News Story by Jeremy Pelofsky

JUNE 27, 2005 (REUTERS) - The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that cable companies don't have to provide rivals with access to their high-speed Internet lines, a victory for the cable and telephone industries, which are seeking deregulation.

The justices by a 6-3 vote overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that cable high-speed Internet service has a telecommunications component and is subject to traditional telephone network-access requirements.

The Supreme Court backed a 2002 Federal Communications Commission decision that said cable broadband Internet service is an information service -- and is thus free from most telephone rules, including requirements to lease network access to competitors.

FCC officials had argued the move was necessary to spur more investment in high-speed Internet services. But consumer groups and independent Internet service providers such as EarthLink Inc. expressed concern that consumers would have few choices for Web access without some FCC safeguards.

The high court decided that the FCC's decision was reasonable under the Communications Act and that the appeals court didn't extend sufficient deference to the FCC as the expert agency to make its decision. Justices Antonin Scalia, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

The Bush administration has been pushing broadband deployment as an economic booster, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin opened the door to using the court decision broadly. "This decision provides much-needed regulatory clarity and a framework for broadband that can be applied to all providers," Martin said.

The decision could also benefit telephone companies that offer digital subscriber lines (DSL), an analyst said.

"It says some of the uncertainty is lifted about continued investment in broadband services like cable modems and DSL," said Craig Moffett at New York-based Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "In that sense, it's a win for the telcos [telecommunications companies] as well, whose DSL services are still regulated as telecommunications services."

Cable companies such as Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc. are locked in a fierce battle with Internet service providers and telephone companies that offer their own high-speed Internet service and plan to provide with video service. The cable industry has about 21 million high-speed Internet access subscribers. Despite somewhat slower downloading speeds, DSL services have been gaining on cable and now have about 15 million lines.

"It will simply mean that price-gouging cable companies can keep ratcheting up prices and limiting Internet service options for consumers," said Gene Kimmelman, director of Consumers Union of the United States Inc.'s Washington office.

"This lack of choice limits the future deployment of innovative voice, video and data services beyond just those offered by the local cable company," said Dave Baker, vice president of law and public policy at Atlanta-based EarthLink.

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that peer-to-peer companies could be held liable for the widespread copyright infringement of their users. It's bad news for file-swapping services and, maybe, for the broader technology industry. More Details of the case.

Internet file-sharing services will be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, rejecting warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod.

At issue was whether the file-sharing services should be held liable even if they have no direct control over what millions of online users are doing with the software they provide for free. As much as 90 percent of songs and movies copied on the file-sharing networks are downloaded illegally, according to music industry filings.

The entertainment industry said it needed protection against the billions of dollars in revenue they lose to illegal swapping. Consumer groups worried that expanded liability will stifle the technology revolution of the last two decades that brought video cassette recorders, MP3 players and Apple's iPod.

Companies will have to pay music and movie artists for up to billions in losses if they are found to have promoted illegal downloading.

Two lower courts previously sided with Grokster without holding a trial. They each based their decisions on the 1984 Supreme Court ruling that Sony Corp could not be sued over consumers who used its VCRs to make illegal copies of movies.

The lower courts reasoned that, like VCRs, the file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. They also said the file-sharing services were not legally responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.

But in Monday's ruling, lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.

Typically we would not cover anything political in our blog, but please.. Our government now has the right to take your land due to some developers plan for 'economic development'. For some time, it has appeared that Americans were asleep. Now we should question, if they have been drugged. Our supreme court basically has taken this part of 5th amendment and thrown it in the trash. Case Law Rules!!

In the midst of argument in Kelo v. New London—a critically important case about the government's right to condemn private land and give it to private developers—the lawyer for the city of New London, Conn., pulls out an actual prop. In response to a query from Sandra Day O'Connor as to whether there's a concrete development plan for what would replace the handful of homes being condemned, Wesley W. Horton hauls out a big poster board with the whole proposed community laid out. Condos here, marina here, yank out this crappy little Victorian house and the health club will go there, he enthuses.

At the losing end of these forced transactions are homeowners who don't want to sell. Justice Clarence Thomas, another dissenter, said these are disproportionately likely to be African Americans, who are more likely to own properties the government wants cleared away. But their rights to their homes are supposed to be the same as anyone else's.

