18930972
submission
justice4all writes:
Facebook has launched a shopping discount service based on its Places app in the UK
Facebook has launched its Places Deals feature in the UK, which rewards users for ‘checking in’ to various locations using their mobile phones.
Users logging into Facebook Places will see yellow and green icons next to their nearby places, allowing them to claim deals by checking in at those places and showing their phone in the associated venue. “In just a few clicks, you can get individual discounts, share deals with your friends, earn rewards and secure donations for good causes,” said the company.
Facebook launched the feature in the US in November 2010, threatening the money-making strategies of services such as Foursquare and Gowalla that have long been offering deals and coupons to people who check-in to businesses. Places Deals has now been expanded to Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Canada.
Initial UK partners reportedly include Starbucks, which will offer a free coffee to the first 30,000 customers checking in using the Facebook Places app, and food chain Yo Sushi
18415962
submission
justice4all writes:
Students arrested on suspicion of using stolen credit cards and bogus PayPal accounts to sell on eBay
Two Foreign exchange students from Vietnam are accused of being mules for an international identity theft ring believed to have stolen millions of dollars from online merchants, according to an affidavit filed by federal investigators in Minnesota district court.
The affidavit sought a search warrant to raid the home of two Vietnamese exchange students attending Minnesota’s Winona State University. During the resulting raid, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit seized documents and computer equipment, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
18415688
submission
krou writes:
According to StatCounter, the month of December saw the first time where IE usage in Europe was knocked off the top spot by Firefox. Firefox usage sat at 38.11%, with IE sitting at 37.52%. Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, stated that "This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share." Google Chrome was in 3rd place with 14.58% of market share.
18400202
submission
justice4all writes:
The ongoing cyberwar over Wikileaks has taken a new turn with individual countries now being attacked
The hacktivist group known as Anonymous is now thought to be targeting sovereign nations, after it launched attacks against the government websites of Zimbabwe and Tunisia.
Anonymous has achieved notoriety in the past few months following the arrest and subsequent bail of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who faces a court appearance in the UK later this month for leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables.
The group has previously targeted companies such as Mastercard and PayPal with distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), after they withdrew their support for the Wikileaks website.
Nations Targeted
Indeed, the attacks are thought to be so serious that Scotland Yard has confirmed it has been investigating the Internet vigilante group for some time.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has created a taskforce, which has been lumbered with the unfortunate moniker of WikiLeaks Task Force (or WTF for short).
And in a new turn of events the hacking group is switching away from companies, and now seems to be targeting countries that are hostile to Wikileaks.
18184696
submission
justice4all writes:
One of the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial says he will take his appeal bid to the Supreme Court in Sweden
One of the defendants of the Pirate Bay trial, the Swedish tech magnate Carl Lundstrom, has confirmed he will appeal the sentence imposed by a Swedish appeal court, by taking his case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.
Lundstrom, along with his three co-defendants – Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Fredrik Neij – were found guilty of being accessories to copyright violations by a Swedish court back in April 2009.
The copyright test case against The Pirate Bay was brought by the Swedish subsidiaries of leading music and film companies, including Sony BMG, Universal Music, EMI and Warner Brothers.
18092170
submission
justice4all writes:
Apple, Oracle and EMC are apparently the joint owners, with Microsoft, of 882 patents bought from Novell
It has emerged that Microsoft’s partners in the consortium that bought 882 patents from Novell last month are Apple, Oracle and EMC.
When Novell was bought by Attachmate in November, a Microsoft-backed consortium called CPTN acquired 882 patents for $450 million, from the one-time leader in networks and application software. There is still no word which patents have been bought, but the other members of the consortium have been revealed as three dominant industry players.
According to a page on the site of the German federal antitrust authority (the “Bundeskartellamt”), CPTN is composed of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC, and its key business is unsurprisingly ”
Members of the consortium have taken controversial stances on patents in the past — Oracle is currently suing Google over the implementation of Java in the Android OS, and Apple is suing Nokia and HTC.
18067296
submission
justice4all writes:
The judge overseeing the trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange yesterday gave permission for two journalists to post Twitter updates, in what is thought to be only the second time that members of the media have tweeted from the inside a courtroom.
As the hearing began at 2pm on 14 December, special correspondent for The Times, Alexi Mostrous tweeted: “judge just gave me explicit permission to tweet proceedings ‘if it’s quiet and doesn’t disturb anything’.”
Freelance reporter and freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke also said: “In an amazing nod to the fact we live in digital age, judge has said we can tweet”.
18027130
submission
justice4all writes:
Amazon says its sites in Europe suffered hardware problems, not a WikiLeaks cyber-war attack
Amazon sites in Europe were offline for half an hour on Sunday, but the online seller says the problem was due to hardware faults, not an attack inspired by the continuing WikiLeaks cyber-war.
The Amazon sites for the UK, Germany, Italy and France were all out for about half an hour around 9pm Sunday night. Amazon had been a target of reprisals last week, for removing WikiLeaks from its servers, but the outage was apparently caused by hardware problems, not a denial of service (DoS) attack.
