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SNIPPET: "UPDATE: The Koobface gang is upgrading the command and control infrastructure in response to the positive ROI out of the takedown activities." SNIPPET: "Related posts: Dissecting Koobface Worm's Twitter Campaign Dissecting the Koobface Worm's December Campaign Dissecting the Latest Koobface Facebook Campaign The Koobface Gang Mixing Social Engineering Vectors"

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain. He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," he said. "And if we do succeed, we will send...

Several open-source software companies and many other allies have banded together in a consortium called Open Source for America to try to persuade the U.S. government to use more of the collaboratively developed software, to participate in its development, and help its practitioners work with the government better. The group includes more than 70 companies, academic institutions, organizations, and individuals. Among them are Linux sellers Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical; software sellers Sun Microsystems, its would-be acquirer Oracle, Mozilla, SugarCRM, Alfresco Software, Pentaho, Revolution Computing, Zmanda, EnterpriseDB, and Yahoo's Zimbra; and open-source allies including Advanced Micro Devices and Google. The...

Hackers extracted lists of files from computers that they contaminated with the virus that triggered cyberattacks last week in the United States and South Korea, police in Seoul said Tuesday. The attacks, in which floods of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in both countries. The finding means that hackers not only used affected computers for Web attacks, but also attempted to steal information from them. That adds to concern that contaminated computers were ordered to damage their own hard disks or files...

The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange. Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults. The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear...

Thousands of websites have been hit by fast-moving exploit code that installs a cocktail of nasty malware on visitors' computers by targeting a previously unknown vulnerability in some versions of Internet Explorer. The compromised websites link to a series of servers that exploit a zero-day vulnerability in an IE component that processes media. The vulnerability affects those using the XP and 2003 versions of Windows, Microsoft warned in this advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user," company security representatives wrote. "When using Internet Explorer, code execution is remote and...

I'm writing a desktop application that I'd like to deploy onto Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. I'm trying to pick the language that will give me the most conveniences, without setting timebombs that will go off down the road. Here's what I think I know so far: C++ Pros: 1) resulting code runs fastest, provided I am not a bonehead 2) most flexibility in memory management 3) Maximum difficulty in reverse engineering my object code, though there is nothing revolutionary or complex in what I plan to write. 4) Tools are rock-solid. C++ Cons: 1) memory management is the biggest hassle,...

This year, Acer appears poised to overtake Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent into one of America’s favorite dorm-to-empire business stories. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.

Note: The following text is a quote: Spam, Phishing, and Malicious Code Related to Recent Celebrity Deaths added June 26, 2009 at 10:44 am US-CERT is aware of public reports of an increased number of spam campaigns, phishing attacks, and malicious code targeting the recent deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. These email messages may attempt to gain user information through phishing attacks or by recording email addresses if the user replies to the message. Additionally, email messages may contain malicious code or may contain a link to a seemingly legitimate website containing malicious code. US-CERT would like to...

Newspapers are fighting back against predictions that the printed word is dead. "Individuated news" has arrived.

I want to imbed a Martha Stewart video clip in my Wordpress blog. Is there a way to do this? Sorry for the vanity.

A recent computer intrusion that forced the FBI to shut down its computer network and disrupted FBI operations was traced to an e-mail containing malicious code that originated in China, according to FBI officials. The forced shutdown of the network affected one significant FBI operation -- the May 20 arrest of homegrown terrorism suspects in New York, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. "The Chinese shut down our network," said one FBI official familiar with assessments of the attack.

WASHINGTON, June 17, 2009 – With the economic downturn causing a spike in consumer scams, the Federal Trade Commission is encouraging servicemembers and their families to report their complaints to an online site so it can better target its investigations. The FTC’s Consumer Sentinel/Military provides a secure online database for the military community to report concerns about identity theft, deceptive lending or mortgage practices, debt collection, phone fraud or other scams, said Carol Kando-Pineda in the FTC’s consumer and business education division. “Filing via Consumer Sentinel/Military helps us follow the trends of how many military complaints we’re getting and...

Small but disruptive Jun 11th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO AND TAIPEI From The Economist print edition Laptops are evolving—and forcing the rest of the computer industry to change IT WAS like waiting for Godot: in the end, the great man did not come. The crowd at Apple’s jamboree in San Francisco this week was visibly disappointed when Steve Jobs, the computer-maker’s legendary chief executive, did not even put in a brief appearance after a six-month medical leave. But another no-show was perhaps more important. Proving many techno-pundits wrong, Apple did not present a “tablet”—a pared-down computer in both size and...

