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Security program automatically tracks down missing patches

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:21:40 +0000

Secunia has updated its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) with the ability to silently download and apply patches from multiple vendors soon after their release. PSI 2.0 is now available in an open beta test,

Alongside the failure of security software to detect an exploit or a piece of malicious software, missing patches remain a significant reason why computers become infected with bad code. Cybercriminals are increasingly probing third-party applications to find a way to take over computers.

Secunia looked at the top 50 programs used by its more than two million users. Twenty-six of those programs are made by Microsoft, which uses an auto-update mechanism to distribute patches on the second Tuesday of the month. Of the 420 or so vulnerabilities found in those 50 programs in 2009, about 35 percent of those were Microsoft programs, said Stefan Frei, research analyst director for the company.

The rest were in third-party applications from Adobe Systems, Apple and others, which use up to 13 different update mechanisms for the remaining 65 percent of vulnerabilities found in the 24 applications, Frei said.

Many of those applications have auto-update mechanisms, but none have uniform schedules for checking for new patches, Frei said. That leaves a window of opportunity for cybercriminals.

"This clearly shows why cybercrime is happening," Frei said. "They [cybercriminals] don't need Microsoft."

Even with diligent patching, there are "lots of users who have one, two, three apps that are not patched," Frei said.

In 2009, Secunia proposed to software vendors to create a common protocol that all vendors could use in order to get patches distributed faster. No agreement was reached, Frei said.

As a result, Secunia figured out the "secret sauce" to silently auto-update many applications in PSI 2.0. "This works for quite a few applications, and we are increasing the number of applications we can support," Frei said. "If the vendor releases the patch in a way that we can automate the download of the installation, it works."

PSI takes an inventory of applications on a person's computer and their version number. It then checks in with Secunia several times a day to see if a new patch has been released, which is the default configuration for the application although users can turn it off. Secunia recommends leaving PSI run in the background, as it is a lightweight application, Frei said.

Since PSI 2.0 was released a couple of days ago, more than 6,500 people have downloaded it and more than 10,000 patches have been installed. Most users need at least one patch. The number of downloads of PSI and patch installs was surprising, Frei said.

"We were astonished after 24 hours when we looked at the data," he said.

Secunia recorded more than 2,000 installations of patches for Adobe's Flash Player and more than 1,000 for Adobe Reader. Other most frequently patched applications from the sample set included Sun's Java JRE, Adobe Air, Irfan View, the Opera Web browser, Skype, Wireshark and the Firefox browser, according to Secunia's blog.

PSI 2.0 is free. The software is expected to come out of beta later this year, Frei said.

hello everyone

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:08:42 +0000

Hello all! My username is ONeill2310 but people can just refer to me as ONeill...unless there is someone who already goes by such a moniker? Well either way I just found this forum and hopefully this will be a good platform for me to begin programming. I have very very very little experience with programming. I think it was almost eight years ago since I took a class on programming in high school. In the class we did not go very deep into the subject and I barely remember the class after all these years. Sooo for all intensive purposes I am a complete newbie to all of this. I have had a fairly extensive experience with computers in general. Most of my knowledge has grown from building my own pcs and fixing my friend's. Ultimately I am hoping to grasp a better understanding of computers as a whole before I go back to school for a computer science degree. I look forward to chatting with you guys and learning as much as I can!

Oh yeah...I am hoping to eventually move over to game programming but that is just a side note of my ultimate goal which will be after many many deeper trips into the rabbit hole.

The Most Dangerous Jobs in Technology

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:55:07 +0000

In the world of information technology, some professions are particularly perilous. Whether you’re risking psychological stress or your very life, these fields aren’t for the faint of heart. Some people in these roles thrive on adrenaline, climbing thousands of feet to fix communications towers. Others risk only emotional damage, getting paid to consume disturbing Internet content.

Workplace deaths in the United States have dropped in recent years, along with the employment rate. In the developing world, though, certain countries have a long way to go before some technology-related working conditions can be called humane.

