Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of the technology bosses advising President ObamaUS President Barack Obama has met Silicon Valley bosses, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Apple's Steve Jobs and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt were also present at the private get-together in California. The president had been seeking the views of technology leaders as he works to turn around his country's ailing economy. Mr Obama has said he wants to encourage American businesses to invest more money in innovation. Among those meeting the president were the bosses of Twitter, Yahoo and Oracle.

Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs was in attendance, despite media reports that his health had taken a turn for the worse. US newspaper the National Enquirer published pictures, said to be of Mr Jobs, looking emaciated. He is currently on his third medical leave of absence from Apple since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. Thursday's meeting with the president was a private event, hosted by venture capitalist John Doerr.

Symantec and Disaster Preparedness

Small and medium sized businesses are not taking disaster preparedness for their computers and networks as seriously as they should, according to survey results released by Symantec.

The Symantec 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey found that that most SMBs don't take action to prepare for disasters until after they have experienced loss from downtime, and that this lack of preparation has a significant impact on their customers and their business.
Disaster Plans
Only half (50 percent) of the respondents to the global survey said they already have a plan in place to deal with an outage or disruption to their computer or technology resources. That's up slightly from 47 percent in the 2010 survey, but 14 percent do not have a plan, nor do they have any intention to create one.

Fifty-seven percent of small businesses don't have a plan, compared to 47 percent of medium businesses. Of the respondents who plan to implement a plan in the future, 16 percent plan to do so within 30 days, 34 percent plan to do so between one and three months and 25 percent plan to do so between three and six months. Even though only half of respondents have a plan, 81 percent of all respondents are somewhat/very satisfied with their plans to deal with outages or disruptions, whether formal or informal; indeed, 84 percent state that their computer systems are somewhat/completely protected.

When those who do not have a plan were asked why not, roughly half (52 percent) don't think computer systems are critical to the business. Forty-one percent said that it never occurred to them to put together a plan, and 40 percent said that disaster preparedness is not a priority.

It is alarming that more SMBs do not have plans to help them deal with disasters and keep their computer systems up and running, especially when one considers that 65 percent of SMBs reside in regions that they consider susceptible to natural disasters.

In fact, SMBs experienced a median of six outages in the past year. The top three reasons for downtime include cyber attacks, power outages, employee errors and upgrades, with each occurring a median of once per company in the last year.

Of SMBs with a disaster preparedness plan, half (50 percent) implemented the plan due to either an outage or data loss. Fifty-two percent put together their plans within the last six months. Again, there were some differences according to company size. Thirty-six percent of small businesses with a disaster preparedness plan implemented their plan within the last six months, compared to 58 percent of medium businesses.
Advice from Symantec: Don't Wait Until It's Too Late
It is critical for SMBs to not wait until after a disaster to think about what they should have done to protect their data. Not only is downtime costly from a financial perspective, but it could mean the complete demise of the business. SMBs can't wait until it is too late, and they need to begin mapping out a disaster preparedness plan today. A plan should include identification of key systems and data that is intrinsic to the running of the business. Basically, identify your critical resources.

Symantec also advises SMBs to test their disaster plan frequently. (Only 28 percent of respondents have actually tested their recovery plans.) If frequent testing is not feasible due to resources and bandwidth, SMBs should at least review their disaster preparedness plan on a quarterly basis.

After a disaster hits is the worst time to learn that critical files were not backed up as planned. Regular disaster recovery testing is invaluable. Test your plan anytime anything changes in your environment.
Information Protection
The survey also found that SMB information is not protected. Only half of companies surveyed back up at least 60 percent of their data, and less than half back up their data weekly or more frequently. Only 23 percent back up daily.

Of those surveyed, 31 percent do not back up email, 21 percent do not back up application data and 17 percent do not back up customer data. Respondents also reported that a disaster would cause information loss. Forty-four percent of SMBs said they would lose at least 40 percent of their data in the event of a disaster.
Advice from Symantec: Protect Information Completely
To reduce the risk of losing critical business information, SMBs must implement the appropriate security and backup solutions to archive important files, such as customer records and financial information for the long term. Natural disasters, theft and cyberattacks can all result in data and financial loss, so SMBs need to make sure important files are saved not only on an external hard drive and/or company network, but in a safe, off-site location.
The Consequences of Being Unprepared
Disasters can have a significant financial impact on SMBs. Downtime costs SMBs a median of $12,500 per day. It costs small businesses a median of $3,000 per day and medium businesses a median of $23,000 per day.

Outages also have a considerable effect on SMB customers. SMB customers reported that SMB outages cost them $10,000 per day, and 29 percent said they lost "some" or "a lot of" data as a result of disasters impacting their SMB vendors.

Downtime also causes customers to leave with 54 percent of SMB customer respondents reporting they have switched SMB vendors due to unreliable computing systems, a 12 percent increase compared with last year's survey.

For many SMBs, disasters could also put them out of business. Forty-four percent of SMB customers stated that their SMB vendors have temporarily shut down due to a disaster.
Advice from Symantec: Get Employees Invested in Protection
SMB employees play a key role in helping to prevent downtime and should be educated on computer security best practices and what to do if information is accidentally deleted or cannot easily be found in their files. Since SMBs have few resources, all employees should know how to retrieve the businesses' information in times of disaster.

How To Find Best Domain Names

There was a time when I used to own like 100 domains (most of them I never used) because I was under the impression that those domains have value only later on realizing that they have no value and there is on point in wasting money in renewing them, so I let them go. I have also seen domains being sold for $150k so I can safely say that I know a thing or two of finding perfect domain names for your next site or blog.

These tips are only for finding best and suitable domain names for generic sites, don’t register them thinking you can sell them later for huge profit.

1. Since all the keywords and keyword combination related domains are already taken, you are better of gong with branding. Chose a web 2.0 domain name like mwolk (its already taken) which is very generic so you can use it for anything.

2. The domain name has to be short – 4 character domain names are costly but you can get 5 character domain names for cheap or can register them (I am sure some 5 character domain names are still left). No one likes to type and remember long domain names so avoid them.

3. Get as many vowels as possible – The more vowels you can get like a, e, i, o and u, the better the domain will sound. It is also a good thing to have them at alternate position as it is considered to help in pronunciation.

4. Should be easy to pronounce – This is a must as a domain which is not easy to pronounce can never a great domain name. Avoid characters like j,k, x, y, z, q etc. Also if possible, avoid digits too, they don’t look that good on domain names.

5. Get the .com – unless you are targeting local markets like UK or Australia, always look to have .com domain names. People may say that .org and .net are also good but .com just stands out. Even if you are planning to use .uk or .au or any such tld, still buy .com version of it too so in future no one can steal your brand. The last thing you want is to pay thousands of dollars to pay for .com version of domain just because you tried to save $10 in the beginning.

