ISLAND ROMANCE
IT'S getting serious between Barbara Walters, 77, and Dr. Robert N. Butler, 80. Walters and Butler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and gerontologist, just got back from a weeklong romantic Caribbean getaway to St. Martin, friends say, and she is...
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Baseball roundup: Tuesday's action on the diamonds - Canada.com
 Canada.com | Baseball roundup: Tuesday's action on the diamonds Canada.com - Pirates Ronnie Paulino, right, is greeted by on-deck batter Paul Maholm after hitting a solo home run. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic). (CP) - Paul Maholm and Jason Bay prevented the Pittsburgh Pirates from reaching a dubious milestone. Maholm pitches Pittsburgh to desperation win Maholm, Pirates shutout Astros |
Gee... That Was Quick...
Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. (Read on Source)
Porn Still the Top Online Industry
The internet is primarily guys. Most guys are pervs. If that’s news to you then you’re probably deaf, blind, and dumb in which case I’m sorry for your misfortune. With this amazing knowledge it shouldn’t take one long to deduce that internet porn is an absolutely **huge** industry. With online poker [...] (Read on Source)
House Panel Recommends Increasing NASA and NOAA Budgets
WASHINGTON - A House appropriations subcommittee voted June 11 to give NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) more money for 2008 than the White House was seeking for either agency. (Read on Source)
iPhone Impact, the Artist's PC, Product for the Week Off
In the U.S., a lot of folks are off this week because the 4th of July, which marks the Independence Day holiday, comes on a Wednesday this year. An impressive number of Americans have been spending the last few days scrambling to buy a $3,000 phone, and I think it is time to begin talking about the impact of this event.
Acer files patent counterclaim against HP
(InfoWorld) - Acer Inc. has filed a patent counterclaim against rival Hewlett-Packard Co. as part of its response to two HP lawsuits.
The lawsuits come amid a major push by Acer into the U.S. PC market, and brisk global growth. The Taiwanese company's shipments to the U.S., HP's home turf, grew 163.8 percent year-on-year in the most recent second quarter, according to preliminary figures by market researcher IDC. HP has also been gaining market share in PCs at the expense of other rivals such as Dell Inc., but Acer remains the fastest-growing PC maker among the top 10.
The counterclaim filed last week by Acer alleges HP has infringed its antenna and DVD-ROM head technology patents. The suit was filed in the same court as the HP lawsuits against Acer, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
The HP lawsuits claim that Acer has infringed 10 HP patents related to PCs. The world's largest PC vendor is seeking to block Acer PC imports to the U.S. and is asking for compensation from Acer, payment of legal fees, and triple damages for alleged intentional violation of the patents.
Court documents in the Acer counterclaim were not yet available at the time of writing.
Acer has said it believes its contracts with contract PC makers indemnify it from HP's claims, and has already filed a lawsuit against three of its suppliers aimed at forcing them to live up to their contracts. Many laptop and desktop PC suppliers do the design and manufacturing work for customers. Acer said that since its suppliers worked on the design of the PCs in question, they should share the burden of the HP lawsuit. The supplier agreements specifically indemnify the company from lawsuits such as the two brought about by HP, Acer said.
The HP lawsuits come as Acer continues to gain market share in the global PC business, and some analysts have called the disputes a response to the inroads Acer has made in the U.S. PC market.
Acer's shipments to the U.S. grew 163.8 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, according to preliminary figures from market researcher IDC, beating all other companies among the top six. The Taiwanese company more than doubled its market share to 5.2 percent from 2.1 percent a year ago.
"Acer continued its rapid expansion in the Americas while posting strong gains in other regions as well," IDC said in a statement. New retail and dealer partner agreements are boosting Acer's drive into the U.S. market, the industry researcher said.
By contrast, HP's shipments in the U.S. grew 26 percent over the same time. HP retained its title as the world's biggest PC vendor with a 19.3 percent share of the market, compared to 7.2 percent for fourth place Acer. Acer's worldwide shipments in the second quarter rose 55 percent against the same time last year, compared to 36.5 percent growth for HP.
Productivity enhancers for Thunderbird
As with Firefox, you can extend Thunderbird's functionality by installing extensions. Mozilla's official extension repository has quite a few nifty tools on offer, and which ones you choose to install depends entirely on your needs. There are, however, a few extensions that you might find indispensable no matter how you use Thunderbird.