This sort of "economic development" is generally banned in Washington. Our 1889 constitution says, with a short list of exceptions: "Private property shall not be taken for private use."

Your house cannot be condemned for a Costco, a Nordstrom or a Sheraton Hotel. Under the rules of Connecticut, it could.

The town of New London claimed that its seizure of property was necessary for economic development. The ruling now puts every church, small business, or home at risk of condemnation. This land is your land! Doubt it....

Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) is extended till December:

You need to reinstall the beta and it will appear with the new date and will not go south on you next month.

Beta overview Help protect your PC from spyware and other potentially unwanted software.

The term SATA II has grown in popularity as the moniker for the SATA 3Gb/s data transfer rate, causing great confusion with customers because, quite simply, it’s a misnomer.

The first step toward a better understanding of SATA is to know that SATA II is not the brand name for SATA’s 3Gb/s data transfer rate, but the name of the organization formed to author the SATA specifications. The group has since changed names, to the Serial ATA International Organization, or SATA-IO.

The 3Gb/s capability is just one of many defined by the former SATA II committee, but because it is among the most prominent features, 3Gb/s has become synonymous with SATA II. Hence, the source of the confusion.

In reality, 3Gbps is only one facet of second-generation SATA. While we'll call the standard "SATA-II" for simplicity, bear in mind that the standard includes a few other features:

• External SATA, or eSATA defines a new, more robust connector and cable lengths of up to 2 meters. Note that eSATA devices will typically run at 1.5Gbps.
• Port Multipliers. Port multipliers are chips that allow one physical port to access up to 15 drives. Multipliers would be used in multidrive configurations to simplify cabling. Here's where the 3Gbps speed defined in the second generation standard can really have an impact. Note that generation-one SATA drives can connect to port multipliers.
• 3Gbps. Not all SATA-II devices are required to run at 3Gbps, but the increased speed is there for applications and drives that want to take advantage of it. 3Gbps drives are completely backward compatible—you can plug them into a first-generation SATA system, but they'll just move data at a maximum 1.5Gbps. Cables are compatible, and first-generation SATA drives will work fine in systems that support 3Gbps although the drives themselves will still be 1.5Gbps.
• Native Command Queuing. NCQ can intelligently reorder commands as needed to improve performance.
• A new, more robust cable connector that gives tactile feedback ("clicks") when you snap it in. But it's compatible with old connectors, and old cables can plug into a device with the new device connector.
• Hot plug capability. This is pretty important for users of external drives, but also applies to server systems. The hardware now manages power and data integrity when drives are hot-swapped.

Learn More Here

Consumers are totally confused as to when to take an action against something their anti-spyware has defined as a threat. Even the companies who write the code cannot agree on anything.

It is hard to get all these things to work together and behave. The burden is on the software provider who took on the task to enter this business. What is required here is some agreement on some basic standards for the business which will allow these applications to come up with a relevant guess. They're beset by legal headaches, constantly challenged for what their products define and target as malware.

Many anti-spyware programs scour computer hard drives for those data-tracking files called cookies that we often get from Web visits. Microsoft Corp.'s tool does not. And there are disputes aplenty about whether certain widely used advertising programs circulating on the Internet are clean of spyware.

Surprise! There's little agreement on what should be considered spyware, or even what adware is, exactly. Or on whether adware, which delivers ads, is a form of spyware or a breed apart. Honestly one should question any right they have to collect this demographic information as a matter of law. One would think that the right to privacy should win out. Again this has proven that money wins as a course of law. At least until the consumer numbers force the issue.

Claria Corp., formerly known as Gator Corp., has sued several anti-spyware companies and Web sites for calling its advertising software "spyware." PC Pitstop rewrote some of its materials as part of a settlement.

Joseph Telafici, director of operations for McAfee Inc.'s security research unit, says the company now gets one or two complaints a week, compared with two or three per quarter last year from companies whose programs it has dubbed spyware or adware.

Symantec Corp. sought to pre-empt a lawsuit by filing one itself, asking a federal court to declare that it had the right to call Hotbot.com Inc.'s toolbar adware. Hotbot did not respond to requests for comment.

