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Businesses

Bank of America Cuts Off Wikileaks Transactions 467

Posted by timothy from the hello-complaints-department dept.
Chaonici writes "The first actual bank to do so, Bank of America has decided that it will follow in the footsteps of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, and halt all its transactions that it believes are intended for WikiLeaks, including donations in support of the organization. 'This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.' Coincidentally, in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine, Julian Assange stated that he was in possession of the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, and that he planned to release information about a major bank early next year."
Software

Submission + - Dropbox 1.0 finally released

Submitted by Zack
Zack writes: Dropbox has finally released version 1.0. The new version comes with hundreds of bug fixes, including invalid file names on Windows, weird Unicode normalizations, Word and Excel file locking, abnormal symlinks hierarchies, and case sensitive file systems on Mac. It also adds TrueCrypt support, a Rainbow Shell that offers support for extended attributes, selective sync, a new installation wizard, and reduces resource usage.
Google

What To Do About Mobile Devices That Lie 107

Posted by timothy from the spanking-is-harmful-to-the-screen dept.
GMGruman writes "InfoWorld has caught two Android devices that falsely report security compliance that the Android OS does not actually support, and Apple quietly has dropped its jailbreak-detection API from iOS 4. So how can IT and businesses that allow iPhones, iPads, and Androids trust that the new generation of mobile devices won't become Trojan horses for malware? There's no easy answer, but Galen Gruman explains what current technologies can do to help — and how Apple, Google, and others might increase the trustworthiness of their platforms in the future."
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone & Android apps breaching privacy of use (wsj.com)

Submitted by N!NJA
N!NJA writes: Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name — even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps" — games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones — showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. Among the apps tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. [...]

"The great thing about mobile is you can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie," says Meghan O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. "That's how we track everything." Ms. O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone users whenever it can. "We watch what apps you download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the app you go," she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual. [...]

Some developers feel pressure to release more data about people. Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope Android app, says ad-network executives encouraged him to transmit users' locations. Mr. Binshtok says he declined because of privacy concerns. But ads targeted by location bring in two to five times as much money as untargeted ads, Mr. Binshtok says. "We are losing a lot of revenue."

Submission + - Bank of America Cuts Off Wikileaks Transactions (kansascity.com) 1

Submitted by Chaonici
Chaonici writes: The first actual bank to do so, Bank of America has decided that it will follow in the footsteps of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, and halt all its transactions that it believes are intended for WikiLeaks, including donations in support of the organization. 'This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.' Coincidentally, in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine, Julian Assange stated that he was in possession of the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, and that he planned to release information about a major bank early next year.
Security

Submission + - Scientists find TSA scanners may tear apart DNA (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by Terrence Aym
Terrence Aym writes: Los Alamos scientist Boian Alexandrov and his team discovered is that the resonant effects of the terahertz (THz) waves bombarding humans unzips the double-stranded DNA molecule. This ripping apart of the twisted chain of DNA creates bubbles between the genes that can interfere with the processes of life itself: normal DNA replication and critical gene expression.

Submission + - Yahoo email search not working for weeks now!!

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "If you have a Yahoo email account and who doesn't? The search function, that you use to search back into your account's 6000+ emails dating back to 1997, will only look back about 30 days. Say good bye to that hot babe that sent you the email in 2005 because that email is now lost in the Yahoo ether. Thanks Yahoo!! Oh there is a fix. You can down all your emails to your new gmail account."
Idle

Submission + - Nigerian Email Scam Victim Sues Bank, Loses Appeal (rhlaw.com)

Submitted by reidhellyer
reidhellyer writes: While many victims of the so-called “Nigerian e-mail scam” would be too embarrassed to trumpet that fact, others end up infamous for their victimhood like the appellant in a published opinion of the California Court of Appeal in Riverside.
Censorship

Submission + - Amazon Still Sells Pedophilia Books (bnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has found itself in another censorship controversy. This time, it removed some erotic fantasy fiction with an incest theme from its physical and ebook shelves. The company appears to be trying to keep a lid on the issue, tightly controlling what it says and refusing to address questions about its current actions that would be considered fundamental by many of its writer and publishing house vendors as well as consumers. Given that Amazon still sells incest fantasy by other writers as well as material with a strong pedophilia theme — which got it in hot water recently — you really have to wonder what is going on.
Canada