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and the another trick to find domain is :

1. Keep It Simple
2. Shorter is Better
3. Can You Say The Domain Without Explanation
4. Never Let Someone Else Purchase Your Domain
5. Ask for Advice and Feedback
6. Avoid Hyphenated Domains
7. Avoid Homophones
8. Don’t Use Digit Numbers or Numerals
9. Choose the Right Extension (.com, .net, .org, etc…)
10. Use Keywords for Search Optimization
11. Make It Memorable (and brand-able)
12. Stay Away From “Premium” Domains
13. Look Closely for Embarrassing Words
14. Don’t Use Clever Spelling
15. Choose Company Name and Brand Names
16. Make It Unique
17. Avoid Copyright Infringement (or trademark issues)
18. Use Defensive Misspelling Techniques
19. Protect Your Brand With Extensions
20. Check For Domain Abuse
21. Choose a Reliable Domain Registrar
22. Use Automatic Renewals
23. Use a Domain Generator to Find Available Domains
24. Purchase Your Domain for 10 Years
25. Find a Domain ASAP

Future Chock-Full of Chips

Moore's Law, which posits that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months, also more or less applies to electricity, running water and paper, suggested physicist and author Michio Kaku at the RSA conference on Tuesday. This means, among other things, that over the next several decades, computer chips will wend their way into a multitude of everyday products, right down to the clothes we wear.

Twenty years from now, semiconductor chips will cost a penny apiece and will be in everything -- our clothing, our sunglasses, our contact Increase sales with VerticalResponse. Free trial. lenses and even our toilets -- physicist Michio Kaku told an audience Thursday at the RSA 2011 convention.

They'll revolutionize warfare, manufacturing and the medical field, said Kaku, one of the co-founders of string field theory.

Kaku's talk was based on interviews he conducted with 300 of the world's top scientists about their views of the future. Those interviews have been published in his latest book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100.
This Is Number Four

Moore's Law, which posits that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months, also more or less applies to electricity, running water and paper, Kaku suggested.

Extrapolating this curve out into the future, some computer chips will eventually cost about a penny apiece, Kaku stated. "There will be millions scattered in our clothing, in the environment."

When computer chip prices fall to about a penny, chips will be ubiquitous. They'll be present in our clothing and in our eyeglasses, Kaku remarked.

Embedded chips will give our eyeglasses access to the Internet on the fly, Kaku predicted. Eyeglasses will then double as their owners' home offices or entertainment centers.

"In 10 years, we'll live in a world where we can identify people's faces, see their biographies, see subtitles as they speak in other languages and, if you're an artist, you'll be able to create any sculpture by waving your hands and see it develop," Kaku said.
The Technology of War

The United States military is using a version of smart glasses called "Land Warrior," which Kaku saw at demonstrated at Fort Benning. "It's the Internet of the battlefield -- you'll see friendly troops, enemy troops, everything on your glasses," he told his audience.

Augmented reality will be used to enhance the capability of smart glasses. "You've seen this before in the movies," Kaku said, showing a slide from the film "The Terminator."

The Chinese already have created an augmented reality version of the Summer Palace in Beijing, Kaku stated.

The U.S. Department of Defense began investing in augmented technology back in 2007.

One company, Tanagram, has worked on a DARPA project involving an augmented reality interface for F-35 fighter jets.

Two other companies announced products including augmented reality at the Mobile World Congress, being held in Barcelona, Spain.

Route 66 unveiled a new app for Android earlier this week that incorporates augmented reality. Meanwhile, Travel site TripAdvisor announced Thursday at MWC that it has added a virtual tours feature that uses augmented reality to its iPad app.
More Uses for the Ubiquitous Chip

Paper will be electronic, using organic LED (OLED) technology. "Your cellphone will scroll out paper which can be totally flexible," Kaku said.

The wallpaper of the future will be both flexible and intelligent, and it will consist of hundreds of computers on the wall. "When you want to redecorate your house, you talk to the walls and they'll change to whatever color you want," Kaku said.

Office files will follow people around in the cloud as they move from room to room, or between the home and office, Kaku forecast.

"Today your office is structured around your PC," Kaku said. "Why? The content is more important than your platform."

Cars of the future will drive themselves, Kaku said. "Google is already investing millions of dollars into this technology and predicts that, in eight or nine years, your car will drive itself," he pointed out.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), however, isn't hold too tightly to that time frame.

"We aren't going to put a hard number on when the car will be available on the road," Google spokesperson Jay Nancarrow told TechNewsWorld.

"The technology has made a lot of progress, but there are a lot of other external factors involved with putting cars on the road that make it more difficult to give an estimate," he explained. "The team is hard at work on some of the toughest computer science challenges in their field."
Reinventing Manufacturing

The ubiquity of chips will lead to mass customization, Kaku forecast.

For example, consumers will be able to walk into a store, select an item of clothing they want, and send a message to the manufacturer, who will create that item tailored exactly to them, Kaku said.

This is already happening now, Jake Sorofman, chief marketing officer at rPath, told TechNewsWorld.

"That's what Dell's (Nasdaq: DELL) doing," Sorofman elaborated. "They've outsourced manufacturing and they're just assemblers who configure their products to suit market needs. We see that at Ikea as well."
Eliminating Diseases

All medicine will be reduced to computer science, Kaku said.

"When Isaac Asimov did this in the movie 'Fantastic Voyage,' people laughed," Kaku elaborated. "In the future we'll do this. We've already done this with nanoparticles."

The California Institute of Technology has developed nanoparticles that can home in and destroy individual cancer cells, Kaku said. These have been up to 80 percent effective in trials.

Smart toilets will help eliminate cancer, Kaku suggested. "Your toilet will have DNA chips which can zoom in on individual cancer cells and can tell you if you have cancer," he explained. "It will tell you that there are 100 cancer cells in a colony in your body 10 years before that forms into a tumor."

Google offers a Web-app boost

Google has passed a significant milestone with the release of its first version of Native Client, a software foundation designed to let Web-based applications tap into a person's computer chip.

The software, called Arctic Sea, is available built into Chrome 10, which entered beta testing yesterday. "A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications," product manager Christian Stefansen said of the Native Client release in a blog post today.

Native Client--NaCl for short--is an unusual approach to the challenge of letting people download software over the Web. Web applications today often use JavaScript, an increasingly powerful language but one that still limits a program's performance compared with those running natively on a computer--Skype or Photoshop, for example.

Google's NaCl project lets such native software be downloaded directly from a Web server but includes specific security mechanisms to keep out malicious code. Native Client modules must be written with specially modified tools to restrict use of potentially harmful instructions, and the browser examines the software in advance to ensure it executes only the safe operations. NaCl also confines software to a "sandbox" with limited privileges.

Native Client could let code libraries written in the C programming language be relatively easily adapted for browser-based applications. That could make it easier, for example, to build into Web applications the codecs Skype uses for compressing and decompressing video and audio or for the processor-intensive tasks used in Photoshop's image processing. One company that's committed to Native Client is Unity 3D, whose video-game engine can use NaCl for things like simulating physics.

Why is that important? Because Google is a huge believer in cloud computing, in which the state of an application is stored on a central server on the Internet and a browser acts as a vessel to run it. With Native Client, Google thinks it can get to within just a few percentage points of the performance of ordinary native applications, removing a major impediment to the cloud-computing technology.

