It seems that some companies are fortunate enough to be able to make money even from their faults. The Monterey Herald details an account of a woman who was informed by Choicepoint that crooks had accessed some of her personal information. This was apparently due to a lapse in security at Choicepoint. They then offered to sell her access to her own information to see what might have been compromised.
Author: Avery
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Zotob may affect XP Service pack 1 systems
There’s an eweek article indicating the zotob family of worms could affect Windows XP SP1 systems as well as the Windows 2000 systems that are currently affected. Since the original outbreak it’s been reported that there were certain circumstances that an XP system could be compromised, this seems to back that up.
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Virtual Server 2005 R2 to support Linux
Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 will be supporting both Linux and Solaris as guest operating systems in the coming release. The coming release of Virtual Server 2005 R2 will also include 64-bit support.
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Titan Rain – China attempting to crack US computers?
According to an article at the Washington Post, it appears that there are a large number of attacks against Defense related non-classified computers coming from (at least in the last hop) computers residing in China. It’s unclear whether these attacks are REALLY originating from China or if crackers are using Chinese machines as a convenient haven before making the attack on Defense related US machines.
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Developergo linux Livecd review
The thing I love about linux livecd’s is the ability to try before you make much of a commitment. You can boot, test, evaluate, and then reboot and be back at your usual desktop as if nothing has happened. (With emulators like QEMU and VMWare you don’t even have to reboot the PC.) There are a lot of Developer tools under linux, but until now I haven’t been aware of a distribution (livecd or otherwise) that is emphasizing those.
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Mandrive Linux 2006 Beta 3
Looks like Mandriva has released beta 3 in the release cycle for their 2006 release. There is a full review of the beta with plenty of screenshots and the changelog detailed at distroreviews.com. The news is just being posted on the main mandrivalinux site.
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W3C registers comment with Copyright office
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, the US Copyright office had a notice that the new pre-registration system MAY not support browsers other than Internet Explorer. (This news update at the Register claims Netscape as well. The W3C has registered a comment with the US Copyright Office and that is reported in the link above.
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New protocol to identify location of access point users?
Intel has developed a new technology that will more precisely identify where a wireless user is. The previous approach has used signal strength to more than one access point as a guage. This new approach uses a time-stamped packet from two access points. The difference between the packet stamp and the arrival time will give a more precise measure of where the mobile user is.
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Power breakthrough for mobile devices?
I’ve seen a reference to UltraCell which has announced a new product which is essentially a small portable fuel cell capable of providing 25 Watts of power using hot-swappable methanol canisters. It looks as though they’ve got a military joint project for the development of portable power systems. From reading the product brochures for the ultracell25 and ultracellxx90 (which provides 45 watts of output) it looks fairly promising.
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Google Mail now open for signups
Google Mail (GMail) has up until now been open to signups by invitation only. It seems they’ve opened up their process a bit and if you have a mobile phone, you can signup using that. It’s interesting I was reading last night how the invitation process was perhaps a clever way to keep the spammers out.