Submission + - CBC Endangered (friends.ca)

Submitted by Don Philip
Don Philip writes: The current Canadian government is apparently trying to shut down Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC. Over the years, the CBC has done a splendid job of reporting on Canadian issues, and has generally been fair in its treatment of all political parties. There is an online petition so sign if you would like to support the CBC's continued existence.
Spam

Over 40% of New Mechanical Turk Jobs Involve Spam 56

Posted by Soulskill from the lower-than-expected dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An NYU study reveals that over 40% of the jobs posted by new employers on MTurk are some sort of spam request, such as fake account creation, fraudulent ad clicks, or fake comments, tweets, likes and votes. The study also shows that the bad jobs could be automatically filtered with 95% accuracy, but Amazon is not interested."
Science

Submission + - IceCube Neutrino Scope Done, Buried at South Pole (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on the IceCube Neutrino Detector, a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon. Accordingly called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, completion is expected to occur at 8 p.m. CST, once the last of more than 5,000 optical sensors is buried as much as two miles below the permanent ice cap covering Antarctica. The sensors are buried over one square kilometer of Antarctica's frozen tundra; weight-wise, that's a gigaton of ice. "The detection of these neutrinos will resolve the century-old question of the origin of cosmic rays," said researcher Francis Halzen in an interview from his cold base at the South Pole. "Other missions include the search for dark matter and for supernova explosions inside our own Galaxy. It is however a discovery instrument, and surprises are what we really hope for."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - ITU softens on the definition of 4G mobile (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: After setting off a marketing free-for-all by effectively declaring that only future versions of LTE and WiMax will be 4G, the International Telecommunication Union appears to have opened its doors and let the party come inside.

In October, the global standards group declared that after long study, it had determined which technologies truly qualified for its IMT-Advanced label, sometimes called 4G (fourth-generation). Only two systems made the list: LTE-Advanced, an emerging version of Long-Term Evolution technology, and WirelessMAN-Advanced, the next version of WiMax, also called WiMax 2. Neither is commercially available yet.

Stripping the official 4G title from current LTE and WiMax, which both had claimed it, was the perfect foil for T-Mobile USA to wholeheartedly advertise its HSPA+ (High-Speed Packet Access) network as 4G.

But in a recent press release http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/48.aspx about the opening of the ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar 2010, the august United Nations-affiliated agency appears to have caved in.

"As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as '4G,'" the press release said, "although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed."
Security

Openwall Linux 3.0 — No SUIDs, Anti-Log-Spoofing 122

Posted by Soulskill from the wouldn't-an-open-wall-be-a-gate dept.
solardiz writes "Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or Owl for short) version 3.0 is out, marking 10 years of work on the project. Owl is a small, security-enhanced Linux distro for servers, appliances, and virtual appliances. Two curious properties of Owl 3.0: no SUID programs in the default install (yet the system is usable, including password changing); and logging of who sends messages to syslog (thus, a user can't have a log message appear to come, say, from the kernel or sshd). No other distro has these. Other highlights of Owl 3.0: single live+install+source CD, i686 or x86_64, integrated OpenVZ (host and/or guest), 'make iso' & 'make vztemplate' in the included build environment, ext4 by default, xz in tar/rpm/less, 'anti-Debian' key blacklisting in OpenSSH. A full install is under 400 MB, and it can rebuild itself from source."
Facebook

Submission + - Show Me The Money? Facebook Rakes In $2B In 2010 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Not long after being criticized for not knowing how to make money, Facebook is looking to reel in more than $2 billion in sales in 2010. The world's largest social network is expected to more than double its 2009 sales figures, which reportedly came in between $700 million and $800 million, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Citing unnamed sources, Bloomberg also reported that Facebook executives were only expecting to bring in $1.5 billion in sales this year but exceeded those expectations by half a billion dollars. 'I'm not surprised they're finally effectively monetizing their assets,' said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. 'It's been a combination of increasing page views, increasing customer interest in social media and a tidal wave of publicity.It wasn't so long ago that Facebook was receiving a lot of scrutiny about its need to develop a solid business plan.

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