posted by Karen | 7:45 PM
|
0 comments
San Diego, Calif.-based Websense has reported that some Hotmail accounts have been compromised, with all mail and contacts erased. The only remaining message: a ransom note demanding payment for the return of the deleted data.
"If you want to know where your contacts and your e-mails are then pay us or if you prefer to lose everything then don't write soon!" the note read, said Websense, in a rough translation of the original Spanish.
Users' accounts were compromised after they had accessed their Web mail accounts at a public Internet caf in Mexico, Websense added.
Previous "ransomware" attacks took a different tack. Typical was a March scheme where an attacker first planted a Trojan horse on PCs, then used the malware to encrypt a large number of documents and files. Later, the criminal sent e-mail to the victim demanding payment for the key that unlocked the encrypted files.
posted by Karen | 7:23 PM
|
0 comments
There aren't that many places (yet) where you have to provide biometric data to gain access. Usually they're limited to high-security areas, you know, places like nuclear research facilities, airports, libraries (!) and by the end of this month, Walt Disney World. Oh yes, the Magic Kingdom will soon be taking fingerprints of its visitors at all four Orlando-area theme parks, and is well on its way becoming a real nation-state, given that it already issues passports and has a standing army of costumed characters (and let's not even speak of their monstrous robot dominion). Disney says that this is to prevent ticket fraud and officials claim that the company is not actually taking "fingerprints," but rather, mathematical representations of fingerprints, as calculated by series of points measured on a fingerprint. A little math never hurt anymore, right? Except when it can be tied to an individual's identity, a record of their whereabouts, and corresponding physical traits. It's a world of hopes and a world of fears, indeed.
posted by Karen | 6:59 PM
|
0 comments
The scanners _ to be installed on 130 library computers this summer _ will verify the identity of computer users. Library officials said they wanted to tighten computer access because many people borrow library cards and pass codes from friends or family to log on. The technology also will help the library implement a new policy that allows parents to put filters on their children's' accounts, officials said.
posted by Karen | 5:48 AM
|
0 comments
posted by Karen | 8:38 PM
|
0 comments
Biometrics (ancient Greek: bios ="life", metron ="measure") is the study of automated methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioural traits.
In information technology, biometric authentication refers to technologies that measure and analyze human physical and behavioural characteristics for authentication purposes. Examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, facial patterns and hand measurements, while examples of mostly behavioural characteristics include signature, gait and typing patterns. Voice is considered a mix of both physical and behavioural characteristics. However, it can be argued that all biometric traits share physical and behavioural aspects.
posted by Karen | 8:30 PM
|
0 comments
update Mozilla officially released Firefox 2 on Tuesday afternoon, adding security features and a new interface.
Firefox 2 was made available for free download at 2:15 p.m. PDT. Mozilla has set up two download sites for the udpate, which it said it has optimized for the expected high volume of traffic, at Getfirefox.com and Mozilla.com/firefox. (Firefox 2 is also available for free via CNET Download.com.)
"The key focus in Firefox 2 is making sure that what we are focusing on is tightness and efficiency--with the ability of turning that browser into exactly what one needs, focusing on security, stability and speed," said Mike Beltzner, who Mozilla describes as its "phenomenologist."
The revamped Firefox includes a new interface theme and more security protection such as built-in phishing protection. It also has session memory, which, when the browser is re-opened, brings back the set of Web pages that were in use when it was last closed. Changes have also been made in the technology to import RSS feeds, which now offers a feed list view with title and first lines. (Click here for the CNET Review.)
The camp in favor of having a "close" button on each tab has won over the majority who argued against them, Beltzner said. Previously, there was one "close" button at the right of the bar. Clicking on this closed only the one last viewed--but it could be difficult to work out which one this was.
"Google did usability studies with eye-tracking tools and determined that people actually look to the tab first, and it would take longer to determine if they had the right tab and were ready to close it," Beltzner said. "NASA Ames recently did cognitive modeling for us on tabs. Not only was the 'close' button on a tab quicker, but people would be more accurate. They also gave us good data on how wide tabs had to be before people clicked on the wrong one."
The NASA results also convinced Mozilla developers that people will inevitably close the wrong tab at some point, no matter what. That led to the creation of an "undo close tab" feature. "It will reopen the tab you just closed, and if you had written anything into a form on the site with that Web tab, it will restore that info as well," Beltzner said.
The new theme for the Firefox 2 interface has a cleaner look, resembling Opera 9, with similar Web feed features, rounded buttons and more opalescence.
