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“I don’t think any of us [developers] have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before, which is why it’s hard to describe why it’s such a big threat to security,” Jonathan Zdziarski told Wired.

With physical access to a 3GS iPhone and some free software data can be extracted within two minutes and an image of the entire raw disk in about 45 minutes, he said. The iPhone decrypts the data on its own once the extraction has begun, he explains in a video demonstration.

Apple has been touting the encryption and other features to entice corporate users to the device. And it seems to be working. Nearly 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies have purchased 10,000 or more iPhones per company, the company said on its financial results conference call on Tuesday.

2009-07-24 12:18:39.0
Written By Elinor Mills

I’m talking about Defcon, which starts Thursday and runs through Sunday. The event turns part of the Las Vegas strip into a geek equivalent of “Animal House” for a three-day weekend every summer.

Started in 1993 by Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, Defcon brings together some of the top security experts from around the world, along with thousands of hacker wannabes whose pranks in previous years–hacking the elevators and ATMs and cementing the toilets, to name a few–have led to bans at certain hotels.

“One good thing about the [economic] downturn is that the Riviera Hotel has been easier to deal with,” said Moss, who was recently named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “They’re letting us have access to the pool, so we’ll have pool parties, and they’ve allowed us to do more social things that we wanted to do.”

In addition to being a hacker playground and summer camp, Defcon is a semi-neutral ground where people who blur the lines of legality mingle with federal agents whose job it is to hunt them down.

Moss also runs Defcon’s big-sister conference, Black Hat, which runs Wednesday and Thursday at the more upscale but no less kitschy Caesars Palace.

While Black Hat is more professional, with vendor tables in the lobby and respectable product presentations in meeting rooms, Defcon is a chaotic tableau of goth-attired groupies, script kiddies hunkered over laptops lining the hallways at all hours of the night and gray-haired hackers who were likely teens when they first started coming to the event.

The presentations are usually top-notch (many of them duplicates from the more expensive Black Hat show), but Defcon is known just as much for the activities going on outside of the sessions.

There’s Hacker Jeopardy, Hacker Karaoke, an artwork contest, geo-caching events, a beverage cooling contraption contest, organized target shooting, a Capture the Flag penetration testing competition, lock picking workshops, a PGP Key Signing Party, DJs, a scavenger hunt, the highly popular Spot the Fed contest, a competition to find the best social engineer and a Cannonball Runrace described as “a race against time over 288 miles of road” from Redondo Beach to Las Vegas on Thursday.

Despite the recession, both events are expected to be crowded.

“We had been expecting 30 percent fewer attendees and in reality we’re only going to have 10 to 15 percent fewer,” Moss said. “The market went down and all of this research came up.”

The research topics run the gamut of vulnerabilities and exploits on everything from iPhones to smart grids. One session deals with air traffic control security (or lack thereof). Others have to do with injecting electromagnet pulses into the wiring system of jets, insecurities with Firefox plug-ins, cloud computing security issues and a new tool to send controversial news to censored countries without using proxy servers.

Several researchers are going to release a tool for hacking into Oracle databases. Meanwhile, two Hewlett-Packard researchers plan to demonstrate a proof-of-concept browser-based darknet type of network called “Veiled” that allows for the creation of a secure, decentralized peer-to-peer network in which no client software is downloaded.

“The clients are the owners of the files and there is no single point of failure,” said Matt Wood, a senior researcher in the Web Security Research Group at HP Software and Solutions. “No one in the government can go to you and say ‘we need the files.’”

Interesting session titles include “Cracking 400,000 Passwords, or How to Explain to Your Roommate why the Power Bill is a Little High,” “Manipulation and Abuse of the Consumer Credit Reporting Agencies,” “Hacking Capitalism ’09,” and “‘Smart’ Parking Meter Implementations, Globalism, and You (aka Meter Maids Eat Their Young).”

There’s always a Meet the Fed panel with representatives from all the major defense and security-related government agencies. And well-known keynote speakers and presenters include Robert Lentz, chief security officer for the Department of Defense; Rod Beckstrom, former Director of the National Cyber Security Center in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Adam Savage, co-host of the “MythBusters” TV show; and perennial favorite Bruce Schneier, security guru and chief technology officer of BT Counterpane.