That is, as long as Google can convince the rest of the world to adopt it. Fortunately for Google, it's got Chrome as a vehicle to deliver such technology into people's hands--and with more than 10 percent of people on the Net using Chrome, Google has a real foothold. With Native Client, Chrome OS could become significantly more capable, too, and with a variation called PNaCl still in the works, it works on the ARM processors that power virtually all smartphones today. Today Native Client works only on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors.

A major part of Google's recent NaCl work has been rebuilding it to use a new browser plug-in interface called Pepper, or PPAPI. (NaCl is the chemical abbreviation for sodium chloride--table salt--and is paired with Pepper. Get it?) With this release and Chrome 10, NaCl now uses Pepper.

Native Client remains turned off by default for now, since its own interface isn't quite finished, but it can be enabled through Chrome's about:flags mechanism.

One reason Google is pitching NaCl to developers is that it's finished some security work that had been incomplete. An outer sandbox, not just an inner one, is working for additional protection. And an auto-update mechanism lets Google more quickly replace a version if it's found to have a security problem, the company said.

How far NaCl will spread beyond Chrome remains to be seen. But to be truly useful, it needs programmers writing code.

That's quite possible, of course. One indicator of interest came in a draft Firefox road map for 2011. Regarding Native Client support, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's outgoing director of Firefox, had this to say: "Some vendor push here, mostly from Adobe."

Google still has some convincing to do. "I don't think Native Client is going to be a very big deal, but Google does, so we'll see how that plays out," Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said in a 2010 interview.

And to use NaCl, browsers need a design that isolates plug-ins into separate memory compartments. "We aim to support multiple browsers. However, a number of features that we consider requirements for a production-quality system are difficult to implement without help from the browser. Specific examples are an out-of-process plug-in architecture and appropriate interfaces for integrated 3D graphics. We have worked closely with Chromium developers to deliver these features and we would be eager to collaborate with developers from other browsers," Google said on a NaCl FAQ

Native Client has support now for computing, audio, and 2D graphics. In addition, Google reworked NaCl so that programmers need not worry so much about specifying which particular processor NaCl is running on.

For those who want to give it a try, Google offers a few NaCl demos.

Coming up will be support for 3D graphics, local file storage, the Web Sockets technology for fast server-to-browser communication, and peer-to-peer networking, Google said. Some of that doubtless will wait for the second-generation "Baltic Sea" release.

"We are excited to see Native Client progressively evolve into a developer-ready technology," Google said. Next up will be seeing if programmers share the excitement.

Google unveils payment platform

This January 2011 screen image shows the Google logo in Washington, DC. Google unveiled an online payment platform for publishers on Wednesday, a day after Apple launched a subscription service of its own for newspapers, magazines, music and video.

Google unveiled an online payment platform for publishers on Wednesday, a day after Apple launched a subscription service of its own for newspapers, magazines, music and video. Google launched an online payment platform for digital newspapers and magazines on Wednesday, as a subscription service unveiled by Apple a day earlier came under fire for the size of the bite it takes from publishers.

Google will take a 10-percent share of revenue from transactions handled by "Google One Pass," less than the 30 percent charged by Apple for subscriptions to applications sold through the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

The iPad currently dominates the tablet computer market but a number of companies are developing tablets running Google's Android software and the technology giants are also fierce rivals on the smartphone platform front.

The dueling online subscription services are aimed at attracting content producers to their respective mobile devices and come as struggling newspapers and magazines seek to boost revenue from the Web.

Google's new payment system for online content was announced by the Mountain View, California-based company's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a speech at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Google said Google One Pass "is currently intended for periodicals, such as news and magazines, but is a flexible payment system that can be used for many other types of content."

Lee Shirani, director of business product management for Google Commerce, said publishers who opt to use Google One Pass to charge readers for digital content can set their own prices and terms.

"Readers who purchase from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smartphones and websites using a single sign-on with an email and password," Shirani said in a blog post.

"Importantly, the service helps publishers authenticate existing subscribers so that readers don't have to re-subscribe in order to access their content on new devices," Shirani said.

Google said publishers can offer readers a variety of options including full subscriptions or even single articles for purchase.

"With Google One Pass, publishers can customize how and when they charge for content while experimenting with different models to see what works best for them," Google said. "We've been working with publishers for some time now to help them find ways to engage their readers, attract traffic to their sites, and make money online," said Carlo D'Asaro Biondo, Google vice president for Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Google said its launch partners include German publishers Axel Springer AG, Focus Online and Stern.de, France's Le Nouvel Observateur and Spain's Prisa.

Google's US partners are Rust Communications, publisher of the Southeast Missourian newspaper, Media General, which operates 18 television stations and 21 daily newspapers, and Bonnier Corp., publisher of Popular Science.

The Internet search giant said Google One Pass is currently available from publishers in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.

The announcement coincided with criticism of Apple's subscription service for newspapers, magazines, music and video.

While publishers mostly grumbled anonymously, digital music subscription service Rhapsody was one of the few companies to publicly hit out at Apple.

"An Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple, in addition to content fees that we pay to the music labels, publishers and artists, is economically untenable," Rhapsody president Jon Irwin said in a statement.

"The bottom line is we would not be able to offer our service through the iTunes store if subjected to Apple's 30 percent monthly fee vs. a typical 2.5 percent credit card fee," Irwin said, adding that the company would be "determining an appropriate legal and business response."

Forrester research analyst James McQuivey said "taking a 30 percent toll amounts to a massive increase in the cost basis of a content business that will kill it.

"I staunchly defend Apple's right to price its products and services any way it wants," McQuivey said. "But it is shortsighted.

"Because now Apple has given every publisher, producer, and distributor in the business a reason to actively pursue alternatives to the elegant apps that Apple had hitherto taught us to depend on," he said.

Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Boston's Northeastern University, said Apple's terms "seem so onerous that I just don't think that there's going to be many publications adopting this.

Scareware Scam

Scammers are apparently using Google's URL shortening service, goo.gl, to distribute bogus links. The links take users to a scareware sight that purports to find malicious software on the user's computer, then offers to sell the user an AV product to solve the supposed problem. URL shorteners are commonly used in Twitter, but they can disguise a malicious link's true nature.Twitter has been hit by fast-spreading spam using Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) goo.gl URL shortening service.

The attack sends malicious links that take recipients clicking on them to a website hosting the "Security Shield" antivirus software program.

When users land on that site, they are essentially tricked into downloading and paying for the Security Shield application.

Twitter is resetting the passwords of accounts that are spreading the malicious link.
The Anatomy of the Fake AV Attack

The attackers send out tweets containing a link from the goo.gl shortened link service. This service and others like it compress long URLs into shorter ones, making them easier to fit into services like Twitter, which places a strict limit on the number of characters each tweet may contain. However, the services can also disguise the true nature of a link by hiding its actual URL.

Anyone clicking on the link is taken through two bounces to a website hosting the "Security Shield" fake antivirus program. Visitors are told they have suspicious applications running on their PCs and are urged to run a scan.

The scan shows the victim's PC is infected, and the website then asks the user to download and pay for the Security Shield application.

There's some uncertainty as to how the attacks were launched in the first place.