1. Internet Content Moderation

Think of the most disgusting things you've stumbled across online. Now imagine viewing the stuff that nightmares are made of--hate crimes, torture, child abuse--in living color, from 9 to 5 every day. That's the work of Internet content moderators, who get paid to filter out that kind of material so you don't have to see it pop up on a social network or photo-sharing site. Demand for the work is growing, especially as more Web-based services enable users to post pictures instantly from their mobile devices.

"Obviously it's not the job for everyone," says Stacey Springer, vice president of operations at Caleris. The West Des Moines, Iowa, company's 55 employees scan up to 7 million images every day for some 80 different clients. "Some people might take it personally if they have a child and see images of children that might be sensitive to them, or if they see animal cruelty."

Caleris content reviewers receive free counseling as well as benefits including health insurance, but for some the psychological scars don't heal easily.

2. Electronics Assembly

Safety nets around the dorms of an electronics factory in Shenzen, China, are a grim reminder that ten employees have jumped to their death there since January. A 25-year-old employee who later committed suicide reportedly had been beaten at the Hon Hai plant after losing a prototype iPhone 4 last year.

Recall the frenzy, hoopla, and lines around the block at the launch of Apple's latest smartphone, and you can imagine the deadline pressure for the people assembling it. Foxconn, which makes iPhones, iPads, and other electronics from Apple, Dell, and HP, has been accused of fostering "sweatshop" conditions. However complex the chain of events leading to suicide may be, human-rights groups have criticized Foxconn and other manufacturers for creating an unbearable, pressure-cooker environment for workers, mostly young migrants from rural areas.

In light of the suicides, the company has raised wages, promised psychological testing for employees, and tried to boost morale with rallies. Foxconn plans to increase its workforce of more than 900,000 to 1.3 million in the next year.

Psychological pressure isn't the only rough condition reported in electronics factories, though. Labor and human-rights organizations also charge that workers testing microchips and assembling LCDs for Samsung were exposed to radiation that caused cancer.

3. Fixing Undersea Internet Cables

Cables that span the oceans keep people connected online across continents. Contrary to popular belief, it's hard connections such as these--not satellites in space--that provide more than 99 percent of the world's Internet connectivity. Someone has to lay and fix those cables when an undersea earthquake or errant anchor cuts off the data flow.

About 70 vessels around the world are tasked with fiber-optics installation and repairs. Some are on call around the clock. Each has a crew of about 50 people, including cable-installation engineers and controllers of remote-operated vehicles, who spend weeks or months at sea.

Robots rather than human divers lay and bury cables in the seabed as deep as 16,000 feet below the water's surface, but it takes the human hands on deck to haul in, repair, and drop heavy cables. Though they wear rubber gloves, in a worst-case scenario a cable operating with 10,000 volts could become energized. And looking straight into the lasers of a sliced cable can burn out your retinas in a matter of seconds.

As with fishing--perhaps the deadliest profession--this job carries the risk of encountering "acts of God" on the sea. Members of the crew are also prone to slips, trips, and falls on wet decks.

Elaborate layers of safeguards on the vessels reflect the dangerous nature of the work, says John Davies, managing director for Global Marine Systems, the largest company that handles submarine Internet cables.

4. Communications-Tower Climbing

Close to 11,000 people install and fix the communications towers that keep our mobile calls connected. In 2006, 18 of them died on the job.The head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2008 called cell-phone-tower climbing the most dangerous work in America.

"Clearly it was the most dangerous job if you looked at a niche industry," says Craig Lekutis, president of the news portal WirelessEstimator.com.

The industry has made improvements, but any work at extreme heights involves the risk of a fall. Fatalities tend to happen when workers don't use the right safety gear, or when they disconnect just for a moment. When a person is positioned 30 to 2000 feet in the air, such shortcuts can make routine tasks--such as testing an antenna--deadly. Accidents can happen even when the employee takes precautions; a tower can weaken at its base and fall, for instance, or a lanyard can break from a safety harness.

Amid a construction boom to make way for 3G and 4G wireless networks, Lekutis estimates, a quarter of a million communications towers--and rising--could be in need of installation or repair.

