Posts Tagged ‘web/news’

FTC threatens fines, jail for online check service operators

// November 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The Federal Trade Commission has charged those behind the shady online check service Qchex with contempt, and wants daily fines imposed on them until they give up the ghost. The group has launched a new site—a Qchex clone—with the same questionable policies that made Qchex a “dinner bell for fraudsters.” This has left the FTC fuming, and it wants the site’s operators to quit helping criminals rip people off— now . You may remember Qchex from a court order earlier this year —in February, a US District Court ordered the company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up its ill-gotten gains. It turns out that the check creation and delivery service failed to implement safeguards to prevent fraud, a point that the FTC had brought up back in 2006. Qchex apparently created and sent checks drawn from any old bank account without verifying that the person requesting the check was the owner of said accounts. Unsurprisingly, this made Qchex a shining beacon for scammers from around the globe who used the service to steal money from people’s accounts, using those same checks to pay for various goods and services.

An introduction to the FBI’s anti-cyber crime network

// November 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The Federal Bureau of Investigation told Congress this week that when it comes to cyber crime, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda aren’t the sharpest pencils in the cup, but they’re not out of the game either. “It is always worth remaining mindful that terrorists do not require long term, persistent network access to accomplish some or all of their goals,” Steven R. Chabinsky, one of the Bureau’s Cyber Division directors, explained to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. “Rather, a compelling act of terror in cyberspace could take advantage of a limited window of opportunity to access and then destroy portions of our networked infrastructure.” And there are lots of such windows, Chabinsky added, since, “we, as a nation, continue to deploy new technologies without having in place sufficient hardware or software assurance schemes, or sufficient security processes that extend through the entire lifecycle of our networks.” Thus the FBI has set up its own network to respond to whatever comes down the pike. Time will tell, and probably soon, how effective it is, but Chabinsky laid it out all the parts at the hearing. They include a division within the bureau, an inter-federal task force, an alliance with state, local, and industry enforcers, and a consumer complaint center.

JavaScript, graphics performance improvements on tap for IE9

// November 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The first information about the next version of Microsoft’s web browser was revealed at PDC on Wednesday. The announcement described three main areas of improvement: JavaScript, web standards, and graphics technology. IE9 will contain a new, significantly faster JavaScript engine, it will have richer support for web standards like CSS 3, and it will use the new Direct2D and DirectWrite technology for its graphics and text rendering.

Ethics leaks spur House bill banning P2P apps on .gov PCs

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Peer-to-peer filesharing applications have been wildly popular, especially among those interested in accessing pirated software, music, and media. But not everyone who operates a P2P client knows how to properly configure the software, and some clients may share entire directories unless explicitly directed not to. Apparently, some government employees have exhibited this sort of carelessness, as private and secret government documents have shown up on P2P networks. Now, at least one Congressman has had enough, and has introduced a bill that would ban the use of P2P software by government employees. The Congressman in question is Edolphus Towns of New York, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a statement announcing the bill’s introduction, Towns highlights a number of embarrassing incidents in which sensitive government files showed up on P2P networks. These include schematics for the Presidential helicopter and the location of a first-family safe house, as well as the financial records of a Supreme Court Justice.

Paper outs "anonymous" commenter, job loss ensues

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Internet commenters aren’t generally known for their eloquence and impeccable manners. Still, people’s tasteless little one-offs are relatively harmless most of the time—until the comment police happen across your note and contact your employer. That’s what happened to one unlucky commenter posting to the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (of all places), where a poorly chosen vulgarity eventually led to the loss of his job. The Post-Dispatch had posted a story last Friday on its blog about the ” craziest thing you’ve ever eaten .” You’re all geeks, so we’re guessing that your minds are going all sorts of places. So were the commenters on that post. Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media for the Post-Dispatch who had made the post, noticed that one commenter had posted a “single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy” (let your imagination run wild). The comment was deleted, but this particular user must have been enthused about his cunning lingual abilities, as he went back minutes later to post it a second time.

Scientists create the first programmable quantum processor

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Scientists have developed a number of quantum computing systems that use ions or electrons as bits of data; mathematical “operations” can be performed on them with beams of light or electrical pulses. Until recently, however, these systems could only perform the specific tasks they were designed to do. But a group of NIST scientists have published a description of a quantum processor that can receive virtually any set of instructions and perform them on a set of inputs—in short, they’ve made the first programmable quantum processor. In order to do general calculations, a computer must be able to perform an arbitrary number of unitary transformations, operations that change the state while preserving the structure of the system. Unlike a regular computer, a quantum computer stores information in “qubits,” or quantum bits. A regular bit may hold only one piece of data (0 or 1), but a qubit can hold a superposition of 0 and 1; it only adopts a definite value when measured.

Microsoft: Azure to go live in January, for pay in February

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Microsoft plans to transition its Windows Azure cloud computing platform from preview to full production capacity on 1st January next year, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced at the annual PDC conference on Tuesday. The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain no-cost throughout January; from February 1st it will start accumulating charges. The cost schedule was previously announced in July.

Google book settlement revised, criticized

// November 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Late Friday night, Google filed a revised version of its book settlement with the New York court that is overseeing the case. The new version limits the settlement to works published in a handful of English-speaking countries, and contains significant concessions that appear to be direct responses to some of the criticisms of the deal. Nevertheless, some of its harshest critics have clearly not been placated, as the revised deal has already come under fire due to continuing legal, privacy, and business issues. Perhaps the most significant change made to the deal is the limit to its scope. The EU as a whole (and several of its member countries) objected to several aspects of the settlement, which could have seen Google offer scans of European works that have never been licensed for sale in the US. Google offered to add European publishers and authors to the board that oversaw the handling of book content, but that was apparently not enough to satisfy the European publishing business; as a result, most of the EU has been dropped.

SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP

// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

On the Chromium blog , Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon write about an early-stage research project called SPDY (”speedy”). Unhappy with the performance of the venerable hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), researchers at Google think they can do better.  The main problem with HTTP is that today, it’s used in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used. HTTP is very efficient at transferring an individual file. But it wasn’t designed to transfer a large number of small files efficiently, and this is exactly what the protocol is called upon to do with today’s websites. Pages with 60 or more images, CSS files, and external JavaScript are not unusual for high-profile Web destinations. Loading all those individual files mostly takes time because of all the overhead of separately requesting them and waiting for the TCP sessions HTTP runs over to probe the network capacity and ramp up their transmission speed. Browsers can either send requests to the same server over one session, in which case small files can get stuck behind big ones, or set up parallel HTTP/TCP sessions where each must ramp up from minimum speed individually. With all the extra features and cookies, an HTTP request is often almost a kilobyte in size, and takes precious dozens of milliseconds to transmit. 

Teen’s Facebook update gets robbery charges dropped

// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Most of the stories we report that involve people being noticed for their Internet activities at home have an unhappy ending. In the case of New Yorker Rodney Bradford, however, a Facebook posting made from his father’s apartment turned into his get-out-of-jail-free card. Though Bradford’s story is being jubilantly reported as a victory for Internet-addicted youth everywhere, it also raises questions about how much law enforcement should trust what’s posted online. Bradford, a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident, was arrested last month for allegedly robbing a man at gunpoint. This, in itself, was not a very newsworthy event—until his defense lawyer discovered that Bradford had made an update to his Facebook profile at the time of the robbery. Bradford had insisted that he was at his father’s Harlem apartment at the time, and that the update was made from there. When the district attorney verified the claims with Bradford’s father and stepmother and the IP information with Facebook, the charges against Bradford were dropped.

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