Symantec still faces a lawsuit by Trekeight LLC, whose product Symantec brands adware.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that many legitimate programs — including Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Web browser — send out data without making the user fully aware, one of the common attributes of spyware.

And many programs that spy, do have legitimate functions — people may run a keystroke recorder to monitor spouses whom they suspect of cheating. Or they may willingly accept adware in exchange for a free game or screensaver.

Anti-spyware software companies say they leave removal decisions to customers, though many users simply follow their recommendations, failing to distinguish the mild from the malicious.

Anti-spyware companies have an incentive to overlist programs.

The fact that getting this issue resolved by some ruling, law, or guideline will only push the adware and spyware companies to refine what they do by some new term. Then they will stand up in court and dare you to call them a spyware company; then claiming they are "reportware"; "searchware" or "sponsorware."

Anti-virus vendor Symantec is ending its relationship with online market research company ComScore, which makes the "Marketscore" spyware program.

Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, Calif., is in the process of severing its e-mail scanning services from ComScore Networks Inc.'s online behavior-tracking programs, according to Genevieve Haldeman, a Symantec spokesperson.

The relationship had raised the eyebrows of anti-spyware activists critical of ComScore's programs, which capture and store information from online sessions, including encrypted traffic from sensitive online transactions.

Marketscore, also known as OpinionSquare, NetSetter and JDCouncil, is a Web proxy agent that directs all Web traffic from computers it is installed on through servers operated by ComScore, before forwarding the traffic along to its final destination.

ComScore collects data from insecure browsing sessions and encrypted sessions, possibly including online shopping baskets, banking sessions or interactions containing health information, according to disclosures in the Marketscore privacy statement.

Full Article

Yahoo has closed all of its user-created Internet chat rooms amid fears that adults are using the sites to lure minors into sexual acts.

"We began implementing the changes to Yahoo Chat user rooms in the past week," spokeswoman Mary Osako, said. "We are working on improvements to enhance the user experience in compliance with our terms of service."

She said Yahoo planned to resume the service some time in the future.

The user-created chat rooms were shut down not long after a series of reports last month by a Houston television station revealed that adults were using the sites to lure young children for sex.

Yahoo requires users to agree not to "harm minors in any way" or make available any content that is "unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous or otherwise objectionable, " according to its Web site.

However, chat rooms set up and maintained by Yahoo remain open, Osako said.

Osako refused to say whether the report led to the Sunnyvale company's decision, but several big named advertisers did pull the plug on their ads that appeared in the chat rooms.

According to the Houston television station, KPRC, those chat rooms were named with blatant sexual overtones, including "Girls 13 and under for older guys" and "Girls 13 and up for much older men" and were all listed under "education chat rooms."

When blue-chip advertisers PepsiCo, Georgia-Pacific and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance discovered their ads were running on some of the same sites featured on the television news report, they yanked the spots.

"We were completely unaware that our ads were associated with these chat rooms in any way," Dave DeCecco, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said in a statement. "As soon as we were aware we worked with Yahoo to immediately remove them."

The telecom giant formed from the merger of Sprint (Quote, Chart) and Nextel (Quote, Chart) will be known as Sprint, but the Nextel name won't disappear altogether.

"The companies are in the enviable position of possessing two incredibly valuable brands with overwhelming positive and powerful equity in the marketplace," Mark Schweitzer, designated chief marketing officer for the new company, said in a statement.

The Nextel name will be affixed to a line of business-oriented products and services, including the instant, nationwide, digital walkie-talkie service.

Services sold under the Nextel brand will be aimed at selected businesses and government among others.

Sprint and Nextel announced their intention to merge in December. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year pending approval from shareholders and regulators.

Executives expect $12 billion in synergies from the combined company, mainly from their wireless networks and operations. The company will maintain executive headquarters in Nextel's Reston, Va., building, and operational headquarters in Sprint's Overland Park, Kan., facility.

REDMOND, Wash.--The random chatter of several hundred Microsoft engineers filled the cavernous executive briefing center recently at the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle.

Within minutes after their meeting was convened, however, the hall became hushed. Hackers had successfully lured a Windows laptop onto a malicious wireless network.