"It probably began by phishing of some sort," Adam Wosotowsky, principal engineer at McAfee Labs, told TechNewsWorld. "Possibly a social media worm like Koobface."

Variants of the Koobface worm have been used to attack Twitter for some time. This worm was initially targeted at Facebook, which it has attacked repeatedly over the years.

"It's not a worm," Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, told TechNewsWorld. "It's a spam campaign that points to malicious software."

The attack could have occurred because users were using the same passwords on another website that was compromised, Cluley said.
Dynamite Comes in Small Packages

This fake AV attack is the latest in a series of attacks hitting Twitter in which shortened URLs were used.

In December, a Twitter worm using the goo.gl URL shortening service hit Twitter. In that attack, victims were reportedly first redirected to the compromised website of a French furniture company before being redirected to other domains.

In February of 2010, Twitter users were flooded with short URLs prefaced with the message "This you???" that led them to a fake Twitter login page, according to Andrew Brandt, a member of Webroot's threat research team.

"Twitter almost always involves shortened URLs -- whether they be good or bad," Sophos' Cluley said. "Shortened URLs can, of course, obscure from the unwary user the eventual destination that they will be taken to."

In November, a Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) blog post warned that hackers were substituting legitimate shortened URLs included in tweets with different ones pointing to malicious websites after scanning the Twitter homepage to pick the most trendy topics.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

It's not as if people are oblivious to the danger posed by shortened URLs.

At least as early as 2009, security Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 Whitepaper from CyberSource experts were warning about the danger of URL shortening.

In September, McAfee launched a secure short URL service.

In December, University of Tulsa computer science student Ben Schmidt created his own URL shortening service, d0z.me, which he dubbed "The Evil URL Shortener," that doubles as a weapon for issuing distributed denial-of-service attacks as a proof-of-concept project.

McAfee Labs warned in its threat predictions for 2011 that social media sites with URL-shortening services will lead all other such sites in terms of cybercriminal activity.

"Shortened URLs can be a danger sign," David Harley, an ESET senior research fellow, told TechNewsWorld. "Black hats do use them to hide the real destination in a number of contexts."

Black hats are malicious hackers.

However, it's not feasible to ban shortened URLs outright.

"Shortened URL sites are not 100 percent malicious, so blocking the domain outright can cause false positives, which researchers generally try to avoid," McAfee's Wosotowsky pointed out. "Goo.gl is an example of a site that's associated with Google, which might frown upon blocking the domain. This allows spammers to continually abuse the site."

Anonymous Swarms

A security company has felt the wrath of Anonymous after its CEO told a newspaper he had discovered personal information about individuals he believes are high-ranking members of the hacktivist group. In retaliation, the group disabled the company's website, published thousands of its internal emails and posted an online rebuke to the executive's claims.Anonymous, an amorphous group of cyberactivists, has set its sights on HBGary Federal, a company claiming to provide security Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 Whitepaper from CyberSource expertise to the United States' federal government.

The group took down HBGary Federal's websites and posted a message denouncing the company online Create an online store today -- 30 day free trial. Click here to learn more..

Anonymous' attack followed statements by Aaron Barr, HBGary Federal's CEO, that the company had collected information on the group's main leaders.

Anonymous has previously attacked the websites of governments and firms that opposed or took action against WikiLeaks for publishing more than 250,000 U.S. government cables on the Internet.

HBGary Federal did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
HBGary's Misstep

During an interview the Financial Times published last week, Barr claimed to have put together information about various high-ranking members of Anonymous through various means, including Facebook profiles.

Barr did this to demonstrate the security risks to organizations from social media and networking, he claimed.

In the interview, he also identified the nicknames and locations of a few individuals he believed to be top members of Anonymous.

Giving an interview to the Financial Times was probably a mistake, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

"One thing you quickly learn as a security company is that you don't go out and bait people," Enderle said. "You don't go out and seek news coverage or it will backfire on you," he added.

"That's the risk you take any time you challenge hackers," Mandeep Khera, chief marketing Increase sales with VerticalResponse. Free trial. officer at Cenzic, told TechNewsWorld. "They'll always find a way to get in."
Anonymous' Reaction

In addition to hijacking HBGary Federal's domain, Anonymous posted a message on the company's website.

The message also included an excerpt from what it claims is one of Barr's emails in which he essentially said his actions were about publicizing HBGary Federal's expertise.

Anonymous' message states the information Barr discovered is publicly available on its IRC networks, and it implies that Barr meant to sell his research to the FBI. The message claims Anonymous has in fact already sent the information to the FBI itself.

The cyberactivist group also posted 66,000 of HBGary Federal's corporate emails onto the Web.

Members of the group are being targeted by various governments. The British authorities have reportedly arrested five people they claim are members of Anonymous, and the U.S. authorities are claimed to have carried out 40 court-authorized searches in connection with their investigation into Anonymous.
What Is HBGary Federal?

HBGary Federal was the U.S. government cybersecurity services arm of HBGary. It was spun off in December of 2009.

HBGary CEO and Founder Greg Hoglund hired cybersecurity experts Aaron Barr and Ted Vera as the spin-off's CEO and COO, respectively. Both are former employees of Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC).

Barr, whose interview triggered the retaliation from Anonymous, reportedly served as the director of technology for the cybersecurity and signal intelligence business unit in Northrop Grumman's Intelligence Systems Division.

HBGary Federal's targeted customers included the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community and other government agencies.
Breaking Into HBGary Federal

Anonymous apparently hacked into HBGary Federal by first hacking a tech support server, then compromising an insecure Web server to get at the company's emails, Hoglund told the Financial Times.

Finding and getting into a relatively insecure server in order to penetrate the enterprise network is a pretty standard hacking technique. Shouldn't a company that specializes in security perhaps have all its servers secured?

"If you're in the security business you probably need to make sure your own stuff is secure," Enderle said. "But often it's a case of the cobbler's children not having new shoes -- a company puts out new technology but that technology isn't necessarily applied to its own operations."

That's because the workings of many security companies' operations and in-house IT are kept separate, Enderle elaborated.

"The general security posture across the industry is very low right now," Cenzic's Khera said. "Most companies, for example, are testing only a fraction of their Web applications for security."

However, it might not be feasible to harden all a company's systems, even if that company specializes in security, suggested Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET.

"Even security companies have budgets and resource limitations," Abrams told TechNewsWorld. "Security is all about managing risk and, in weighing how secure the least important servers need to be, public relations should be part of the risk assessment for a security company."

Malware Is on the Move

Mobile operating systems are the new favorite target of malware, and social engineering remains the favorite old standby for launching attacks. Tried-and-true preventive care works best. "Never give information via email, smartphone or on the Web, and verify independently before you click on any unknown text or email message, game, application or security update," advises UVa security expert Karen McDowell.Cybercriminals are following innocent consumers away from email Increase sales with VerticalResponse. Free trial. and toward more popular, smartphone-style platforms, McAfee reported Tuesday.

"New mobile malware in 2010 increased by 46 percent compared with 2009," noted McAfee spokesperson Joris Evers.

Among the likeliest targets in 2010, Symbian and Android platforms were splattered by Trojans and bots with names like "SymbOS/Zitmo.A" and "Android/Geinimi."

