472444
submission
DeeQ writes
"University of Wisconsin-Madison officials have advised more than 200 employees their personal information was inadvertently released on the Internet.
The information included e-mail addresses, phone numbers and Social Security-based campus ID numbers of faculty and staff who made purchases from a campus computer shop. It had been accessible on a campus Internet site for at least a year.
Spokesman Brian Rust said the university learned of the potential exposure after a staffer found information about his own purchase during a routine online search.
He said employees involved in the exposure were reprimanded but declined to say what their punishment entailed. He said there's no indication the information was misused.
The revelation is the third privacy breach disclosed by state government agencies this month."Link to Original Source
468358
submission
DeeQ writes
"OSLO (Reuters) — Budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA said on Tuesday it will offer mobile phone and wireless Internet services on flights later this year.
The company will also provide travel information for passengers, broadband telephone services and mobile banking.
The on-board services, to be launched in the fourth quarter, will be provided by a new subsidiary, Call Norwegian AS.
"Call Norwegian will be an Internet-based mobile telephone company, and the products will be focused on primary mobile telephone services (network service)," Norwegian Air Shuttle said in a statement."Link to Original Source
468298
submission
DeeQ writes
"Communications regulators have cleared Google to bid in an upcoming auction of coveted wireless airwaves, according to auction documents released by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday. Google was among a list of potential bidders released by the FCC that have made a required up-front payment and have been cleared to take part in the high-stakes 700MHz wireless auction.
The auction is scheduled to begin on January 24 and expected to raise at least $10 billion for the U.S. government from airwaves being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. As expected, the list of qualified bidders also included U.S. wireless providers AT&T and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone, as well as ventures involving EchoStar Communications, Cablevision Systems, Qualcomm, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen."Link to Original Source
468294
submission
DeeQ writes
"San Francisco — Branching out in the SOA space, MuleSource will introduce Tuesday its Mule Galaxy software, an open source SOA governance platform with an integrated registry and repository.
The company also will refresh its Mule open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and offer Mule Saturn, a lightweight BAM (business activity monitoring) tool that works with the ESB.
Mule Galaxy 1.0 stores and manages SOA artifacts and provides governance and lifecycle management. MuleSource is positioning Galaxy, Mule, and Saturn as products that make SOA infrastructure software more accessible to enterprises. The Community edition of Galaxy is available now, and a fully tested enterprise edition is due in the second quarter of this year.
"I think that's a great idea because the fact that it's open source allows a lot more transparency into what the code is doing and how it is doing it," said the user, Eugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, makers of LeapFrog educational toys. LeapFrog has no plans to use Galaxy because its transactional systems do not leverage its Mule software."Link to Original Source
468290
submission
DeeQ writes
"The security firm Finjan says it has discovered a major new type of malware that has infected more than 10,000 Web sites in December alone. Deemed "random js toolkit," it is a Trojan that infects end users' PCs and sends data from the infected machine to the "master" hacker. It can be used to steal passwords, documents and other sensitive information.
The malware dynamically creates and changes JavaScript code every time it is accessed, Finjan said. Thus, traditional anti-malware programs can't identify it.
Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak said in a release, "Signaturing a dynamic script is not effective. Signaturing the exploiting code itself is also not effective, since these exploits are changing continually to stay ahead of current zero-day threats and available patches. Keeping an up-to-date list of 'highly-trusted-doubtful' domains serves only as a limited defense against this attack vector.""Link to Original Source
460130
submission
DeeQ writes
"For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted — to use an old cliche — as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.
But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC's booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
"What we are already doing to address piracy hasn't been working. There's no secret there," said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. "We've got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there's no doubt about it," he said."
433332
submission
DeeQ writes
"A computer worm has been spreading on Google's big-in-Brazil Orkut social network, according to a report on the Sounds from the Dungeon blog.
The relatively harmless worm appears to use JavaScript and Flash code to create new scrapbook entries on profiles with a New Year's message in Portuguese before propagating to the victim's friends.It may have infected as many as 400,000 users, according to a post on a blog called
"c0d3w12."
"It appears Google has responded quickly," writes a blogger on ValleyWag. "Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time.""Link to Original Source
429800
submission
DeeQ writes
"Microsoft plans to bundle a cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator in its upcoming service pack for Windows Vista.
The cryptographically weak Dual_EC_DRBG approach, which is based on the mathematics of elliptic curves, was one of four "deterministic random bit generators", approved by the NIST in March.
Flaws in the approach (Dual_EC_DRBG) first emerged in August at the Crypto 2007 conference when cryptographers Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson demonstrated that two constants in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers.
Anyone who had access to the second set of numbers would have a kind of skeleton key able to unlock any instance of Dual_EC_DRBG. Suspicions that this weakness might be used as a backdoor have been fueled by the NSA's support of Dual_EC_DRBG in the standards-setting process.
Random number generators are important because the correct operation of SSL and other protocols relies on their randomness.Crypto guru Bruce Schneier, who previously described the weakness as a backdoor, notes that the Dual_EC_DRBG approach will be implemented in Windows Vista SP1."Link to Original Source
424746
submission
DeeQ writes
"Nvidia has launched its anticipated 'Tri-SLI' technology as "3-way SLI", allowing gamers to connect not one, not two but three graphics cards in co-operative rendering harmony.
They have to be Nvidia GeForce cards, natch, but when connected deliver up to 2.8 times the performance of a single GPU. That, the company claimed, is enough to allow games 60fps frame-rates at a resolution of 2560 x 1600 with 8x anti-aliasing enabled.
As expected, 3-way SLI works on systems build upon Nvidia's nForce 680 SLI chipset, and requires three GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra cards. A special three-card connector links the three add-in boards.
Oh, and you'll need an 1100W power supply with six six-pin PCIe power connectors... phew"Link to Original Source
424676
submission
DeeQ writes
"— If you're tired of watching Mitt and Mike, Hilary and Rudy, and Colbert and Coulter limit their swipes to words, pick one and go for it in the new video game "DC Smackdown."
art.dc.smackdown.jpg
"DC Smackdown" skewers bipartisanly.
Featuring signature moves like the "Intern Trample," "Mormon Conversion" and "Barack Your World," the 17-character game skewers bipartisanly.
"It's a real simple game — we're talking Street Fighter, circa 1994," said Dave Holbrook, a freelance producer and former Disney animator who made it, with help from friends, in his spare time. "It's nothing crazy, but it's a fun little commentary on what's going on. And everybody's special move has to do with their political stance or what they've said."
Now available just for PCs, the game costs $4.99 to download. Holbrook said he initially wanted to charge an extra buck for donation to the customer's political campaign of choice, but changed his mind because of regulatory paperwork."Link to Original Source
