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Security

Submission + - Dealing with long-term security requirements?

Submitted by tbo
tbo writes: I'm an academic researcher in the field of quantum computing. I'm interested in learning what the IT community is doing to prepare for future developments in quantum computing and the resulting security implications — in particular, the compromise of most or all known public key cryptosystems.

Although large-scale quantum computers may be a decade or more away, this still has immediate implications for those with long-term forward security requirements (i.e., data that must stay secret for a long time). Does your organization have data with substantial forward security requirements? How do you deal with protecting that data against future advances in cryptanalysis? Has your organization considered quantum key distribution or other new cryptography technologies?

Another concern is replacing the present-day public key cryptography infrastructure with something immune to quantum computers. A malicious person with access to a single large-scale quantum computer could use it to crack the root certificate authorities' private keys, thus enabling him or her to fake certificates for anything they want and perform undetectable man-in-the-middle attacks against banks and e-commerce sites. Since it's very hard to revoke and re-issue root certificates, this would only have to happen once to do serious damage. What are people planning to do about this?
Businesses

Submission + - 15 Minute SEO

Submitted by
Amit Bhawnani
Amit Bhawnani writes: "15 Minute SEO is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance."
Google

Submission + - Interesting article on page rankings manipulation

Submitted by
Ayal Rosenthal
Ayal Rosenthal writes: "March 14, 2007 (Computerworld) — Rand Fishkin knows how valuable it is for a Web site to rank high in a Google search. But even this president of a search engine optimization firm was blown away by a proposal he received at a search engine optimization conference in London last month, where he was a panelist. The topic — Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon "black hat" practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention. The rest of the panel scoffed. "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight," one chided. After all, this is the cutthroat online gambling sector. But one poker Web site owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. "He said, 'If you can get us a search ranking in the top five for online poker or gambling [using white hat methods], we'll buy that site from you for $10 million,'" http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command =viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012943&pageNumber=1"

Microsoft One Step From World's Greenest Company 492

Posted by samzenpus from the environmental-update dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article, Microsoft is only a few lines of code away from becoming the greenest company on Earth." From the article: "Redmond should issue a software upgrade to every computer running Microsoft Windows worldwide to adjust each machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency." The author figures that the upgrade would affect 100 million computers and that the power cost savings could hit $7 billion per year. CO2 emissions would be cut by 45 million tons. But what about the impact on computing?

Fully Open Source NTFS Support Under Linux 310

Posted by CowboyNeal from the long-time-coming dept.
lord_rob the only on writes "The Linux NTFS project has released a beta version of its fully open source userspace (using FUSE) 3G-Linux NTFS support driver. According to the developer, this driver beats hands down other NTFS support solutions performance-wise (including commercial Paragon NTFS driver and also Captive NTFS, which is using windows ntfs.sys driver under WINE)." That's right, writing to NTFS even works. Soon it'll mean one less recovery disk to keep around, I hope.

RAID Problems With Intel Core 2? 284

Posted by Zonk from the arr-aye-eye-dee dept.
Nom du Keyboard writes "The Inquirer is reporting that the new Intel Core 2 processors Woodcrest and Conroe are suffering badly when running RAID 5 disk arrays, even when using non-Intel controllers. Can Intel afford to make a misstep now with even in the small subset of users running RAID 5 systems?" From the article: "The performance in benchmarks is there, but the performance in real world isn't. While synthetic benchmarks will do the thing and show RAID5-worthy results, CPU utilization will go through the roof no matter what CPU is used, and the hiccups will occur every now and then. It remains to be seen whether this can be fixed via BIOS or micro-code update."

Spam from Taiwan 229

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the spam-who-loved-me dept.
TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.

Intel's Conroe Resurfaces, Benchmarks Strong 152

Posted by CowboyNeal from the kicking-the-tires dept.
MojoKid writes "Intel has been occasionally leaking performance results of their upcoming Core 2 Duo processor for the desktop, code named Conroe. At this years IDF select members of the press were allowed to get hands-on access to test systems for benchmarking. Now, coincident with this week's Computex show in Taiwan, Intel has seen fit to show us just what their soon to be released CPU can do, yet again. Select press members got together with Intel in New York city for another round of testing with Conroe. HotHardware has a performance showcase posted with scores from a Core 2 Duo E6700 machine and a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition X6800. The results, compared against the backdrop of an overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 system, look very impressive indeed for Intel."

Windows Servers Beat Linux Servers 709

Posted by samzenpus from the say-it-aint-so dept.
RobbeR49 writes "Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux. Unix was the big winner, however, beating both Windows and Linux in annual uptime. From the article: 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.' Yankee Group is claiming no bias in the survey as they were not sponsored by any particular OS vendor."

Ballmer Beaten by Spyware 501

Posted by Zonk from the don't-tell-anecdotes-at-a-public-event dept.
Devil's BSD writes "At a Windows Vista reviewers conference, Microsoft platform president Jim Allchin told a rather amusing story about Steve Ballmer. Apparently, a friend asked him to rid his computer of the spyware and malware that had accumulated over the years. As the story goes, neither Ballmer nor Microsoft's top engineers could fix the infested computer. The article goes on to discuss and compare Microsoft's new security offering, Windows Live OneCare."

A Look at FreeNAS Server 214

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the you-can-never-have-too-much-storage-space dept.
NewsForge (Also owned by VA) has a quick look at FreeNAS, an open source network attached storage server that can be deployed on pretty much any old PC you have sitting around the house. From the article: "The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media."

Amazon One-Click Patent to be Re-Examined 132

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-one-click dept.
timrichardson writes "A New Zealand actor, frustrated by a poor shopping experience, has successfully requested that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review the correctness of Amazon's infamous One-Click patent. An examiner for the agency ruled that the re-examination requested by Peter Calveley had raised a 'substantial new question of patentability' affecting Amazon's patent, according to a document outlining the agency's decision."

Can Ordinary PC Users Ditch Windows for Linux? 1483

Posted by Zonk from the do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Mark Golden, a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, tried to switch from Windows to Linux, and found it too complex for his liking. He writes: 'For me, though, using the Linux systems didn't make sense. I often send documents and spreadsheets between my home PC and the one at work, which uses Microsoft Office. And the files are sometimes complex. Meanwhile, for both personal and professional computer use, I want access to all multimedia functions. While solutions may exist to almost every problem I encountered, I was willing to invest only a limited amount of time as a system administrator. Claims by some Linux publishers that anybody can easily switch to Linux from Windows seem totally oversold.'"

Microsoft Customers Balk at Hard Sell 353

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the if-you-can't-beat-em-get-a-bigger-stick dept.
HangingChad writes "ComputerWorld is running an article about Microsoft's latest type of sales force scare tactic. Apparently Microsoft is using the new title of 'engagement manager' to attempt sales via intimidation. From the article: 'Indeed, according to Microsoft's Web site, the responsibility of someone with Lawless' title of "engagement manager" is to "perform as an integrated member of the account team, drive business development and closing of new services engagements in targeted accounts."'"

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