Equal-opportunity hacking

Polish security researcher Michal Zalewski, known for his seemingly unending stream of browser vulnerability discoveries, has struck again. This time he's reported four flaws that are sure to get the attention of bug squashers in both Microsoft and Mozilla camps.

While both Microsoft and an ISP have won multi-million dollar judgments against Robert Alan Soloway for spamming, he apparently kept on spamming. This time around, he might not have it so easy. Rather than a civil case from a company, he's now been arrested for sending out millions of spam emails over a zombie network he put together -- and it looks like the feds threw everything they could think of against him: mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Apparently, the identity theft part was for "taking over someone's domain" (though, it's not clear here if they mean falsifying an email address or for the zombie network). Either way, it's hard to believe that this will really have much of an impact. After all, other spammers have been arrested (and jailed) before and it's not like the spam has gone down. So it seems a bit ridiculous for the federal authorities who are going after the guy to claim that people should see the amount of spam they receive start going down due to this arrest. Someone else will simply step in and fill the gap pretty quickly.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Wireless

Amazingly, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is actually not located in the UK, but we wouldn't doubt if the latest development to emerge from its confines somehow ends up across the pond. Nevertheless, scientists at the lab have developed a Laser-Based Item Monitoring System that "addresses surveillance requirements in places where video would be unacceptable because of the presence of proprietary information or other privacy concerns." Essentially, this optical monitoring system uses low-cost reflective tags placed on objects, and then maps the precise location of high-value items to sense tampering. The laser can purportedly detect minute changes (movements of less than a centimeter) by utilizing "a high-resolution two-axis laser scanner capable of looking at a 60-degree field of view in 0.0005-degree increments," meaning that it can divide its field of view into more than 10 billion individual pointing locations. The crew also noted that this system was generally superior to bar code and RFID alternatives as the LBIMS would not be susceptible to jamming or interception, but there's no word just yet on when the Department of Energy (or anyone else) will be putting this stuff to good use.

[Via Smartmobs, photo courtesy of Primidi]

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