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alphadogg writes "The high-profile troubles on the city of San Francisco's computer network continue, despite a dramatic jailhouse intervention by the city's mayor this week. The high-profile troubles on the city of San Francisco's computer network continue, despite a dramatic jailhouse intervention by the city's mayor this week. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072308-san-francisco-childs.html?hpg1=bn While the city has regained control of the five devices at the heart of its FiberWAN network, which carries data between city government buildings, administrators are still locked out of the city's voice over Internet Protocol system and local area networks within the Sheriff's Department and the Recreation & Park Department. Assistant District Attorney Conrad Del Rosario revealed the ongoing problems Wednesday at a bail hearing for Terry Childs, the former network administrator with the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) who is accused of holding the city's networks hostage for the past 10 days."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072308-parts-of-san-francisco-network.html

alphadogg writes "The Web site for the president of Georgia was knocked offline by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack over the weekend, yet another in a series of cyberattacks attacks against countries experiencing political friction with Russia. Georgia's presidential Web site was down for about a day starting early Saturday until Sunday, according to the Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks malicious Internet activity. Network experts said the attack was executed by a botnet, or a network of computers that can be commanded to overwhelm a Web site with too much traffic."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072108-georgia-presidents-web-site-falls.html

A new generation of mobile Web browsers is finally making the Web a reality on handheld devices. The latest example is last week's beta launch of Opera Mobile 9.5, a native Web browser for high-end smartphones. It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale. Other brand-new entrants, such as Mobile Firefox and Skyfire, are expected later this year, at least in beta form. But the evolving mobile browsers are only one part of the picture. Mobile browsing is affected by the client hardware, ranging from the processor to the kind of wireless network being used, all of which have improved markedly. It's also affected by the design of Web sites being targeted, and there's new attention being focused on optimizing these sites for mobile users.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072108-mobile.html?ts0hb=&story=ts_mb

alphadogg writes "An employee of 1-800-Flowers.com has been fired after an e-mailed death threat was linked to her account. The crudely worded e-mail was sent Sunday to Paul "PZ" Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris, who is known for his criticism of religion and creationism. It was one of several hostile messages he had received following a controversial July 8 blog posting. The address on the e-mail showed that it came from Melanie Kroll at 1-800-Flowers.com, an online floral delivery service."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071608-woman-fired-over-death-threat.html

alphadogg writes "University of Washington researchers have come up with a way to customize computer interfaces for individuals based on a 20-to-90-minute vision and motor skills (mouse handling, etc.) test. A paper (Decision-Theoretic User Interface Generation) describing the system — dubbed Supple — was presented this week at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's conference in Chicago. "Assistive technologies are built on the assumption that it's the people who have to adapt to the technology. We tried to reverse this assumption, and make the software adapt to people," said lead author Krzysztof Gajos, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering, in a statement."
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29981

alphadogg writes "Rootkits are software code designed to hide from detection. So Kaspersky Lab's hunt for the elusive Rustock.C rootkit, rumored to exist for almost two years, reads like a detective plot. Alexander Gostev, Kaspersky Lab's senior virus analyst, tells the tale in his blog Tuesday on Viruslist. According to Gostev, the Russian security firm Dr. Web in early May announced its experts had obtained a sample of Rustock.C in March but the sample it shared with the rest of the antivirus community lacked a 'dropper', the file designed to install the rootkit on the system. If the dropper had been provided, "this file could have significantly simplified the work carried out by other antivirus laboratories to analyze the rootkit and develop procedures to detect and treat Rustock.C."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071508-rustock-rootkit.html?ts0hb=&story=ts_rust

alphadogg writes "The business potential of social-networking Web sites and various Web 2.0 technologies remains largely untapped, according to separate reports released by the analyst firms Forrester Research and Gartner on Thursday. IT departments are taking an active role in acquiring and deploying Web 2.0 technologies, but such individual technologies as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds are being adopted in only a minority of businesses, the researchers found."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071008-social-networking-web-20-untapped.html?netht=ts_071108&nladname=071108dailynewsamal

alphadogg writes "VMware ousted co-founder and CEO Diane Greene Tuesday, replacing her with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz. The VMware board of directors, which is composed mostly of directors and officers from VMware owner EMC, announced its decision to make a "change in the leadership of the company," saying the move will help VMware "extend its lead in the virtualization market" Maritz has been on the EMC payroll since February as president of its cloud computing division. (Read recent Q&A with Greene here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062408-vmware-diane-greene.html )"
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070808-vmware-ousts-greene.html?hpg1=bn

alphadogg writes "One big and so far unsung enterprise attraction for the iPhone may be that it can fully access SharePoint sites. At least, that's according to a couple of West Coast consultants who've been testing the iPhone on some SharePoint portals. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is one of the fastest growing Microsoft enterprise applications, a document management system recast for online collaboration and, increasingly, social networking. It's a way to get a lot more real work done, than is possible with just Exchange-based email. Mobile access to SharePoint is possible, but it calls for some backend development work and users are limited in what they see, what they can access, and what they can do."
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29262

alphadogg writes "Coach potatoes of the world rejoice! A computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego has come up with a way to free your hands (for more important things like holding chip bowls and cold beers) by turning your face into a remote control that speeds and slows video playback. Well actually, coach potatoes will probably need to wait a bit to experience this breakthrough. The technology development is part of a larger project for using automated facial expression recognition to improve teaching methods, including teaching by robots."
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29289

alphadogg writes "All evidence points to the fact that smartphone viruses will be a threat to your network even though they aren't at this moment. After all, the latest mobile devices are packed with more and more applications and corporate data, are enabled for real Web browsing and online collaboration, and can access corporate servers. What's more, they live outside your firewall and often make use of three wireless networks (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular). "It's definitely something I worry about a lot," says Sam Lamonica, CIO of Rudolph and Sletten, a Redwood City, Calif., general contractor. "With the proliferation of smartphones throughout our business, it poses a great risk if and when hackers get good at pumping malware through those devices.""
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062308-wireless-questions-1.html?hpg1=bn

alphadogg writes "Red Hat used its annual summit this week to improve the flexibility, openness and manageability of its Linux platforms, with announcements that it will deliver a new hypervisor and open source the code for the Red Hat Network Linux management platform. Red Hat has opened a beta for a Linux-based hypervisor called oVirt that can fit onto a 64MB flash drive and boot on virtually any piece of x86 hardware. It also announced the open sourcing of Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, an automated management tool for Linux that handles content updates, systems provisioning, updating and monitoring, permissions and scheduling on both physical and virtual servers."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061908-red-hat-summit-hypervisor.html?hpg1=bn

Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year's NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecom industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches. ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061908-nxtcomm-isp-p2p.html?hpg1=bn

alphadogg writes "When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued Michael Fiola a Dell Latitude in November 2006, it set off a chain of events that would cost him his job, his friends and about a year of his life, as he fought criminal charges that he had downloaded child pornography onto the laptop. Last week, prosecutors dropped their year-old case after a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061808-a-misconfigured-laptop-a-wrecked.html?hpg1=bn?

alphadogg writes "Mozilla's big plan on Tuesday to set a world record for downloads with the Firefox 3 browser hit a snag when its Web site would not work properly. Though the big "Download Day" was set to begin at 1 p.m. ET, Mozilla's Web site was down or working sporadically all morning on the East Coast, and users still could not download Firefox 3 from the site more than an hour later. A Firefox spokeswoman said via e-mail just after 2 p.m. that the company was aware of the problem and "working to get it back up quickly." Mozilla also outlined the problems it was having with its Web site in a blog entry."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061708-firefox-3-download-day-cripples.html?ts0hb=&story=ts_ff