JWRose - Slashdot User

FTC Shuts Down Calif. ISP For Botnets, Child Porn 224

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 04, 2009 @03:00PM from the child-porn-world-needs-more-suicides dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Trade Commission has convinced a federal judge to pull the plug on a 3FN.net, a.k.a. 'Pricewert LLC,' a Northern California based hosting provider. The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities, the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog writes. From the story: 'Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.' The story quotes a former Justice Dept. expert saying the FTC action may be a smoke screen for a larger criminal investigation by the federal government in 3FN's activities."

Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft tool to validate open standards 1

Submitted by Oldspeak on Tuesday June 02, 2009 @11:54AM

Oldspeak writes: "Geman research institute Fraunhofer Fokus and Microsoft on Monday announced plans to build an online tool that will help organisations validate their documents against internationally recognised document-format standards.

The tool is intended to be a step towards delivering on the promise of the ISO/IEC 29500 and ECMA-376 standards, both of which are based on Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) document format, Microsoft said. .. with different vendors implementing the standard in different ways, organisations need a way to make sure the documents they create are fully standards-compliant, Fraunhofer and Microsoft said"

I don't follow the logic, what kind of 'standard' is it that allows for implementing in 'different ways' and why would one of the suppliers of such a standard need a tool to validate it's own 'open' document standard? I do recall someone stating that more than one standard was a good thing, but I hadn't realized that even the individual standards, came in different varieties.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - First Internet Election Takes Place in Hawaii

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Friday May 29, 2009 @03:03PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that voting has ended in what is being touted as the nation's first all-digital election and city officials say it has been a success after some 7.300 voters in Honolulu's neighborhood council election were able to pick winners entirely online or via telephone. Although only 6.3 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, city officials say the experiment appears to have generated few problems and it even saved the financially strapped city around $100,000. "It is kind of the wave of the future," said Bryan Mick, a community relations specialist with the city Neighborhood Commission, "so we're kind of glad in a way that we got to be the ones who initiated it." Before the first day of balloting, voters living in 22 neighborhood board districts with contested races received a passcode that, along with the last four digits of their Social Security number, gave them access to an election Web site created by Everyone Counts. Voting also was conducted by phone, with results electronically fed into the same computer system that collected the Web votes. Lori Steele, head of Everyone Counts, the San Diego-based firm chosen by the commission to run the election, said the computer codes in her firm's system are available for auditing, and that each completed ballot is heavily encrypted and more secure than that used in Internet banking. Web voting, which produces no paper record, cannot be used in city council or state elections because state law bars voting systems that do not include a vote verification process. "The technology side, it works," said Joan Manke, executive secretary of the commission. "So my sense is because it's a change, it's something totally new, it takes time. I think, for people to buy into it, to want to actually try it.""

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