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Verizon

Submission + - Verizon Connectivity Issues in Upstate SC (wyff4.com)

David7 writes: Verizon officials tell News 4 they were having connectivity issues in the Upstate Wednesday, and that some customers were experiencing a cell phone outage.
Spam

Submission + - Malicious Spam Spikes to 'Epic' Level (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall.

The huge spike comes at a time when spam should, in fact, be dropping because of the takedown of the Rustock botnet, the Spamit network and other botnets.

"From the beginning of August, we have observed a huge surge of malicious spam which far exceeds anything we have seen over the past two years, including prior to the SpamIt takedown last October. The majority of the malicious spam comes from the Cutwail botnet, although Festi and Asprox are among the other contributors," M86 researcher Rodel Mendrez said.

Security

Submission + - Customer Email Address Leaks 2

anyaristow writes: Since the mid nineties I've used a unique email address for everyone I do business with and for every service or site I sign up with, so that if someone leaks my email address to spammers I know who did the leaking. Until this year I'd only had a few of these addresses compromised (including a national flower seller and a major music gear maker). This year I'm getting about one every other month, including a telecommunications giant and one of the three credit reporting agencies. There are no mailboxes or accounts associated with these email addresses; I receive all email to the domain. These addresses exist only as text I typed into a web form, and as header fields in received email. I'd consider a man-in-the-middle or someone gaining access to my mailbox as possible culprits except I haven't had communication with that credit agency in years, and I just yesterday started receiving spam to that address. That, and only a few of these addresses are compromised. Is anyone else seeing this, and can anyone think of a reason other other than lax security or the use of third-party email campaigns?
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Tampa teen bomber spies FBI spies (usatoday.com) 1

minstrelmike writes: The expelled teen planning to blow up his high school knew something was wrong Sunday when he looked for wireless networks:

On Sunday evening, he posted this interesting item on his Facebook status page: "The weirdest thing happened today ... when my homie was trying to connect to a wireless network the connections list came up and one of them was called: FBI_SURVEILLANCE_VAN It was weird..."

The Military

Submission + - MIT Researchers Aim To Help Keep Track of Planes (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: "'Aboard a floating airport like the US Navy’s USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and thousands of lives are all managed by something that looks like a board game,' says IDG News Service's Nick Barber in this video report. But researchers at MIT are working to digitize that system. The Navy-funded research is 'primarily investigating how humans and computers can work together and schedule operations on the aircraft carrier collaboratively,' said Jason Ryan, a Ph.D. student in the Humans & Automation Lab at MIT."
Google

Submission + - Argentina: Judge blocks hundreds of Blogger sites. (globalvoicesonline.org)

LeandroTLZ writes: "This hit the Internet about a week ago, but all of the news outlets reporting it have missed a very important detail. A federal judge ordered all of Argentina's ISPs to block a website that was publishing private emails from the president and some aides. The resolution to block the site can be read here at their national communications agency, and you will notice that it specifies one IP address to block, 216.239.32.21. The major ISPs have indeed blocked that IP address completely. The problem is that the IP address was not just hosting that website; a simple WHOIS query reveals who it belongs to: none other than Google, Inc. Specifically, the address is used by Blogger to serve websites. Because of this, a significant number of blogs and webpages hosted at Blogger have disappeared from Argentina's ISPs. Magazines like www.habitantesdemoria.com, independent films like www.elpozolapelicula.com.ar, business websites like www.torrealsur.com.ar and webcast sites like www.radiotelevisionatlantis.tk — they are all inaccessible from Argentina. No news outlet seems to be aware of this at the moment, and are treating the block as a freedom of speech issue against a single website, unaware that the judge has accidentally silenced hundreds, possibly thousands of websites."
Earth

Submission + - NASA shoots down comet Elenin doomsday predictions (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "The comet Elenin which will pass by Earth October 16 has generated such an inordinate amount of doomsday reports from a number of different sources that NASA today issued a release meant to address a variety of them. To address the myriad concerns, NASA said its scientists compiled a list of the most popular questions it has received about Elenin."

Submission + - Mozilla Ships Firefox6, Patches 10 Vulnerabilities (computerworld.com)

JohnBert writes: "Mozilla released Firefox 6, the second edition since it shifted to a rapid-ship cycle that delivers a new version of the browser every six weeks. The company also patched 10 bugs with the upgrade and issued an update to 2010's Firefox 3.6 that fixed seven flaws total, six of them different than the ones quashed in Firefox 6.

Today's release of Firefox 6 was the second time in a row that Mozilla met its self-imposed deadline since the debut of a faster shipping schedule in March. Mozilla has historically struggled to ship browser upgrades on time, but is now 2-for-2 after picking up the pace.