TomTom for iPhoneTomTom for iPhone has been a long time coming, but it looks fantastic. Check out these official photos and video to see how it’ll change the way you drive with your mobile for ever! TomTom’s car kit for iPhone lets the phone work in landscape or portrait mode, boosts the volume of the iPhone’s loudspeaker and even enhances its GPS signal. Not enough for you? It also charges the iPhone, and offers an audio output. All that on top of slick TomTom software that spurts spoken directions and offers all the usual satnav skills you’d expect. Check it...

Thursday, March 26, 2009 – Day 66 of Barack Obama's presidency – may be remembered as the day that his clean-living administration went to pot. The occasion was the launch of Obama's Online Town Hall, designed to build on the momentum of his net-fuelled campaign by inviting ordinary Americans to pose questions directly to their new leader. The idea was touted in advance on the Whitehouse's website, and 92,000 people turned up online to speak directly to the President. When the roster of questions bubbled up to the President's monitor at the press conference, however, most were obsessed with the...

... One theory being investigated is that signals from a nearby military communication station interfered with the air data computer. ...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- These captives already get to order fast-food takeout from the base and have access to a phone booth for weekly calls. Now some 17 Uighur Muslims awaiting a nation to grant them asylum are about to go high-tech, with laptops and web training. While awaiting details of President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camps by Jan. 22, commanders here have ordered 20 laptops for the captives of Camp Iguana. ''As you know, detainees are leaving this place,'' said Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, who oversees detainee classes, a multilingual library and now-emerging...

By the end of WWII, 11 Colossus machines were in use Bletchley Park is best known for the work done on cracking the German codes and helping to bring World War II to a close far sooner than might have happened without those code breakers. But many believe Bletchley should be celebrated not just for what it ended but also for what it started - namely the computer age. The pioneering machines at Bletchley were created to help codebreakers cope with the enormous volume of enciphered material the Allies managed to intercept. The machine that arguably had the greatest influence...

Is is worthwhile to try and build your own laptop? Our son is going to college in the fall. The college sent out a flyer and you can purchase a Dell Latitude from them for $1054.00. It would have Vista Office pre installed. I had spoken to one of my cousins and we went through the Dell website and the same system would have cost an additional $600. So, $1600.00 Now, a the high school graduation, the father of the son that our son will be sharing a dorm room with says that he built his son's laptop and that...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says the nation for too long has failed to adequately protect the security of its computer networks, and he will name a new cyber czar to take on the job. Obama made the announcement at the White House Friday, surrounded by a host of government officials and White House aides. The president called it "a transformational moment" for America and said he will soon pick the person he wants to head up a new White House office of cyber security. Obama said the stepped up security is overdue. He also said that while the newly...

Dell has seen its latest quarterly profits decline by almost two-thirds as the worldwide recession continues to hit sales of computers. The world's second-largest maker of personal computers made a net profit of $290m (£182m) in the three months to 1 May, down 63% from $784m a year ago. Revenues at the firm fell 23% to $12.3bn. However the results were better than analysts had feared. Dell said the global trading environment remained "challenging". 'Cutting costs' Dell has already moved to cut costs in the face of falling sales, reducing its global workforce by more than 9,000 positions over the...

"Government Is Funding Technology to Monitor People's Health-Care Behavior by Having Them 'Visit' with Computers" SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) - “Health-care professional time is very, very expensive,” says Robert Friedman of Boston Medical Center. “We’re not going to constrain health-care costs by giving patients absolutely unlimited time with doctors or nurses--they’re too expensive.” In an effort to increase efficiency in the treatment of certain health-care problems, the federal government has provided Friedman with about $22 million in grants since 1995 to develop technology that can save people actual visits to a doctor's office by allowing them to make "virtual" visits in which...

This is a personal request, not an article. I'm looking for thoughts by FReepers who know what the hell they're talking about, not flamewars. I have a Mac (love it) and a Windows (XP, whatever the latest service pack is). Have the following questions. 1) I want to do backups of the Mac. What is a good website or source (explicit page reference!) to the Time Machine utility? 1a) Where can I find the logfile to see who is attempting to access my Mac? (The PC has several anti-virus products and firewalls on it already.) 2) I want to do...