When hackers go public with details on exploits, vendors get nervous–companies have moved to block presentations at the shows over the years. This year is no exception. Juniper Networks pulled a talk one of its researchers was set to give about a flaw in ATM software after the ATM vendor complained. In his presentation entitled “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines,” Barnaby Jack was planning to provide a live demonstration of an attack on an automated teller machine.

“I’m disappointed Barnaby Jack’s talk was canceled,” said Moss. Another speaker this year was “forced or encouraged” not to release a tool, Moss said, but he couldn’t remember which speaker or talk it was.

Last year, a talk on hacking smartcards used in the Boston subway system was blocked after a federal judge granted the Massachusetts transit authority’s request for an injunction. In 2005, a security researcher was sued after giving a presentation at Defcon on how attackers could take over Cisco Systems routers. And in 2001, the FBI took Russian crypto expert Dmitry Sklyarov into custody at his Las Vegas hotel the day after he gave a Defcon talk about insecurities in e-book security software. All cases were eventually settled.

Defcon averted another type of legal debacle this year–the importation of its microprocessor-dependent badges, which are needed for the badge-hacking contest.

“I’m excited the badges for Defcon will be here,” Moss said gleefully. “They were held up in Chinese customs for two months. It was a complete nightmare.”

2009-07-27 04:00:00.0
Written By Elinor Mills

The two security bulletins will address one overall issue and are being released separately “to provide the broadest protections possible to customers,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The vulnerabilities affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista,Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Visual C++ 2005 and 2008, according to the security bulletin advance notification.

“While we can’t go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications,” the statement said. “The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin.”

“The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as critical that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported,” Microsoft said.

Customers who are current with their security updates are protected from known attacks related to the updates, the company said. The updates will be released through the Microsoft Update, Windows Update, and Windows Server Update services.

A Webcast to address customer questions is scheduled for Tuesday from 1 p.m. PDT to 2 p.m. at this site.

Microsoft typically releases security patches on a monthly basis, the second Tuesday of every month, and did not say why it is making this rare, out-of-cycle release.

2009-07-24 17:11:00.0
Written By Elinor Mills

That was the take-away from a panel discussion Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm: Tech conference here.

The need for cities that use less energy is clear. Although cities occupy just 2 percent of the world’s geography, they account for 75 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emmissions, according to Clinton Climate Initiative Chairman Ira Magaziner. Cisco Systems CTO Padmasree Warrior noted that there will be 100 new cities with populations of more than 1 million people by 2025.

But while technology has the best potential for allowing society to maintain its standard of living in a sustainable way, the industry isn’t necessarily set up to provide such technology.

“We’re not there yet as an industry,” said Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos. “Our business models are built on complexity.”

Technology is also built based on frequent upgrade cycles and getting value from disposability of products. “There’s a tension there,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot harder than you at first think.”

Papadopoulos pointed to home automation as an example where the tech industry has failed to recognize the different standards needed in new markets.

“We’ve failed pretty miserably at that so far,” he said. “The are complex and they don’t work well. If we follow that model we will fail and we will be cursed.”

Hara CEO Amit Chatterjee said that the focus now should be on changes that can be made without major technology shifts, giving solar and other low-carbon technologies a chance to mature.

“There is a unique opportunity to focus on lo hanging fruit or fruit that’s on the ground,” Chatterjee said. “That is where we need to start. Insulation is a huge win for the U.S. well before we get to solar panels.”

Composting locally, he added, creates compressed natural gas that can fuel vehicles.

Chatterjee said that going after the “quick wins” could cut 30 percent of our carbon footprint.

Cutting energy use can also create jobs, the panelists agreed. But only if the right economic incentives are there, such as putting a price on carbon use.

Magaziner said awareness of the issues are improving, but that that isn’t enough.

“What we really need is action,” he said. “The next three, four, five ears are going to be critical.”

Written By Ina Fried

A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company’s search page will follow suit starting next month.

The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo’s effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo’s profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, <strongGoogle, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from <strongMicrosoft's online business<strong and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.

The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.

The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.

Newer web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.

Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo’s. It began “bucket testing” it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.

New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company’s developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they’ll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/try new or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.

“The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback–tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn’t,” Bhat said. “It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn’t.”

The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done “in the coming months,” Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can’t choose to use or not use the new design.

Opening up Yahoo’s content to other sites’ operations–and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates–is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users’ activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.

There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.

Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between “fun” and “serious,” he said.

In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile sites. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers , that customization will carry over to their mobile version.

Bhat wouldn’t share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it’s possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.

Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.

“Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo,” Bhat said. “We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged.”

Posted by: www.MJLComputer.com

Over the weekend, social news site Digg changed how its links work in a way that gives the site an increase in the number of users who visit.

Users of the site’s URL-shortening service noticed that if the Web address they had shortened had been submitted to Digg, the shortened URL would then take its visitors to the story’s page on Digg instead of the page it linked to. At least it was this way for users who were not logged into Digg; registered users who had turned off the DiggBar (and who had a recent log-in cookie from Digg) would not see the change in behavior.

The problem

This may seem like a small change, but it’s a big knock on Digg’s shortening service, and for Digg’s credibility at maintaining features.

Introduced in early April, the DiggBar was originally intended as a service that did three things: one was to shorten links and act as a redirection tool. The second was to bring Digg features along for the ride with a framed bar that would appear on the top of the page and provide a simple way to view user comments, related stories, as well as other Digg items from that same site. The third was to provide a simpler way for users to publish content, either to Digg itself, or places like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. This included giving users the capability to shorten a URL by dropping a Digg.com/ in front of the site’s address.

Despite the bevvy of features compared to some competing URL-shortening services, both users and publishers alike found fault in the DiggBar. Users had problems with the service since it drastically hid information about the site they were on, including the URL in their browser’s address bar, and any bookmarks they saved, which would retain the DiggBar. For publishers, there was the worry that users would choose to comment back on Digg instead of on their own pages, as well as SEO damage from search engines not properly indexing and attributing traffic since Digg.com was the redirector.

Digg’s solution, which came just two weeks after the DiggBar launch, was to make the whole DiggBar experience something users had to opt-in to see. This meant that registered users of the site would only see shortened Digg URLs, and the DiggBar by choice. Stray visitors of Digg wouldn’t see either.

A feature that was once quite controversial, the DiggBar is now a rarity, unless users are registered with Digg and have opted-in to see it on Digg story links.

(Credit: CNET)

In effect this left the DiggBar as something power users could take advantage of, but that casual users would never see–reducing the entire DiggBar feature down to URL shortening.

This clearly wasn’t good enough for Digg, since this move nets the site more ad impressions and unique user tracks than it would by acting as a redirection service alone. Back when it was originally introduced, the company was able to get by since the DiggBar displayed ads when people were using certain features such as viewing related content, Digg user comments, and other stories from that site’s particular source. But, without the DiggBar on top, and without any kind of recognition–other than in name, Digg was getting none of these benefits.

So is Digg’s shortening service now just a way to shorten links to Digg.com pages? Digg founder Kevin Rose went on to say as much in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, citing that the company was having to internally juggle certain shortened-URLs that had become popular from outside sources. Particularly, ones from Twitter where the source site would be on the receiving end of an increasing amount of traffic, but because of the lack of a Digg frame bar on the top of the page, it wasn’t easy for users to Digg the story without having to make their way back to Digg.com.

The solution, was to change the link to kick users to the Digg.com story page, as if they had found their way there naturally. However, this caused confusion for users since that page would only show up when clicking from Twitter, and not when clicking that link from another domain. Digg’s fix to that problem? Homogenization. All shortened Digg links simply go to Digg pages, as long as the story’s been submitted. Otherwise, the URLs send users to the source site, which prompts the question if it’s worth submitting a story to Digg, since it can rot a link that thousands of people may be using.

Making big money on small URLs

Digg’s departure from providing parts of its shortening service could be a good signal of where the URL-shortening service is headed. Turning big URLs into small ones is not difficult, however maintaining these services indefinitely, and at no cost, is a challenge.

The easiest option is interstitial ads–the kind users need to wait through, or click a certain link to bypass on their way to the source content. Digg has effectively done that by forcing users to come through Digg on their way to the content. The big difference in Digg’s case is that users who might have gone to Digg for shortening can simply go elsewhere that does not put advertising on the page, or require an extra click from users.

So could this mean Digg is working on a paid variant on its shortening service that gives either users or content owners the option to pay to get that direct-level of service? Possibly. It could also mean Digg simply realized it was footing the bill for a service that was bypassing the very pages that were keeping it afloat.