The Firefox 2 launch comes just days after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, the first update to its browser in almost five years.
"We see the release of IE7 as a great thing. It was in maintenance mode for several years. Our browser and others made people think that the Web browser could do something more for them, and that spurred on new (developments and interest in Web browsers)," Beltzner said.
Unlike IE7, Mozilla's Firefox 2 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
Early buzz
Buzz surrounding rumors of early access to the final version of Firefox 2 via an FTP to a Mozilla directory link went round the Internet on Monday and Tuesday, as fans and bloggers hoped to get an early look at the free software.
Mozilla earlier asked people not to attempt to download the update from a direct file link, saying that it would not guarantee "that any set of files currently found within its Web site or elsewhere will be the final release."
Mozilla asked that users be kind to the people who donated servers for the launch and wait until the release Tuesday afternoon.
"No, we have. Not. Released. Firefox. 2. Yet," Paul Reid posted on his Mozilla blog on Monday evening and pointed to a list of problems with obtaining an FTP link copy of Firefox 2.
"Digg and Reddit posts linking to direct FTP mirrors could be costing the operators of those mirrors hundreds to thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills, or may cause them to crash by linking directly to them," Reid wrote. "This could cause them to 'un-volunteer' their services as a mirror, making it even harder to obtain Firefox on release days."
"We are asking this as a favor. We are very flattered that people are so excited about Firefox 2, but we don't want to crash machines," Beltzner said.
posted by Karen | 7:50 PM
|
0 comments
Using the keywords "Martin Luther King," the first result on Google and AOL--whose search is powered by Google--and the second result on Microsoft Windows Live search is a Web site created by a white supremacists group that purports to provide "a true historical examination" of the civil rights leader.
Granted, there are sponsored links above the result on all three sites and a "snapshot" of links to related content on AOL above the link on that Web site. But given that many people rely on the information they get in the top few results, someone could come away with a skewed perception of the man.
That's where librarians come in. While the Web is good for offering quick results from a broad range of sources, which may or may not be trustworthy, librarians can help people get access to more authoritative information and go deeper with their research.
"There are limitations with the search engines," said Marilyn Parr, public service and collections access officer at the Library of Congress. "You can type in 'Thomas Jefferson' in any search engine and you will get thousands of hits. How do you then sort through those to find the ones that are verifiable information, authentic and not someone's personal opinion?"
Most people don't bother to look at results past the first page or spend much time evaluating the source of the material, experts say.
"There's a problem with information illiteracy among people. People find information online and don't question whether it's valid or not," said Chris Sherman, executive editor of industry blog site SearchEngineWatch.com. "I think that's where librarians are extremely important. They are trained to evaluate the quality of the information."
AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said the company has contacted Google about the Martin Luther King search results.
"We get all of our organic search results from Google, as you know, so we don't set the algorithms by which they are ranked," Weinstein wrote in an e-mail. "Although we can't micro-manage billions of search results, our users would not expect this to be the first result for that common search, and we do not want to promote the Web sites of hate organizations, so we have asked Google to remove this particular site from the results it provides to us."
At Google, a Web site's ranking is determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to any given query, a company representative said. The company can't tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she said.
"In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking," the representative wrote in an e-mail.
The results on Microsoft's search engine are "not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content, said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search.
"The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results," he said. "We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized."
Search engines have added tools, like the ability to refine the search by date and source, and some offer suggestions for narrowing the search or offer shortcuts to more popular content. Some even offer academic vertical search sites, as Google Scholar and Windows Live Search do. Windows Live Search also allows users to create macros to do automated searches on their favorite Web sites. But many people either don't know about those tools or know how to use them to improve their queries.
"For some people, if the answer isn't in the first few results it might as well not be there," said Gary Price, founder and editor of the ResourceShelf blog and director of online resources at Ask.com. "No matter how smart and helpful search engines get, they're never going to replace librarians."
Search engines say the situation isn't so dire. The general public is getting more sophisticated in its search skills, said Tim Mayer, senior director of product management on Yahoo's search team.
"The amount of keywords people are entering is growing" to between two and three words, he said. "Search engine quality is improving and people are generally finding what they're looking for more often."
However, without some universal agreement on categorizing content, Web searches will always be lacking, some experts say.
"On the Web, every word is a keyword. It's such a mess," said Jason Strauss, head librarian at the Wright Institute, a graduate school of psychology in Berkeley, Calif. "When I use Google Search I almost always limit my search to the top-level domains dot-edu or dot-org. They usually have higher-quality information."
