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TSA Announces Pilot of Trusted Traveler Program 388

Posted by Soulskill from the another-day-at-the-theater dept.
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN reports that the TSA has announced the pilot of their trusted traveler program. This is the program where an individual gives up additional information to the government and then gets expedited security. The pilot program will only be available to certain frequent fliers on Delta passengers flying out of Atlanta and Detroit, and to American Airlines passengers flying out of Miami and Dallas. Plans are in the work to expand this to other airports and other airlines as well."
Security

Submission + - Researcher finds dangerous vulnerability in Skype (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A security consultant has notified Skype of a cross-site scripting flaw that could be used to change the password on someone's account, according to details posted online. The consultant, Levent Kayan, based in Berlin, posted details of the flaw on his blog on Wednesday and notified Skype a day later. He said on Friday he hasn't heard a response yet. The problem lies in a field where a person can input their mobile phone number. Kayan wrote that a malicious user can insert JavaScript into the mobile phone field of their profile.
Programming

In-Depth Look At HTML5 150

Posted by CmdrTaco from the digging-in-for-the-long-haul dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."
News

Submission + - Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing (ispyce.com)

Submitted by
autospa
autospa writes: "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing", is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."
Government

Submission + - Senate Passes Landmark Patent Reform Bill (earthweb.com)

Submitted by inkscapee
inkscapee writes: The US Senate is congratulating itself for passing a 'landmark' piece of patent reform legislation. Some key elements are 'first to file' instead of first to invent, and ending fee diversion, which means fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office. Curiously, this practice has resulted in a backlog of 700,000 patent applications. The House is reportedly working on a similar bill, and soon harmony and rationality will triumph.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by
AndyAndyAndyAndy
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook offers easy commenting alternative (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Spice Consumer
Spice Consumer writes: Facebook has just unvield a "...new system (that) lets website owners replace their current commenting system with Facebook’s simply by dropping in a few lines of Javascript." How widely adopted this new system becomes could greatly affect Facebook's already entrenched position on the web and further compromise individual user's privacy.
Security

Submission + - Russia's Top ePayment Firm Is Top Rogue AV Player (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brian Krebs has posted a deep dive through more than a year worth of emails leaked from ChronoPay, Russia's largest online credit card processor. The story uses the documents to show how ChronoPay has worked to corner the market for processing rogue anti-virus or "scareware," and the evidence indicates that ChronoPay executives created scareware companies from the ground up, paying for everything form their domain name registration to virtual hosting, to setting up the front companies and associated bank accounts and the 1-800 support lines for entire scareware operations that typically netted the company millions in revenue for each scam.
Media

Submission + - Posting AC - a thing of the past? (indystar.com) 1

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: A Marion County judge has ruled, for the first time in Indiana, that news media outlets can be ordered by the court to reveal identifying information about posters to their online forums.
If you think that this will affect only posting on /. or the like, think again: according to TFA, under threat seems to be no less than the right of the media outlets to protect the identity of their sources.
Privacy

Submission + - Student sues FBI for planting GPS tracker (yahoo.com)

Submitted by GabriellaKat
GabriellaKat writes: This story was also covered last year when he found the tracking device.
"Yasir Afifi, 20, says a mechanic doing an oil change on his car in October discovered the device stuck with magnets between his right rear wheel and exhaust. They weren't sure what it was, but Afifi had the mechanic remove it and a friend posted photos of it online to see whether anyone could identify it. Two days later, Afifi says, agents wearing bullet-proof vests pulled him over as he drove away from his apartment in San Jose, Calif., and demanded their property back."
Now he has decided to sue the FBI
Government

Submission + - DHS Eyes Covert Body Scans (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggest that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has signed contracts for the development of mobile and static systems that can be used scan pedestrians and people at rail and bus stations and special event venues — apparently at times without their knowledge. Under consideration: An Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance platform; an X-Ray Backscatter system that could detect concealed metallic and high-density plastic objects on people from up to 10 meters away; a walk-through x-ray screening system that could be deployed at entrances to special events or other points of interest, which could be installed in corridors and likely scan people walking through it without them knowing it, EPIC said."
Facebook

Submission + - Teenagers Jailed For Criminal version of Facebook (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Three teenagers in the UK have been sentenced for up to five years in jail for creating and operating Gh0stMarket.net, one of the world’s largest English-language internet crime forums. The Gh0stMarket website, which had about 8,000 members, was dubbed by the court as the “criminal equivalent of Facebook”, or “Crimebook.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Over 40,000 John Doe Copyright Troll Cases Dismissed 52

Posted by Roblimo from the sometimes-the-good-guys-win dept.
Requiem18th writes "From the EFF site: Thousands of unnamed 'John Does' in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en masse."

Despite the dismissal, EFF has received reports that some Does are still receiving notices from their ISPs informing them that their identities are being sought in relation to these cases. If you get one, contact the EFF immediately.
Censorship

Submission + - PayPal freezes support account for Bradley Manning (couragetoresist.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The online payment provider PayPal has frozen the account of Courage to Resist, which in collaboration with the Bradley Manning Support Network is currently raising funds in support of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. “We’ve been in discussions with PayPal for weeks, and by their own admission there’s no legal obligation for them to close down our account,” noted Loraine Reitman of the Bradley Manning Support Network (Support Network). “This was an internal policy decision by PayPal.”

“They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization’s checking account by default. While there may be no legal obligation to provide services, there is an ethical obligation. By shutting out legitimate nonprofit activity, PayPal shows itself to be morally bankrupt.”
Businesses

Submission + - Google Launches New Assault on Microsoft Office

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "BetaNews reports that Google has announced the global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year with technology that builds off Google acquisition of DocVerse. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is essentially a plugin for Windows versions of the productivity suit (2003, 2007, 2010). "The plugin syncs your work through Google's cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time," says Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha. Additionally, Google announced a 90-day trial for Appsperience described as "a way for companies that currently use cumbersome legacy systems to see how web-powered tools help their teams work together more effectively.""

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