5. Unregulated E-Waste Recycling

When you send an old computer or CRT monitor off for recycling, chances are it will wind up in a junkyard halfway around the world rather than being dismantled safely nearby. Used hardware from the industrialized world often travels thousands of miles to developing parts of Asia and Africa.

People hoping to earn a dollar a day collect machines and smash them with crude tools to strip gold, silver, and other precious metals out of circuit boards. They may come into dangerous contact with lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, and brominated flame retardants. Some are exposed to more chemical harm by soaking circuit boards in acid, or burning PVC cabling to retrieve copper.

"That has to be one of the most treacherous jobs around, especially in light of the products being handled," says Sheila Davis, head of the nonprofit Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. "We see children in India smashing these monitors with sandals and no protective gear, and exposure to lead can cause significant neurological diseases and learning disabilities."

In addition, inmates in some U.S. prisons are exposed to the same toxic substances in e-waste recycling operations, earning from a nickel to $1.25 an hour.

The U.S. government doesn't closely track what happens to spent electronics. To prevent your used gear from being recycled under poor working conditions, resell or donate the equipment to someone who will keep it in use, and make sure recyclers are certified with the Basel Action Network's e-Stewards program.

6. Mining 'Conflict Minerals'

The eastern Congo is rich in the key ingredients that keep electronics ticking. The area holds tantalum for use in capacitors, tin for circuit-board solder, tungsten to make cell phones vibrate, and gold for connecting components. Despite such natural wealth, tens of thousands (or, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands) of people work in appalling conditions to extract those materials.

"Potentially each and every one of our cell phones, laptop computers, and PCs contains some of these conflict minerals," says Sasha Lezhnev, a researcher for human-rights group Global Witness.

"It's analogous to blood diamonds. You get a bunch of people digging in river streams by hand. Some are carving out a mountain literally. When I went out to the mines, I met many children as young as 11 years old. There were military commanders with AK-47s easily extracting money from everyone who mines."

Armed Congolese groups earn about $180 million each year in this trade, while the majority of the people live in poverty. Smugglers take $1 billion in materials out of the country every year, according to the Congolese government.

No tech company has been able to audit and certify that all of its products are "conflict-free," but some--including Intel and Motorola--are taking steps in that direction.

7. Infrastructure Work in War Zones

A dangerous job in peacetime is one thing, but try focusing on a task when you're the potential target for a sniper or a bomb. Whether building communications infrastructure for civilians or military operations, military personnel and private contractors in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan risk their lives on a regular basis.

It's unclear exactly how many people doing IT-related work have lost their lives among the 4735 Coalition military deaths in Iraq since 2003, and the 2026 dead in Operation Enduring Freedom since 2001 so far, as counted on the independent iCasualties Website.

According to a count conducted in September 2009, at least three telecommunications engineers are among the 533 foreign private contractors who have died in Iraq since the beginning of the conflict there. Two telecom engineers are among the 146 private foreign contractors who have perished in Afghanistan.

Microsoft still mum on programs prone to DLL hijacking attacks

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:54:33 +0000

Microsoft on Tuesday again abstained from naming which of its Windows programs, if any, contain bugs that could lead to widespread "DLL load hijacking" attacks.

Also on Tuesday, the company published an automated tool to make it easier for users to block attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in a host of Windows applications.

The DLL load hijacking vulnerabilities exist in many Windows applications because the programs don't call code libraries -- dubbed "dynamic-link library," or "DLL" -- using the full pathname, but instead use only the filename. Criminals can exploit that by tricking the application into loading a malicious file with the same name as the required DLL. The result: Hackers can hijack the PC and plant malware on the machine.

"Microsoft plans to address those of our products affected by this issue in the most appropriate way for customers," said Jerry Bryant, a group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center, in a Tuesday entry on that team's blog . "This will primarily be in the form of security updates or defense-in-depth updates."

Although Microsoft again declined to call out its vulnerable software, outside researchers have identified as potential targets a number of its high-profile apps, including Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, Address Book and Windows Contact, and Windows Live Mail.

