Free Republic

(Sept. 30) -- The intrigue surrounding the mysterious, highly sophisticated computer worm Stuxnet got a little more Dan Brownish today with the revelation that there may be hidden messages embedded in the malware's code. The New York Times reported this morning that one of the files in the worm was called "Myrtus," which may be a reference to the Old Testament Book of Esther, in which Jews thwart a Persian plot against them. Along with mysterious Myrtus were two numbers that might be additional clues to who is behind the worm. Or, as the Times points out, they could mean...

Symantec security researcher Liam O Murchu (photo above) says he found the “05091979" date in the Stuxnet code, a possible link to the May 9, 1979 execution of Jewish Iranian businessman and philantropist Habib Elghanian. (snip) We’ve heard murmurings of biblical references and public confirmation that the Iran’s Buescher nuclear reactor was the main target. Now comes O Murchu with this tittilating disclosure suggesting a direct link to Israel. However, security experts are cautioning against reading too much into anything deliberately left in the code by the Stuxnet authors because, at this level, there could be all kinds of decoys...

Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. (Nothing gets a techie's blood pressure going more than watching as competing technologies duke it out.) Format wars are to the tech world what elections are to politics, or what playoffs are to sports: a...

Computerworld - A majority of mobile application developers see Google's Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey published Monday. The survey, conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC, polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Of those developers, 59% said that Android had the "best long-term outlook," compared to just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. ... To make things even tougher for Apple down the...

The world’s first cyber ‘super weapon’ may have been designed to attack a nuclear power station in Iran, experts believe. A computer virus called Stuxnet has been described as the most sophisticated 'worm' ever created and has already infected more than 45,000 networks worldwide. A 'worm' is a type of computer virus that can reproduce by sending copies of itself to any PC that is connected to the infected machine. Now internet security experts fear that Stuxnet, which was first detected in June, is the first 'worm' specifically created to target real-world infrastructure such as power stations and water plants....

A quest to get Barack Obama to shout his commitment to solar power from the roof tops - by re-installing vintage solar panels at the White House - ended in disappointment for environmental campaigners today. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, had led a group of environmental activists to Washington in a bio-diesel van hoping to persuade Obama to re-install a set of solar panels originally put up by Jimmy Carter. The actual Carter-era solar panels - which weigh in at 55 kilograms and are nearly 2 metres long - are out-dated now. But campaigners had hoped that the White...

Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter resources at any moment. According to a Twitter employee—talking to designer Dustin Curtis—Bieber has "racks of servers dedicated to him. I'm sure this will excite his haters (hello 4chan!) even more. Updated Dustin confirmed to us that his tweet is not a joke. He was told about it by a Twitter employee. Since Bieber is almost a perennial trending topic, I'm not surprised. Still, and given the 180 million unique visitors every month, that's quite an achievement. What is really important, however, is this: Now, every time that whale pops, you will have one more...

As part of a bid for foreign currency, Kim Jong-Il is trying to bolster North Korean software-development capabilities, including video games targeting foreign audiences, like a mobile-phone bowling app starring Jeff Bridges's character from The Big Lebowski as well as Men in Black spinoff, called Alien Assault. Both games are published by a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

It was first published 126 years ago and is respected the world over. But the Oxford English Dictionary will never appear in print again, its owners have announced. Instead, the 80 lexicographers who have been working on the third edition for the past 21 years have been told the fruits of their labour will exist solely online.   The OED has been available on the internet for the past ten years and receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay £205 a year, plus VAT, to access it. Oxford University Press says the dominance of the internet...

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just decided that it was legal for the police to put a GPS tracking device on your car, sitting in your driveway, on your property. Here's how to protect yourself.Matt's post about the decision explains in depth about the ruling. To quickly summarize, the supreme court had said before that police can look through things that anyone in the public could come across, meaning, your driveway is freely accessible to the public, hence, the cops can look through it. The 9th circuit court now says that cops can shove a GPS locator onto your car, because the area is publicly...

