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PHP

March To Be Month of PHP Bugs 292

Posted by kdawson from the open-season dept.
PHP writes "Stefan Esser is the founder of both the Hardened-PHP Project and the PHP Security Response Team (which he recently left). During an interview with SecurityFocus he announced the upcoming Month of PHP bugs initiative in March." Quoting: "We will disclose different types of bugs, mainly buffer overflows or double free (/destruction) vulnerabilities, some only local, but some remotely triggerable... Additionally there are some trivial bypass vulnerabilities in PHP's own protection features... As a vulnerability reporter you feel kinda puzzled how people among the PHP Security Response Team can claim in public that they do not know about any security vulnerability in PHP, when you disclosed about 20 holes to them in the two weeks before. At this point you stop bothering whether anyone considers the disclosure of unreported vulnerabilities unethical. Additionally a few of the reported bugs have been known for years among the PHP developers and will most probably never be fixed. In total we have more than 31 bugs to disclose, and therefore there will be days when more than one vulnerability will be disclosed."
The Courts

RIAA Admits ISPs Have Misidentified "John Does" 271

Posted by kdawson from the record-keeping dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has sent out a letter to the ISPs telling them to stop making mistakes in identifying subscribers, and offering a 'Pre-Doe settlement option' — with a discount of '$1000 or more' — to their subscribers, if and only if the ISP agrees to preserve its logs for 180 days. Other interesting points in the letter (PDF): the RIAA will be launching a web site for 'early settlements,' www.p2plawsuits.com; the letter asks the ISPs to notify the RIAA if they have previously 'misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena' or become aware of 'technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena'; it notes that ISPs have identified 'John Does' who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and it requests that ISPs furnish their underlying log files, not just names and addresses, when responding to RIAA subpoenas."
Google

Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Videos 225

Posted by Zonk from the moment-of-zen-everybody dept.
AlHunt writes "According to the folks at PCWorld Viacom has publicly scolded YouTube for continuing to host throngs of Viacom videos without permission. They are demanding that over 100,000 of its clips be removed from the site. This includes content from Comedy Central (no more Daily Show), MTV, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, and VH1. YouTube has acknowledged receiving a DMCA request from Viacom, and the article notes what a dire precedent this could be if Google can't reach an agreement with Viacom and its fellow IP holders."
Space

China Tests Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon 552

Posted by samzenpus from the the-people's-laser dept.
schnippy writes "U.S. intelligence agencies believe that China has successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon by destroying one of their old weather satellites. The test, if confirmed, would be an order of magnitude more provocative than earlier reports of Chinese blinding lasers being. Arms Control Wonk has a good writeup on what this will mean for U.S. policy."

Fear of Snakes May Have Driven Pre-Human Evolution 553

Posted by Hemos from the snakes-on-a-plane dept.
Krishna Dagli writes "An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests. The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand. Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions — traits that are important for detecting threats at close range. Humans are descended from those same primates. "

McAfee Blames Open Source for Botnets 223

Posted by timothy from the how-conveeeeenient dept.
v3xt0r writes "It seems that 'the Open Source Development Model' is to be blamed for the recent increase in botnet development. 'We're not taking aim at the open-source movement; we're talking about the full-disclosure model and how that effectively serves malware development,' the spokesman for McAfee says. Why not just blame the IRC Protocol? Or simply admit that Proprietary vendors cannot keep pace with the Open Source Model?"

EA Confirms Major Wii Support 150

Posted by Zonk from the woot-wii-woot dept.
Electronic Arts has confirmed they are 100% committed to the Nintendo Wii, reports Gamasutra. The largest game publisher in the U.S. has revealed six games currently in production for the console, which is scheduled to launch sometime in the Fall. From the article: "The EA statement on the matter comments: 'Each title will remain true to the hallmarks of its franchise but is being designed to maximize the power of the Wii hardware and take full advantage of the uniqueness and innovation of its one-of-a-kind controller.'"

MySpace #1 US Destination Last Week 381

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the looking-for-a-stage-2-burn dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hitwise is reporting that MySpace has reached the top, surpassing Yahoo! Mail as the most visited site on the internet for US users. Seeing a 4300% increase in visits in just two short years, this internet sensation has come quite a long ways. From the article: 'To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits.'"

Firefox 2.0 'Beta Candidate 1' Released 368

Posted by Zonk from the new-fox-in-the-henhouse dept.
Krishna Dagli writes to mention that a Firefox 2.0 Beta Candidate has been released to the public. Ars Technica looks at some of the included features such as tab scrolling, anti-phishing measures, and an integrated spellchecker. From the article: "There is an option to search for updates for any extensions that have been broken, but it was not able to update any of the extensions I had installed. Fortunately, Firefox has been integrating many useful extensions (like the ability to drag and drop tabs to new locations) along its development, so this is not as big of a problem as it might seem. The browser seemed quite fast and stable, although I did not perform any benchmarking tests. I found one really obscure bug, where if the user clicks on a help link when a preferences dialog box is open, a new copy of Firefox will load without the user being able to switch back to the original either through Alt-Tab or the Windows task bar."

An IE-Based Tabbed Browser from China 163

Posted by timothy from the adversity-breeds-strength dept.
wannabgeek writes "CNET reports that a new browser, Maxthon is gaining wide popularity in China. 14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it ... Part of the reason, it has features that help in circumventing the Chinese government censors. CNET says it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, and is slowly gaining foothold in Europe as well as the U.S."

Opera 9.0 Released 395

Posted by timothy from the too-bad-it's-not-open-source dept.
Nurgled writes "After teasing us for months with betas and snapshots, Opera Software have finally released version 9.0 of their web browser. The new version features correct ACID2 rendering, native support for the SVG Basic profile, a built-in BitTorrent client, support for Microsoft's designmode and contenteditable extensions, per-site configuration, Atom support, Web Forms 2.0 support, Canvas support (and some Opera-specific extensions), NTLM authentication, some support of parts of CSS3 and lots more. The full changelog is available." p14nd4 adds "And for you *nix users, it hasn't hit their .deb repository quite yet, but there are regular installers available for the major players, including a fixed Ubuntu installer and an x86 Solaris version."

Frozen Chip from IBM hits 500 GHz 417

Posted by timothy from the there's-a-catch-,,, dept.
sideshow2004 writes "EETimes is reporting this morning that IBM and Georiga Tech have demonstrated a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins. The 'frozen chip' was fabricated by IBM on 200mm wafers, and, at room temperature, the circuits operated at approximately 350 GHz."

Are Spam Blockers Too Strict? 226

Posted by Zonk from the unequivocal-no dept.
Myrte writes "Wired.com has a long piece on whether spam blockers are blocking wanted messages." From the article: "For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages. AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem."

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