Other vendors' software may also be at risk, including Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Adobe's Photoshop.

Bryant hinted that some Microsoft software could be exploited. "Due to the fact that customers need to click through a series of warnings and dialogs to open a malicious file, we rate most of these vulnerabilities as Important," he said, referring to the second-highest threat ranking in the company's four-step scoring system.

Microsoft typically uses Important to describe bugs that can be exploited remotely -- via the Internet or e-mail, for example -- but which also require that the user assist the attack in some way, usually by clicking through warnings or opening a malicious file.

In another blog , Jonathan Ness, an engineer with MSRC, and Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an MSRC program manager, described how customers can deploy and use a tool the company first offered Aug. 23 .

That tool blocks the loading of DLLs from remote directories, such as those on USB drives, Web sites and an organization's network, and is aimed at enterprise IT personnel.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft acknowledged that users have asked for more help with the tool. Shortly after its release, IT professionals complained that the tool was confusing and asked colleagues for advice on how to configure it.

To simplify things, Microsoft has posted a "Fix It" tool on its support site that automatically blocks any DLLs from loading from WebDAV or SMB (Server Message Block) shares, two of the most likely attack vectors. Users must still download and install the original tool, however.

Ness and Van Horenbeeck also downplayed the threat to some extent, saying that DLL load hijacking bugs cannot be exploited via "drive-by" attacks, where a user's PC is infected as soon as he or she browses to a malicious site.

"A victim would need to browse to a malicious WebDAV server or a malicious SMB server and double-click a file in the Windows Explorer window that the malicious server displays," they said.

Microsoft has known of the issue since at least August 2009 , when researchers with the University of California Davis notified the company of their work. There's evidence, however, of reports as far back as 2000, and attacks exploiting the flaw the following year, when the Nimda worm leveraged the bug in Office 2000.

HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and the creator of the Metasploit penetration testing toolkit, was the first to reveal the potential attacks when, on Aug. 19, he said he'd found 40 vulnerable Windows applications . Moore was followed by other researchers who claimed different numbers of at-risk programs, ranging from more than 200 to fewer than 30.

Some vendors have already patched the problem in their software. Both uTorrent and Wireshark, a BitTorrent client and network protocol analyzer, respectively, have been updated to address the bug.

Others are working on a fix. "We're testing our own Firefox-specific fixes and plan to get them out to users soon," Mozilla's security team said in an e-mail reply to questions last week.

Even so, Microsoft said patches may be long in coming to some users. "We recognize that it may take quite a bit of time for all affected applications to be updated and for some, an update may not be possible," Bryant admitted.

In lieu of patches, the blocking tool is the best defense, he continued. With that in mind, Microsoft plans to make the tool available "within the next couple of weeks" for downloading and deployment using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Microsoft's most-used business patch management mechanism.

The company is also thinking about pushing the tool to everyone, including consumers, via Windows Update, although it would be switched off by default, said Bryant.

VMware positions Java for the cloud

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:17:25 +0000

EMC VMware on Tuesday is introducing its cloud computing platform for Java development, which relies on technologies from the company's SpringSource division.

The VMware Cloud Application Platform leverages the popular Spring Framework for Java development and the newly branded vFabric product set, which features pre-existing SpringSource products offering capabilities such as data management, messaging, and dynamic load balancing. The 2.5 million users of Spring will be eyed as initial users of the platform.

[ SpringSource introduced Spring 3.0 last year. | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog and Developer World newsletter. ]

"At the end of the day, we feel we're providing a very legitimate path to this cloud computing architecture of the future for Java," said Shaun Connolly, EMC VMware's vice president of products. Until now, there had not been a clear path to the cloud for Java developers, he said.

Applications on the VMware cloud platform can share information with underlying infrastructure to boost software performance, quality of service, and infrastructure utilization, according to VMware. Users can deploy vFabric inside a data center or within public clouds such as VMforce. Also, vFabric can be deployed at a VMware vCloud service provider such as Savvis.

VMware anticipates its Java cloud platform being used for deployment of rich Web applications or for application integration.

