327185
submission
Spritzer writes:
Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee approved an amendment to the Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998 which would prevent the tax ban from expiring. However, the amendment will eliminate protection for VoIP services.
From the article:
"The amendment, offered by committee Chairman John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, would extend the ban on Internet access taxes until Nov. 1, 2011. ... The Conyers amendment would allow nine states with Internet access taxes to continue them. It would also narrow the definition of Internet access, excluding services such as VoIP from the tax ban."
299155
submission
Spritzer writes:
According to an AP report posted Saturday, drug maker Merck's experimental HIV vaccine has "failed to work in a large international test, leading the developer to halt the study."
"In a statement, the NIH said a data safety monitoring board, reviewing interim results, found the vaccine did not prevent HIV infection. Nor did it limit severity of the disease 'in those who become infected with HIV as a result of their own behaviors that exposed them to the virus' — another goal of the study."
292583
submission
Spritzer writes:
While waiting for the Wachovia website to load recently I noticed that content from Tribalfusion, Doubleclick and other web tracking/advertising firms was loaded. Using Adblock Plus I checked the list of blocked content and found that 9 items from similar sources were included on the page. After logging in, the majority of them are not loaded, but an item from Hitbox is loaded on every page while using the site. I can understand their usage (although I don't necessarily agree with it) of Hitbox for tracking usage of particular aspects of their online banking applications, but I can't understand why a reputable bank would use so many other tracking systems. I checked the websites of their 8 largest US competitors and only found one other that included this type of content.
While I understand that my actual banking information is not compromised by this it sure seems like a serious privacy issue to me. I have contacted Wachovia and received nothing but unrelated canned responses concerning website security and popup blockers. Has anyone else seen this type of thing on banking websites? What are your suggestions for approaching Wachovia with this issue?
171073
submission
Spritzer writes:
I work for a rather large corporation with multiple divisions around the world. Nearly all user computers in the company are Windows systems, and there is no plan to move to Linux in the future. However, a good many of our products are now designed to run on Linux systems for security and stability purposes. Obviously, the design/development teams are knowledgeable in the use of Linux operating systems.Unfortunately my field service teams are not, and their is no in-house training program. This has begun to affect our ability to provide efficient, quality service to customers when in the field.
What training services have you used in the past to get people trained in the basics of using? I'd prefer to stay away from online, self-paced courses and get my people some hands on training with an instructor.
92290
submission
Spritzer writes:
It seems that Google's mail service has been opened up to everyone. An invitation is no longer required.
From the article:
Invitations will no longer be required to join the nearly 3-year-old "Gmail" service in the United States, Canada, Mexico and a swath of Asian and South American countries where the Mountain View-based company previously limited the number of users.
With those restrictions now lifted, Gmail will be open to all comers worldwide for the first time since Google unveiled the service on April Fool's Day in 2004.
Although it will no longer require invitations to sign up, Gmail is retaining its "beta," or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.
53250
submission
Spritzer writes:
It seems there have been enough incidents of broken wrist straps that Nintendo has announced they will investigate the problem.
From the Article:
"We are investigating," Iwata said of reports about the Wii's strap coming off as players swung around the controller, at times causing the remote to fly out of their hands.
Players use the Wii remote like a tennis racket, sword and other devices to play games.
"Some people are getting a lot more excited than we'd expected," Iwata said. "We need to better communicate to people how to deal with Wii as a new form of entertainment."
43288
submission
Spritzer writes:
Secunia is reporting a "highly critical" bug in OSX which could potentially allow privilege escalation and DoS.
From the advisory:
"LMH has reported a vulnerability in Mac OS X, which potentially can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges or by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an error in com.apple.AppleDiskImageController when handling corrupted DMG image structures. This can be exploited to cause a memory corruption and may allow execution of arbitrary code in kernel-mode.
7741
submission
Spritzer writes:
According to the EFF the new Zune portable media player from Microsoft won't play files infected with the old Microsoft DRM. It seems that all of the "PlaysforSure" media that has been sold and is currently being sold will not play on the Zune. In addition, Microsoft has now advocated violating the DMCA in order to transfer files to the player. Microsoft Zune architect J Allard was quoted as saying there's "Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats, so the most popular formats out there, whether it's MPEG-4 or H.264, we'll support those." I guess the DMCA only applies when it suits their interest.
