Showing headlines posted by zanek

Disgruntled Yahoo! advertisers who were hoping for just compensation from the Pay-Per-Click fraud settlement may as well get over it. Here's the short version: Yahoo! names an insider to watch ad traffic, invites 3 advertisers a year to chat, promises to make an effort to come up with industry-wide standards, extends its fraud claim period, and gives you an advertising credit... if you can prove you were harmed. I almost forgot the best part. Your class action attorneys walk away with nearly five million bucks. D'oh!

When the Linux Ten Commandments were committed to stone, Number One was, "Thou shalt not use root for thy personal login." Too bad the masses didn't get the memo. They've left the Linux priesthood forever gnashing its teeth in denial. Email Battles captured a chat with one of the sinners.

The new breed of rootkits is operating system-agnostic. 64-bit implementations of BSD, Linux, MacOS X, Windows Vista are all considered vulnerable, as long as they're riding atop the wrong chips from AMD and Intel. VM rootkits quietly sieze control of the chips' virtualization technology to control or pervert any and every process the attacker chooses. Current defense possibilities are depressingly mechanical.

The fallout from an intentional dump of search data by AOL researchers is rapidly spreading. So far, those poisoned by the spill include porn-seekers, suicidals, murderers, other AOL users, the spillers, MySpace and Google. Beneficiaries include blog spammers, pay-per-click crooks, trial lawyers and competitors of every stripe.

[I highly suggest you get any remaining family members off of AOL now. I mean now! - dcparris]

Modernizing cellphone networks are forcing the elderly and handicapped to upgrade from cellphones they have used for years to the new breed of confusing devices with keys too small for aging eyes to see. Email Battles has found a few tricks you can use while you're waiting for America's too-slick cell phone marketers to catch up with the aging Baby Boom.

[This has no direct relationship with GNU/Linux or FOSS, but perhaps some hacker can come up with some solution to some of the problems, using the fact that a lot of cellphones now run Linux. -- grouch]

Microsoft security guru Jeff Jones is extending the meme that Windows is more secure than Linux. Ever curious, Email Battles decided to check out his assumptions and methodologies. Setting aside easy red herrings like the timing of fixes, they still came across judgment calls that less MS-centric researchers might have made differently.

When we first built our newsblog, existing blogging software was dumb and ugly. So we wrote our own blogware in Python, using Zope as the platform. It was beyond state-of-the-art. But blogging software grew up with lots of exciting features, while simply maintaining our custom-built platform became more and more painful for our guy with more important things to do. In the end, we gained a lot, and lost a little.

After a year of testing, French virus experts have concluded that Microsoft Office is less dangerous than its competitor, OpenOffice. In the short term, this is great news for Microsoft... outside of Europe. More anti-open source FUD will delay some planned migrations. Longer term, OpenOffice will benefit, as France and Germany pour resources into securing the product they now rely upon. The race is, as they say, afoot.

Since a contractor used an FBI agent's password and ancient off-the-web utilities to repeatedly crack the Bureau's network, people are starting to ask questions. Problem is, they're the wrong questions. After blowing $581 million on its failed Trilogy IT boondoggle, the FBI re-badged it, then re-sold it to Congress for another $500 million. Unfortunately, the Inspector General's report shows that the "lack of people who know what they're doing" persists. Does J. Edgar Hoover's old team have the minimal competence required to protect itself in the Internet age?

Too often, excellent communicators publish newsfeeds so dumb that they drive readers away. If RSS or Atom feeds are part of your mix, you may want to see how many barriers you've inadvertently built to block loyal subscribers.

Groups who despise the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have organized an email campaign to let the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) know what they think of its continuing effort to privatize coordination and management of Internet Domain Names and DNS. So how's it going? Email Battles shows how the mysterious power of the Web reveals all.

Antivirus builders protected Windows for years, allowing Microsoft to divert its development money to feature-bloat, in lieu of security. In fact, Microsoft's security bench was so empty that, once the decision was made to take over the security business, Redmond was forced to buy outside companies. Email Battles addresses a/v makers' mistakes and Microsoft's new attack strategy, and asks the really tough questions to boot, like, "What's with the name?"

If you were IBM what would you do? Microsoft programmers built a piece of code to allow Microsoft email software to interoperate with IBM's Domino/Lotus combo. When the code doesn't work, IBM advises users to talk to the folks who wrote the broken code, because, after all, it's Microsoft's code. Microsoft triumphantly proclaims that, unlike IBM, it will minister to people who can't make its code work, and by the way, this proves the value of its product. Huh? Most of us would take advantage of the silliness of Microsoft's position. IBM, however, hit the mattresses.

Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing, Martin Taylor, occupied the chair for just three months before he was unceremoniously "disappeared." This is bad news for Windows Live competitors, who have been thoroughly enjoying pratfalls similar to those made by Taylor in his previous assignment: Microsoft's silly anti-Linux crusade, "Get the Facts."

Published data reveals that, when identity thieves want Social Security numbers, they head for the fountainhead: Government. No other entity is as efficient at losing SSNs. The preferred method of acquisition? Unattended laptops. When that fails, crooks fall back to tapes, printouts, web postings, inside theft and other tricks wholly dependent on bureaucratic incompetence. After all, cracking networks from the outside can be tricky.

As Microsoft servers shuddered under the onslaught from anxious users downloading Windows Vista Beta 2, reviewers report that the corpulent code gobbles laptop batteries, hogs memory, and waddles through its chores. A Windows development team manager explains why this outcome for the "largest software project in history" was entirely predictable.

After a blogger recently exposed daily communications between Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and Microsoft servers, Redmond's response was somewhat unsettling. Officials admitted that the validation checker tasked with protecting Microsoft's digital rights has potential uses beyond those previously disclosed.

Proponents of Windows Small Business Server sell it as Microsoft's cheap answer to Linux and other free open source operating systems. The customer gets a Swiss Army knife of Windows software, as long as it's all loaded on a single server. That's where the problem starts. Every loaded program brings its own vulnerabilities which, in the aggregrate, can bring down the whole computer. On the other hand, Linux suffers from fewer critical vulnerabilities, and none of the restrictions.

Every discussion of software patents ends with commenters roundly condemning the greedy sleazebags who filed them. But when pressed, one software patenter told Email Battles why he seeks patents for his software, in succinct terms that will strike home with every programmer and business manager. For an attorney, this guy sure can simplify.

The thieves stole a laptop from a car. The laptop held hundreds of thousands of transaction records, including credit cards, for Hotels.com customers. When you review Hotels.com's Security Policy, you'll see that, while the firm takes great pride in locking down everything its administrators can imagine, managers never saw the auditor's blunders coming.