The bigger problem, it seems, is that Digg listens too closely to its users and critics instead of staying on course. Digg URLs should have always come with a frame bar on top. It may have been annoying to some, but that was the price of admission. If users wanted a straight-up URL-shortener, there were hundreds available at the time when Digg unveiled its own. The one killer feature was the fact that it took the Digg community along for the ride, which is so clearly far removed from people using it that Digg has chosen to go this route instead.

Based on a long history of changing things its users do not like, it’s possible the company will revert to the old way of handling shortened links. However, Digg has made no mention of the change on either its public-facing blogs or on the company’s Twitter account. While this could just be a slow start after a big weekend of activity, it could also signal some internal debate on what’s best for the longevity of the service. I just hope Digg takes a step back and looks at what it offered to begin with, since the current service is such a shadow of its former self.

Written by:  Josh Lowensohn
]]> http://mjlhosting.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/digg-stops-redirecting-some-urls-links-to-self-instead/feed/ 0 mjlhosting http://mjlhosting.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/google-earth-dives-into-the-sea/ http://mjlhosting.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/google-earth-dives-into-the-sea/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:18:59 +0000 mjlhosting http://mjlhosting.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/google-earth-dives-into-the-sea/ ]]> 2009-02-03 06:34:00.0
Written By CBS Interactive staff

Google Earth is adding an ocean feature, allowing people to dive into the deep blue right from their desktop, CBS News Correspondent Daniel Sieberg reports.

John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, said, “Vast parts of it are largely unexplored and we don’t really know what’s down there.”

While the visibility in the water has been cleaned up, everything you see is based on actual data. It’s not quite swimming with the fishes, but it will let you see where they live.

Hanke showed Sieberg some impressive images that can be found with the new feature. “This is really an undersea canyon that is quite dramatic,” Hanke said. “It’s imilar in scale to the Grand Canyon.”

You can also click on icons to see photos and sometimes video of endangered species, like the Goliath Grouper, or even an odd-looking type of shrimp off the coast of Spain.

There’s even a fish GPS — you can follow creatures that have been tagged, from above the water or below it.

A worldwide network of scientists will be constantly adding video, photos, and underwater topography.

“Just as Google Earth has connected people to far off places and made them real, this is going to connect people to the ocean, and make it a much more real and accessible place,” said Marine Biologist Stephanie Wear, from the Nature Conservancy.

The good news is you don’t need to be a computer whiz or a marine biologist.

Once you download Google Earth, it’s just a matter of double-clicking on the ocean to get more detail. Then scroll your mouse over different icons to see what lies beneath, or on the surface.

Hanke said the possibilities are vast, with the ability to see things like “the best surf spots in the world, with photographs of the waves, the best kite surfing spots, the best wind surfing spots.”

For tourists, students, and landlubbers alike, it’s a unique underwater adventure.

And, it’s one that doesn’t mean getting all wet.

• Click here for more stories, and images, on Google Earth 5.0.

Google Earth can now take you to the moon.

Timed with the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, the Internet giant on Monday released an addition to its Google Earth mapping software to provide images of moon landscapes and traces of human exploration there.

Called the Moon in Google Earth, the software allows you to see topographical features on our closest celestial neighbor with the lunar equivalent of Google Street View. People can also see a gallery of the Apollo space missions and get information on every robotic spacecraft that has visited the moon.

“This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together,” Anousheh Ansari, a trustee of X Prize Foundation and the first female private space explorer, said Monday on a Google blog.

Google is hosting an event Monday to launch the Moon in Google Earth site at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where Ansari and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin will speak.

To access the images from Google Earth, you select Moon from the toolbar in Google Earth. From there, the viewer zooms down to get detailed images of the moon’s surface.

From the left panel, people can surface information about the moon, including historical charts used by astronauts for training and NASA mission control. High-resolution photos break down the moon’s surface into different quadrants to show its features.

The tool is designed to teach people about the missions to the moon by visiting the various Apollo landing sites. After zooming into a location, people can see video clips and panoramic stills taken by the astronauts, such as Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Aldrin also offers a guided video tour of the moon from within Google Earth.

The artifacts tab allows people to see three-dimensional models of the spacecraft that have gone to the moon.

The Moon in Google Earth project was done through Google’s partnerships with NASA, which allowed researchers to develop much of the content. Japan’s space agency, Jaxa, also donated the global terrain dataset for the moon.