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Security

Submission + - Inside a Modern Malware Distribution System 1

Submitted by
Scrabblous
Scrabblous writes: "This eweek.com article provides a peek at the backend code and control server associated with Pushdo, a complex Trojan downloader that meticulously tracks its victims. From the article: For starters, the Pushdo controller uses the GeoIP geolocation database in conjunction with whitelists and blacklists of country codes to allow the malware distributor to limit one of the malware loads from infecting users located in a particular country. It also goes a step further, logging the victim's primary hard drive serial number, tracking whether the file system is NTFS, the number of times the victim system has launched a Pushdo variant, and the Windows OS version that executed the malware."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure (reuters.com) 2

Submitted by Google85
Google85 writes: Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.
The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.
Math

Submission + - MIT Student disproves Stephen Wolfram

Submitted by Richard Pritches
Richard Pritches writes: MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS). Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit. Richard
Security

Submission + - Antivirus protection worse than a year ago (heise-security.co.uk)

Submitted by
juct
juct writes: "In a test of 17 antivirus products, the german magazine c't concluded, that the effectiveness has fallen off, and more and more pests can now slip past these barriers. Most of the products perform reasonably well if they can rely on their database of signatures. But if they have to detect new malware with heuristics, the results were worse than last year. Besides this c't did the first comprehensive test of behaviour blocking in antivirus products and found that more than half of them did not react on suspicious behaviour at all. The test itself is available only in the printed magazine, heise Security published a summary."
Space

Submission + - Solar System Date of Birth Determined (ucdavis.edu)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."
Television

Penetration Testing TV Series Coming 209

Posted by kdawson from the tiger-team dept.
ChazeFroy writes "CourtTV (TruTV) has a new series starting Dec. 25 at 11 pm called 'Tiger Team.' It follows a group of elite penetration testers hired to test organizations' security using social engineering, wired/wireless penetration testing, and physically defeating security mechanisms (lock picking, dumpster diving, going through air vents/windows). They do all of this while avoiding the organizations' various security defenses as well as law enforcement. The stars of the show also did a radio spot this morning in Denver." Wonder how they socially engineer away the presence of a camera team in the air vents.
The Courts

Submission + - Judge rules TorrentSpy destroyed evidence (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by
Come play kdice
Come play kdice writes: "A federal judge has handed the MPAA a resounding victory in its copyright infringement lawsuit against TorrentSpy. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered a default judgment against Justin Bunnell and the rest of named defendants in Columbia Pictures et al. v. Justin Bunnell et al. after finding that TorrentSpy "engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence" and lying under oath about said destruction. After being sued, TorrentSpy mounted a vigorous defense, including a countersuit it filed against the MPAA in May 2006, but, behind the scenes, the court documents paint a picture of a company desperately trying to bury any and all incriminating evidence. TorrentSpy has announced its intention to appeal, but its conduct makes a reversal unlikely."
Intel

Submission + - Intel announces Open Fibre Channel over Ethernet (open-fcoe.org)

Submitted by
sofar
sofar writes: "Intel has just announced and released source code for their Open-FCoE project, which creates a transport that allows native Fibre Channel frames to travel over ordinary ethernet cables to any Linux system. This is an extremely interesting development where datacenters can reduce cost and maintenance by reducing the amount of Fibre Channel equipment and cabling while still enjoying the benefits and performance of Fibre Channel equipment. The new standard for channelling fibre channel frames over ethernet is backed by Cisco, Sun, IBM, EMC, Emulex and a variety of others working in the storage field. The timing of this announce makes sense with 10 Gigabit Ethernet becoming more widespread in the datacenter."
Microsoft

Submission + - Vista named year's most dissapointing product (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Shadow7789
Shadow7789 writes: No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC Magazine has named Windows Vista the most disappointing product of 2007. From the article:
'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?...No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'
IBM

Submission + - How to really bury a mainframe (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframe but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved 47-year-old IBM 650 mainframe Betelgeuse by holding a New Orleans style jazz funeral. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000 word (10 digits and sign) capacity and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23123"
Government

Submission + - British Village Requests Removal from GPS Maps (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "The tiny village of Barrow Gurney, England has asked GPS map publisher Tele Atlas to remove them from the company's maps. The reason: truck drivers using GPS navigation devices are being directed to drive through the town despite the roads being too narrow for sidewalks, and causing numerous accidents. At the root of the problem lies the fact that the navigation maps used by trucks are the same as those used by passenger cars, which don't contain data on road width or no truck zones. Tele Atlas says they will release truck-appropriate databases at some point, but until then they advise local governments to make use of a technology dating back to the Romans: road signs."
Government

Submission + - Wikileaks coup: Guantanamo and rendition manuals (wikileaks.org)

Submitted by James Hardine
James Hardine writes: The Washington Post is reporting that Wikileaks has released another manual for Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay together with the US military's rendition operations manual. This release follows from the Wikileaks release of the 2003 SOP Manual as reported in Slashdot and the New York Times last month. Wikileaks compares the two manuals (2003, 2004) and reveals damning changes in official US detainee policy in exquisite detail. Who knew that diff could be such a powerful political weapon?
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Klausner sues iPhone for $360M over voicemail

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Klausner Technologies said on Monday the company had filed a $360 million suit against Apple and AT&T over voicemail patents that Klausner claims the Apple iPhone infringes. New York-based Klausner said the lawsuit also names Comcast, Cablevision Systems and eBay's Skype as infringing its patent for "visual voicemail." The plaintiff seeks an additional US$300 million from the three. The suit alleges asserts that the defendants' Internet-based voicemail products and services violate a Klausner patent. It seeks damages and future royalties estimated at $300 million, according to the press release.
Portables

Submission + - NEC develops the world's fastest MRAM

Submitted by
Gary
Gary writes: "NEC has succeeded in developing a new SRAM compatible MRAM that can operate at 250MHz, the world's fastest MRAM operation speed. MRAM is expected to be the dominant next-generation memory technology as it realizes ultra fast operation speeds, nonvolatility — ability to retain data with the power off, and unlimited write endurance. Verification at the SRAM speed level proves that the newly-developed MRAM could be embedded in system LSIs as SRAM substitutes in the future."

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