Congressmen want investigation of Homeland Security hackings; Unisys denies lax network management
(DHS) to investigate cyberattacks against government systems reportedly managed by . Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and
Databases: Patient Drug Information Available from PubMed
Databases: Patient Drug Information Available from PubMed Starting October 12, 2007, some PubMed users will see links to a drug information resource on over two million citations….MedMaster drug information includes brand names and helpful information about the drug. Of the over two million citations with “Patient Drug Information&# ... (Read on Source)
Certification aka "Some Assembly Required"
Billy on Open Source: "The product will be the same as the general purpose release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to maintain 'certification.' It will, however, have a new name--Red Hat Appliance OS..."
One Click Privacy
Whatever happens on your PC stays on your PC. One Click Privacy permanently erases all internet ...
Camera-Free Variant of the Nokia E51 Announced
Nokia today introduced a camera-free variant of the Nokia E51, the popular Eseries device aimed at business users. The new device, which features all the same functionality for businesses as the E51, was developed in response to demand from professionals who require a high-performing mobile device, but work in industries where security reasons restrict the use of cameras. The camera-free Nokia E51 is expected to begin shipping in the 1st quarter of 2008 with an estimated retail price of 250 euro...
Old School SEO Sucks and is a waste of money
Old School SEO Sucks and in isolation is a waste of money I won’t be telling anyone anything new when I say that today in 2008 the web is a very different place from the web we knew in 1998. Back then Google was pretty fledgling, and spent a lot of time and energy building relationships [...] (Read on Source)
Apple's MobileMe service set to debut
Apple's MobileMe service is set to debut this week in advance of the iPhone 3G launch. Subscribers of Apple's .Mac service should prepare to see the site go down, as it transitions to MobileMe.
Security Matters: Lesson From the DNS Bug: Patching Isn't Enough
Despite the best efforts of the security community, the details of a critical internet vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky about six months ago have leaked. Hackers are racing to produce exploit code, and network operators who haven't already patched the hole are scrambling to catch up. The whole mess is a good illustration of the problems with researching and disclosing flaws like this.
The details of the vulnerability aren't important, but basically it's a form of DNS cache poisoning. The DNS system is what translates domain names people understand, like www.schneier.com, to IP addresses computers understand: 204.11.246.1. There is a whole family of vulnerabilities where the DNS system on your computer is fooled into thinking that the IP address for www.badsite.com is really the IP address for www.goodsite.com -- there's no way for you to tell the difference -- and that allows the criminals at www.badsite.com to trick you into doing all sorts of things, like giving up your bank account details. Kaminsky discovered a particularly nasty variant of this cache-poisoning attack.
Here's the way the timeline was supposed to work: Kaminsky discovered the vulnerability about six months ago, and quietly worked with vendors to patch it. (There's a fairly straightforward fix, although the implementation nuances are complicated.) Of course, this meant describing the vulnerability to them; why would companies like Microsoft and Cisco believe him otherwise? On July 8, he held a press conference to announce the vulnerability -- but not the details -- and reveal that a patch was available from a long list of vendors. We would all have a month to patch, and Kaminsky would release details of the vulnerability at the BlackHat conference early next month.
Of course, the details leaked. How isn't important; it could have leaked a zillion different ways. Too many people knew about it for it to remain secret. Others who knew the general idea were too smart not to speculate on the details. I'm kind of amazed the details remained secret for this long; undoubtedly it had leaked into the underground community before the public leak two days ago. So now everyone who back-burnered the problem is rushing to patch, while the hacker community is racing to produce working exploits.
What's the moral here? It's easy to condemn Kaminsky: If he had shut up about the problem, we wouldn't be in this mess. But that's just wrong. Kaminsky found the vulnerability by accident. There's no reason to believe he was the first one to find it, and it's ridiculous to believe he would be the last. Don't shoot the messenger. The problem is with the DNS protocol; it's insecure.
The real lesson is that the patch treadmill doesn't work, and it hasn't for years. This cycle of finding security holes and rushing to patch them before the bad guys exploit those vulnerabilities is expensive, inefficient and incomplete. We need to design security into our systems right from the beginning. We need assurance. We need security engineers involved in system design. This process won't prevent every vulnerability, but it's much more secure -- and cheaper -- than the patch treadmill we're all on now.