"It was just silent," said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit. "You couldn't hear anybody breathe."

Matt Thomlinson, whose job it is to help make Microsoft engineers create more secure code, noticed that some of the engineers were turning red, becoming obviously angry at the demo hacking incident. Yet as painful as the lesson was, he was glad to see the crowd of engineers taking things personally.

Thomlinson frequently makes similar entreaties to the engineers on the need for secure code, but he said his own lectures don't have the same effect. "It kind of hits people up here," Thomlinson said, pointing to his head. "Things are different when a group of programmers watches their actual code exploited. It kind of hits people in the gut."

Full Article

Shopping bags have always been one of my favorites - I have implemented quite a lot flavors of these, with the last one being an XML implementation in ASP (presented in my latest book "Teach Yourself ASP 2.0 in 24 Hours"). This one was fairly neat in that you were storing XML as a string Session variable, however, the code didn't look too good and you had to be knowledgeable about XML.

The two outstanding features of XSB are: extensibility via custom properties, and scalability because you don't need to store an object in a Session variable - the XML data is sufficient, which is very small. See the sample shopping solution on how to implement it!

• Installation and Download
• Object model, methods and properties
• Samples

Component and Samples only (size is approx. 20KB)
The most current version number of the component is 1.0. It is compiled with Visual Basic 6.0 SP3.

Installation Version of XSB (NO samples) (size is approx. 1.35MB)
Download this file if you don't have the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime on your server. The setup program will install the component and the necessary files. To get the ASP samples, you also need the Component and Samples download.

June 17, 2005
Simple FTP Methods from Microsoft Access
By Danny Lesandrini

Every once in a while, I have been asked to provide FTP services in my Access applications. Years ago, I found some really complex code in a VB Tutorial book that used the Inet Control for managing FTP commands. It was finicky at best and required thousands of lines to accomplish the simplest tasks.

I read this article today and there are clearly a number of developers who would find this a most interesting approach. Certainly beats the hoops one had to jump through in the past to do something that should have been alot simplier.

Full article here

LONDON-- A new browser flaw could allow attackers to trick users into relinquishing sensitive information such as passwords. The flaw is unusual in that it affects every mainstream browser and can be exploited on the Mac OS X operating system as easily as on Windows, according to security company Secunia.

Because of the way most browsers handle JavaScript dialog boxes, it's unclear which site a dialog box originates from, Secunia reported. An untrusted site could direct a user to a secure site such as a bank, and then cause a dialog box to pop up in front of the bank site's window.

When the user entered password information, that data would be sent to the attacker, Secunia stated. "Successful exploitation normally requires that a user is tricked into opening a link from a malicious Web site to a trusted Web site," the company observed in its advisory.

Opera Patched

The flaw has been confirmed in Opera, Safari, Mozilla-based browsers, iCab, and Mac and Windows versions of Internet Explorer. As of Wednesday, only Opera had issued a patch, in version 8.01. The bug has been fixed in the beta of iCab version 3.0.

The Redmond software vendor also has pushed out its beta-expiration date for its pending product from July to December. What's going on?

Microsoft is slated to release to the Web in the next day or two a beta refresh of its Microsoft AntiSpyware product. Some testers reported on Wednesday that they had downloaded a new beta version of Microsoft AntiSpyware (version number 1.0.613). They also reported that Microsoft had extended the beta-expiration date for the product from July 31, 2005, to December 31, 2005.

Microsoft officials confirmed that Microsoft had extended the beta period until the end of the year. Officials also acknowledged that the company has been testing on a selective basis the beta refresh number 1.0.613. (The current beta version number is 1.0.509.)

The pending refresh is not Beta 2, however, Microsoft executives said. Beta 2 will be released "some time later this year," they said.

"We are going through with a refresh of the (Microsoft AntiSpyware) beta," said Paul Bryan, director of product management with Microsoft's security technology and business unit. "We are testing this right now a bit, making sure that things are OK" before releasing to all testers.

Microsoft officially announced its plans to field a Microsoft-branded anti-spyware product (code-named "Atlanta") in January, following its purchase of Giant Software in December, 2004. The beta supports Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft released a publicly available Beta 1, that was not much more than a repackaging of Giant's technology, on January 6. On February 16, Microsoft issued a beta refresh. Since then, the company has made available weekly "signature updates" of the product to interested testers.

