Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tuesday News items

Malicious subtitle file could trip up media player



State agency moves to plug USB flash drive security gap
The Division of Child Support collects about $700 million annually in child-support payments form noncustodial parents. The agency, part of the state's Department of Social and Health Services, manages 350,000 active child-support cases annually, noted Main.




FTC Deal Suggests Enterprises Could Be Liable for Poor Security - 3/17/2008 5:50:00 PM ValueClick found negligent when Commission discovers vulnerabilites contrary to privacy policies promising encryption and 'reasonable security measures'




Supermarket Chains Hit By Data Theft
Retailers Hannaford Brothers and Sweetbay admit to being the targets of a massive credit-card data theft disclosed Monday. 18-Mar-2008
Data thieves broke into computers at supermarket chains Hannaford Brothers and Sweetbay, stealing an estimated 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers, Hannaford said Monday.

The Boston Globe's Ross Kerber today writes that Hannaford is still investigating the specifics of how the data was taken, but that the company's chief executive said the data "was illegally accessed from our computer systems during transmission of card authorization." Translation: The hackers snatched the credit/debit card data sometime between when the customer swiped their card in the reader at the register and when that transaction was approved.



Microsoft hits milestone with long-awaited Vista SP1 release
Microsoft has officially announced the availability of Service Pack 1 for Vista. The English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish version are available now.
March 18, 2008 - 12:19PM CT - by Emil Protalinski

After many rumors as to when Windows Vista would get its much-anticipated first service pack looked improbable, Microsoft has finally dropped SP1 on the masses. SP1 rolls together 23 security updates and 550 hotfixes into a 434.5MB download (726.5MB for the 64-bit version). Apart from improvements brought by individual updates that are now part of SP1, changes that SP1 brings by itself to Microsoft's flagship OS are numerous. Significant changes include:
File copying should no longer have an ETA of hundreds of years
UAC has been altered slightly, including fewer prompts in specific scenarios
DirectX has been updated to support not only DirectX 9 and 10 hardware, but the backwards-compatible
10.1 as well
WGA has been
tweaked to address two of the most popular exploits
Further support has been added for
third party search solutions

Trend Micro Details Its Recent Failed Web Attack TechWeb - Fri Mar 14, 2:30 PM ET
The code inserted in some Web pages of its site was meant to redirect the visitor to a malicious server that would download malware capable of stealing passwords.


State Supreme Court LimitsOnline Access To Legal Records
By CARA WYNN
OKLAHOMA CITY (CN) - The Oklahoma Supreme Court is cutting off Internet access to court records, for the stated goal of protecting people from identity theft. The court's March 11 order states that the Supreme Court adopted the rules "in an effort to balance the rights of privacy of individuals who use Oklahoma's court system and public access to court documents, and are applicable to all documents filed in the district courts and the Oklahoma Supreme Court."

E-Voting Firm Threatens Ed Felten If He Reviews Its E-Voting Machine
from the well-that's-comforting dept
Many of the folks around here are surely aware of the name Ed Felten, the Princeton professor who runs the fantastic blog Freedom To Tinker, and who has been involved in a number of important technology news stories over the years. One of the first that brought him to much wider attention in the tech community happened back in 2001. The recording industry had set up a contest, asking anyone to try to hack its SDMI DRM offering. The idea was to prove that SDMI was a perfectly good DRM. But, of course, like every other DRM, it had its faults, and Felten and some of his researchers figured them out. That's where things got ridiculous. Despite the fact that the recording industry had told people to try to hack SDMI, when Felten went to present the paper, he was threatened with a lawsuit for breaking the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Eventually, after a ton of public pressure, the recording industry backed down, but Felten's name was cemented in the minds of many in the tech industry as a fighter for freedom of speech and, more importantly, the freedom to tinker.

Police Blotter: Murderer nabbed via tracking, Web search

What: Woman, sentenced to 25 years in prison for murdering her husband, appeals on Fourth Amendment grounds. Conviction based in part on GPS tracking and her Internet searches.
When: Texas appeals court rules on March 13.
Outcome: Sentence upheld.

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