"WASHINGTON (AP) - Law enforcement computers were struck by a Mystery computer virus Thursday, forcing the FBI and the U.S. Marshals to shut down part of their networks as a precaution. The U.S. Marshals confirmed it disconnected from the Justice Department's computers as a protective measure after being hit by the virus; an FBI official said only that that agency was experiencing similar issues and was working on the problem."

"Jihad Recollections - Issue # 2 In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Ever Merciful Al-Fursan Media Productions Presents Jihad Recollections / Issue no. 2 SNIPPET: "[ Obamaturk: The Secular Phenomenon ]" SNIPPET: "Your brothers in Al-Fursan Media Productions May 2009 / Jumada al-Awwal 1430H" SNIPPET: "73 Pages DATE ADDED 05/16/2009" DOCUMENT DETAILS - QUOTE: http://www.scribd.com/docinfo/15508071?access_key=key-p4jtwgkqbgc51b1xpos SNIPPET: "Document Details for Jihad Recollections - Issue # 2 Metadata Title Jihad Recollections - Issue # 2 Description In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Ever Merciful Al-Fursan Media Productions Presents Jihad Recollections / Issue no. 2 [ Obamaturk:...

<p>ASBURY (AP) — Mary LaMour can't understand why her computer works at other people's homes, and outside, but not inside her house.</p> <p>Neither can a computer technician.</p> <p>"It's uncanny," said Chuck Freisinger, of Phoenix Computer Services in Dubuque. "My other technician and I looked at that situation. When it's in their house, it doesn't work. When it's outside, it works fine. She took it to a friend's house and it worked fine."</p>

From the IxQuick website: Ixquick is a metasearch engine. It is being recommended by Katherine Albrecht, a leading privacy advocate who is now their US spokesperson. It is located in the Netherlands and NY. Most important feature it offers is Privacy. With personal privacy being under attack on the internet, In June 2006 Ixquick started to delete its users' privacy data within 48 hrs. As of January 2009 they do not record IP addresses at all anymore thereby offering our users full Privacy. Furthermore they abolished the use of Unique ID cookies. To date they still have the industry’s leading...

SNIPPET: "NEW YORK — A jury convicted a Lebanese-born Swede on Tuesday of plotting to help Al Qaeda recruit by trying to set up a weapons-training post in Oregon and distributing terrorist training manuals over the Internet. The verdict against Oussama Kassir..."

Note: The following text is a quote: Swedish National Charged with Hacking and Theft of Trade Secrets Related to Alleged Computer Intrusions at NASA and Cisco Philip Gabriel Pettersson, aka "Stakkato," 21, a Swedish national, was indicted today on intrusion and trade secret theft charges. The five-count indictment includes one intrusion count and two trade secret misappropriation counts involving Cisco Systems Inc. (Cisco), of San Jose, Calif., which is a provider of computer network equipment and producer of Internet routers. According to the allegations in the indictment Pettersson intentionally committed an intrusion between May 12, 2004, and May 13, 2004,...

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents. Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

North Korea runs a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service, a news report said Tuesday. The North's military has expanded the unit, staffing it with about 100 personnel, mostly graduates of a Pyongyang university that teaches computer skills, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an intelligence agency it didn't identify. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it is aware that Pyongyang has been training hackers in recent years but did not provide details and had no other comment. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy...

Friday, May 1, 2009 Summarizing Zero Day's Posts for April The following is a brief summary of all of my posts at ZDNet's Zero Day for April. You can also go through previous summaries for March, February, January, December, November, October, September, August and July, as well as subscribe to my personal RSS feed or Zero Day's main feed. Notable articles include: Google's CAPTCHA experiment and the human factor; Conficker's estimated economic cost? $9.1 billion and Twitter hit by multiple variants of XSS worm.

"Geeks Helping Kill al Qaeda"

Note: The following text is a quote: Ali Al-Marri Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to Al-Qaeda Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, 43, a dual national of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaeda. Al-Marri entered his guilty plea at a hearing this afternoon before Judge Michael M. Mihm in U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois. In so doing, al-Marri admitted that he agreed with others to provide material support or resources to al-Qaeda in the form of personnel, including himself, to work under al-Qaeda’s...