This week's Microsoft AntiSpyware beta refresh will include a couple of new features, Bryan said.

The refresh is designed to alleviate "some issues" with Winsock/ISP removal. While Bryan said these were relatively low in number in the current beta, he admitted that they've played havoc with some testers' network connectivity when certain traffic-intercepting software is part of a network stack

An ominous increase in sniffing activity on TCP Port 445 could signal an impending mass malicious code attack targeting a recently patched Microsoft vulnerability, according to a warning from security researchers.

Researchers at Symantec Corp.'s DeepSight Network have detected a surge in scans on Port 445, an indication that malicious hackers may have already created exploits for a flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol.

In Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft uses TCP Port 445 to run SMB directly over TCP/IP to handle the sharing of files, printers, serial ports, and also to communicate between computers.

The vulnerability, which was rated "critical," was patched one week ago in Microsoft's MS05-027 bulletin, and the increased noise on that port could be the first sign that a password brute force attack is imminent, Symantec DeepSight warned.

A spokesperson for Microsoft's Security Response Center said the company was not aware of any active attempts to exploit the vulnerability.

"Port scanning is an activity that may be indicative of an attempt to discover attack vectors against any vendor product and is not an activity unique to Microsoft products," she added.

She said software engineers at Redmond would continue to analyze and monitor for any malicious activity but stressed that she was not aware of any customers being attacked via sniffing against TCP Port 445 and have not received any indication of malicious activity associated with MS05-027.

SPANISH police have arrested 'P. Power', one of the most renowned code-crackers on the internet, following a nine-month inquiry.

Armed with a simple modem connection, a decrepit computer and standard software P. Power had broken security codes and hacked his way into costly professional computer programs, the interior ministry said.

Spanish authorities have not released the identity of P. Power, known only by his Internet pseudonym, but they did say he was a 26-year-old engineer.

After meticulously unassembling programs, analysing their weak points and then stripping them of their protection, the hacker broadcast messages to the internet saying he was the unique code-cracker and was sending out the codes for free, according to the interior ministry.

The ministry added it was impossible to put a price on the damage caused to firms using the programs pirated, or to say how many internet users had downloaded the codes for free.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A security hole that allowed easy access to the purchase information of millions of CVS Corp.'s loyalty card customers prompted the company to pull Internet access to the data on Tuesday.

The Woonsocket-based drugstore chain, which has issued 50 million of the cards, said it would restore Web-based access to the information after it creates additional security hurdles.

The data security flaw in the ExtraCare card service was exposed Monday by the grassroots group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN.

It said anyone could learn what a customer had purchased with an ExtraCare card by logging on to a company Web site with the card number, the customer's zip code and first three letters of the customer's last name.

Full Article

Google's top executive confirmed on Tuesday that the company is planning to expand into broader online payment services but said it will not compete with a PayPal-like service.

In a company-issued statement, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company does not plan to offer what he called a "person-to-person stored-value payments system."

One of the main features of PayPal, a division of eBay Inc., is the ability for consumers to store balances in order to make e-commerce payments.

Following a story by the Wall Street Journal published on Friday, speculation ran rampant about Google offering a PayPal competitor.

Instead, Schmidt said that Google is looking to expand its current online payment services, which is largely used to handle payments from advertisers and to Web publishers in Google's popular online advertising programs.

Schmidt stopped short of offering details about Google's next online payment plans or when the Mountain View, Calif., company will introduce a broader service.

"The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs, which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers," Schmidt said in the statement. "We are building products in the area to solve new problems in e-commerce."

I was reading an article this morning and though on face value I pretty much agree with the article.  Click Here 

I must say I personally have some serious questions about trusting your business to this type of development, or for that matter even a call center.

On the the projects you want developed off shore. I have but a couple of questions here. A small company in Phoenix AZ SmarterTools has developed a three outstanding apps SmarterMail, SmarterStats, and Smarter Tickets.  Now the point here is if someone is a good code writer. We all know the need for good applications are really high. Why then are none of these applications coming out of India, and Eastern Block countries?