Components of vFabric include the following technologies:

* tc server, an enterprise version of the Apache Tomcat Java server
* GemFire data management software
* RabbitMQ messaging server, for communicating between applications inside and outside the data center
* ERS (Enterprise Ready Server), which is an enterprise version of the Apache Web server featurjng dynamic load balancing
* Hyperic, for application performance management

"The benefits of our VMware vFabric is these are very lightweight components," Connolly said. "At the end of the day, developers want a nice elastic fabric and that's why we chose the name vFabric," he said. VMware's Java cloud platform is akin to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform for Microsoft-based developers, Connolly said.

VMware's cloud platform is aimed at the private cloud market, said analyst Karin Kelley, of the 451 Group. "They're basically building up their middleware stack to support the enterprise private cloud for Java apps and they're really targeting the private cloud market," she said.

VMware VFabric can run on top of the company's vSphere virtualization technology, which supplies automated provisioning and configuring, Connolly said. RabbitMQ, Hyperic, and GemFire technologies were gained through acquisitions. SpringSource itself was acquired by EMC VMware last year.

Spring and VMware Application Platform Services are available for download. VMware anticipates selling vFabric-based services, with prices beginning at $500 per CPU.

VMware will roll out VMware Cloud Application Platform at the VMworld conference in San Francisco.

Download tips for women, from women, on advancing in IT

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:22:59 +0000

Women have a unique perspective on the obstacles to becoming top executives in the male-dominated business IT profession. Representing just 24 percent of U.S. technology employees in 2009, women find themselves surrounded by male bosses, direct reports and colleagues. It doesn't get any better as they reach the upper ranks--women represent only 10 percent of heads of IT, according to CIO's 2010 State of the CIO survey. As one female CIO put it, "It's a shame women are opting out of this profession. [They appear to be doing so because] it 'costs' a lot...time, commitment and personal sacrifice. We can't do everything, but failure is not allowed."

At the request of the CIO Executive Council, female senior IT leaders collaborated to document their most important advice for women moving up the IT ladder. Behind each broad piece of advice--such as identifying the impact of your personal life on your IT career at each stage--are personal stories from women who have become strong IT leaders and better business executives.

One is Annabelle Bexiga, CIO at TIAA-CREF, who noted, "I've seen women come in who are driven and are immediately looking for their next job, but you need to have a solid foundation of skills." Twila Day, senior VP and CIO of Sysco, also shared some techniques that help her gain a stronger voice at the executive table and showcase confidence. At the top of her list for those new to the big discussions: Don't sit at the end of the table or in the corner; instead, place yourself squarely in the middle of the meeting room.

To download the Top 10 document, go to council.cio.com/dl0910

Is this a good example of audio-video disclaimer?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 20:07:13 +0000

I think this was the first thing i came across when I googled for Audio Video Disclaimer. Some ytube users wrote that their videos, or just music from videos were removed because they didnt have a disclaimer.
Could someone confirm that this type of disclaimer worked for some of their videos?

Code:

Disclaimer: All  content expressed in this video is 

copyright of . All audio expressed in 

this video is copyright of . I agree that this video is 

in full compliance with U.S.C Title 17, Section 107, which constitutes 

a "fair use" agreement from the rightful copyright owners, 
COMPANY WHO MADE GAME> and . For any of those wishing 

to distribute my video online, you must acknowledge me, Shrooblord, as 

the original creator of this video, and 
COMPANIES> for the Game and the Music. Failure to give due credit will 

result in an immediate deletion of my plagiarized video!

Research experiment disrupts Internet, for some

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:32:25 +0000

An experiment run by Duke University and a European group responsible for managing Internet resources went wrong Friday, disrupting a small percentage of Internet traffic.

The damage could have been far worse however, and the incident shows just how fragile one of the Internet's core protocols really is, security experts say.

The problem started just before 9 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time Friday and lasted less than half an hour. It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) -- used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the Internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was soon passed from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems.

