Free Republic

Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today that he approved the contract with Roemer Wallens Gold & Mineaux LLP. The firm’s founder is James Roemer, who has worked with local and state governments for decades. The money will go to “investigations pursuant to the Assembly sexual harassment/retaliation policy.” In February, the Assembly entered into two contracts worth $205,000 for an outside firm, Rossein Associates, to handle sexual-harassment cases in the chamber. Assemblymen Vito Lopez, D-Brooklyn, and Dennis Gabryszak, D-Cheektowaga, Erie County, resigned because of the allegations. Assemblyman Micah Kellner, D-Manhattan, is fighting the charges against him. In another contract Monday, the state’s...

Guns are good for the goose but NOT for the gander. A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper’s Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013. According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a...

We were a bit disappointed in how President Obama handled his recent Reddit AMA, giving mostly canned politician's answers to a community that tends to expect a bit more human emotion. It was no Woody Harrelson debacle, but it did seem like a missed opportunity. And, now, some Redditors are suggesting that parts of it were actually stage. Some internet sleuthing pointed out that among the only 10 questions that Obama chose to answer (out of hundreds that were asked almost immediately) was one from someone who appears to have been planted by the administration. The evidence: Profile created mere...

Workers outraged at Caribbean junket As union bosses continued livin’ it up in the Puerto Rican sun yesterday, municipal workers getting soaked by New York’s cold rain were livid that their hard-earned money was funding the leaders’ Caribbean “convention.” “There goes our union dues!” fumed a furious Local 3 electrician. “They paid for that junket with union dues.” “I’ve worked for 10 months in the last two years. I’m getting laid off at the end of the year,” the electrician railed. “I have no use for the union. All I see is waste, corruption and hypocrisy.” At an Upper West...

We've been pointing out a variety of attempts to push back on the First Amendment lately. One fertile ground for such attacks are local politicians carrying the "cyberbullying" banner, in various attempts to magically outlaw being a "jerk" online, usually by making it illegal to offend someone online. Of course, making someone's action illegal based on how someone else feels about it is all kinds of crazy. It also would seem to violate the very principles of the First Amendment, which bar Congress (and local governments) from passing any laws that take away one's right to free speech. In the...

Last week, we wrote about how Rep. Anna Eshoo (whose district covers much of Silicon Valley) is apparently so incredibly out of touch on what PROTECT IP is about (despite it having a huge impact on the economy of her district) that she thought it was really about immigration. We were willing to chalk it up to a busy staffer sending out the wrong form letter, but there's growing evidence that our elected officials simply don't know what PROTECT IP is about at all. David Segal from Demand Progress was kind enough to pass on that they've been watching the...

Microsoft is telling Windows users that they'll have to reinstall the operating system if they get infected with a new rootkit that hides in the machine's boot sector.A new variant of a Trojan Microsoft calls "Popureb" digs so deeply into the system that the only way to eradicate it is to return Windows to its out-of-the-box configuration, Chun Feng, an engineer with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), said last week on the group's blog."If your system does get infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise you to fix the MBR and then use a recovery CD to restore your system to...

It really would be kind of funny to watch the US government congratulate itself for censorship of websites if it wasn't just kind of sad. At a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on intellectual property issues, Senator Patrick Leahy (top 3 campaign contribution sources: lawyers, entertainment industry, lobbyists -- you can't make this stuff up) praised administration officials for censoring websites based on questionable accusations from an entertainment industry who seems to think that their own content creators are running "pirate" websites. Of course, Leahy apparently doesn't recognize the irony of condemning internet censorship in other countries while praising it at...

Trusteer identified Sunspot, a little known Windows malware platform that has been in circulation for some time, but was never previously recognized for its financial fraud capabilities. There are confirmed fraud losses associated with Sunspot, so the threat is real. Sunspot is another example of the growing list of financial malware that is flooding the Internet. Sunspot targets 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms from Windows XP through Windows 7, and is capable of installing in non-administrator and administrator accounts. Once installed, it targets Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. This is a very modern malware platform with sophisticated fraud capabilities. Equally...

Ed Bott, ZDNet, three days ago: “Coming Soon to a Mac Near You: Serious Malware”: Now I am seeing evidence that the next target is OS X. That’s potentially very bad news for Mac owners who have abandoned their PCs in the belief that switching to a Mac somehow immunizes them from malware. Security experts know, of course, that there’s nothing magical about Macs when it comes to security. They just haven’t been targeted because Windows has been such a big juicy target for so long. But now that Macs have achieved a critical mass of success in the marketplace,...

