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Google

Google Book Search Settlement Receiving Criticism 119

Posted by Soulskill from the not-everyone-is-on-the-same-page dept.
waderoush writes "While James Gleick, Lawrence Lessig, and other pundits have reacted positively to this week's proposed settlement of the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google over the Google Book Search project, a deeper study of the agreement turns up some worrisome provisions that could make online access to books much more costly and difficult than it needs to be. Harvard University's libraries, for example, declined to endorse the settlement over concerns that it provides no mechanism for keeping the cost of access to books reasonable. And while the parties to the settlement have made much of the clause providing public libraries with free full-text access to Google's database of over 7 million out-of-print books, Xconomy has a post pointing out that this access is restricted to exactly one Google terminal per library. So, you can read books for free — as long as you're the first person to get to your public library's computer room in the morning."
Privacy

Submission + - FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills (google.com)

Submitted by nelk
nelk writes: FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills. Due to internal investigation of legitimacy? Supreme Court order?
How about unpaid phone bill?
From the article:
Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.
Communications

Journal Journal: How to Register a cn Domain Name 1

Journal by CNdomain
Today I received a letter about asking me to register a cn domain from Shanghai idc Network Information Technology Co., Ltd(Shang Hai idc Co.,Ltd). But I don't know more about it. The letter is follow: Dear CEO, Shanghai idc Network Information Technology Co., Ltd. is a professional agency to engage the service of domain name registration in China. Shanghai idc Network Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Shang Hai idc Co.,Ltd) Have dealed with more than 30,000 cn domain names and other forms
Sony

Submission + - Blue Blu-ray?

Submitted by TopSpin
TopSpin writes: According to this story, at Japan's recent euphemistically named Adult Treasure Expo 2007, adult filmmakers said Sony had begun offering technical support — which was later confirmed by Sony PR, which stated that Sony would offer support to any filmmaker working on the format, no matter their industry. Apparently, Blu-ray is now the preferred media for Japanese porn.
NASA

Submission + - NASA building largest single-kernel Linux system

Submitted by wellingj
wellingj writes: NASA and SGI are building a new Linux super computer that contains a total of 1024 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processors, resulting in 13.1 TFLOPs. This computer would rank as the 64th fastest computer. As some may know, 1024 cores is the current max for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support. SGI has therefor developed the necessary modifications and submitted them upstream.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone Hacked to Work in Australia (smh.com.au)

Submitted by g0rAngA
g0rAngA writes: The Sydney Morning Herald is running a story on the iPhone, which has been hacked to work with Telstra, one of the main telecommunications providers in Australia. From the article: 'The hack, which was demonstrated in a video clip posted to YouTube over the weekend, does not allow the user to receive calls or send and receive SMS. It is the furthest anyone has come to unlocking the iPhone for use outside the AT&T mobile network in the US.'
The video on YouTube has been taken down, however instructions for unlocking the phone can still be found on the hackint0sh forums.
Software

Submission + - SearchInform Technologies Inc. announces a new ver

Submitted by
Alena Siameshka
Alena Siameshka writes: "May 28, 2007 — SearchInform Technologies Inc. announces a new version of SearchInform, a corporate system of full text search and search for documents with similar content in large data volumes, featuring an enhanced data indexing algorithm. New functions of SearchInform 4.0.09 Fundamental changes took place in intranet computers indexing algorithm. Now an agent program tracking all changes is installed on each computer and all data gets recorded into a log file. Before scanning all these files for changes used to be extremely time-consuming, now only the log file created by agent-program gets scanned. As a result of this innovation (only modified and new files being indexed) the index updating speed has significantly increased. Another important detail is that now all information gets indexed regardless of whether the folder is in common access or not. All indexed data gets placed into the storage located on the server. This allows the user to conduct search through all information regardless of the computer it was indexed on, so even if the computer containing needed information is switched off, the information will still be found. Even if certain files were deleted from the computer by accident, they will still be available in the storage for a set period of time. The size of the storage and the time intervals throughout which the information will be stored in it are defined by the user. Main features of SearchInform: — Phrase search with due consideration to stemming and thesaurus — New SoftInform Search Technology of search for similar documents — High indexing speed (from 15 to 30 Gb/hour), — Client-server architecture — Scalability — Query caching system — Support of over 60 most popular text formats, Outlook & TheBat electronic messages, mp3 & avi tags, and logs of MSN and ICQ instant messaging programs — Indexing DBMS fields (Lotus, SQL, Oracle) About SearchInform Technologies SearchInform Technologies was founded in 1995 and has been operating in the area of information technologies with special focus on information searching, storing and processing. The range of company's products is quite large and encompasses from mass production of single user-oriented products to ready business solutions to be integrated into corporate systems. Owing to its extensive experience in various projects, the company offers its services on developing custom information systems of any complexity. More information on our website: http://www.searchinform.com/ For all inquiries mailto:alena.siameshka@searchinform.com Alena Siameshka, Head of PR & Marketing Department at SearchInform Technologies"

Submission + - ISPs willingly accepting abuse?

Submitted by beh
beh writes: Yesterday, at 2:30pm GMT someone started ssh scanning my servers — thanks to fail2ban, there's not much chance of anything happening there, but nevertheless, when I finally saw all the fail2ban messages about it 2 1/2 hours later, I reported the issue to theplanet.com, the provider from which the attack originated.

At first, there was no response apart from 'This is an auto-response'. A further 12 hours later, finally an answer "we will investigate", in the meantime, the attack continues.

By now, it has been 23 hours since the attack started, and over 20 since I reported it to the ISP; no further reaction, the ssh scans continue to come in from 70.87.55,194; and since the attack goes again all IP addresses of both of my servers, I can only assume it will go against the entire subnet of those servers (especially since a third server belonging to the same domain, with another ISP is not the target).

I've just had a quick online chat with their support desk, and all they tell me is "I can't do anything about it; my hands are tied. Mail the abuse desk again, but please note, the investigation and actions from it can take between 24 and 72hours.".

My question now is this — when does an ISP become an accomplice to an attacker, by willingly leaving him to continue to attack other systems, even though the provider knows full well about what's going on?

Where are the rights of those people that are on the receiving end of those attacks — I can hardly 'take my business elsewhere', since I'm not a customer of theplanet.com... For the moment, I'm 'happy' with the attacks to continue, as the attacker seems to be using dictionary based attacks and hasn't hit on any accounts that could be vulnerable; but obviously, I can't say how safe other systems on the same subnets, or on other subnets that are being attacked might be. Leaving this unchallenged for 24-72 hours seems a sure-fire way to exacerbate the problem, as any additional host someone might be able to break into, will only make future attacks worse.

So, what can/should be done?
Privacy

Who's Trading Your E-mail Addresses? 355

Posted by CmdrTaco from the checking-the-nasdaq-now dept.
Bennett Haselton is back with another piece on e-mail privacy. He starts "On April 14, 2007, I signed up for an AmeriTrade account using an e-mail address consisting of 16 random alphanumeric characters, which I never gave to anyone else. On May 15, I started receiving pump-and-dump stock spams sent to that e-mail address. I was hardly the first person to discover that this happens. Almost all of the top hits in a Google search for "ameritrade spam" are from people with the same story: they used a unique address for each service that they sign up with, so they could tell if any company ever leaked their address to a spammer, and the address they gave to AmeriTrade started getting stock spam. (I don't actually do that with most companies where I create accounts. But after hearing all the AmeriTrade stories, I created an account with them in April just for the purpose of entering a unique e-mail address and seeing if it would get leaked.)" Bennett continues on if you're willing to click the link.

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