Shouldn’tthis and this get more news coverage? US Commerce Department computers (specifically a bureau responsible for export licenses) is under cyber attack from hackers based in China. The Bureau in question is the Bureau of Industry and Security…. which handles “U.S. exports which have both commercial and military applications”…. They’ve been targetted by various rootkits among other malwares and in early September were forced to cut off internet access (yes that’s around a MONTH ago).
Category: General Web/Tech
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Beware visiting Samsung’s site
Betanews is reporting that Samsung’s site has been hacked and is currently serving up malware in some areas. user intervention is required for it to run on the users pc, but be cautious. Samsung has been notified, but as of Friday morning (according to the report) the trojan horse is still there. I really wonder if it hasn’t occured to them to pull the whole thing offline to clean things up?
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Another Debian server security breach
According to this story, there has been another compromise of a debian project server. (Is this the third in the last year?)… the Alioth webserver was offline most of the 5th of September…
It was simply stopped because we discovered that some script kiddies were running an IRC proxy. After thorough investigation, we discovered that they exploited a pmwiki security hole[1] to deface some web pages, to install some malicious php pages which in turn were used to setup the IRC proxy.
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Project Gutenberg July 2006 DVD
I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through a web interface. Given all the hoopla over Google releasing free book downloads, I would have thought that there would be more people reminding us of Project Gutenberg which boasts 19,000 FREE downloadable ebooks (which has been quite a labor intensive process – they’re all in text or html format.)
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Google Maps and package tracking
I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking…. This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don’t know, I mean, when I read that a package is in Cincinnati, I have a pretty good idea of WHERE that is, Knoxville, etc…. the idea of an RSS feed for your tracking number is interesting – that could be useful. (Although I wonder how quickly that feed would be updated.)
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Open Source OCR
I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for some time, it’s supposed to be among the top 3 in accuracy according to testing by UNLV. The source code is available at their sourceforge.net page. It’ will be good to see this taken up and integrated as a backend by open source scanning applications. (Maybe even office suites as a “recognize text in image file” type option….)
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Bizarre Internet Explorer 7 problem – Several of my pages are not displayed AT ALL
I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I even tested side by side with Firefox which WAS able to display the page and Explorer 7 which wasn’t. I thought it might just be a rendering bug of some sort, but today got a chance to try IE7 on Windows XP (RC1). So… the problem is still there, I can find NO other browser exhibiting the same behavior. It affects averyjparker.com, northcarolinagenealogy.net and southcarolinagenealogy.org, but NOT onlineradiotv.com (which all by the way are hosted out of the same VPS – so I know the VPS is up and the database server is just fine….)
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Run a botnet go to jail
It’s really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100’s of thousands of computers. There NEED to be more stories like this. Unfortunately though, with a possible benefit of making $6,000-10,000 per month being a botnet herder…. and only 2 high profile arrests and convictions, I don’t know if this will discourage ENOUGH people from this kind of activity.
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Free (and legal) music downloads coming by Christmas 2006 and DRM
I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading the free music. Testing will begin in the US and Canada before the end of the year. It sounds as though they will use DRM from Microsoft on the free downloads…
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Persistent spammers
Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) broadcastemailgroupcom and broadcastemailcorporation.com are some of their other recent aliases. They claim in the email that their offer is only for non-profit groups and to excuse the inconvenience if you have received this by mistake. Over the last weekend though, I received 7-10 of these on various postmaster@ and root@ addresses (Plus one sales@ address) for the various domains that I either own or administer for others.