The answer to the question depends on how iPad is classified and how the shipments add up combined with Macs. Is iPad a PC, like Windows tablets or low-powered netbooks? The definition is sure to generate controversy because of what's at stake -- which manufacturer is market share leader in the United States.Late yesterday, I contacted Gartner and IDC, which both measure global PC shipments. But only Gartner responded to my question about how iPad is classified. It is clear from preliminary second quarter PC shipment data that neither analyst firm calculated iPad with PC shipments (Gartner explicitly explained...

   Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be that's required to see them the way they were thousands of years ago.Although it seems impossible to think that anything could be left to discover after thousands of years of wind, sun, sand, and art students, finding the long lost patterns on a piece of ancient Greek sculpture can be as easy as shining a lamp on it. A technique called ‘raking light' has been used to analyze art for a long...

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- I'm a little more conservative than most tech writers when it comes to hot trends that may not be hot nor be trends. I freely admit to some skepticism when e-readers made their debut highlighted by both the Sony Corp. book reader and the Kindle from Amazon.com Inc. The trend was confirmed by Apple Inc.'s iPad, but I need to be more adept at spotting the trend when it is beginning and in the wild. I missed the signals, twice. You look to the public-at-large to spot trends, not to pundits. Two examples come to mind....

SNIPPET: "Thousands of online banking customers have had their accounts drained by a sophisticated new computer virus, internet security experts say. Around £675,000 was taken from a "large UK financial institution" over the last month with 3,000 customers hit - and the attacks are ongoing. Online security firm M86 Security Labs said the customers were infected with a Trojan virus - which cannot be detected by traditional anti-virus software - while browsing the internet. The Trojan, known as a Zeus v3, copies the passwords and usernames of customers' online details and transfers their funds to a different account. It then...

My Firewall/Antivirus detected an infection of the "Packed.Win32.Krap.hm!A2" and http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=45e98426fafd221ffb7d55ce8a1ae531 says it's: A malicious trojan horse or bot that may represent security risk for the compromised system and/or its network environment. I tried to block it and delete the infected files, but that just set off an attack against my computer, which caused me to reload from backup several times. How do I get rid of this nightmare, and prevent it from coming back?

Genetically modified bacteria that munch on sugar to produce refinable fuels could bring down the cost of switching to cleaner energy. Once the technology is fully developed, the company expects the alkane to cost around $50 per barrel, says del Cardayre. "We have a one-step process to make alkane" in an industrial process, says Schirmer. "Basically, in goes the feedstock – sugar – and out comes the vehicle-ready fuel. The bacteria can be grown on any sugar, including those produced from second-generation cellulose-based sources such as grasses and plant waste, which do not compete for land with food crops.

I installed a new harddrive and new XP pro on my sons computer today. All is fine except it cannot access the internet. When I try to create a network, it says it cannot find network adaptors and devices. It is a new installation, any ideas? Thanks.

Until now, only users of Google's tragically short lived Nexus One had access to Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo), but according to a communiqué from Verizon, the original Droid will be getting the update next week. This is big news for a large segment of the Android user base as the Droid was a very popular phone.  Android 2.2 brings some useful new features to the platform. For instance, Google's new Jun-in-time compiler speeds up applications dramatically, and the browsers new JavaScript V8 engine makes web pages render much faster. We're going to be very interested to see how Motorola handles...

Motorola's eagerly anticipated Droid X smartphone is expected to hit the hot summer streets in just a few hours. But don't plan on hacking, rooting or modding the Android-powered device anytime soon. 
In addition to locking down the smartphone with an encrypted bootloader, Motorola has instructed its obedient Droid to brick itself if the kernel, bootloader or ROM becomes noticeably compromised.

What can you do with a few gigabytes and a USB port? Quite a lot, with the right software. Learn how to encrypt your work, run whole systems, rescue Windows, and customize your thumb drive with these USB-geared tricks.Photo by Debs (ò‿ó)♪.Note: Gina previously rounded up 10 thumb drive tricks in April 2007, and we've borrowed a few of those ideas here. But many of the apps have updated, some have been replaced with better offerings, and a few totally new cool things (Chrome OS! XBMC!) have made their way into this mix.10. Give Your Drive a Custom Icon An...