"Consumers need to realize that mobiles, whether smartphone or tablet, are mini computers," said David Gorodyansky, CEO of AnchorFree. "This means all the vulnerabilities of a computer exist, often with a less-protected OS."

"From a hacker's point of view, the large user base created by wide scale adoption of iOS (iPhone) and Android will increasingly make these platforms a target, and I definitely expect to see some high-profile mobile attacks in the coming year," Cenzic CMO Mandeep Khera told TechNewsWorld.

"Smartphone access should be a concern to corporations that don't want employees accessing company secrets via unsecured mobile networks," Khera told TechNewsWorld. "For consumers, as banks and e-commerce sites deploy apps that give customers unprecedented access to their bank accounts, security Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 Whitepaper from CyberSource becomes more important than ever."

Unlike their mobile partners in crime, spam bots -- including Bredolab, Lethic, Xarvester, and parts of the Zeus botnet -- have gone dormant in droves this year,.

"Concurrently, spam accounted for 80 percent of total email traffic in Q4 2010, the lowest point since the first quarter of 2007," McAfee's Evers told TechNewsWorld.
The Bot Pack

Like a flu pandemic, botnet infections were particularly acute in Q4 2010, with Rustock, Cutwail and Bobax leading the bot pack. Social media sites, like mosquitoes, often acted as disease vectors.

"Whether we are using smartphones or computers, social engineering attacks are still the primary attack vector, and a major vector in the spread of botnet infections," University of Virginia information security analyst Karen McDowell, PhD, GCIH, told TechNewsWorld.

McAfee advises tablet and smartphone users to watch out for Zeus-Murofet, Conficker, and Koobface botnets specifically, and more generally, phishing URLs from the IRS, gift cards, rewards accounts, and social networking accounts.

Phishing vectors spread bot diseases when users click on phishing emails, answer phishing phone calls, or click on text messages that "appear to come from your carrier," McDowell explained, adding that tried-and-true preventive care works best. "Never give information via email, smartphone or on the Web, and verify independently before you click on any unknown text or email message, game, application or security update."

More preventive options: "Don't log onto unprotected WiFi, and use a VPN to encrypt and secure your browsing, which acts as a secure, encrypted tunnel for your communications," AnchorFree's Gorodyansky told TechNewsWorld.
Malware's Mantra

Twenty million new pieces of malware -- nearly 55,000 new malware threats every day -- plastered the cybersphere in 2010, migrating toward smartphones because "cybercriminals are keeping tabs on what's popular and what will have the biggest impact from the smallest effort," said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs.

"Think globally, act locally" might be malware's new mantra, with threats that "now tend to match the types of users, habits and events that are specific to a region," McAfee's Evers added. Global criminal favorites include AutoRun malware such as Generic!atr; banking Trojans and downloaders such as PWS or Generic.dx; and Web-based exploits such as StartPage and Exploit-MS04-028, the McAfee report claims.

To avoid malware, treat search terms and Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) products with extra care, McAfee advises. Of the top 100 search results, 51 percent led to malicious sites. And throughout 2010, malware developers exploited weaknesses in Flash and PDF, a trend McAfee sees continuing.

Despite the advice, pests will persist, driven to infect by "a general lack of awareness towards the need for security," Gorodyansky explained.

"This is the same as it was for computers, when most people thought they were completely safe once they installed an antivirus program," he recalled.

"It really doesn't matter what type of device is used -- the steps to secure a Web application haven't changed," Sam Shelby, e-government coordinator for the City of Columbia, Missouri, told TechNewsWorld. "You can never trust input: always authenticate, validate and sanitize input data."

Google makes Web search more social

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results.

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results. The move is an expansion of "Google Social Search," which the Internet giant introduced in 2009.

Instead of featuring at the bottom of a page of search results, relevant posts from the social media accounts of a user's friends are now integrated into the list of results themselves.

A Google search for camping, for example, may bring up a Twitter post by a friend about hiking trails or a link to campsite pictures uploaded by a friend to Flickr.

"Relevance isn't just about pages -- it's also about relationships," Google product management director Mike Cassidy and product manager Matthew Kulick said in a blog post.

"Today we’re taking another step forward -- enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they're publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website," they said.

"This means you'll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they've shared or created," they added.

Social search will only be available to users who have a Google account.

Google account holders will also have the option of linking their social media accounts to their Google profiles.

Mindful of potential privacy concerns, Cassidy and Kulick said: "The new setting enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile."

Google said the new social search feature is only available in English for the moment.

It will also not display any input from the largest social network of them all -- Facebook -- which has previously declined to share data with Google.

Make WiFi Noise To Breakthrough

A team of Stanford researchers have come up with "full duplex" radios that can talk and listen at the same time -- a feat that enables communications simultaneity over WiFi networks. Cutting through existing WiFi congestion could double network speeds and capacities, encourage ambitious new projects -- such as citywide WiFi -- and even help prevent plane crashes.Ten-4. Back to you. Over.

On a radio or over the TV airwaves, speakers have to rely on back-and-forth communications because radio traffic only flows in one direction at a time on a frequency. Or so said scientific conventional wisdom, until Stanford researchers developed so-called "full duplex" radios that can send and receive signals at the same time. Twice as fast as existing radio devices, the new technology promises less congested, more efficient networks.

"Textbooks say you can't do it," said the technology's principal investigator Philip Levis, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering at Stanford. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed."

Dreams of supercharged WiFi connections are already dancing.

"Full-duplex technology like this could literally double the speed of WiFi connections almost overnight," said Jason Katz, founder and CEO of instant messaging and wireless video technology provider Paltalk.com. "This could greatly enhance each and every WiFi user's Internet experience."
WiFi Workaround

Used to telephones and cellular phones, most people don't think about the inability to communicate simultaneously on radio. Perhaps they should, because cellphones route around the problem with expensive technologies whose costs get passed along to consumers -- and make similar fixes unfeasible for wireless networks that often come free, including WiFi.

The idea for communications simultaneity came virtually simultaneously among three Stanford electrical engineering graduate students -- Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain and Kannan Srinivasan.

They wanted to answer this question: "What if radios could do the same thing our brains do when we listen and talk simultaneously: screen out the sound of our own voice?" Stanford science writer Sandeep Ravindran explained.

Simultaneous talk on a radio can build a Tower of Babel in no time.

"If both people are shouting at the same time, neither of them will hear the other," Levis told TechNewsWorld.

With help from Levis and Sachin Katti, an assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, the grad students had to overcome an intrinsic flaw in radio communications. That is, a radio's own transmissions -- billions of times stronger than anything it might pick up from another radio -- overwhelm incoming signals, Levis explained.

"It's like trying to hear a whisper while you are shouting," he said. Filtering out the noise became the basis for the new solution, which Paltalk's Katz said should encourage further innovations.

"I would think enabling this technology would encourage more WiFi projects designed to blanket large areas such as cities," he told TechNewsWorld. "Networks should be far less congested, and cities would greatly benefit."
Double Time

Sending and receiving signals simultaneously doubles the amount of information sent, Levis said, which means faster home or office networks -- and a boost to air traffic controllers, a high pressure bunch often beleaguered by the demands of skyward communication critical to safety.

