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Dave Murphy, you would think, should know better. He is an information technology consultant - someone who counsels the rest of us on how to protect our computer, by making it difficult for someone to decipher passwords, for instance. Yet he keeps his four-digit bank card number in his wallet, and his various passwords are stored on a handheld computer that is always with him. At least, he says, the password database is encrypted and the note in his wallet is written in Chinese digits in Korean script. "Without my little crib sheet, I can't remember all that stuff," said...

The brazen airport computer theft that has Australia's anti-terror fighters up in arms By Philip Cornford September 5, 2003 On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport. The men, described as being of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance, took a lift to the third floor of the Charles Ulm building in Link Road, next to the customs handling depot and the Qantas Jet Base. They presented themselves to the security desk as technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the outsourced customs computer services...

While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely. I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations. Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40...

Sorry for the vanity, but my old computer, which was being brought in for repairs, was stolen out of my car the other day, and with it I lost all of my FR threads I had saved since this past March. Hugely irritating. I've tried, but have been unable to get back to view threads since last March. Is it possible? I'm not talking about plugging in words and going backwards; I'd like to start around March 1 and go forward day by day, viewing old threads (yes, I do have a life - it'll take a few months to...

The research and activism arm of BlackBox Voting.com   CONTENTSIntroductionPart 1 - Can the votes be changed?Part 2 - Can the password be bypassed?Part 3 ? Can the audit log be altered? ************* Introduction According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system. The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how...

Former Tech student pleads to porn charge A former Texas Tech student pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to downloading child pornography from the Internet. David Russell Brigham, 23, of Abilene faces a maximum sentence of 15 years when U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings sentences him in several weeks. A Lubbock federal grand jury indicted Brigham in March on 13 charges of transporting and receiving child pornography. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Brigham admitted that in November 2000 he downloaded an image of a young girl engaging in sexual intercourse with an adult man. The additional charges will be...

he computer program that helped NASA mistakenly decide that the shuttle Columbia had not been deeply harmed by a piece of falling foam would have predicted serious damage if used properly, said the retired Boeing engineer who developed the program. The engineer, Allen J. Richardson, said the program, known as Crater, was never intended to be used in a mission to predict damage, as it was in Columbia's fatal flight. Members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which is expected to release its final report on the disaster tomorrow, have disparaged Crater as a flawed tool. But Mr. Richardson said...

Evidence gathered by Microsoft, the FBI, and the Secret Service on the worldwide attacks made against the computers running the Windows operating system fits the profile of 'terrorist activity.'Industry sources citing Mirosoft officials told World Tribune.com that the recent attacks from the 'Blaster' worm and its variants, coupled with an email virus called 'SoBig-F' show signs of a coordinated attack by an entity wanting to disrupt world commerce.Microsoft is cooperating with both the FBI and the Secret Service and will report their findings in the next few days.While at present no terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility for these attacks in...

THE NATIONAL SECURITY Agency, the government's security arm, along with help from Network Associates, last week announced it has made a security-enhanced version of Linux available for download. The NSA said it realizes that operating system security is necessary and that mainstream operating systems often lack critical security features that could enforce the confidentiality and integrity of network communications. Dubbed Security-Enhanced (SE) Linux, the NSA's version allows programs to have only the slimmest security permissions to run. SE Linux has a strong, yet flexible, access control architecture incorporated into the kernel to foil tampering and bypassing of security mechanisms. The...

1) MSFT knows it put out flawed software. 2) MSFT knows that a hostile hacker could take malicious advantage of the flaws. 3) MSFT knows that no one has been downloading the patches they've been sending out. 4) MSFT sends out a relatively benign worm that does not destroy data, but gets users to update their machines. 5) MSFT deflects suspicion by putting a "Billy" message in the worm, and intimates that the real weapon will be directed at MSFT on Saturday. 5a) MSFT doesn't direct the worm at old versions of Windows because they don't care about them any...

