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Submission + - Zeus Trojan Cost Kentucky County $415,000 (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post's Brian Krebs has a piece that dissects a cyber attack this week against Bullitt County, Ky. The home of Fort Knox lost $415,000 after a Windows PC belonging to the county treasurer got infected with a scary new variant of the Zeus keystroke logger Trojan, which includes a back-connect feature that allows the crooks to log in to the victim's bank account using the victim's own Internet connection. The story breaks down in detail how the attackers were able to defeat the bank's two-factor authentication and the county's checks-and-balances system, and includes interviews with two of the 25 money mules in the United States who were hired or duped into accepting unauthorized transfers from the county and then wiring the money to the fraudsters in Ukraine. From the story: "Bullitt County Attorney Walt Sholar said the trouble began on June 22, when someone started making unauthorized wire transfers of $10,000 or less from the county's payroll to accounts belonging to at least 25 individuals around the country (some individuals received multiple payments). On June 29, the county's bank realized something was wrong, and began requesting that the banks receiving those transfers start reversing them, Sholar said.
Microsoft

Submission + - New York Times Dropping Silverlight for Flash (infoq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Another one bites the dust. After the news of Major League Baseball dropping Silverlight and switching to Adobe Flash (link) here comes another bad news for Microsoft: The New York Times is also dropping Silverlight and replacing it with Flash. The timing couldn't be worse as Microsoft was just promoting its New York Times Silverlight Kit. The reasons:

Silverlight version has been plagued with problems, both political and technical. The biggest hurdle was the lack of cross-platform support.
GUI

Submission + - How minimalist can an IDE GUI be? 2

Submitted by
copiedright
copiedright writes: "I am currently in the early phases of developing an IDE focused on web languages (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc). Obviously there are numerous IDEs floating around already however the concept I am currently prototyping has features and a structure that no other IDE has. But when it comes to designing the GUI I am focused on being as minimalist as possible and what I note in most IDEs, most notably Visual Studio, is that I don't use two thirds of the controls as many are redundant. My question therefore is, when it comes to an IDE GUI, what are the controls that you can't live without or desire the most?"
Announcements

Submission + - Climate change shrinking Scottish sheep (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Milder winter weather has caused a wild breed of Scottish sheep to shrink in size by around 5% over the last 25 years, and now experts think they understand why. Curiously this has occurred despite the evolutionary benefits of large body size in the harsh conditions in which the animals live. The research, reported today in the U.S. journal Science, suggests a mechanism by which climate change can very rapidly act to alter the size and shape of a species.
The Courts

Submission + - US gouple gets prison time for Internet obscenity (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet."
Cellphones

Submission + - Apple rejects iPhone app, files a patent for it (tuaw.com) 1

Submitted by recoiledsnake
recoiledsnake writes: Yet another app has been buried in the iPhone Application Graveyard . While this is nothing new, the kicker this time is that Apple has filed a patent on karaoke functionality in the iPod application a few weeks after rejecting the iKaraoke app for duplicating functionality that doesn't exist... yet. Maybe the $99 iPhone Developer Program fee should include a crystal ball for testing apps for duplicating Apple programs' functionality before submitting them so that precious time and resources of app developeres is not unnecessarily wasted. Jobs himself had responded to accusations of political censorship of iPhone applications in the past.
The Courts

Submission + - The Catcher's Sequel Goes Awry

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "US District Court Judge Deborah Batts issued a preliminary injunction this week barring the US publication and sale of a parody of J. D. Salinger's famous 1951 coming of age novel "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" by Swedish author Frederik Colting. Colting's lawyer had argued at a hearing that, like a previous parody of "Gone with the Wind" called "The Wind Done Gone" his client's work was covered by fair use provisions because it is a critical parody of Salinger's iconic novel and was therefore tranformative, rather than derivative of the original work by the reclusive author. During the hearing Judge Batts expressed skepticism toward that argument and while acknowledging that Colting's book is mildly tranformative of the original work--mainly because it includes Salinger himself as a character bent on killing off the septuagenarian Holden Caulfield. But Caulfield may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists. While still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth, teachers say young readers today don't like Holden as much as they used to and what once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as "weird," "whiny" and "immature." In the meantime Colting's attorney said he plans to seek an expedited appeal of the ruling with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit so the book, already published in the UK can be published in the United States.. "Members of the public are deprived of the chance to read the book and decide for themselves whether it adds to their understanding of Salinger and his work.""
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Head sued for trade secret theft and fraud 1

Submitted by akahige
akahige writes: In what can only be described as a massive turning of the karmic wheel, Darl McBride (SCO), Robert Brazell (founder of Overstock.com), Stephen Norris (an investment capital guy), and Bryan Cave (former Pelican Equity attorney) are all listed as defendants in a lawsuit filed that alleges they conspired to steal trade secrets from Pelican Equity which they used to establish Talos Partners, a stock lending business. Among the charges are fraud, conspiracy, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Groklaw posted about this last night and has since pulled the story, though the PDF of the complaint is still available, and there's a summary on Courthouse News Service.
Government

Submission + - Valencia (Spain) moves to free software

Submitted by diegocgteleline.es
diegocgteleline.es writes: A LWN article talks about the adoption of free software in the Valencia Autonomous Community (Spain): "Over the last decade or so there have been multiple reports of governments making the switch to free software. Some have been relatively successful, like Munich, others have been less so. A recent report from Valencia provides a nice look inside the transition to free software that has been going on since 2003. The department manager noted that the biggest problem faced was the "fear of change [...] we have faced up to the challenge with well-laid plans, training and an alternative plan of action just in case"
Earth

Ocean Currents Proposed As Cause of Magnetic Field 333

Posted by kdawson from the round-and-round-and-round-in-the-circle-game dept.
pjt33 notes a recently published paper proposing that ocean currents could account for Earth's magnetic field. The wrteup appears on the Institute of Physics site; the IOP is co-owner, with the German Physical Society, of the open-access journal in which the paper appears. This reader adds, "The currently predominant theory is that the cause of Earth's magnetic field is molten iron flowing in the outer core. There is at present no direct evidence for either theory." "Professor Gregory Ryskin from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans' salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation."

Comment Re:No radioactivity involved? (Score 3, Funny) 221

by hullabalucination (#27234599) Attached to: Spider Bite Allows Man To Walk Again

You know, all you had to do was check the Yellow Pages for the Sutter Buttes/Tarantula Junction exchange, and there right under the "World Domination, Evil Genetic Engineering Consultants" heading was this listing:

"Tarantek: Your one-stop source for mutants, clones, evil world domination schemes, improbability manipulation and 'unapproved' research. Arachnids our specialty. We're also California's largest wholesaler of Chia Pets. We take MasterCard, Discover Card and VISA."

* * * * *

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
—Abraham Lincoln

Comment Funny... (Score 1) 614

by hullabalucination (#26726905) Attached to: Software Piracy At the Beijing Branch Office?

..but I run an advertising agency that uses "free replacements" (on Linux) and am today wrapping up my fourth high-quality print project of the young year and a Website upgrade. Just for your edification, GIMP's had a very good CMYK export plugin for several years now, and I'll put my print portfolio up against anyone's.

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