Presently, if two aircraft try to call the control tower at the same time on the same frequency, neither will get through. Such blocked transmissions have caused aircraft collisions, Levis said, a problem the new approach would resolve.

Provisional patent in hand, the Stanford group is trying to increase both transmission strength and distance, necessary before the technology is WiFi-ready.

With an instant messaging client that allows users to share video, audio and text with up to 10 people at any time for free, the thought of faster, cheaper networks that allow more people to communicate at once impresses Paltalk's Katz.

However, where the Stanford innovation goes from here depends "largely on how the inventors decide to commercialize it," he explained. "Regardless, it should cause a new cycle of hardware purchasing to enable the technology."

How to check password hacked

A security researcher today provided a way for users to see whether their e-mail addresses and passwords were among the 1.3 million compromised in a hack of Gawker Media's sites.

HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and the creator of the open source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit, came up with a down-and-dirty way for users to search the list of purloined account information without having to download the massive 487MB file from the Internet.

On Sunday, Gawker, which operates several popular technology sites, including Gizmodo and Lifehacker, confirmed that its servers had been hacked, and that hundreds of thousands of registered users' email addresses and passwords had been accessed. A group calling itself "Gnosis" claimed credit for the attack, and said it had obtained more than 1.3 million accounts.

Gawker apologised for the breach, and urged users to change their passwords. If that password was used for accessing other sites, Gawker recommended that users change it for those destinations as well.

"It's best to assume that your username and password were included among the leaked data," Gawker said in an FAQ it posted on the Lifehacker site.

Moore had a better idea, and has assembled a way for people to check whether their account, including their password, has been compromised.

In an email to Computerworld Monday, Moore spelled out the technique:

Step 1: Go to http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/, enter an email address in the 'Input' field, click the 'MD5' button, then copy the hash from the 'Result' field.

Step 2: Go to http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?dsrcid=350662, click 'Show Options,' then paste the already-obtained hash in the field to the right of the '=' symbol. Change the left-most field to 'MD5.' Click 'Apply.'
If the email address is among those compromised, the search will show a result.

Although Gawker said it encrypted users' passwords, some passwords have already been decrypted by Gnosis.

Moore used MD5 hashes of the email addresses in the list he posted as a Google Fusion Table so users could check whether their accounts had been compromised without exposing the addresses a second time.

Fecebook With HTTPS Connections

How important is your Facebook account? Do you consider it as important as, say, your bank account? If you happen to feel this way about Facebook, then you'll like the latest news regarding the social network service.

Earlier this week, Facebook rolled out a new feature which allows users to connect with a HTTPS connection.

What is a HTTPS connection?

Basically it's an encrypted link, which is very similar to what most banks provide their customers. The connection type will be able to curb the problems with "sidejacking". Which is the act of cracking into connections over open Wi-Fi networks.

Considering many people keep up with their social networking in public places, this could be a huge privacy move for some users. For those who travel on a consistent basis, this is a huge improvement.

This security feature is added to a long list of updates Facebook has rolled out recently. With one such featured being the "social authentication" feature. This makes it so users have to verify photos of their friends in order to verify their account status.

It's perhaps coincidence, or maybe not, that this feature has released the day after an API error was used to hack into Mark Zuckerberg's account page. The error has been patched, alongside with the release of the HTTPS feature.

The update has also released a day before the Data Privacy Day. Which is an international time to boost awareness for data privacy.

With HTTPS, Facebook continues to try and improve its security image. Many people have criticized them through the years for not protecting users' security and privacy enough. This update is certainly taking a step in the right direction to help boost their image.

internet explorer can't better

The time has come to dump Internet Explorer. I know, I know – you may have heard the same thing before from those that think it’s cool to hate Microsoft; but I’m not one of those guys. I’m actually an MCSE and I happen to like quite a few of Microsoft’s products. Rather than lump me into the Microsoft-basher category, consider for a moment why you use the browser you use, and humor me by entertaining the notion – if even for a second – that switching to another might be worth your while.

My argument is simple: the benefits of using IE are too few – and the faults too great – to put off the adoption of an alternative any longer.

Security

Since information security is my hobby/job/obsession, this particular topic is near and dear to my heart. Just about everyone reading this has seen computers that have been beaten down with spyware – the evil junk that hijacks IE and renders a system virtually useless. How many times have you been called to a family member’s house to clean up their system? Or had to call your techie friend to come clean yours? It’s often quite awkward – the system slows to a crawl and every other mouse click conjures up some species of perverse, obscene image. What most people don’t realize, however, is that there is a very simple and powerful way to defend your system (and/or the systems of your loved ones) in one fell swoop.

Don’t use Internet Explorer.

What makes other browsers better than IE at protecting vs. spyware and other attacks? Well, it’s simple really – most other browsers don’t make it so easy to install malicious software on your system without you knowing about it. IE makes it relatively trivial through two features called ActiveX and Active Scripting. These technologies were designed specifically for the purpose of giving Web sites more control over a user’s computer. Unfortunately, as we have seen with exploit after exploit – that’s not always a good thing.

In addition to the spyware issues, IE in general has had a terrible track record when it comes to all types of serious security issues. For years now, it’s seemed like every time you turn around there is a new way to have your computer taken over via Internet Explorer. Put “internet explorer” and “allow an attacker to execute commands” (with the quotes) into Google and you’ll see what I mean.

In IE’s defense, many anti-Microsoft types will claim that it’s not possible to lock down IE at all. This is not true. It is possible – but if and only if you have a fair amount of technical know-how on the subject, and the time to do it. My personal view, however, is that tools such as Internet browsers should not require expertise and configuration time to be able to use them safely.

Standards

This is likely to get me in some hot water with my fellow security enthusiasts, but I find this issue to be of even more concern than that of IE’s security. The Internet works for one simple reason – everything at its core has been built on agreements that bind it together. Whether a computer is connected from California or Sri Lanka, it’s going to speak the same language and obey the same rules – the rules defined by standards. If this weren’t the case there would be no Internet at all. These agreements are forged by a body of people whose goal is nothing short of designing a better and more efficient Internet for everyone. Microsoft, for some odd reason, seems bent on breaking stride with these agreed-upon standards. Case in point: the next time you’re in a bookstore, head over to the technology section and pick up a book on XHTML or CSS. These are two major Web standards that deal with how Web pages are displayed to users, and within any book on the subjects you will find one common theme:

The absolute worst browser when it comes to supporting the standards is Internet Explorer.

Page after page in these books will reveal features supported in other browsers, but not in IE. Ask yourself why a company would choose not to support standards that benefit everyone? The way I see it, it’s for precisely one of two reasons – either they are unable to, or they don’t want to. Given the fact that they are a multi-billion dollar company (one of the richest on the planet), I can’t help but lean toward the second option. Without going into too much detail (See Longhorn), they have their own plans, and those plans involve implementing their own standard and forcing it upon the world. Call me a geek/hippie, but the idea of a multi-billion dollar corporation snubbing its nose at agreed-upon standards is nothing short of infuriating.

