Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Wednesday News Items

Hackers seize on Excel vulnerability Symantec researchers said they've spotted a Web site that tries to exploit computers lacking one of the recently issued patches for Excel. Read more...


Network Solutions suspends anti-Islamist film Web site



The REAL story will be when it's revealed what caused this outage.
Outage shuts Netflix Web site for 12 hours



Report: Facebook security lapse exposes photos



Symantec suspects bot in attacks on D-Link routers



Update: Microsoft admits it knew about, didn't patch, bugs



Yet another laptop theft: Agilent warns 51,000 workers of potential data compromise




Feds Get Guilty Plea From Operation Bot Roast - 3/19/2008 4:08:00 PM A 21-year-old bot herder faces 10 years and a $250,000 fine



The ultimate identity theft: "house stealing"
networkworld.com — The FBI issued a warning today about "a totally new kind of crime: house stealing." It combines the twin dangers of identity theft and mortgage fraud. Incredibly, some people are being victimized while still occupying their homes.More…




Motorola to split into two companies




Slab of Antarctic ice shelf collapses




John C. Dvorak: The iPhone Is No Desktop
pcmag.com — People are willing to make a device that you can drop in the toilet or leave in a taxi cab the next desktop computing platform. Ridiculous.More… (Apple)




NSA's Domestic Spying
This article from The Wall Street Journal outlines how the NSA is increasingly engaging in domestic surveillance, data collection, and data mining. The result is essentially the same as Total Information Awareness.




"Eco-friendly or "green" products are becoming much more fashionable these days, especially in things like high-end electronics, where the impact on the environment and the disposal of these products is being regulated now by such things as the RoHS compliance standard. In addition, power consumption is also being looked at more closely for all the obvious reasons. Hard Drive manufacturer Western Digital recently took the initiative by being the first drive manufacture to produce and market a lower power version of their Caviar line of hard drives. The numbers here show that a green hard drive will probably only save an average end user about 10 watts in total system power consumption. However, from a data center perspective, where demand for storage is growing by the petabyte at an alarming rate, 10 watts per drive can certainly add up quick"




New spam over EasterMarch 26, 2008The Rustock Botnet changed the structure of its spam emails over the Easter weekend.






It's Good To Be A Monopoly: Bell Canada Tells ISPs To Shut Up And Accept Traffic Shaping
from the what-are-you-gonna-do? dept
Remember how Bell Canada had decided to start traffic shaping without telling any of its ISP resellers? Well, in a meeting with those resellers, the company both admitted it and told them there was nothing they could do about it, even if it meant that those ISPs were violating their own terms of service and promises to customers. It's good to be a monopoly, you see. Since those ISPs have nowhere else to go, Bell Canada is able to do whatever it wants to the network, and if those ISPs don't like it, they're pretty much out of luck.
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AT&T's Spam Filter Gets A Bit Too Aggressive
from the why-no-recourse? dept
You can certainly understand why ISPs offer spam filters. It's a service for users who don't want to be totally bombarded with spam. But what I've never understood is that these ISPs rarely give the user a chance to circumvent the spam filter themselves. If most people want to ignore it and assume all spam is spam, then so be it. But what if some users want to make sure no legit emails are getting through? Witness the latest chatter about AT&T's "upgraded" spam filter that is apparently eating up a ton of legitimate emails with no indication to the receiving party. It's surprising that AT&T would do this, knowing (as it must) that back when Verizon became too aggressive with its spam filters, it lost a class action lawsuit and had to pay out a few million dollars to annoyed users. Either way, it's a reminder not to use your ISP's email solution.
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Lawyer Can Sue TV Show for "Libel in Fiction"
By MATTHEW HELLER
Calling it a one-of-a-kind case, a New York judge has stretched "libel-in-fiction" precedent and ruled that an attorney can sue the producers of "Law & Order" for falsely portraying him as a case-rigging crook. more






FTC plans anti-phishing roundtable
Sue Marquette Poremba March 25, 2008
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting a half-day roundtable event to discuss new strategies aimed at increasing awareness of phishing schemes.




Bringing Light to Computers
By Kate GreeneWednesday, March 26, 2008
IBM research could bring the speed of fiber-optic networks to the chips inside personal





Measuring Asia's Pollution Exports
By Brittany SauserWednesday, March 26, 2008
NASA has quantified the amount of pollution that moves from East Asia to North America.





Hackers Exploit Excel HolePC World - 46 minutes ago
Researchers at Symantec identify a Web site with malware that takes advantage of systems lacking a recent Excel patch.




Factory Orders Drop Unexpectedly
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM 30 minutes ago
Manufacturers suffered a sharp pullback in orders in February as a closely watched barometer of business spending slipped for the second consecutive month.




Ford Sells Luxury Brands for $1.7 Billion 9:30 AM ET




Lots of Questions from Auction 73
The Federal Communication Commission's high-stakes spectrum auction is over, but debate continues on what happened with the D-block and other issues certainly will crop up. For instance, how open will the C-block be? More

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