Hacking and Anonymous surfing

I have often recommended file-scanning services like VirusTotal and Jotti, which allow visitors to upload a suspicious file and scan it against dozens of commercial anti-virus tools. If a scan generates any virus alerts or red flags, the report produced by the scan is shared with all of the participating anti-virus makers so that those vendors can incorporate detection for the newly discovered malware into their products.

That pooling of intelligence on new threats also serves to make the free scanning services less attractive to virus authors, who would almost certainly like nothing more than to freely and simultaneously test the stealth of their new creations across a wide range of security software. Still, there is nothing to stop an enterprising hacker from purchasing a license for each of the anti-virus tools on the market and selling access to a separate scanning service that appeals to the virus-writing community.

Enter upstart file-scanning services like av-check.com and virtest.com, which bank on the guarantee that they won’t share your malware with the anti-virus community.

“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” — Joseph Stalin

In the past eight years, elections in the United States have taken on the guise of a TV game show, with the elections themselves not quite as compelling as watching voting mechanisms fail across the country, especially in key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio. Pols and pundits from both sides of the aisle are quick to place most of the blame on faulty electronic voting systems. But until we set a technical policy that favors open voting systems, as Australia did in 2001 with its open source eVACS (Electronic Voting and Counting System), we have only ourselves to blame.

The closed source approach to disenfranchisement Current U.S. policy ensures that e-voting remains in the hands of very few proprietary vendors, including the much-maligned Diebold, which has received so much bad press that it has renamed its voting machine division Premier Election Solutions.

Many organizations are embracing SOA as a way to increase application flexibility, make integration more manageable, lower development costs, and better align technology systems to business processes. The appeal of SOA is that it divides an organization’s IT infrastructure into services, each of which implements a business process consumable by users and services.

For example, a service may expose the functionality to add a new employee to the employer’s payroll and benefits system. To make services usable in multiple contexts, for both lowered cost and increased process consistency, each service provides a contract describing how it may be used and what functionality it contains.

But the SOA approach turns on its head the traditional security approach used by enterprises today. The mix-and-match nature of SOA services, and the use of messaging as the orchestration mechanism for SOA’s composite applications, eliminates the ability to build clear boundaries around — and security barriers for — enterprise apps. The very thing that gives SOA its flexibility also increases its security risk

Working in IT isn’t always pretty. After all, we can’t all work on the cutting-edge technologies all the time. Some of us have to get dirty — in some cases, literally.

Unfortunately, dirty jobs — whether you’re being chained to a help desk, hacking 30-year-old code, finding yourself wedged between warring factions in the conference room, or mucking about in human effluvia — are necessary to make nearly every organization tick. (Well, maybe not the human effluvia part.)

The good news? Master at least one of them, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a job with somebody. We don’t guarantee you’ll like it, though. Here are seven of the dirtiest jobs in IT, and why your organization needs them.

A second person has agreed to plead guilty in the case involving a copy of the Mike Myers bomb “The Love Guru” leaking on the Internet a day before its theatrical release.

The whole affair could serve as a cautionary tale to folks who abuse their access to unreleased films, even when their motivation might be as innocuous as to, say, be the life of a party.

Mischa Wynhausen, 31, of Irvine, Calif., is set to make his felony plea in the next couple of months, and it’s agreed he’ll serve three years’ probation for the crime of uploading the Paramount Pictures movie to the Internet.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who lost a job in 2009, you’ve probably started networking. You’re attending conferences, sending resumes and calling friends of friends.
Perhaps you’ve discovered that networking has changed since the last time you job-hunted.

While old-fashioned techniques still work, a new wave of high- and low-tech strategies has emerged. Outreach activities now include raising your online profile, volunteering your time and expertise to a worthy cause and attending informal gatherings where socializing supplants business talk.

The most successful networkers seek gainful employment with laserlike focus. They research what they want and whom they want to meet. Then they target their efforts to pursue what matters most to them.

The first effects of France’s new law against internet piracy will begin to be felt as the new year begins.

The law was passed after a long struggle in parliament, and in the teeth of bitter opposition from groups opposed to internet restrictions. Illegal downloaders will be sent a warning e-mail, then a letter if they continue, and finally must appear before a judge if they offend again.

The judge can impose a fine, or suspend their access to the internet. The Creation and Internet Bill set up a new state agency – the Higher Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (Hadopi). The law was backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy and the entertainment industry.

For consumer groups that concern themselves with Internet privacy, the efforts to press policymakers to enact regulations or pass laws setting boundaries for collecting data online recall the plight of the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodgers fan: “Wait ’til next year” serves as a fitting mantra for both.

So 2009 came and went with little movement on the privacy front, but advocates are looking ahead to 2010 with high hopes that this year, finally, will be their year. And they may be right. The best hope for groups looking to advance the privacy agenda in 2010 rests with the Federal Trade Commission, which has been sending signals that closer scrutiny is on its way.

A new report bolsters the rumored January 26 date assigned to an Apple Event planned at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. The event is widely believed to serve as the debut of the company’s new slate as an expansion of its iPhone/iPod touch platform.

The brief report, published by Fox News today, offers additional confirmation of the date first cited by the Financial Times last week.

While the original report indicated that Apple had reserved the space to make “a major product announcement,” today’s report indicates that sources have first hand knowledge that the event will be associated with a product in the “mobility space.”

BACK IN 2006 the rumour mill decided that Intel was going to buy Nvidia.

It all started when AMD bought ATI and even some traditional news outlets thought that Intel was going to follow suit and grab that other graphics company. Shares in the Green Goblin shot through the roof, helped by the fact that neither side said it was not going to happen.

At the time everyone said it was a pretty silly idea. Chipzilla didn’t need Nvidia, since it was already doing fairly well in the graphics market. If it really wanted to compete with ATI all it needed to do was upgrade its own graphics division and create the whole thing in house. It was also expected that the price to buy Nvidia at the time would have been over ten billion.