For them, a software company in any third world country. It makes more sense to simple write a few good apps than to do web development for small, medium and large companies? After all everyone within their organization is familar with the code and can do some level of support for it. My guess is that likely their software would prove their capabilities and likely most would not fair well.

I honestly start to wonder if by working beneath the wire so to speak. They can easily leave any back door or questionable security problem exposed. I am not saying that this might be the intent. However, working with people you know would never know where to look kind of opens the ignorant hiring people only based on the dollar bid. This is  simply not the right approach.

I have to say this if India or any third world country is good they will create the applications themself and sell them. A great place to start would be in my opinion a Low cost CMS system. Just a few searches on the web will show you how expensive something like this is if done properly. Look how long and how many companies have been created simply for a shopping cart application. There are so many to chose from today it is almost confusing. Seems logical to me that this level of competition can be focused on more than just a shopping cart.

Seagate Targeting Perpendicular Recording Hard Drive
Both Toshiba and Hitachi have made their plans clear of launching drives running on the latest perpendicular recording technology. The products from these companies should start appearing in the market by the end of current year with 2007 being the year where it should start replacing the traditional storage media. The latest news in is that the market leader and the giant in the storage industry Seagate also has made clear their plans in this segment.
Even though perpendicular recording will take magnetic recording technology much further than the current longitudinal methods, superparamagnetic effects still exist at some point, though it is difficult to predict exactly when this will occur. "At this time, we estimate that perpendicular recording methods may take us all the way to one terabit per square inch," Dr. Kryder continued. "When that level is reached, a single 3.5 inch disc will store over one terabyte of information."
While that amount of storage is a significant advance beyond that of storage capacity available in a single drive today, when put into perspective with the best estimates and forecasts of our current and future storage requirements, the need for technologists to continue to forge ahead beyond that figure is clear. The UC Berkeley study reported that the world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes (one exabyte is the equivalent of one billion gigabytes) of information each year in total, comprising all magnetic, paper, film, and optical data. In addition to that sum, it is conceivable that eventually much of the older media such as those produced on film and paper may also make its way to magnetic data translation, increasing the overall total figure further.

 

avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users, non-commercial users. Both conditions should be met! Our company offers Home Edition free of charge, since in our opinion, it is possible to avoid global virus spreading by efficient prevention; however, many user are not able or do not want to pay for antivirus software. This page will show you the most important features of this program.

Institutions (even non-commercial ones) are not allowed to use avast! Home Edition. However, ALWIL Software provides the full line of avast! antivirus products at special discount prices for non-profit, charity, educational and government institutions. Please see our price lists for details.

The latest version of this program is 4.6. To find out what's new, please refer to this page.

My personal review is that this Free software like the server version I have used is outstanding. The first and best feature is that after reboot the software can and will by default do a low level complete drive scan. Of course if you do not want to wait, a simple hit of the Esc will let you move on.

Free web editor especially for beginners and non-web-technical people. It uses "content + template = a web site". No need to code HTML. What You See Is What You Get. No need to design. Get a nice looking by a ready-made or custom-made web template. No need to learn. It allows anyone to update, create and publish web content easily. No need to wait. Start to use Ewisoft Web Builder to control your web site and your budget now!

Site 1: Download Now

Size: 5.69MB

Publisher: Visit Website

Release Date: 04-02-04

Submit Date: 04-05-04

OS: Win 98/ME/2K/XP

Downloads: 3750

HighTech Talks » CSS Tab Designer (Freeware)

CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required!


With our CSS Tab Designer, you can :

• Quickly design your list visually
• Choose from a variety of styles/colors (currently 45 different designs/colors supported)
• Generate strict xhtml compliant code

Police in London arrested an unemployed computer systems administrator last week, more than two and a half years after U.S. authorities said they would request his extradition to answer charges of hacking U.S. federal computer systems.

Gary McKinnon, 39, was arrested at his home in northeast London, according to a spokeswoman for the city's Metropolitan Police Service. He was released on bail last Wednesday after a court hearing on extradition.