17986650
submission
justice4all writes:
Anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law has suffered an embarrassing defeat in its first file-sharing court case
The controversial law firm that specialises in anti-piracy lawsuits has suffered an embarrassing legal defeat in court.
ACS:Law achieved notoriety for its “pay up or we’ll sue” letters to people who it claims infringed on its clients’ copyrights. The German partner of ACS:Law defended its actions in April, saying it was just protecting its rights-holders.
This was in marked contrast to the findings of consumer magazine Which?
Which? has been actively campaigning against the “pay up or we’ll sue” letter campaign used by ACS:Law, after it received hundreds of enquiries from people who claimed they were wrongly accused of pirating porn and music content. Among the accused was a 78-year-old man, accused of downloading pornography.
17842098
submission
justice4all writes:
The Swiss Pirate Party provides WikiLeaks a new home, after EveryDNS cuts it off the Internet
The WikiLeaks website has been removed from the Internet’s domain name service (DNS) after posting thousands of secret US diplomatic documents, but now has an address in Switzerland, Wikileaks.ch, apparently provided by the local Pirate Party.
Domain name service provider EveryDNS.net terminated services to the whistleblosing site last on 2 December, claiming denial of service (DoS) attacks on Wikileaks.org had threatened its infrastructure and endangered access to thousands of other websites.
The Swiss address was announced this morning on Wikileaks’ Twitter feed, hours after WikiLeaks effectively disappeared from the Internet. According to a Whois record at DomainTools.com the domain was registered to the Swiss Pirate Party earlier this year.
While the site’s web address is fluid, users can also reach the wikilieaks.org, and cablegate.org sites if they bypass the DNS lookup, and type in their respective IP addresses, http://88.80.13.160/ and http://204.236.131.131/.
17709456
submission
justice4all writes:
Google is working on a fix to a zero-day flaw that could see Android users’ data being accessed by hackers
A British security expert, Thomas Cannon, has a discovered a potentially serious vulnerability in the Android browser that could lead to a user’s data on their mobile phone or tablet device being exposed to attack. Google confirmed to eWEEK Europe UK that it is currently working on a fix.
Cannon discovered the vulnerability in the Android browser and then informed Google, before posting information about the flaw on his blog.
“While doing an application security assessment one evening I found a general vulnerability in Android which allows a malicious website to get the contents of any file stored on the SD card,” Cannon wrote. “It would also be possible to retrieve a limited range of other data and files stored on the phone using this vulnerability.”
17562944
submission
justice4all writes:
A banker has accidentally leaked the details of an upcoming flotation in an email, osting the Swiss bank an estimated £6.2 million in fees
Human error is being blamed after a banker accidentally leaked the details of General Motors’ upcoming flotation in an email.
The banker at Swiss bank UBS is thought to have accidentally send out the rogue email to more than 100 people.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the mistake led to UBS being dropped as an underwriter to the car maker.
Just Push Send
The alleged leak apparently also included details of GM’s listing price. The incident was revealed in papers filed by GM at America’s Securities & Exchange Commission.
The filing, which said the email did “not reflect GM’s views”, reportedly said that investors who buy GM stock could seek refunds or damages because of the leak if UBS remained an underwriter on the deal.
17530612
submission
justice4all writes:
Security firm Imperva has compiled a list of the top ten security trends for 2011, with government hacking and smartphone attacks topping the stack.
The security firm highlighted that government-sponsored cyber attacks will become more sophisticated, building on techniques learnt from the the commercial hacker industry, such as automation and viral distribution. Attacks such as the infamous Stuxnet worm are likely to become more common, with hackers aiming to gain control of critical infrastructure.
Meanwhile, cyber security will increasingly become a business process, with CISOs and security professionals needing to become experts in enterprise data protection, according to Imperva. As security researchers become better at unearthing less diligent criminals, the hacker community will consolidate into a few, more powerful cyber-crime organisations.
Imperva gave the example of the cyber-crime ring that used the Zeus Trojan to steal $70 million from US banks and £6 million from UK accounts. Many of the ring leaders were arrested in September this year, following a year-long investigation that included the infiltration of hackers’ servers by security researchers.
17245000
submission
justice4all writes:
A new survey has revealed that business concerns over the complexity of migrating to Windows Office 2010 software is leading to delayed deployments
Bad news for Microsoft after a new survey found that concerns around the complexity of migrating to Microsoft Office 2010 is delaying broad deployment until 2011.
In a global survey of 953 IT professionals conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research and sponsored by Dell’s Kace division, eighty-five percent of those polled said they plan to adopt Office 2010, and while enthusiasm for Office 2010 is high, almost 80 percent of IT professionals polled said they have significant concerns about the complexity of the migration.
16536210
submission
justice4all writes:
Three IBM Analytics Solution Centres will focus on financial services, green technology and Smarter Cities in Switzerland, Hungary and Austria
IBM opened three new analytics centres in Europe, strengthening its offerings in the growing business analytics market.
The announcement follows just days after IBMs $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza, a data warehousing and analytics appliance vendor. Last week, IBM also acquired OpenPages, another company with an analytics package designed to help companies identify and manage risk.