Microsoft warned on Wednesday of a new zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The flaw creates a means for hackers to inject malware onto vulnerable systems, providing surfers are first tricked into visiting booby-trapped websites. As such the flaw poses a severe drive-by download risk. All established version of IE (from 6 to 8) are affected. It's unclear whether or not the IE 9 beta is similarly vulnerable. The flaw reportedly involves the handling of Cascading Style Sheets by Microsoft's browser software. The bug first came to light on the seclists.org full disclosure mailing list earlier this month. A module exploiting...

<p>The New York Times said he was dead. But Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ former manager, says it will take more than a story in the newspaper to see him off.</p> <p>Weaver, 80, is alive and kicking – though with less animation than he did around umpires – despite a Times’ piece on Saturday that put him six feet under.</p>

Two of the world's biggest ad serving networks – one owned by Google and the other by Microsoft – have been caught delivering booby-trapped banner ads that infect computers with malware without any action required on the part of the end user. The ads on Google's DoubleClick and Microsoft's rad.msn.com contained heavily obfuscated javascript in an attempt to conceal the attack, according to an analysis by web security firm Armorize. As a result, people surfing to Scout.com, MSNBC.com and other sites that relied on the ad platforms were surreptitiously attacked by malicious code that in many cases was able to...

Even safe mode cannot end devil-spawned reboot loop An update from AVG on Wednesday night rendered 64 bit Windows 7 systems unstable after it was applied. Several Register readers have been affected by the problem, which leaves machines in a continuous reboot loop. AVG has pulled the problem update (3292) and published an advisory apologising for the cock-up and providing instructions on how to get hobbled systems back up and running again. Recovering a Blue Screened PC is more involved than simply rebooting in safe mode, as the security vendor explains. Desktop versions of Windows 7 seem particularly prone to...

Firefox extension created to shine a light on the problem of unencrypted websites fails, because rather than offering a solution, it only makes it worse. Most people know that public Wi-Fi hotspots aren't the safest connections in the world and probably aren't the best place to be doing things like online banking. But you probably didn't realize just how easy it is to steal logins for email and services like Facebook from other people on a hotspot. Well, thanks to a new Firefox extension called Firesheep, anyone can easily view other people on their network and, with a click of...

According to the University of Virginia's Information Technology and Communication (ITC), which services the IT needs for most of the campus, 43 percent of first-year students at its residence halls during 2009 were using a Mac.The figure represents a continuation of a five-year trend that's seeing increased Mac penetration on the campus amongst first year students. Prior to 2004, Mac usage amongst freshmen hovered between three and four percent (with the exception of 1997). 2004, however, served as a watershed year: share increased by four percentage points. A host of theories can help explain this jump. I'd probably point to...

Elmhurst officials are considering creating a "disturbance and disorderly conduct" violation after a resident accused of rolling her eyes and sighing was ejected from a public meeting. City Attorney Don Storino has been directed by the city’s finance and council affairs committee to look at various sources including “Robert’s Rules of Order,” Illinois state statutes and policies adopted by other municipalities for a legal definition of disorderly conduct and disruptive behavior. He is expected to report his findings to the committee on July 26. Ald. Stephen Hipskind said Darlene Heslop rolled her eyes and sighed while attending a June 14...

The root-kit tool was released to "to persuade manufacturers to fix a bug that lets hackers read a victim's email and text messages," according to report by Reuters. "It wasn't difficult to build," said Nicholas Percoco, who leads Spider Labs. Working with a colleague, Percoco said it took about two weeks to develop the tool, which allows nefarious users to take control of the device and steal email and text messages. Percoco distributed the root kit on DVDs at the Defcon conference, which is a meeting of around 10,000 security experts who can attend anonymously. Reuters noted that "law enforcement...

A questionable Android mobile wallpaper app, which collects your personal data and sends it to a mysterious site in China, has been downloaded millions of times, according to data unearthed by mobile security firm Lookout.That means that apps that seem good but are really stealing your personal information are a big risk at a time when mobile apps are exploding on smartphones said John Hering, chief executive, and Kevin MaHaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, said in their talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.“Even good apps can be modified to turn bad after a lot of...

Virus writers have begun using the unpatched shortcut flaw in Windows first exploited by the Stuxnet worm, which targets power plant control systems, to create malware that infects the general population of vulnerable Windows machines. Slovakian security firm Eset reports the appearance of two malware strains that exploit security vulnerabilities in the way Windows handles .lnk (shortcut) files, first used by Stuxnet to swipe information from Windows-based SCADA systems from Siemens. The Chymine-A Trojan uses the same security hole to install a keystroke logger while the Autorun-VB-RP worm has been updated to use the shortcut vulnerability as an infection method....