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Australia

Submission + - Aussie spies spooked by cyberwar (securecomputing.net.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks cables released overnight revealed that Australia's top cyber spy agency (akin to the NSA) was unprepared for cyberwar in the view of other intelligence agencies in 2008. Australian agencies were so concerned they asked US intelligence to provide the framework to defend the country's critical information infrastructure, modelling on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Spooks also discussed how Israel was preparing to take down Iran's nuclear program and how to stay relevant when so much information that was classified was now open source and available to anyone.

Submission + - Scammers turn to Freelancer.com for botnets, IDs (securecomputing.net.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Freelancer.com is being used to recruit malware writers and for identity fraud, recent posts to the global crowdsourcing website have revealed. A British user identified as Novak1 has asked malware writers to craft Zeus-like botnet software and for graphic designers to forge British driver's licence blanks as Photoshop templates. The alarm was raised by Finnish anti-malware researcher Mikko Hypponen in a tweet earlier today. Freelancer.com says the posts violate their terms and conditions and will delete similar posts in future.

Submission + - Cablegate: German criticisms of US data protection (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by natecochrane
natecochrane writes: The US Ambassador to Germany scoffed at German criticisms of US data protection inadequacies, secret diplomatic despatches published to the internet on the weekend revealed. It was a case of German privacy adovcates' worst fears coming true. German politicians from the FDP centre-right faction of the ruling coalition were concerned last year that US safeguards were too lax and that information gathered on its nationals travelling to the US was "pointless" and compromised German interests. But the US ambassador to Germany told the US Secretary of State that the FDP had it wrong because it "has been out of power for over 10 years and lack experience tackling security issues in the internet age". Ambassador Murphy wrote that the "FDP appears not to fully grasp the transnational character of terrorism today and terrorists' increasing use of the Internet". But it appears the FDP understood more about data-leak prevention because it urged the US to appoint a data protection commissioner like the one Germany had.
Transportation

Submission + - Electric Car Goes 375 Miles on One 6 Minute Charge (allcarselectric.com) 2

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 375 miles at moderate highway speeds. It doesn’t end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph.
HP

Submission + - Gallery shuts HP-sponsored art exhibition (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by littlekorea
littlekorea writes: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art has closed an HP-sponsored exhibition after artists protested about copyright conditions imposed by the technology giant. The HP marketing initiative invited artists to email their works to the exhibition to demonstrate ePrinter technology. But artists protests when they noted that the terms and conditions offered HP a ''perpetual, non-revocable, worldwide and royalty-free'' to their work.
Earth

40 Million Year Old Primate Fossils Found In Asia 91

Posted by samzenpus from the look-who's-coming-to-dinner dept.
sosaited writes "It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of four primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old, during which period Africa was thought to not have these species. The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa."
Networking

Submission + - Closing in on 1Gbps using DSL (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "DSL vendors are using a variety of methods such as bonding several copper lines, creating virtual ones and using advanced noise cancellation to increase broadband over copper to several hundred megabits per second. At the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Nokia Siemens Networks became the latest vendor to brag about its copper prowess. It can now transmit speeds of up to 825M bps over a distance of 400 meters."
The Military

Submission + - Power Failure Shuts Down 50 US Nuclear Missiles (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "The Atlantic reports that a power failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile, temporarily offline on Saturday. The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman III's. According to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what's known as "LF Down" status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. The cause of the failure remains unknown, although it is suspected to be a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official."

Submission + - Netsuite CEO says Microsoft cloud is “fake&r (crn.com.au)

Submitted by sholto
sholto writes: This week Netsuite CEO Zac Nelson decided not to get involved in the tiff between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff over the definition of cloud computing. Instead in this blunt Q&A he divided IT vendors into real clouds and fake clouds.
Who is selling fake clouds? “Microsoft is famous for saying 'all our applications are in the cloud'. No they're not. They're their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how's it going to succeed in 2010?”
The Almighty Buck

Wikileaks Donations Account Shut Down 725

Posted by timothy from the sucker-punch dept.
Scrameustache writes "The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had its funding blocked and that it is the victim of financial warfare by the US government. Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist. The apparent blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon publicly expressed its anger at WikiLeaks and its founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, for obtaining thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan."
Security

Chertoff Advocates Cyber Cold War 115

Posted by timothy from the sir-your-analogy-is-unbuttoned dept.
Jack Spine writes "The US and allied countries should formulate a doctrine to apply the principles of nuclear deterrence to cyber attacks and cyber espionage, according to former US Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. No matter that it's very difficult to attribute the source of cyber attacks — just take punitive action against the platform being used to attack, says Chertoff."
The Matrix

Submission + - Cheap ADSL holds up 802.11n router design (crn.com.au)

Submitted by sholto
sholto writes: Ever wondered why you can't find the perfect 802.11n router? You know, the one with dual band, great range, USB print server AND storage. Australian ISPs used to give away modem routers with expensive ADSL plans to consumers, but competition has forced them to drop the plans' prices so low they can't subsidise the boxes any more. D-Link says R&D into N routers is now caught in a Catch-22.
Security

Submission + - Does anyone like Norton Antivirus? (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I have been writing about tech security for years and whenever i mention Symantec's Norton Antivirus, heaps of readers email to complain. However, over the past few years Symantec has completely rewritten Norton AV. So i want to know, how different are the new versions? Do you use it? Did you use it in the past and ditch it? Will you ever consider going back? Early comments from my readers seem very positive for Symantec. Has the company turned it around?
Security

Submission + - Nanotechnology to stop banknote fraud (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by
bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: "A multi-million dollar nanotechnology tool to be launched in Australia next March could yield new anti-counterfeiting technology. Monash researcher Matteo Altissimo said Monash were in discussions about using the tool for improving banknote fraud prevention, but could not name the researchers or organisations involved due to non-disclosure agreements. The etching device will be housed in Monash University's upcoming Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN), which will pay 1.5 million Euros (USD$2.2m) for the machine and an additional estimated $30,000 per year for related utilities. One example of EBL-related anti-counterfeit technology is Exelgram, which was developed by CSIRO in the 1990s and has been used in Hungrarian, Estonian and New Zealand bank notes, Ukranian visas and American Express travellers' cheques."

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