Monday, December 21, 2009

Monday 12/21/09

Deconstructing Facebook's New Privacy Settings
Forrester Research analyst Chenxi Wang picks apart Facebook's new privacy settings so the rest of us can figure out how to navigate and even benefit from them.

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Check Your Friends! Facebook IMs May Lead To Trouble
Monday December 21, 2009 at 7:27 am CST
I ran into a few strange IMs over the weekend. When I was not shoveling out my driveway from the 15 inches of snow that covered it I was logged into Facebook telling people about it…. It was then that I started receiving some VERY interesting IMs from a friend extolling the virtues of a clean colon (yep – you read that right)...

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Cisco Regains Top Spot in IPS Market by Jamey Heary
Cisco Snatches Q3 Security Market Share from its Competitors

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Federal Government to streamline online authentication
The Federal Government has moved to streamline the use of authentication tools among departments...

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Ford Pushes For Wi-Fi Enabled Vehicles
New SYNC vehicles will take USB 3G modems

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Are you ready for 4k sector drives?
Robin Harris: Western Digital has started shipping drives that drop the ancient 512 byte disk sector for a 4096 byte - 4k - sector. What's in it for you? And what will it do to you?

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Gotchas?
If you are in either of these 2 groups:
  • Windows XP users
  • Windows users who clone disks with software like Norton Ghost
there are a couple of gotchas if you want to use a 4k drive. Since most drives aren’t 4k and won’t be for another year or more, this may not affect you either. Vista and W7 users are cool except for cloning.

1) Windows XP does not automatically align writes on 4k boundaries, which hurts performance. WD has software - the Advanced Format Align Utility for their drives. I assume other vendors will too when they start shipping.
XP users need to run this utility once to use a 4k drive with a clean install, cloning software or a do-it-yourself USB drive. WD-branded 4k USB drives are already aligned so it isn’t needed for those drives.

2) Windows clone software vendors have yet to implement 4k support. If you clone an XP, Vista or W7 drive you should run the align utility. The cloning vendors need to get on board Real Soon Now. Vendors are welcome to comment on their plans.

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David Pogue Weighs In On Ebook DRM: Non-DRM'd Ebook Increased His Sales
Pogue relates his own experience in running a test with his publisher (which is O'Reilly) in putting out a non-DRM'd ebook, and he found that sales increased...

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Heartland settles with American Express over breach
Dan Kaplan December 18, 2009
Heartland Payment Systems has settled its first lawsuit with a card brand over the 2008 data breach.

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Thief steals U.S. Army laptop from employee's home
Angela Moscaritolo December 17, 2009
A laptop containing the personal information of tens of thousands of U.S. Army soldiers, family members and U.S. Department of Defense employees was recently stolen.

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Judge grants TJX hacker sentencing delay over health
Angela Moscaritolo December 17, 2009
A psychiatric evaluation has determined that Albert Gonzalez's actions were consistent with the behaviors of someone who suffers from Asperger's syndrome, and his sentencing has been delayed until March.

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Facebook sues three over alleged spam, phishing
Dan Kaplan December 17, 2009
Fresh off a $711 million spam judgment in its favor, Facebook this week sued three more individuals that it contends assaulted its members with spam.

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Cisco WebEx WRF Player Vulnerabilities
Cisco today released details of a set of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and fixes for their WebEx WRF player. The exploits describe multiple buffer overflows caused by a maliciously crafted WRF file (generally posted on a website), or by attending a WebEx meeting with an attacker attending. The results of the exploit can result in execution of arbitrary code on the target system.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20091216-webex.shtml

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Is Netflix "borking" lesbians with subscriber data releases?

2 days ago - by Nate Anderson Posted in: Law & Disorder
An Ohio lesbian doesn't want to be outed by her Netflix recommendations, and she is part of a new class-action lawsuit against the movie rental company.

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Suspected NKoreans hack war plan for SKorea AFP – Thu Dec 17, 11:27 pm ET
AFP/File
SEOUL (AFP) - Computer hackers who may be from North Korea have gained access to a secret US-South Korean plan to defend the peninsula in case of war, the defence ministry said Friday.

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Cybercrooks Target File-Sharing Networks
Security experts at Kaspersky Labs warn that cybercriminals are shifting their focus from worms and spams to file-sharing services.

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Twitter's DNS Provider Denies Hack
Rerouting was managed from within Twitter's own account, says the microblogging site's domain manager.

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Italian Police Arrest Hacker Sought for Fraud
Italian police have arrested an alleged hacker who is accused of defrauding banks and mobile phone operators out of several million dollars.

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Adobe explains PDF patch delay
Unless users apply one of the workarounds that Adobe's suggested, the decision will leave systems open to attack until Jan. 12, when the patch is released. According to several security firms, the flaw has been in use by criminals since at least Nov. 20. Adobe only found out Monday that the vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications was being actively exploited.

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Drone incident serves up data encryption lesson

In a story that's receiving widespread attention, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Afghanistan were tapping into live feeds from Predator drones using a $26 software tool called SkyGrabber from Russian company SkySoftware.

The hitherto largely unknown software product doesn't require Internet connectivity and is designed to intercept music, photos, video and TV satellite programming for free. Insurgents in Iraq, however, were able to use SkyGrabber to grab live video feeds from unmanned Predator drones because the transmissions were being sent unencrypted to ground control stations.

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