Options

Lucky for us, we have alternatives. The good news is that the alternative browsers are actually as good or better than IE. There are many out there, but in my opinion the Mozilla products are the best. I personally prefer and recommend Mozilla Firefox. Not only does it keep your browsing sessions a lot more secure and spyware-free, but it also supports the standards religiously and has a wide range of powerful features. Arguably the biggest benefit to using a Mozilla-based product is something called tabbed browsing. What this allows you to do is have multiple pages open within a single browser window. Rather than going from window to window in the taskbar, you can simply switch between clearly visible tabs, all within the same view. You can even do this and many other commands via the keyboard if you are into that sort of thing.

Using Firefox will not require any major shift in your daily browsing habits. It’ll import your favorites automatically, and you can benefit from the improved security starting the first time you open it. With the popup blocking enabled, you can breath quite a bit easier when browsing to unknown sites. Attempts to install garbage on your system that could have easily succeeded if you were using IE will simply be ignored by Firefox. Plus, the whole time you’re browsing you’ll know that you are doing your part to keep the soul of the Internet alive by choosing to use a browser whose developers actually care about standards.

Of course, I still use IE. (pause for effect) …it’s how I get my Windows security updates. : Seriously though – Windows Update is a must, and it only works in IE, so that in itself is a good reason to fire up IE once in a while. Aside from Windows Update though, there is still the occasional site that I go to that doesn’t look right in any other browser. Those sites, by the way, are all the more reason to not use IE. They weren’t written according to the standards, and they look bad in any browser other than IE as a result of that fact. Using IE all the time just because the occasional site is designed so poorly as to look like crap in other browsers is utterly bad form. I implore you not to give into this temptation.

Wrapping It Up

So, in closing, I leave you with two thoughts:

1. Due to the combination of ActiveX, scripting, and its integration with the Windows operating system, Internet Explorer is more vulnerable to attack than many other browsers.
2. The designers of Internet Explorer have purposely turned their back on the standards designed to benefit the Internet as a whole. They have done this for years, continue to do it today, and appear to have nothing but their own interests at heart.

I ask that you consider these points and pull down a copy of Firefox, Opera, or another alternative browser. Run it for a week and see how it feels. As mentioned above, I personally recommend Firefox due to its excellent development team and large user base. Once you have had some time to get to know your new onramp to the Web, I think you’ll find that you’ll wish you had switched sooner. No longer will you have to worry about garbage clogging up your system because of your browser, or having to make a mad rush for a patch every time an IE vulnerability is released.

Finally, and most importantly – spread the word. It’s time now for us to put alternative browsers on the map and let it be known that we are aware of our choices. We need not settle for what we are being fed when there are better, more secure alternatives out there.

Anti Sosial Of Sosial Media

Portland, People walking by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows surrounding Cristin Norine could be excused for thinking that she is working in an office alone or lives in a ground-level apartment in dire need of drapes.

She does not look like a prisoner.

But for 30 days that's exactly what Norine is. Her "cell" is a large storefront that sat unrented for months until the owner decided to let artists use it as a gallery so it wouldn't look so empty.


Norine has moved in donated furniture, exercise equipment and a large-screen computer with a projector overhead so everyone walking by can see as she tweets, updates her Facebook page and Skypes.

During her stay no one comes in and Norine never goes outside. Her only contact with other people is through technology.

In that regard, Norine says she is not that different from anyone else.

"We think we are being social on these gadgets," she said. "And it can be a really great thing when people live in different states, but when you are at dinner or you are trying to have a conversation and you are being distracted by these other things. Or maybe you are just not going out as much because you are staying home and are online."

Usually a TV and photography production manager based in Los Angeles, California, Norine ended up in her own personal fishbowl in Portland after a chance meeting with Josh Elliott.
Elliott worked in photography in Oregon and the two realized they shared a similar curiosity about the effects that the barrage of new technologies are having on people.

Elliott knew about the available storefront and almost overnight, Norine moved in.

The Public Isolation Project was born.

As she literally X's off the 30 days she is spending cut off from the world, Norine chronicles her experience through her blog http://www.publicisolationproject.com/.

On the other side of the glass, Elliott is filming a documentary on their collaboration.

They are not anti-technology, Elliott says, just hoping to inspire more conversation about how everything from the internet to iPads are shaping people's lives.

"We are accessible 24/7," Elliott says. "Having a cell phone in your pocket you can be called or texted or video chatted at any point. With Facebook you are updating all time. You have friends on Facebook that you have never met, and they know more about what's going on in your life than your mother does who is not on Facebook."

Norine puts herself out there in a way that would make the most avid Twitterer or Facebook addict suffer an attack of shyness.

She eats, exercises and sleeps in full view of a busy Portland street. With a bathroom as her only private area, she is on almost constant display.

Norine's exhibitionism is extreme but hardly unique. Last month, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry held a prize for a contestant to move to the museum for a month and become a living exhibit. Some 1,500 people applied.

In 2004, a Malaysian woman set a record for enduring 32 days in a glass box with hundreds of scorpions as company. In 2000, an actress living in a glass house in Chile inspired protests after taking public showers.

Elliott says the near total lack of privacy takes a toll on Norine.
"Even on a Sunday when she just wants to take a break from this and have a cup of coffee," he said, "There's people coming up and knocking on the window. She just doesn't have any time for herself and I think that's hard."

Norine admits she didn't think she would make it past two weeks and has what she calls "the bad days."

On day 16 of her blog she writes, "Went to bed before 9 p.m. I wasn't feeling well and was too tired to write. ... I could really use some fresh air."

But she says having a routine has made the experiment more bearable.

"I get up, I make myself coffee and breakfast and get ready." Norine says. "Some days I'll be working out. Then I get on the computer and do my work -- I try to take a lunch break. I even have people who will come and have lunch with me on the other side of the window."

Norine e-mails and Skypes and chats online with anyone who wants to know more about her and the project. Until, she says, the overload sets in.

"I'll realize I need to take a break," Norine says. "And I'll go and do something that doesn't have to do with the computer and I can't turn it off. I still hear those dings and I get drawn back to the computer. I definitely have noticed since I have been here that I am addicted!"

The project ends on December 1 and Norine says she yearns for human interaction, a good meal and to hear live music.

Even if Norine can't wait to leave her self-imposed prison, she and the project have changed the surrounding neighborhood.

People who walk by her every day on their way to work stop for a few brief seconds to wave hello.

Day laborers awaiting work across the street watch her moving around the living space as if it were a favorite soap opera.

New friends pop by and hold notes against the window.

A woman who only gives her name as Debra watches Norine intently for several minutes before saying, "I know what it's like: I have an infant and I get stuck in my house all the time and I find myself so hungry for adult conversation."

James Bond Bunker

Amazon dumped the controversial site WikiLeaks from its computer servers on Wednesday.

But WikiLeaks, which is known for publishing state secrets, apparently has found a new home for its files: A Cold War bunker, inside a Swedish mountain, that's been described as fit for a "James Bond" movie.

A company called Bahnhof is hosting the WikiLeaks site from a literal cave inside White Mountain, near Stockholm, Sweden, according to news reports from Forbes, The Associated Press, and the Norwegian news website VG Nett.