Note: The following text is a quote: Two Missouri Brothers Among Those Indicted in $4 Million Nationwide Spamming Conspiracy Millions of E-Mail Addresses Illegally Harvested from Computers at 2,000 Schools KANSAS CITY, MO—Two Missouri men and their company are among those indicted by a federal grand jury in a nationwide e-mail spamming case that victimized more than 2,000 colleges and universities in a scheme that sold more than $4 million worth of products to students, announced Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, of St. Louis., his brother, Osmaan Ahmad...

At LAST! Castro's commie linux variant "Nova" has been removed from the computers at "Geeks On Caffeine!" But at what cost? NOTE: The author of this comic requests that you visit his web site and please refrain from copying the cartoon within this thread. Thanks!

Liquid crystals - Display genius no match for petty politics How the LCD lost its DaddyBy Cade Metz in San FranciscoPosted in Science, 27th April 2009 17:17 GMT Free whitepaper – Surviving and thriving in the customer-driven age Happy Birthday, IC George Heilmeier is widely known as the father of the LCD. But he abandoned his liquid crystal baby nearly forty years ago. In 1964, as a researcher at RCA's corporate lab in Princeton, New Jersey, Heilmeier uncovered the electro-optical properties of molecular and liquid crystals. And four years later, at an RCA press conference in New York City, he showed...

For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal...

AMERICA needs to pay a heckuva a lot more atten tion to the cyberthreat. Now. Sure, the Pentagon is refuting a Wall Street Journal report last week that hackers pinched loads of data on the military's newest, high-tech fighter aircraft from contractors' computer networks via the Internet. But even if the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program wasn't actually penetrated by cyberspies, it's still a chilling wake-up call for the United States. The computer systems of the F-35 Lightning were penetrated "repeatedly," according to the newspaper, allowing cyber cat burglars to "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to...

SNIPPET: "Does terrorism work, meaning, does it achieve its perpetrators' objectives?" SNIPPET: "In the long term, however, Islamists will likely recognize the limits of violence and increasingly pursue their repugnant goals through legitimate ways. Radical Islam's best chance to defeat us lies not in bombings and beheadings but in classrooms, law courts, computer games, television studios, and electoral campaigns. We are on notice."

April 25, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. will unveil an add-on to Windows 7 that lets users run applications designed for Windows XP in a virtual machine, the company confirmed Friday -- the first time Microsoft has relied on virtualization to provide backward compatibility.

Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. Continued....

By Donna Miles American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 22, 2009 – Defense Department officials are working to reduce vulnerability to cyber-attack attempts that occur regularly and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said. “We are under attack virtually all the time, every day here,” Gates told CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric yesterday during an interview broadcast on the show. Attempts to attack DoD computer networks have more than doubled recently, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters yesterday. He declined to cite details, saying that to do so would only “make it...

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration plans to create a new military command to coordinate the defense of Pentagon computer networks and improve U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare, according to current and former officials familiar with the plans. The initiative will reshape the military's efforts to protect its networks from attacks by hackers, especially those from countries such as China and Russia. The new command will be unveiled within the next few weeks, Pentagon officials said. The move comes amid growing evidence that sophisticated cyberspies are attacking the U.S. electric grid and key defense programs. A page-one story in The Wall...

Nearly one in 10 American children who play computer games are pathologically addicted, according to new research. Some young gamers show at least six symptoms of gambling addiction, such as lying to family and friends about how much they play games, using the games to escape their problems and becoming restless or irritable when they stop playing. They may also skip homework to play games or spend too much time playing and do poorly in school, the study shows. Douglas Gentile, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University, where the study was carried...

WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft. The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secrectary _______________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release April 13, 2009 April 13, 2009 MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY THE SECRETARY OF COMMERCE SUBJECT: Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba The promotion of democracy and human rights in Cuba is in the national interest of the United States and is a key component of this Nation's foreign policy in the Americas. Measures that decrease dependency of the Cuban people on the Castro regime and that promote contacts between Cuban-Americans...

National Defense: America's electrical grid may have been implanted with cyber-"bombs" waiting to go off. Russia and China are preparing for a new kind of warfare. Where will you be when the lights go out?On April 1, as part of our "Inside The Stimulus" series, we said the proposed "smart grid" designed to monitor electrical use and distribution would make it easier for hackers to break in and possibly disable parts or all of it. Turns out this was no April Fool's joke. A few weeks ago the Pentagon released its 2008 report to Congress titled "Military Power of the...