Monday 01/05/09

Microsoft Tells How It Missed Critical IE Bug Microsoft developers missed a critical bug in Internet Explorer because they weren't properly trained and didn't have the right testing tools, the company's secure code expert acknowledged. Read more...





Expert: Microsoft made $1.5B on 'Vista Capable' campaign
The lawsuit, which began in April 2007, claims that marking hardware as Vista Capable inflated the prices of PCs that were able to run only Vista Home Basic, the lowest-priced edition of the operating system that lacks such features as the Aero user interface. Microsoft has denied that it duped consumers and has countered that Home Basic is a legitimate version of Vista.






Regulator Fines E-Trade Units $1 Million
The online brokerage E-Trade has been fined $1 million for having inadequate policies to prevent money laundering.







The State of Spam: What to Expect in 2009
A look at the scourge of spam in 2008 and some predictions for spam in 2009.






Computer Security's Six Most Important Words Of 2008
For good or ill, these six words were top of mind for security pros -- and hackers -- in the past year






Blocking access to MD5 signed certs
A few people have written in regarding the Firefox plugin SSL Blacklist.

The tool has been around for a while, but they have added the ability to detect MD5 signed certificates and block access. It might be a nice addition to the arsenal. Whilst the address bars in FF and IE do seem to turn green when the site has a SHA signed cert (at least it did for the sites I tested), this might be a bit more obvious. You only get the padlock when the site is MD5 signed.






Trends in Counterfeit Currency
It's getting worse:
More counterfeiters are using today's ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that's just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.

In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.
...
Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police officers don't know what they're supposed to look like.

Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.

The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent.






Just prior to its premiere at MacWorld later this week, CNet has a review of MacHeads, the new documentary film covering the obsessive world of Apple fanboyism. MacHeads features commentary from original Apple employees, the self-confessed Apple-obsessed and girls who claim they'll never sleep with Windows users. Summed up by CNet: 'MacHeads is a superb film that will give Apple haters a few cheap laughs, and Apple fans a few cheap thrills. But it'll entertain both equally, while educating everybody else.'






"The Zune 30 failure became national news when it happened just three days ago. The source code for the bad driver leaked soon after, and now, someone has come up with a very detailed explanation for where the code was bad as well as a number of solutions to deal with it. From a coding/QA standpoint, one has to wonder how this bug was missed if the quality assurance team wasn't slacking off. Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver."






WSJ Confirms RIAA Fired MediaSentry on Sunday January 04, @10:23PM






Photographer Duane Kerzic was standing on the public platform in New York's Penn Station, taking pictures of trains in hopes of winning the annual photo contest that Amtrak had been running since 2003. Amtrak police arrested him for refusing to delete the photos when asked, though they later charged him with trespassing.

"Obviously, there is a lack of communication between Amtrak's marketing department, which promotes the annual contest, called Picture Our Trains, and its police department, which has a history of harassing photographers for photographing these same trains. Not much different than the JetBlue incident from earlier this year where JetBlue flight attendants had a woman arrested for refusing to delete a video she filmed in flight while the JetBlue marketing department hosted a contest encouraging passengers to take photos in flight."

Kerzic's blog has an account of the arrest on Dec. 21 and the aftermath.







Long-term personal data storage
Robin Harris: With so much of the world's data - and yours - in digital form, more people wonder: How do I keep my pictures, music, videos, documents and more around for decades? Here's how.








Is $230K Deal to Cover up Sex Assault Legal?
By MATTHEW HELLER
The enforceability of a "hush money" contract is at issue in the case of a casino host who alleges a Virginia businessman has reneged on an agreement to pay her $230,000 for not telling police that he sexually assaulted her. more






MD5 insecurity affects all internet users
Angela Moscaritolo December 31, 2008
Certification Authorities that have not moved to a more secure cryptographic hash function than MD5 have come under fire in the security world.





The current state of wireless carriers:
According to Verizon filings with the SEC, their acquisition of Alltel will close on January 9. Verizon will pay $5.9 billion and acquire $22.2 billion in Alltel debt, but will be acquiring about 13 million customers -- creating the largest wireless phone company in the country, with 83 million customers (AT&T has 74.9 million, Sprint has 50.5 million, and T-Mobile has 32.1 million).






Long-term personal data storage







U.S. officials crack down on Chinese ‘honey laundering.’ So-called "honey laundering" involves elaborate schemes in which cheap, diluted or contaminated honey from China is brought in after being "laundered" in another country to disguise its origin and evade tariffs and health inspections.
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The concern about Chinese honey stems from the use of a toxic antibiotic to fight a contagious bacterial epidemic that raged through hives across China in 1997. The drug, chloramphenicol, has been banned from all food products by the FDA. The administration says tainted honey from China is at the top of its watch list and has issued three "import alerts" to port and border inspectors about tainted Chinese honey.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/4043733/US-officials-crack-down-on-Chinese-honey-laundering.html