Although McKinnon was indicted in a U.S. District Court in Virginia in November 2002, London police received the extradition warrant only recently, the spokeswoman said. The warrant alleges that McKinnon gained illegal access and made unauthorized modifications to dozens of computers belonging to NASA and the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense between Feb. 1, 2001, and March 19, 2002, she said.

McKinnon allegedly obtained administrator privileges on a number of government computers and then used that access to delete user accounts and install software enabling him to remotely control the systems, according to his indictment.

Many times people have asked me. How can I have shared calendar and features of Exchange without having to run our mail on a Exchange server?  The answer is that honestly Exchange has done a fine job of making a rich interface mail server. This is a nice bit of software which seems to do this pretty well.

WorkgroupShare lets the people in your organization share their Outlook data, such as calendars, contacts, email, tasks and notes, without the expense or expertise required by Microsoft Exchange Server.

Share Outlook folders

Share calendars, contacts, tasks, email and notes amongst selected members of staff, without Exchange.

Organize meetings

Find free/busy times for all users and organize meetings using Outlook in conjunction with WorkgroupShare but without Exchange.

Easy deployment

Effortlessly roll out to the entire organization with the remote client deployment feature.

The FDIC has notified former and current employees of the agency that personal data including name, date of birth, salary, Social Security number and other information had been stolen several months ago.

Although the data theft was discovered in March and letters were sent to affected employees at that time, the FBI subsequently found that data of all former and current Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. employees—not only those notified by the FDIC in March—had been compromised.

Not only is the security breach embarrassing for the FDIC, it's also ironic, because the FDIC's job is to issue alerts to financial institutions about how to handle sensitive information, said Gerry Gebel, senior analyst at Burton Group, a Midvale, Utah, research and advisory firm.

The security breach at the FDIC is just the latest in a series of high-profile cases of identity thefts.

In March, for example, Bank of America Corp. lost several data tapes containing personal information on more than 1 million federal employees.

Also in March, BJ's Wholesale Club Inc. disclosed that customer information was compromised—something the Federal Trade Commission attributes to the wholesale club failing to encrypt data.

To help stem the rising tide of identity theft, Congress is currently mulling over several potential laws that, similar to California SB 1386 and those in process in several other states, would require organizations disclose any unauthorized acquisition of information.

In the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced such a bill, dubbed the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Melissa L. Bean, D-Ill., has introduced a companion bill that would require the government or any business that owns or licenses electronic data containing personal information to notify anybody whose personal information has been compromised. The bills also would create a clearinghouse to collect, track and report data breaches.

Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., also introduced an identity theft bill that would give broader authority to the Federal Trade Commission and require more disclosure.

The Schumer-Nelson ID Theft Prevention Bill will create an FTC Office of Identity Theft to help victims of ID theft reclaim their identities more easily, regulate data merchants, and force companies to inform consumers in plain English that their information may be sold or given to an unaffiliated third party without their consent unless a box is checked.

A report on Trojan e-mail attacks against critical-infrastructure systems in the U.K. highlights an emerging trend away from mass-mailing worms and viruses to far more targeted ones, analysts said.

The U.K.'s National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Center yesterday released a report (PDF format) disclosing that more than 300 government departments and businesses were targeted by a continuing series of e-mail attacks designed to covertly gather sensitive and economically valuable information (see story).

Unlike with phishing and mass-mailing worms, the attackers appear to be going after specific individuals who have access to commercially or economically privileged information, the report said.

The attacks involved the use of e-mails containing so-called Trojan programs or links to Web sites containing Trojan files. Once installed on a user's system, Trojans covertly run in the background and perform a variety of functions, including collecting usernames, passwords and system information; scanning of drives; and uploading of documents and data to remote computers.

"The e-mails use social engineering to appear credible, with subject lines often referring to news articles that would be of interest to the recipient," the report said. "In fact, they are 'spoofed,' making them appear to originate from trusted contacts, news agencies or government departments."

The report highlights how hackers are starting to tailor their attacks and go after specific high-value targets instead of simply launching mass-mailing worms and viruses, said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at MessageLabs Ltd., a New York-based provider of e-mail security services.

BitTorrent, the beloved file-sharing client and protocol that provides a way around bandwidth bottlenecks, has become the newest distribution vehicle for adware/spyware bundles.

