16461314
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Secure microchips in credit cards, passports and a number of other devices (often referred to as "smart cards") may not be as secure as once thought, after a professor and his student in the Tel Aviv University discovered a way to extract information from the chips. They have discovered that the chip's power supply reading fluctuates based on the type of information stored on the chip. Turns out that these minute fluctuations can be measured with an oscilloscope and the resulting data could be analyzed to unlock the otherwise secure information.
16020328
submission
wiedzmin writes:
"This month, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number for "anytime, anywhere" biometric authentication. While enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, said that, taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as traveling within the country without a UID number." Next step, tying that UID number and biometric information to to their RIM BlackBerry PIN number.
15827564
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Google began rolling out the Priority Inbox Beta feature to its Gmail users. If enabled, Gmail will automatically decide which messages are "important" and will display them on top of your Inbox view, based on how often you open and reply to messages of that type. The filters can be adjusted manually and system will automatically "learn" what email is important to you over time.
15818976
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Public broadcaster ARD's show 'Plusminus' teamed up with a known hacker organization "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC) to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RFID) chips were. The report shows how they used the basic new home scanners that will go along with the cards (for use with home computers to process the personal data for official government business) to demonstrate that scammers would have few problems extracting personal information. This includes two fingerprint scans and a new six-digit PIN number meant to be used as a digital signature for official government business and beyond.
13916924
submission
wiedzmin writes:
It looks like malicious website protection in Opera 10.54 is blocking http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo (which is a page you get when clicking the main Facebook logo from most of their pages) for "distributing malicious software", courtesy of AVG advisory. Funny.
8762642
submission
wiedzmin writes:
D-Link announced today that the problem, discovered by security researchers SourceSec, affects three of its wireless routers: DIR-855 (hardware version A2), DIR-655 (versions A1 to A4) and DIR-635 (version B) and lies in D-Link's implementation of Cisco's Home Network Administration Protocol (HNAP), which allows remote router configuration. The scope of the vulnerability is greatly reduced by the fact that the above routers have not been shipped with the affected firmware by default, so only those customers who updated their firmware could be affected. Or at least this was indicated in the company's response to the SourceSac claim that all D-Link routers sold since 2006 were affected.
8021780
submission
wiedzmin writes:
There are no official announcements yet, but according to BlackBerry users' outcries on Twitter, RIM's data services are down for the second time in as many weeks.
7154602
submission
wiedzmin writes:
The social gadget site GDGT has released a compiled, ready-to-run VM images of the new Google Chrome OS for both VMWare and VirtualBox. All you need to give this new thin-client OS a try, is to register an account at GDGT and download the archived image (about 300MB) here.
7105748
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, long-time Mac software developer known as "Rogue Amoeba" and other respected App Store developers have recently decided to discontinue their work on the platform, citing their frustration with Apple's opaque approval processes. Continued issues with erroneous and snap application and API rejections are prompting more and more developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100,000 iPhone apps, continued migration away from iPhone development will most likely result in less quality software for the platform.
7104044
submission
wiedzmin writes:
DeCODE Genetics, a genetics research firm from Iceland has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and Saga Investments, a U.S. venture capital firm, has already put in a bid to buy deCODE’s operations, raising privacy concerns about the fate of customer DNA samples and records. The company hasn’t disclosed how many clients signed up for its service, but provides a number of customer testimonials on its site, including Dorrit Mousaieff, Iceland’s first lady.
7100620
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Google released a new experimental Labs feature called Image Swirl today, which is designed to make it easier to find related images on the Internet and fish out elusive images from the millions already on the web. It utilizes Google's previously released "related image search" feature to group similar images and allow the user to navigate through them as if they were tree branches, discovering and expanding to more and more related images, without having to guess keywords to find them. It's a pretty novel idea and should be extremely useful should it ever graduate from the Google Labs program.
7100290
submission
wiedzmin writes:
Apple's line of laptops ranked fourth behind ASUS, Sony and Toshiba in a multi-year reliability survey of nine notebook makers, with an average 3-year failure rate of 17.4%. According to a study of 30,000 portable computers published today by SquareTrade, company that provides after-sale warranties, Apple finished in the middle of the pack with ASUS (15.6% failure rate) and HP (25.6%) taking the first and last places respectively.
6721813
submission
wiedzmin writes:
A UK firm claims to be developing a USB Plug & Play tool to automate data collection from PCs, similar in functionality to the Microsoft Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) law enforcement utility. Security watchdogs are howling already.
6716405
submission
wiedzmin writes:
National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a revision of its Special Publication 800-41: Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy. This is the first revision of the guidelines since the original SP800-41 was published in January 2002.