After weeks of defending itself against charges of bad programming and lax security, Diebold Election Systems is facing an independent, third-party audit of the software for its touch-screen voting machines. Maryland Gov. Robert L. Erhlich Jr. ordered the review after researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University released a report (PDF) last month revealing numerous programming flaws and security vulnerabilities in the source code for Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting machines.

All, Here a scoop to Freepers which is just now hitting us security pro's. There is a first vulnerability that uses the MS Bug that MS addressed with MS 03-026 two weeks ago. It is calling itself MSBLAST.exe and is spreading in the wild unbelievably fast. http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?date=2003-08-11 A first advisory from McAffee has just been published: http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/defa...&virus_k=100547 Once it finds a vulnerable system, it will spawn a shell on port 4444 and use it to download the actual worm via tftp. The exploit itself is very close to 'dcom.c' and so far appears to use the "universal Win2k" offset only....

Another conspirator gets his blood money. A couple months ago it was Al Gore getting appointed to the board of directors of Apple Computer -- not because he invented the Internet, but as payola for crucifying Apple's competitor Microsoft on a cross of antitrust. This time it's Eric R. Dinallo, a legal pitbull in New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer's office, who's getting a big executive job with Morgan Stanley -- one of the investment banks that he helped Spitzer plunder in his Wall Street stock research jihad. Gretchen Morgenson reports on this in the New York Times without...

I (author) went shopping for a cheap printer, and the first machine that waggled its cartridges at me was the Apollo P-2200. I stared open-mouthed at the price tag: $10. I was tempted. That $10 price tag translated to $40 with a $30 mail-in rebate. But still, 10 bucks! I wanted that printer. I wanted a house full, a different printer for every day of the week. The clerk caught me drooling in the aisle and talked trash to me. He told me that people were coming back after a few months and buying another one. The printer comes loaded...

Is it cool to just seal this thing off with Duct Tape or would black electrical tape be more hip? How about hitting it with a hammer, just a tap... will that help? The CD/CDR drive is continually opening and closing by itself. I tried running a maintenance program on it but it's freezing up and ridiculously slow. I've checked to see if the manual button for the CD/CDR drive is stuck and it's okay. I also checked the eject button on the keyboard. Any chance that this is a virus? Should I take a photo in hopes that George...

My computer, which had been running Windows 98 SE, recently developed a problem which left the hard disk unable to boot into Windows. I have created a startup disk which does at least allow me to get to a command line prompt. I have done countless CD and DIR commands, but am unable to find my .WAB (address book) or .MBX (mailbox) files. Any help would be appreciated. Part of the problem, of course, is that the directory names are truncated. Is there a DOS-based "file search" tool that I could use, that would let me find the files? Thanks.

An intermediate appellate court in Waco has upheld the felony child pornography conviction and seven-year prison sentence of a former Baylor University professor. Waco's 10th Court of Appeals overruled Bruce Watson's appeal on Wednesday, determining that he didn't have permission to appeal after his guilty plea and rejecting his assertion that the statute under which he was convicted is unconstitutional. Watson, 44, a non-tenured French professor who had been with Baylor 12 years, was indicted in September 2000 on 10 counts of possession of child pornography. University officials discovered hundreds of images of nude children and children engaged in sex...

Meet the latest spaced out modern artist - a picture-drawing robot arm in Australia whose brain sits in a petri dish in the US.Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, American and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings: "the semi-living artist". Gripping three coloured markers positioned above a white canvas, a robotic arm churns out drawings akin to that of a three-year-old. Its guidance comes from around 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish 19,000 kilometres away. The "brain" lives at Dr Steve Potter's lab at Georgia's Institute...

My Windows 98 system has a bad hard disk. However, I can get to a command line prompt on that system via a boot diskette I have created. I need to copy off a file that is larger than 1.44 mb. But of course neither COPY nor XCOPY support multiple destination diskettes. I have looked at the utility RAR but it seems pretty hard to understand. So, here is what I need: - a program that works in the command line environment that copies (compression would be great too) a file to multiple diskettes - a corresponding program that uncompresses...

I am getting the dreaded "operating system not found." I have backup, but still would like a recommendation for a data recovery service, if anyone has used one. Thanks.