Public peer-to-peer networks have always been associated with adware program distributions, but BitTorrent, the program created by Bram Cohen to offer a new approach to sharing digital files, has managed to avoid the stigma.

According to Chris Boyd, a renowned security researcher who runs the VitalSecurity.org nonprofit resource center, the warm and fuzzy world of BitTorrent has been invaded by a massive software distribution campaign linked to New York-based adware purveyor Direct Revenue LLC.

"This is the marketing campaign to end all marketing campaigns," said Boyd, the Microsoft Security MVP (most valuable professional) known throughout the security industry by the "Paperghost" moniker.

Boyd, widely known for chronicling spyware, hacking and malware exploits, has published details of the BitTorrent distributions and identified Direct Revenue and Marketing Metrix Group as the companies responsible for the rigged files.

Boyd said he got the first inkling that BitTorrent was a major adware distribution vehicle while searching for the source of Direct Revenue's Aurora, an adware program that includes the prevalent "nail.exe" component. Sifting through mountains of HijackThis logs posted on security forums, Boyd said the answer was staring him in the face. (HijackThis is a popular freeware spyware removal tool that keeps detailed logs of Windows PC scans).

A BitTorrent user downloading a movie clip only becomes aware of the associated adware after the files are reassembled. At that stage, when the user attempts to load the reassembled file, he or she is greeted by an installation notice for an adware bundle distributed by MMG (Marketing Metrix Group), a Canadian company that specializes in P2P network marketing.

Officials from MMG did not respond to queries for comment. On its Web site, the company lists BitTorrent as a lucrative adware distribution vehicle. "Although Bit Torrent is a file format and not a P2P Network … [it] is the fastest growing protocol for file sharing online. Many top Bit Torrent sites such as SuprNova, Lokitorren and Bit Tower support millions of downloads daily," said MMG, which lists PartyPoker.com and Hotbar.com among other clients on its roster.

MasterCard International on Friday said a security breach of credit card payment data had exposed about 40 million cards of all brands to potential fraud in what one analyst said was the biggest privacy breach ever.

About 13.9 million of those credit cards at risk are MasterCard-branded cards, the company said. An unauthorized person infiltrated cardholder data at a company which processes transactions.

There have been a string of episodes this year in which companies have reported stolen or misappropriated customer data. Bank of America Corp., ChoicePoint Inc. and Reed Elsevier's are some of the companies that have reported breaches.

MasterCard International said its security staff identified the breach at Tucson-based CardSystems Solutions Inc., a third-party processor of payment card data. Third party processors process transactions on behalf of financial institutions and merchants.

MasterCard said security vulnerabilities in CardSystems processor's systems allowed an unauthorized individual to infiltrate CardSystems' network and access cardholder data.

CardSystems has already taken steps to improve the security of its system, MasterCard said it was giving the company "a limited amount of time" to demonstrate compliance with MasterCard security requirements.

MasterCard said it immediately notified its customer banks of specific card accounts that may have been subject to compromise so they can take the measures to protect their cardholders.

On Tuesday, May 17th 2005, the federal government revised the 2257 laws. The new regulations not only extend the amount and type of documentation required for producers of adult content, but they also extend the very definition of “producers of adult content.”

2257 originally required that primary producers of adult content maintain records of a given model’s legal documentation (a passport or drivers’ license, for instance). With the new regulations, producers of adult content are required to have several copies of this documentation. Furthermore, they must have copies of all of this documentation available and subject to investigation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The government is not required to give any timely forewarning of any investigation.

In addition, the original 2257 regulations essentially affected ONLY primary producers of adult content—that is, photographers and/or videographers of adult entertainment. With the new regulations, secondary and tertiary “producers” of adult content are subject to the same regulations. In other words, even if a website or video company wasn’t the company that produced the pictures or video, they are still held to the extended laws that regulate primary producers. And, according to the latest legal interpretations, even resellers of adult content—those people who simply make money off of other people’s websites or videos—are required to have access to 2257-compliant documentation.

The new laws will basically shut down free porn on the web for everyone. In a nut shell every site that has nudity will have to keep records and signed statements from each nude person shown on the site. Even if its just a banner!

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