NEW YORK – In Cambridge, Mass., not too far from the Charles River, which cuts near Harvard and M.I.T., David Pearson is attempting to build an un-hackable network. Pearson is a division scientist at BBN Technologies, a private research company in Cambridge, Mass., which is most famous for building, in 1969, the first few nodes of a computer network connecting its headquarters to Harvard University and Boston University that over time would evolve into the Internet. Now the firm has built a network it says is impervious to hackers.
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Mozilla has released the next-to-last planned alpha edition of Firefox 3.0, the first preview to include a major chunk of the browser’s revamped bookmark and history tool. Alpha 5 of Firefox 3.0, which still carries the codename Gran Paradiso, includes the bookmarks portion of Places, the feature that at one time was slated to appear in Firefox 2.0. Last year, however, Mozilla yanked the searchable bookmark-browser history from 2.0 and said it would appear in 2007′s Version 3.0.
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Microsoft is preparing to release six software updates on Tuesday, four of which will fix ‘critical’ vulnerabilities in Windows or its components. Two of the ‘critical’ bulletins address flaws in Windows XP, 2000 and Server 2003. A flaw in versions 5.01, 6.0 and 7.0 of Internet Explorer spans all currently supported versions of Windows including Vista. It ranges in severity, however.
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Symantec has released a free public beta of Norton AntiBot, which uses behaviour analysis to detect malware. The software is based on existing technology from Sana Security, with a few minor additions from Symantec’s SONAR behavioural scanning technology that is now included in Norton products.
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Web servers running Microsoft’s IIS software are twice as likely to host malware as other site servers, it was claimed this week. Nagendra Modadugu, of Google’s newly-formed Anti-Malware Team, based his claims on an analysis of 70,000 domains that were either distributing malware or hosting attack code.
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A Chilean gay rights group claims its Web site was hacked by a Chilean skinhead group. Calling itself the Skinheads from Pitana, the supremacy group allegedly removed from the gay right’s Web site a banner featuring actors supporting the group known as the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Freedom, or MOVILH, the Santiago Times reported Wednesday. In its place, the hackers pasted a large picture of skinheads.
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Ever since its debut, Firefox has garnered a reputation for being an enormously customizable program, both through its add-on architecture and its internal settings. In fact, many of Firefox’s settings aren’t exposed through the Tools > Options menu; the only way to change them is to edit them manually. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most useful Firefox settings that you can change on your own, and that aren’t normally available through the program’s graphical interface.
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Robert Alan Soloway, described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers, was arrested Wednesday. Despite the arrest, millions of junk e-mails continued to surface the mailboxes. He was once on a top 10 list of spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization. Others have since topped him, mostly based in Russia and other countries out of reach of U.S. or European law.
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IronPort Systems has announced the introduction of the IronPort X1050 e-mail security appliance. The IronPort X1050 offers a significant increase in performance, scanning more than 2.5 million messages per hour. This is 400% more processing power than IronPortâs previous generation of carrier-class appliances, the IronPort X1000, and as much as 10 times the performance of competing systems.
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PHP version 5.2.3 released at the beginning of the month purported to eliminate a security vulnerability in the chunk_split() function that splits strings into user-defined substrings. However, according to the PHP security specialist and co-initiator of the Month of PHP Bugs Stefan Esser, this is actually not the case. According to Esser, the original fix was not only malfunctional, but more or less even nonsense, since it only pushed the fundamental problem, an integer overflow, into another line in the source code. An additional fix has been now developed which is supposed to finally eliminate the bug – thus far, however, it has been reported officially only in CVS from PHP.
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