"During this announcement, some Internet service providers reported problems with their networking infrastructure," wrote RIPE NCC's Erik Romijn in a note posted to the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) discussion list. "Immediately after discovering this, we stopped the announcement and started investigating the problem. Our investigation has shown that the problem was likely to have been caused by certain router types incorrectly modifying the experimental attribute and then further announcing the malformed route to their peers."

That shouldn't have happened on systems that were properly configured to support BGP, Romijn said, but nonetheless for a brief period Friday morning, about 1 percent of all the Internet's traffic was affected by the snafu, as routers could not properly process the BGP routes they were being sent.

"Over 3,500 prefixes (announced blocks of IP addresses) became unstable at the exact moment this 'experiment' started," wrote Earl Zmijewski, a general manager with Internet security firm Renesys. "Not surprisingly, they were located all over the world: 832 in the US, 336 in Russia, 277 in Argentina, 256 in Romania and so forth. We saw over 60 countries impacted."

Security experts have warned for years that attackers could cause serious Internet disruptions by messing with BGP routes. Two years ago, YouTube was temporarily cut off from the Internet after a Pakistani BGP route that censored the video service was inadvertently spread worldwide.

Earlier this year, bad routes announced out of China ended up briefly disrupting some Internet traffic.

The damage from Friday's experiment was minimal, but if someone had been able to intentionally announce bad routes, it would have been much worse, said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with security firm Trend Micro.

It's unclear why RIPE NCC and Duke were trying out these new route formats.

One of the researchers behind the experiment, Duke assistant professor Xiaowei Yang, declined to talk in detail about the experiment, citing legal concerns. But she said that the work was for a research paper, and the BGP data that was sent was "100 percent standard compliant."

"It is an experiment initiated by my student and I," she wrote in an e-mail message. "It unexpectedly triggered some vendor bugs."

RIPE NCC could not immediately be reached for comment.

Defending the Internet: National Security v. Big Brother

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:38:04 +0000

In the wake of revelations that the US military network was compromised in 2008, and that US digital interests are under a relative constant threat of attack, the Pentagon is establishing new cyber security initiatives to protect the Internet. The Pentagon strategy--which is part digital NATO, part digital civil defense, and part Big Brother--may ruffle some feathers and raise concerns that the US Internet is becoming a military police state.

The mission of the United States Department of Defense is to provide military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of the nation. The scope of that mission includes emerging threats and the need to deter cyber war and protect the digital security of the nation as well. To fulfill that mission in an increasingly connected world, and with a rising threat of digital attack, the Pentagon wants to expand its sphere of influence.

National Security

The United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, William J. Lynn III, describes a 2008 incident which compromised military computer systems and classified information in an article in Foreign Affairs (free registration required to access full article). "It began when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. The flash drive's malicious computer code, placed there by a foreign intelligence agency, uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. Central Command."

Lynn goes on to say "That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control. It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary."

Lynn notes that more than 100 US enemies and foreign intelligence organizations are hard at work trying to find holes to hack into the digital infrastructure of the United States. That digital infrastructure extends beyond the .MIL, or even the .GOV domains, though--as many private interests also represent vital parts of the nation's critical infrastructure.

Big Brother

Americans--and American businesses--expect the government, and more specifically the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, to defend national security and ensure our freedoms and liberties. When the objective of national security collides with freedom and liberty, it creates friction.

We expect both security and freedom. It was understandable that the United States government would monitor communications to identify potential terrorist threats in the wake of the attack on 9/11, but many citizens were outraged to learn that the Bush administration had authorized warrantless wiretapping of the entire nation by the NSA.

Finding Balance

Lynn explains "Cyberattacks offer a means for potential adversaries to overcome overwhelming U.S. advantages in conventional military power and to do so in ways that are instantaneous and exceedingly hard to trace. Such attacks may not cause the mass casualties of a nuclear strike, but they could paralyze U.S. society all the same. In the long run, hackers' systematic penetration of U.S. universities and businesses could rob the United States of its intellectual property and competitive edge in the global economy."

Any time the issue of government oversight comes up--whether in the financial industry, or for broadband communications--some portion of the population cries "Big Brother" and declares that the government just wants power and control. While that may be a real concern on some level, it has to be balanced with the need for national security.