What a security engineer brings to the problem is a particular mindset. He thinks about systems from a security perspective. It's not that he discovers all possible attacks before the bad guys do; it's more that he anticipates potential types of attacks, and defends against them even if he doesn't know their details. I see this all the time in good cryptographic designs. It's over-engineering based on intuition, but if the security engineer has good intuition, it generally works.
Kaminsky's vulnerability is a perfect example of this. Years ago, cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein looked at DNS security and decided that Source Port Randomization was a smart design choice. That's exactly the work-around being rolled out now following Kaminsky's discovery. Bernstein didn't discover Kaminsky's attack; instead, he saw a general class of attacks and realized that this enhancement could protect against them. Consequently, the DNS program he wrote in 2000, djbdns, doesn't need to be patched; it's already immune to Kaminsky's attack.
That's what a good design looks like. It's not just secure against known attacks; it's also secure against unknown attacks. We need more of this, not just on the internet but in voting machines, ID cards, transportation payment cards ... everywhere. Stop assuming that systems are secure unless demonstrated insecure; start assuming that systems are insecure unless designed securely.
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Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
‘Spam King’ Escapes From Federal Prison
Rocky Mountain News: "The man known as "The Spam King" walked away from a minimum-security federal prison Sunday in Florence and was last seen in Lakewood."
Study: Online Ads Get Performance Boost from Branded Content Sites
Advertisers looking to maximize the impact of their Web advertising should focus on branded content sites, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association. (Read on Source)
Olympic Chief: 'no Deal' on China Net Censorship
IOC President Jacques Rogge denies a deal with Beijing Olympic officials to permit censorship of the Internet during the games.
Offshore Outsourcing Provider Artmotion Introduces Line of Offshore Dedicated Servers with Bundled S
Offshore outsourcing Provider Artmotion Ltd (http://www.artmotion.eu) announced today the launch of its Switzerland-based Dedicated Servers, bundled with a hardware firewall and suite of security consulting services. The comprehensive service enables the customer to manage their business and financial affairs offshore securely with a variety of privacy, security and tax advantages.
Merrill, Goldman Pressured by Cuomo on Auction-Rate Debt - Bloomberg
 Washington Post | Merrill, Goldman Pressured by Cuomo on Auction-Rate Debt Bloomberg - By David Mildenberg and Karen Freifeld Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Merrill Lynch & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. face increased pressure by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to settle claims they misled investors on auction-rate debt as ... New York Steps Up Probe On Auction-Rate Securities Wachovia in Auction-Rate Buyback; Merrill Lynch Faces Suit by Cuomo |
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Acquires from Andreeva Commissions, Santa Fe, Famous American
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery negotiated a purchase and acquisition from Andreeva Portrait Commissions of portraits of Cormac McCarthy and Murray Gell-Mann by acclaimed artist Andrew Tift for their distinguished collection. (PRWeb Sep 2, 2008)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/Smithsonian/portraits/prweb1263134.htm
Dell May Shrink Its Network of Factories - New York Times
 DailyTech | Dell May Shrink Its Network of Factories New York Times - By STEVE LOHR Dell, in a government filing this week, strongly suggested that it planned to shrink its network of factories as part of the computer company?s drive to reduce costs. Dell Trades Factories For Money Dell outsourcing plan may be tough to execute |
David Weidner's Writing on the Wall: Obama says McCain just doesn't get it, but neither does he
To borrow a line, it?s not that I think Barack Obama and John McCain don?t care about what?s happening on Wall Street: They just don?t get it.
It's official: Apple to talk laptops on October 14
Apple's invitation leaves us with a pretty clear idea of what Steve Jobs and company will be talking about.
Pregnancy Disorder Signals Need To Screen For Heart Disease
High blood pressure experienced during pregnancy could be a woman's earliest warning that she is at risk of developing heart disease. Called pre-eclampsia, this type of high blood pressure occurs in 5-10 per cent of all pregnancies.
Woices: a new oral information tool for travelers
David Ciudad Rodriguez passes along word of a new site from Spain (I think) called Woices. It's a free internet service that allows people to create, share and consume "echoes": audio records that are linked to a very specific geographical location or real world object. (Read on Source)
Congress to Automakers: No Plan, No Money
Congressional leaders told Detroit's Big Three automakers Thursday that they have until Dec. 2 to submit a plan to Congress on how they will use billions of taxpayer funds to bring their companies from the brink of destruction.
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