DARPA wants Lockheed Martin to build a decision-making tool for battlefield commanders
Article via Red Herring: "To prevent the data deluge from swamping soldiers, the Army is experimenting with software to sift through the information and even craft algorithms that can make hard choices in the heat of battle. Lockheed Martin announced Friday that DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research arm, awarded the company $1.4 million to build a commander’s interface to make sense of data in a networked war zone."
Comcast's Offer for Outage: $1.43 a Day
Also via BetaNews: "After experiencing three nights of network outages in less than a week, BetaNews has learned that in at least one case in southeast Michigan, a customer received a credit of $2.86 on their bill to compensate for the two days of service he complained about."
New Supercomputer to Track Climate Change
Article via BetaNews: "IBM has announced that the University of Colorado, in cooperation with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has acquired a Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate the ocean, predict the weather and analyze other complex climate phenomena that may affect climate change and cause ripple effects in the global economy."
Comcast Net Outages Tied To DNS Upgrades
Yahoo! News article (originally from Washingtonpost.com) article: "Network problems at one of the Washington area's largest Internet service providers have prevented some subscribers from checking their e-mail accounts and accessing Web sites."
Internet outages annoy Comcast customers
"Cable provider Comcast said Thursday that it was working on technical problems that caused a series of outages in recent days for many of the 7 million people who subscribe to its high-speed Internet service." Read the SiliconValley.com article here.
Internet's growth, innovation threatens newspapers
From SiliconValley.com article: "Craig Newmark already has tormented newspapers by creating a Web site where anyone can post ads at little or no cost, capturing an ever-growing share of the classified advertising market that had been one of the industry's most dependable sources of revenue."
Vendors call for more gov't cybersecurity focus
"The U.S. government needs to get more serious about cybersecurity, but Congress should look at broader ways to combat security problems than focusing on bills that address specific issues such as spam or spyware, a group of executives from IT security product vendors said this week." Read the entire article at Network World Fusion Netflash.
ChoicePoint Wins Menace Award
From WiReD News: "A data broker that sold personal information to identity thieves, an elementary school that tried to track students with radio-frequency ID tags and a consulting firm that helped orchestrate an invasive traveler-monitoring system all received honors this week from privacy rights advocates." Read the entire WiReD article here, and the Privacy International announcement here.
IBM miss could spell trouble in tech-land
From MSNBC/CNBC: Subtitled,"Sun, others in industry also seeing weakness in sales," this financial article explains how "This year may not be as rich as technology companies and investors had hoped." There's also a related article from the New York Times which is posted on C|Net News which explains postulates that "the disappointing performance that IBM reported late Thursday may be nothing more than a momentary stumble."
ISPs crack down on outgoing junk e-mail
From MSNBC article: "There's a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it containment. Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.'s anti-spam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears."
MIT students pull prank on conference
I just love this story. From CNN Offbeat article: "In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference." Touche!
Encarta to Test User Edit System
MSNBC is running a story that explains how Microsoft's Encarta is going to attempt the "Wiki Way" -- allowing users an opportunity to suggest edits or additions to entries, although the changes will be reviewed by editors before they are published. Of course, this is partly due to the resounding successes of Wikipedia, and perhaps as a result of inaccuracies in the mainstream versions of encyclopedias.
Vint Cerf Slams Net Phone Regulation
Vint Cerf appears in the news yet again. This time, as reported in an article on C|Net News, Vint told an Internet governance roundtable in Sydney that in his personal opinion, it was easy to answer the question of how to regulate VoIP -- legislators must not make the mistake of subjecting VoIP offerings to the same rules as telephony services, or else it may stifle innovation. Vint is quoted as saying, "My concern here is the fact that VoIP looks like, and sounds like telephony. This is horribly misleading. To leap to that conclusion is extremely dangerous. VoIP is really just another application on the Internet. Nothing special about it."
Study Finds Pervasive Chinese Internet Controls
Reuters article: "China is the world's leading censor of the Internet, filtering web sites, blogs, e-mail, and online forums for sensitive political content, according to a study released Thursday."
