Hacking and Anonymous surfing

The CEO of a company accused of making more than $100 million selling harmful “scareware” antivirus products was already a fugitive from U.S. authorities, following his arrest in 2008 on criminal counterfeiting charges.

Shaileshkumar “Sam” Jain is one of three men who were charged by the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday for allegedly operating a massive scareware distribution ring.

He’s now thought to reside in Ukraine, but arrived there only after giving authorities the slip after being arrested by federal agents in 2008 on charges that his company sold counterfeit versions of Symantec antivirus products. Jain has been considered a fugitive by U.S. authorities since early 2009, when he skipped out on a $250,000 bond and failed to show up for a Jan. 12 California court appearance.

Chief information security officers in Australia and New Zealand have told analyst firm IBRS that managing consumer-grade mobile devices in the enterprise is one of their top security concerns.

The preliminary results of 70 plus interviews between senior IT security executives and IBRS analyst James Turner have revealed that managing and securing mobile devices – particularly the iPhone was a concern. “Executives are getting them, bringing them into the workplace and asking to have them set up as though it was an enterprise-issued device,” said Turner.

“There are a stack of issues around this, not least of which is the understanding that it’s a consumer device and not built with enterprise utility in mind.” Turner said the penetration testers HackLabs, Securus Global and StratSec, with whom he has discussed the issue, were “scathing” of iPhone security, claiming it was “laughable”.

OpenTrust, a Next-Gen IT security software publisher, announced that it has secured Apple iPad using its OpenTrust Mobile technology to secure access to corporate networks.

According to a release, implementation ensures low TCO securing full wireless access to corporate IT networks. OpenTrust Mobile supports the most common Mobile OS including iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows.

The company said this latest OpenTrust development will allow customers to manage digital identities held on the Apple iPad, along with smart phones equipped with Digital IDs, to remotely & automatically authenticate themselves to corporate networks.

Half of the enterprise computers running the aged Windows XP operating system are still relying on the soon-to-be-retired Service Pack 2 (SP2), a researcher said today.

According to security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, 50% of the several hundred thousand PCs it monitors for its clients are still running Windows XP SP2.

“The normal thing for IT is not to muck around with something that works,” said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer for Qualys, as he tried to explain why corporations have stuck with 2004′s SP2 and not updated to SP3, which debuted two years ago. Microsoft will officially retire Windows XP SP2 on July 13. After that date, although it will continue to provide security updates for XP SP3, it will stop issuing patches for the older SP2.

The value of the information technology services market will climb by an average 3.8 per cent over the next five years, reaching $3.3 billion in 2014, Auckland analyst IDC has forecast.

The growth rate is more than double the forecast inflation rate. IDC expects 47 per cent of spending this year will be accounted for by the purchase of outsourced services.

Analyst Rasika Versleijen-Pradhan says increased consumer and business confidence has improved the economic outlook, but it won’t be an easy rise for the sector: “Many organisations are still short of capital and struggling with cash-flow issues.

Technology firms should be wary of outsourcing manufacturing overseas en masse, says the author of an annual IT industry report. Firms looking to cut costs could lose something more valuable.

“If you divest manufacturing out of your value proposition and don’t have that close integration between manufacturing and design and development … you potentially abdicate a competitive advantage,” says Technology Investment Network director Greg Shanahan.

“A lot of the time it’s that close collaboration that’s made these companies competitive in the first place.” Hamilton-firm Pacific Aerospace, which makes aircraft designed to fly from rough and remote locations with very short landing strips and earned $39 million last year, carries out its manufacturing locally and is a leader in its field, he says.

Entrepreneur Binod Hariharan has big plans for his southern Indian firm, which develops astrology-based computer software to help users find a suitable spouse or plot their career paths.

Similarly ambitious is Somporn Maneeratanakul, managing director of Thai Software Enterprises, and Nguyen Minh Duc, director of BKIS Security, a Vietnamese company that makes antivirus programs.

But their dreams of making it big overseas are in danger of being hijacked in the dangerous waters of the global software industry by pirates who make and sell illegal copies of their products right in their home markets. While global giants such as Microsoft and computer security firm McAfee are prominent targets of copyright thieves, what is less known is that startup Asian software companies are notable victims, industry players said.

If someone you didn’t know sat beside you on the bus and began divulging their family secrets and sexual fantasies, you’d probably slip on some headphones, discreetly search for another seat, and maybe scrunch your eyes closed in the childish hope they’d have vanished when you looked again. We don’t normally crack open the inside of our minds for the delectation of strangers. How weird, then, that these restraints are suspended by so many of us online.

Paul Venezia has a really interesting piece on the subject on tech site InfoWorld. His comment is interesting and pertinent here: “A world of people out there … don’t comprehend how deeply their internet usage is tracked and the level of detail they make available on a constant basis … and somehow, most of them don’t care.”

The story of how the technically-superior Betamax video tape format lost out to VHS, after the porn industry adopted the latter format, has oft been told. Skip through interactive CDs to DVDs and Blu-ray to the sophistication of web sites serving up adult fare and you get the picture.

So it should come as no surprise that the porn industry is licking its lips over this year’s latest much-hyped fad, 3D. One hotly-anticipated forthcoming attraction is a 3D version of the Kama Sutra. from French director Marc Dorcel.

Dorcel’s company was hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival recently, showing off its wares. According to company spokesman and son of the director, Gregory Dorcel, the screening went down well. Even seasoned film executives were enjoying the 3D experience by trying to catch hold of the on-screen actresses and reaching out for the proffered glass of 3D Champagne, Dorcel said.

You might have written off the fuss about Facebook over the past few months as essentially technical: nerds fighting nerds, arguing over the default settings on a website. If only it were that trivial. Technology is certainly part of it, but fundamentally the Facebook story is about how people present themselves to different audiences, and what societies should do about companies that dominate their markets.

As anyone who hasn’t just relocated from Mars knows, Facebook is the biggest social-network website in the world, used by more than 400 million people to share gossip, party invitations and drunken photos with their friends. And it was for friends’ eyes only, according to the service’s early, solemn promise. That changed down the years so that by the start of last week Facebook members had to go through a fiddly procedure to keep their details from being seen by strangers and businesses.