Although Mozilla listed more than 1,600 changes to Firefox 6 in a full bug list, the open-source developer called out only a few in its release notes, among them highlighting domain names in the address bar — both Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) do something similar by boldfacing domain names."

Security

Submission + - How to steal ATM PINs with a thermal camera (sophos.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from UCSD have demontrated how thermal imagery cameras can be used to steal customers' PINs when you withdraw cash from ATMs.

Their paper, entitled "Heat of the Moment: Characterizing the Efcacy of Thermal Camera-Based Attacks", discovered that plastic PIN pads were the best for retaining heat signatures showing which numbers (and in which order) were used by bank customers.

Fortunately the methodology does not appeared to have been used by criminals yet, but a third of people surveyed admit that they do not check ATMs for tampering before withdrawing cash.

Chrome

Submission + - How Secure is Your Browser? (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: Recent research clearly shows that browser security is alarmingly bad. Browsers and plug-ins are frequently outdated and easily attacked. To make things worse, malware authors adapt quickly and most of their new attacks are against browser plug-ins. Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek talks about their research which showed that only about 20% of security vulnerabilities are in the browsers and the great majority of security issues comes from the plug-ins installed in them. These plug-ins are typically not updated by the browser. Top examples are Adobe Flash and Reader, Sun Java and Windows Media Player. While everybody knows about the hackers' predilection for targeting Adobe Flash, data shows that Sun Java is by far the most vulnerable plug-in installed in browsers.

Submission + - French Institubes music label closes shop (tumblr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Institubes, the French label sporting the likes of Bobmo, Surkin, Para One, and other great artists, has announced that they will close shop after 8 years of operation. Their press release is rather tough on some industry-details, and even more on its consumers.

"I could write ten pages about the realities and difficulties of the music business but you’ll only get about two paragraphs and not much whining. We never lived those halcyon days some industry elders tend to rave about. We always moved through a post-apocalyptic, terminally pauperized landscape, complete with irradiated A&R zombies and mutated eyeless bloggers. It’s always been a bit of an uphill battle. But it got worse and worse. At first it was fun to figure out ways to get people to check out our music. But once that’s done and you have something resembling an audience, it becomes apparent that this is not really your job. Your job is to reconcile the public with the very idea of buying records. All the power to you if you can bear it."


Firefox

Submission + - Mozilla Firefox 4 Released

Shining Celebi writes: Mozilla has finally released Firefox 4, a couple months behind schedule. It features hardware accelerated graphics, UI performance improvements, a massive boost in Javascript performance, reduced memory usage, WebGL, a new HTML5 parser, App Tabs, tab grouping via the Panorama feature, bookmark and history syncing, and much more. Many users will also be happy to know the status bar has been more-or-less restored after Mozilla removed it in early betas. Firefox 4 scores over 3 times faster on Sunspider, V8, and Kraken.

Submission + - Bionic brouhaha politically motivated? (groklaw.net)

doperative writes: "It seems totally bogus. We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.

"The kernel headers contain various definitions for the interfaces to user space, and we even actively try to make sure that the headers can be used by user space (and try to mark which of the headers are expected to be usable in such a way). Exactly because we know user space needs those details in order to interact with the kernel.

"So I haven't looked at exactly what Google does with the kernel headers, but I can't see that they'd want to do anything fundamentally different from glibc in this respect," Torvalds wrote.

Torvalds seems to be at best bemused about the issue and perhaps a tad irritated.

"Of course, we do have our own 'internal' headers too, and we have stuff that is meant to be relevant only for the kernel. But there would be no point for Google to even use those, since they are useless outside of the kernel, so I don't see what the whole brouhaha would be all about. Except if it's somebody politically motivated (or motivated by some need of attention)," he continued.

NASA

Submission + - NASA star satellite recovers from 144-hour glitch (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "There was likely a pretty big sigh of relief at NASA's Ames Research Center this week as the group' star satellite Kepler, recovered from a glitch that took it offline for 144 hours. According to NASA the glitch happened March 14, right after the spacecraft issued a network interface card (NIC) reset command to implement a computer program update. During the reset, the NIC sent invalid reaction wheel data to the flight software, which caused the spacecraft to enter safe mode, NASA stated."

Submission + - Mapping job availability with live data (maployed.com)

maployed writes: Maployed! is a google geomap visualization+Indeed.com mashup that enables you to visualize any job search on a map. Choropleth maps are generated based on a job search query. States in darker colors and cities with larger circles on them have higher number of jobs. There is also a normalized view to map the relative availability of advertised jobs compared to the population of the state or city (jobs/100,000 people). Quick and dirty answers to the question — Where are the jobs?

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