In addition, search engines also are only offering up a fraction of all the information out there. There is still the relatively untapped so-called "deep Web" of information behind corporate firewalls and password-protected Web sites. To get to the information, people have to know where the sites are and often have to pay to subscribe.
One such popular site is LexisNexis, which lets users search more than 36,000 news and public record sites, and other sources. Another is WestLaw, which provides access to legal records.
The definitive index and abstract database for psychology academics is PsycInfo, which provides access to journals, conference proceedings and other relevant information and allows users to search specific fields like "author" and "title," Strauss said. Keywords are selected by editors from a set list of terms.
"You end up with the ability to do a 'perfect search.' You get everything about the subject and nothing that is not related to it," Strauss said. "Using the Web, you are trying to think of how other people are phrasing things" to come up with keywords, which leads to mixed results, he added.
Even the federal government is addressing the Web search problem; it is trying to make it easier for citizens to track government spending. President Bush signed a bill into law this week that calls for the creation of an online database that will let people type in names of companies and states, for example, to search for government grants and contracts. The information is already on the Web, but people don't know where to find it.
A lot of people don't know that they can get access to much of the walled-off information in specialized databases for free if they have a public library card, said Price, of Ask.com and ResourceShelf.
Other helpful sites are the Librarians Internet Index, which offers quick lists of carefully vetted, reliable Web sites, the Internet Public Library and Infomine, a collection of scholarly resources on the Internet, according to Price.
With the advent of the Web and search engines, people's interaction with libraries has changed. While the number of reference questions at California public libraries has been declining, the difficulty of the questions has increased, said Ira Bray, a technology consultant at the California State Library.
Gone are the days of calling or visiting the library to find out a famous person's birthplace or the gross national product for the U.S. in 1972--you can get that in two seconds on Google. But you'll need more than a search engine to figure out, for example, what factors were at play in the growth of the U.S. economy that year, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducts research on the impact of the Internet on Americans.
"The idea of the 1950s librarian, that's outdated," said Sarah Houghton-Jan, information Web services manager at the San Mateo County Library in Northern California. "You find people who are expert at searching the Web and using online tools; high-level information experts instead of someone who just stamps books at the checkout desk."
posted by Karen | 4:13 PM
|
0 comments
On Thursday, Microsoft warned people about a vulnerability in the Windows Shell, the part of the operating system that presents the user interface. The flaw affects Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and could be exploited via the Internet Explorer Web browser through a component called WebViewFolderIcon, the company said in an advisory.
"An attacker could host a specially crafted Web site that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer," Microsoft said. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user."
While sample exploit code has been published, Microsoft said it has not yet seen any related attacks. The vulnerability was actually discovered two months ago, but the code only surfaced this week, according to the French Security Incident Response Team.
Security monitoring company Secunia deems the issue "extremely critical," its most severe rating. Microsoft said it is working on a fix and plans to release it on Oct. 10 as part of its regular patch cycle. Meanwhile, it suggested several workarounds in its advisory to protect Windows systems.
The Windows Shell bug is one of several flaws that are publicly known and for which exploit code is available, but which Microsoft has yet to patch. Cybercrooks are actively exploiting yet-to-be-fixed holes in PowerPoint, Word and IE, Microsoft has acknowledged.
Miscreants are taunting Microsoft with zero-day code, or attack code released immediately after a flaw or patch is made public, experts have said. Some security watchers have started to coin the term "zero-day Wednesday" to come after "Patch Tuesday," Microsoft's patch day on the second Tuesday of each month. Microsoft put its patches on a schedule to give IT managers time to plan and prepare.
Microsoft issued a "critical" security fix for Windows on Tuesday, two weeks before its October scheduled release date. The update repairs a flaw in a Windows component called "vgx.dll" that was being exploited widely in cyberattacks, experts said.
posted by Karen | 3:58 PM
|
0 comments
posted by Karen | 10:26 PM
|
1 comments
Over the past five decades, hard drives have come a long way. Travel through time with us as we chronicle 50 milestones in hard-drive development--from product firsts to new technologies, and everything in between.
1956: IBM ships the first hard drive, the RAMAC 305, which holds 5MB of data at $10,000 a megabyte. It is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch platters. (For the full story and interviews with key players, read "The Hard Drive Turns 50.")
1961: IBM invents heads for disk drives that "fly" on a cushion of air or on "air bearings."
1963: IBM comes up with the first removable hard drive, the 1311, which has six 14-inch platters and holds 2.6MB.
E-mail
Print
del.icio.us
Digg this