ix weeks ago, at the end of September, a loose organization of security researchers and network professionals announced that their collective efforts to fight badware had finally borne fruit. After years of complaints and shady dealings, the rogue ISP Atrivo was finally forced offline when the company’s last remaining uplink provider severed its business relationship with the beleaguered baddie. Later in October, the FTC announced that it had won a major injunction against the international spam operation HerbalKing. Now, on the relative heels of these announcements, comes news of a third major takedown. As of yesterday, the rogue ISP McColo has been taken offline, hopefully for good.
A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network. For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.
Visa is introducing a revolutionary new credit card allowing users to use their PIN for online card transactions. Aimed at savvy internet users, the Visa PIN card features an alpha-numeric display and a 12-button keypad built into the back of a conventional credit, debit or prepaid card. The card, developed using technology from Australia-based Emue technologies, promises a three-year battery life, and much improved protection from online fraudsters.
In a desktop media realm dominated by iTunes and Windows Media Player, Songbird is an open source player that dances to its own beat. Built on Mozilla technology, Songbird offers a very customizable interface and integrates a pleasant variety of web services that offer everything from artist bios, lyrics, music store integration, and much more. Since Songbird is now available as an official 1.0 release candidate after a two-year development journey, we felt it was time to plug in some headphones and check it out.
An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial “M” for Musicology.
Google has published a short-term roadmap for Android that provides some insight into the company’s plans for upcoming feature enhancements. Support for localization in the user interface and application framework are one of the major goals. Google aims to complete a German translation by the end of the year and will add French, Italian, and several other languages early next year. This will make it possible for carriers to bring Android-based devices to market in other countries.
A group of women who define themselves as ‘girl geeks’ are trying to encourage a greater female presence in the technology industry by arranging Girl Geek Dinners across the world. Technology conferences can often be all-male affairs and in some countries the technology industry employs very few female workers. Digital Planet’s reporter Angela Saini, attended their most recent meeting at the offices of Microsoft in London. The idea behind the dinners is to change what some women in technology feel is a very male-dominated culture.
Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.1 beta release, an important development milestone for the popular open source web browser. Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3.1 a strong incremental improvement with user interface enhancements, new features, and increased support for emerging web standards. The new beta release includes a modest handful of noteworthy changes that improve the user experience.
When I was on the high school debate team, about 15 years ago, using the Internet was considered strange, if not cheating. We used photocopy machines, print magazines and academic journals almost exclusively. That time in the world’s history is now gone forever.
Quantum cryptography has gained a lot of notoriety in recent years because it is thought to be fundamentally secure, relying on the laws of nature to guarantee security. The basic idea boils down to the fact that no one can observe a quantum system without altering it. The alterations can be detected as an increase in the error rate of the communications system, alerting everyone to a potential eavesdropper. A recent conference publication has highlighted a weakness in quantum cryptography systems, but it focuses on the classical (e.g., not quantum) part of the communications system, which can be used to fool the key distribution system into giving up the secret key.
A new release of the venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is now available for download. Version 2.6 offers a variety of new features, user interface improvements, and is also the first release to include support for the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), a powerful, graph-based image editing framework.
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At the 2008 ECCC this past Saturday, a vendor wanted to offload his entire PC stock on me for $5, which I happily accepted since there was at least one title in there (Martian Memorandum) worth that much. When I got home, however, I found two additional Avantage (Accolade’s budget publishing title) titles that have not yet been released “into the wild”. This means there are no copies of these games floating around on Abandonware sites. For me, this was like finding actual gold nuggets in a collection of Pyrite.
As a car accelerates up and down a hill then slows to follow a hairpin turn, the airflow around it cannot keep up and detaches from the vehicle. This aerodynamic separation creates additional drag that slows the car and forces the engine to work harder. The same phenomenon affects airplanes, boats, submarines, and even your golf ball. Now, in work that could lead to ways of controlling the effect with potential impacts on fuel efficiency and more, MIT scientists and colleagues report new mathematical and experimental work for predicting where that aerodynamic separation will occur.
In a recently published patent, Google describes a vision for an open wireless world, one in which mobile devices (and smartphones in particular) are no longer married to particular cellular service providers. When you buy a phone in the United States today, you typical have to sign a contract that prevents you from using that phone with more than one provider for a predetermined amount of time. You’ll encounter no such requirement when purchasing a laptop, which can be used to connect to the internet through any service provider at any time.
If police officers in Ingolstadt notice a decrease in luxury car drivers running red lights these days, we suspect it’s because of a new project piloted by Audi that lets drivers know exactly how long before a traffic light turns. According to Audi’s press release, the system is meant to prevent “frustrating, fuel-sapping stops at red traffic lights.” After all, the last thing you want to see when you’re driving your brand-new S5 is a red light. We’re liking Audi engineers more and more each day.