Last-minute tax filers hit the Web
Of course, there will always be last-minute tax filers, and this year they are flocking to the web in droves as the filing deadline nears. C|Net News has an article that describes the frenzy here. I'm glad I completed mine back in January....
Vint Cerf: Hollywood interested in BitTorrent
Given the recent spate of lawsuits by the RIAA and the MPAA, I'll just bet they are. In any event, C|Net News is running a story that explains "Cerf, who co-created TCP/IP, told a roundtable on Internet governance in Sydney, Australia, this week that he had recently discussed file-sharing program BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers."
Google's "Track by Number" Gizmo
Wow, Google never ceases to amaze. Check out Googles new Search by Number feature, where you can plug in virtually any number and it will spit out the right answer (for what its worth, no, its not 42), including UPS and FedEx tracking number, vehicle VINs, area codes, etc. Pretty cool stuff.
South Korea Cracks Down on Online Porn
MyWay News article: "The world's most wired country is raiding cyberspace's red-light district in a campaign pitting Confucian morals against modern technology."
George Bush expresses e-mail privacy fears
The Register is also running a story on the comments that President George W. Bush made to the American Society of Newspaper Editors Thursday, in which he stated, "I don't want you reading my personal stuff. There has got to be a certain sense of privacy." One could hope that, given the assaults on personal privacy issues lately, each of us could hope for the same.
Virus Writers have Girlfriends, too....
Wonder of wonders. I ran across this article on The Register in which an old friend of mine, Sarah Gordon (who is a senior principal research engineer at Symantec Security Response), provides an inside look at the psychology of virus writers, perhaps quelling the myth that virus writers are nerdy-types who stay locked indoors and don't have girlfriends.
Entertainment industry doesn't like Grouper, new privacy-friendly P2P app
From Declan McCullagh's Politech blog, I found this pointer to a LA Times article on Grouper: "Grouper's creators say it's not like other file-sharing programs. The entertainment industry isn't so sure."
More Royal Brawn than Brains?
CNN is running a humorous article this morning informing us that Prince Harry "has been told to brush up on his computer skills after reportedly failing a test at the elite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst."
Comcast customer sues over disclosure
Well, it looks like Comcast has more problem on its hands -- this time it is legal issues. MSNBC reports that "Comcast Corp., the top U.S. cable television network operator, is being sued by a Seattle-area woman for disclosing her name and contact information, court records showed on Thursday." More details in the MSNBC article here.
Polo Ralph Lauren confirms HSBC data security problem
Polo Ralph Lauren has identified itself as the U.S. retailer at the center of a scare over stolen customer data. The company said late Thursday that some of its customers' credit card information may have been "misappropriated." Here's a detailed article about this story on InfoWorld, and also on MSNBC.
Bogus blogs snare fresh victims
The BBC reported in an article yesterday that Cyber criminals are starting to use fake blogs to snare new victims. The bogus web journals are being used as traps that infect visitor's machines with keylogging software or viruses.
Comcast Suffers Three Outages In A Week
From advanced IP pipeline: "Cable operator Comcast Corp. has suffered three outages across its network over the last week, leaving customers with only intermittent Internet access during the evening hours." The entire article can be found here.
IBM announces $125m deal with UAE
The Register reports this morning that "IBM has won a $125m deal with the government of the United Arab Emirates to install tracking devices into tens of thousands of cars by the end of next year." Entire article can be found here.
Where's That Windows Media Player Update?
eWeek article: "Three months after promising to update its flagship Windows Media Player software to block a well-known spyware infection vector, Microsoft has still not provided security for the majority of its users."
Study: Home workers "pose security risk"
A BBC article running this morning cites a study conducted by Novell, which indicates that "80% of Britons admit to not taking computer security precautions when working from home." Of course, given the fact that the study was conducted by Novell does not necessarily mean that the study was biased in any way, now does it? In any event, read the entire BBC News story here.
