writes: Information management consultant and ACCU member Astrid Byro has taken on a challenge that takes her well out of her comfort zone: an expedition to Everest's base camp to help save a piece of history at the UK's Bletchley Park. The campaign sees Byro looking for sponsorship for a trek that will take her above 5,360M over a period of about two weeks, risking ice, crevasses, avalanches, and a landing at what has been called the world's most dangerous airport at Lukla. The payoff: to have helped save Hut 6, a historical building in dire need of repair before it is lost to the world.
Cloud

Submission + - Intel demos ray traced Wolfenstein on Atom tablet (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ... well not quite. While the Wolfenstein graphics are displayed on a tablet, the individual frames are being ray traced by a Knights Ferry supercomputer. Knights Ferry is Intel's new HPC chip which can contain up to 50 Larrabee GPGPU cores.

This isn't about Wolfenstein, though. Intel is trying to show off the possibilities of a cloud-based Intel-powered supercomputer that can be used to supercharge low-power smartphones and thin clients — very like OnLive, in fact.

Comment Re:ZoneAlarm and NetBarrier (Score 1) 164

by Blade (#36021876) Attached to: Marlinspike's Droid Firewall Kills Tracking

If you want to sniff on switched networks, stop being so cheap.

You'll need a managed switch with the ability to designate a specific switch port as a SPAN or mirror port (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_mirroring). This will allow you to monitor any other traffic that is passing through the switch.

Those days aren't gone, they merely got a whole lot more expensive.

In any case, it's more likely that you'd do monitoring at the egress point(s) of your private network, not on a particular switch.

Luckily I don't want to sniff stuff on a switched network, although the comment I was replying to made it sound like it was possible to do it by simply sticking another PC on the network. We both know that's not the case.

Your comment is happily covered by my "You'd need to be running some software on the switch or on the internet gateway, or some other device that sees all the traffic for some other reason."

Comment Re:ZoneAlarm and NetBarrier (Score 1) 164

by Blade (#36021790) Attached to: Marlinspike's Droid Firewall Kills Tracking

How do you packet sniff on switched networks? The days of being able to sniff all traffic[1] on a network by having something else on the same network are gone my friend.

You'd need to be running some software on the switch or on the internet gateway, or some other device that sees all the traffic for some other reason.

[1] Yes, you can sniff some broadcast traffic.

Comment Re:Probably just a policy problem (Score 1) 396

by Blade (#35998780) Attached to: Tasmanian Dept. of Education Wants Anti-Virus for Linux, OS X

Policy.

In corporate environments (of the ones I have experience) people don't pay for UNIX hardware and run files-ervers on it with SAMBA. That's why I picked AIX / HP-UX and Solaris, not Linux.

My point was that policy makers don't understand the underlying OS and simply say 'we must have AV' without considering the applications running on those machines.

When my Oracle DB or DB2 instance gets infected with HappySmilieFacev02 I'll change my mind. Policy should be appropriate and not simply blanket coverage, because that leads to as many problems as it solves.

Comment Probably just a policy problem (Score 4, Insightful) 396

by Blade (#35998008) Attached to: Tasmanian Dept. of Education Wants Anti-Virus for Linux, OS X

This is probably just a policy issue. "We've put your AIX / HP-UX / Solaris server in". "What AV does it run?" "Er, it's running AIX / HP-UX / Solaris , we've not installed AV". "But our policy says we have to use product X or product Y to AV protect all our servers". "Yes, but you're not understan....." "Just install AV".

Comment The cloud is never secure ... (Score 5, Insightful) 333

by Blade (#35879168) Attached to: Dropbox Can't See Your Dat– Er, Never Mind

Maybe it comes from working in IT, but I always assume that if someone else is holding my data, they can access it. It doesn't interest me what they say - that's my basic starting assumption. So I always assumed that Dropbox could get to my data, and if I cared about the privacy of that data I just encrypted the files myself first.

It's my data, I'm in control of it. Giving it up to someone else and hoping they keep it safe is silly.

I'm surprised so many people are surprised (and I wonder if the people are are surprised haven't been in IT long?)

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