The MIT Technology Review, where we spotted this story, describes the situation this way:

"If Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is trying to turn himself into a Bond villain, he's succeeded: the ongoing distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks has forced his minions to move the site to a fortified data center encased in a cold war-era, nuke-proof bunker encased in bedrock. Really."

Forbes has further details about the storage site:

"That data center will store Wikileaks' data 30 meters below ground inside a Cold-War-era nuclear bunker carved out of a large rock hill in downtown Stockholm. The server farm has a single entrance and is outfitted by half-meter thick metal doors and backup generators pulled from German submarines --fitting safeguards, perhaps."
What is WikiLeaks? How it works

There are YouTube videos about the bunker, photos on Flickr, and a page on Bahnhof's website dedicated to the White Mountain site. (You may have to translate that page from Swedish to figure it out, but there are photos there, too).

One video, from a group called Data Center Pulse, describes the center as one of the coolest on earth and "fit for a James Bond villain." A man who describes himself as Bahnhof's CEO in the video says that the inspiration for the center actually was "science fiction and James Bond movies."

Bahnhof did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages left by CNN.

Embassy cable tells of American's escape

The tens of thousands of diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and released Sunday are full of policy discussions and geo-strategic issues -- but they also tell some fascinating human stories.

One such cable, sent from the American embassy in Turkey last year, tells of an elderly U.S. citizen's escape from neighboring Iran -- on a horse.

The cable, sent on February 11, 2009, says that 75-year old Hossein Ghanbarzadeh Vahedi had been refused permission to leave Iran to return to the United States after visiting relatives the previous year.

Vahedi -- a dentist from Los Angeles, California -- had traveled to Tehran in early May 2008 and spent four weeks with family and friends without incident.

But at Tehran airport, as he prepared to return home, his passport was confiscated.

"Thus began a seven-month ordeal in which Vahedi appeared almost daily at the court to request that his passport be returned," the cable continued.

Vahedi was born in Iran but left after 1979's Iranian Revolution and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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* WikiLeaks.org
* Iran

As he became increasingly pessimistic about getting his passport back, Vahedi considered options for slipping out of Iran, including crossing into Iraq and smuggling himself onto a ship crossing the Gulf.

In the end, he decided on the mountainous trek into Turkey.

"In spite of temperatures hovering around zero degrees Fahrenheit," the cable says, "Vahedi chose the early part of January because it coincided with the Shia commemoration of Ashura and he thought it likely the police would be more preoccupied."

On January 7, 2009 Vahedi began his odyssey -- first by bus to the city of Urmia and then with a driver into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. There he met two men with a horse who would escort him to the Turkish border.

According to Vahedi's account, related in the cable, he "did not have clothing appropriate for the weather and had a very difficult time with the cold. As an inexperienced rider hours into the climb Vahedi lost his concentration and fell off the horse tumbling into the woods."

The horse appeared to know exactly where it was going, and was often ahead of his guides, Vahedi later told U.S. officials. He speculated that it might have been used on the route many times before to smuggle drugs across the border.

After a fourteen-hour trek, he and his guides were met at the Turkish border by another man, who took him to catch a bus for the ten-hour journey to Ankara. The cable says he arrived at the U.S. Embassy's consular section with some aches and pains but was otherwise in good health. Altogether, Vahedi told U.S. officials, he had paid his guides $7,500.

As for why his passport was confiscated, Vahedi said one reason might have been extortion. According to the cable, "it was made clear to him informally by the authorities at the court that if he paid a $150,000 fine, the process would move more quickly."

Vahedi also suggested to US diplomats that the Iranian authorities may have been unhappy about two pop groups of expatriate Iranians represented by his sons. The cable notes: "According to Vahedi, while the singers are simply Persian pop singers, they have gotten crowds riled up with occasional anti-regime rhetoric."

virus in the beginning

From the Beginning viruses are created is for the use of games, so games that used to be used together as in a network,
but it was a virus that was originally created by John Von Neuman's work out of control.
Virus initially ditujuakan for this game is not spread control and damage the existing network system.
So in essence, the virus is not a bad program,
but as technology advances a lot of certain parties who use viruses to damage something.
The virus factors are:

1. Business Interests
2. Vengeance
3. Want to be famous.
5. Broken Heart.
6. Etc..

For the future development must extra protect about this, so as not to cause unwanted loss in many countries, users of the Internet network.

Google gets OK to delete Street View Wi-Fi data

NEWS Google has been given the go-ahead by the Information Commissioner's Office to delete the data it collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as part of its Street View operation.

Over the past year, the search and advertising giant has drawn criticism from privacy campaigners and come under investigation by national data protection authorities for the harvesting of data, which may have included passwords and login details. Street View cars obtained and stored information from home and other Wi-Fi networks while driving around neighbourhoods taking images for Google Maps.

"I welcome the fact that the Wi-Fi payload data that should never have been collected in the first place can, at last, be deleted," information commissioner Christopher Graham said in a statement on Friday.
Google said it intends to erase the data as soon as possible. It told ZDNet UK that it is not subject to any outstanding legal proceedings in the UK over the data harvesting.

On Friday, the ICO said that Google had signed an undertaking to train staff and engineers on the use and handling of data. Engineering project leaders will have to maintain a privacy design document that will become general practice for Google, said the ICO. In nine months' time, Google will arrange a consensual audit with the ICO in the UK.

In November, the ICO found Google to have been in significant breach of UK data laws, after the company admitted that it had collected personal details in a blog post. The ICO, which has the power to fine companies up to £500,000 for data-protection breaches, said that it would not fine Google, as it would be difficult to prove the company had done any substantial harm.

The ruling represented a U-turn for the privacy body. In May, it gave Google permission to delete the 'payload' data it had intercepted, but the deletion was prevented after campaign group Privacy International lodged a complaint with the Metropolitan Police. In July, an ICO investigation concluded that Google had collected "no meaningful details", leading the Metropolitan Police to drop its own enquiry.

Privacy International campaigner Alex Hanff called for the ICO to improve its approach to such issues. "The ICO needs to be sorted out in a fundamental way," said Hanff. "They are not making routine investigations of companies, and they are not developing forensic investigation routines."

The ICO should be given more powers and expertise to investigate the organisations it suspects of breaching data protection law, according to Open Rights Group director Jim Killock. "The ICO's hand needs to be strengthened," Killock said. "The ICO has not generally been an organisation with a lot of technical expertise. It's quite possible that the ICO investigation into Google could have been more thorough."

Salesforce names Rangaswami chief scientist

JP Rangaswami, the former chief scientist at BT, will take the same position at Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com said today that Rangaswami will contribute to the company's product strategy and be an evangelist for cloud computing around the globe. Rangaswami will focus on European customers and preaching real-time collaboration.

Rangaswami is a veteran of multinational companies and his experience at BT should help Salesforce.com garner a larger enterprise footprint. Rangaswami has been a chief information officer as well being a key player in start-ups. Rangaswami was behind the Ribbit effort at BT.

Read more of "Salesforce names JP Rangaswami chief scientist" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.