The reality is that many private business interests are an integral part of the critical infrastructure that the United States relies on for defense, commerce, communications, and other vital interests. The government should not control those interests, but the Pentagon has a vested interest in monitoring the digital security of servers and networks within those interests in order to fulfill its mission.

Rather than taking either extreme--military spying on everything in the interest of national security or spying on nothing to preserve freedom and liberty--an effective defense of US digital interests is best served by public and private sector interests working cooperatively for the greater good. Businesses should not accept frivolous government monitoring, but should understand that protecting America requires a balance between liberty and security.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:54:41 +0000

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) is a famous mathematician from Germany. He is also known as the "Prince of Mathematics". He exhibited his calculative powers when he corrected his father's arithmetic before the age of three.

His revolutionary nature was demonstrated at age twelve, when he began questioning the axioms of Euclid. His genius was confirmed at the age of nineteen when he proved that the regular n-gon was constructible, for odd n, if and only if n is the product of distinct prime Fermat numbers.

Construction of regular 17-gon (Heptadecagon)

At age 24 he published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, probably the greatest book of pure mathematics ever.

Gauss built the theory of complex numbers into its modern form, including the notion of "monogenic" functions which are now ubiquitous in mathematical physics. The other contributions of Gauss are quite numerous and include the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (that an n-th degree polynomial has n complex roots), hypergeometric series, foundations of statistics, and differential geometry. Gauss was the premier number theoretician of all time, proving Euler's Law of Quadratic Reciprocity. He also did important work in geometry, providing an improved solution to Apollonius' famous problem of tangent circles, stating and proving the Fundamental Theorem of Normal Axonometry, and solving astronomical problems related to comet orbits and navigation by the stars. (The first asteroid was discovered when Gauss was a young man; he famously constructed an 8th-degree polynomial equation to predict its orbit.) Gauss also did important work in several areas of physics, and invented the heliotrope.

Much of Gauss's work wasn't published: unbeknownst to his colleagues it was Gauss who first discovered non-Euclidean geometry (even anticipating Einstein by suggesting physical space might not be Euclidean), doubly periodic elliptic functions, a prime distribution formula, quaternions, foundations of topology, the Law of Least Squares, Dirichlet's class number formula, the butterfly procedure for rapid calculation of Fourier series, and even the rudiments of knot theory. Also in this category is the Fundamental Theorem of Functions of a Complex Variable (that the line-integral over a closed curve of a monogenic function is zero): he proved this first but let Cauchy take the credit. Gauss is widely agreed to be the most brilliant and productive mathematician who ever lived and many would rank him #1; however several of the others on the list had more historical importance. Abel hints at a reason for this: "[Gauss] is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand."

Gauss once wrote "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, ... which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again ..."

Scammers hit Twitter, Facebook, send free iPad spam

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:47:12 +0000

Facebook and Twitter users are complaining about their accounts being compromised and then being used to spam friends with suspicious "free iPad offers."

Twitterwarned users of the scam, Wednesday, saying that it was resetting passwords of affected users. "If you've received a message promising you a new iPad, not only is there no iPad, but also your friends have been hacked," Twitter said

The scam is also hitting Facebook users to, according to company spokesman Simon Axten. "It's affecting an extremely small percentage of people on Facebook, but we take all threats seriously," he said via e-mail.

Gerome Stevens discovered that his Twitter account had been used to direct message contacts late Wednesday. He's not sure how the scammers got into his account, but they sent direct messages to his friends, that said, "u have to check out this website its glitchin right now and sending out ipads to everyone for free!"

He said the messages continued, even after he'd changed his password.

The messages his friends received contained a link to better-gifts.net. That Web site asks for personal information, and then directs the user to a variety of promotional offers from legitimate companies such as Netfilx, the Doubleday Book Club, and Columbia House DVD.

Online marketing programs pay cash for Web traffic, and hackers have found that by phishing victims and then using that information to break into legitimate Twitter and Facebook accounts, they can earn money.

This type of spam is particularly effective, because the messages appear to come from a trusted source.