Archive for December 21st, 2007
Apple and Think Secret, a Mac rumor Web site published by Nicholas M. Ciarelli, have come to an agreement in a nearly three-year-old lawsuit. The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Ciarelli has agreed to shut down ThinkSecret.com.Ciarelli posted a press release on his Web site that said the agreement results in a “positive solution” for both sides. “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits,” Ciarelli said in a statement.
Apple was not immediately available for comment.
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December 21st, 2007
Microsoft 
‘s recent set of security patches is causing problems, namely for Internet Explorer 6 users, who are watching their browsers crash midstream when visiting some sites. Redmond has offered a technical workaround to solve the problem until a more formal fix can be developed.”First, I want to note the security update does protect against the vulnerabilities noted in the bulletin,” Kieron Shorrock, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) program manager responsible for Internet Explorer, wrote in the MSRC blog. The Internet Explorer patch fixes four critical vulnerabilities in the browser, making it the most important of December’s Patch Tuesday updates.
Shorrock said Microsoft has been working with a “small number” of customers who reported issues related to the browser resulting from the update described in security bulletin MS07-069. The problem generates a message that reads, “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and must close.” The bug is not widespread, according to Microsoft, and only affects certain installations of Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP.
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December 21st, 2007
A new Trojan has been discovered in an unlikely place: Google ads. According to BitDefender, the Trojan is actively hijacking Google text ads and replacing them with ads from a different provider.BitDefender, which named the threat Trojan.Qhost.WU, said the Trojan modifies the infected computer’s hosts file, which controls domain mappings. The Trojan damages both users and webmasters because it takes away viewers and thus a possible money source from Web sites, BitDefender virus analyst Attila-Mihaly Balazs said in a statement.
These days, ads may not be such an unlikely place to find Trojans. In fact, according to the Q1 2007 Web Trends Security Report published by Finjan, a computer security company, some 80 percent of malicious code now comes from online ads.
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December 21st, 2007
Security researchers report that Google’s Orkut was the target of what appeared to be a relatively benign worm that experts say illustrates the ability of hackers to drop code into social-media sites.Orkut has millions of registered users, some 700,000 of which were affected by the worm over a period of 24 hours.
The exploit was contained in a JavaScript file, aptly named “virus.js.” When Orkut users received e-mail about a new scrapbook entry and clicked through to the site, the browser downloaded and executed the embedded virus.js file automatically — without the need for any user intervention.
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December 21st, 2007
The list is in, and it includes Microsoft Relevant Products/Services cofounder Paul Allen, Google, AT&T, and Verizon, among many others. It’s a list of the bidders for the 700-MHz spectrum license that these companies could use to build a wireless Relevant Products/Services broadband network that runs across the United States.
The winner of the auction will gain the right to a portion of the U.S. airwaves around the 700-MHz band that will become available when television moves from analog to digital signals. The FCC expects to raise as much as $15 billion in the auction.
“I’m not sure if it’s an auction or a circus at this point. But this is extremely valuable technology, and because it’s so valuable, we are seeing all sorts of folks participating,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. “The players go well above the usual suspects of who we would think would be participating.”
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December 21st, 2007
