Data on 3.3 million borrowers was stolen from a nonprofit company that helps with student loan financing. The theft occurred on 20 or 21 March from the headquarters of Educational Credit Management Corp (ECMC), which services loans when student borrowers enter bankruptcy. The data was contained on portable media, said the organisation, which is a dedicated guaranty agency for Virginia, Oregon and Connecticut. The data included names, addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers but no financial information such as credit card numbers or bank account data, ECMC said in a news release
The US government says it has concerns about Australia’s plan to introduce a mandatory internet filter. The Federal Government wants to force internet service providers to block offensive material, including child pornography and instructions for criminal activity, from overseas web sites. The Government is facing growing pressure from anti-censorship and internet groups to drop the idea. Now the US government has added its voice to those expressing concern
The last days of this dreadful government are being accompanied by an attack on rights and privacy that seems unprecedented during Labour’s 13-year rule. The government is now drawing up plans to amend the Postal Services Act to allow tax inspectors to intercept and open people’s mail before it is delivered. Given the state’s ambitions to collect all communications data this is hardly surprising, but we must ask ourselves how many more rights are seized by government and its agencies before Britain becomes the GDR’s most obvious European imitator. Currently postal workers have the right to intercept suspicious letters and packages and pass them to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and then at an agreed moment the item is opened in front of the addressee. The change in the law will mean that HMRC will be able to open whatever it likes without the addressee being present or being made aware of the interception
A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the US has been disconnected from the Internet. The action by the server’s operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People’s Republic of China
Colombo-BT, once the largest torrent site in Italy, was shut down in the summer of 2008. At the time no arrests were made, but following an extensive investigation Italian authorities have announced today that two admins and four associates have been reported for breaking copyright law
Video cameras on your mobile phone could soon be good enough to record a jazz concert, a nighttime street scene, or a candlelit dinner. A Swedish start-up has created an algorithm, inspired by dung beetles, that can be integrated into camera modules to offer high-quality video in extremely low light situations
For the first time security researchers have spotted a type of malicious software that overwrites update functions for other applications, which could pose additional long-term risks for users. The malware, which infects Windows computers, masks itself as an updater for Adobe Systems’ products and other software such as Java, wrote Nguyen Cong Cuong, an analyst with Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (BKIS), a Vietnamese security company, on its blog. BKIS showed screen shots of a variant of the malware that imitates Adobe Reader version 9 and overwrites the AdobeUpdater.exe, which regularly checks in with Adobe to see if a new version of the software is available
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their web sites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced. Users will pay ¬£1 for a day’s access and ¬£2 for a week’s subscription. The move opens a new front in the battle for readership and will be watched closely by the industry. NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition
. Both titles will launch new web sites in early May, separating their digital presence for the first time and replacing the existing, combined site, Times Online
Want to know what expenses your boss claimed last month? How much your colleague makes? What the co-worker down the hall is really working on? Forget about hacking their computers — you might want to hit the nearest photocopier instead. Turns out the newfangled, multi-purpose copy machines in your office keep a wealth of copied data on a hard drive that anyone can hack
Schools and libraries are hurting students by setting up heavy-handed Web filtering software that block access to potentially educational sites. Instead, educators should trust teachers and librarians to oversee schools Internet access, says Craig Cunningham, a professor at National-Louis University. Web filtering software should be configured so that, when a student stumbles across a site that’s blocked, the teacher or librarian can make a judgment whether the content is appropriate for study, and if it is, the teacher or librarian can let the site through
Twitter has radically reduced the amount of spam on the site, announcing that just over one per cent of all tweets are now spam-related. This is a significant change from August 2009 when spam was at its highest on the site accounting for a massive 11 per cent of tweets sent
Researchers in Japan have designed a super-elastic iron alloy which they hope can be used in sophisticated heart and brain surgeries and even buildings in earthquake zones. The researchers said the metal’s super-elasticity allows it to return to its original form and gives it additional properties, such as ductility and a change in magnetisation. The iron alloy’s stress level is about twice that of nickel titanium and it can be used to deliver stents, which are tubes placed in blood vessels to stop them from collapsing
Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave. The extinct hominin
(human-like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago. An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)-led team of researchers and clinicians has published the first proof that a targeted nanoparticle — used as an experimental therapeutic and injected directly into a patient’s bloodstream — can traffic into tumours, deliver double-stranded small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and turn off an important cancer gene using a mechanism known as RNA interference (RNAi). Moreover, the team provided the first demonstration that this new type of therapy, infused into the bloodstream, can make its way to human tumours in a dose-dependent fashion — i.e., a higher number of nanoparticles sent into the body leads to a higher number of nanoparticles in the tumour cells
Google today added an alert to Gmail that warns users of the Web mail service when their account may have been hijacked. Using several criteria — including plotting the Internet protocol (IP) address of each successful log-on — Google determines whether to sound the alarm, which pops up at the top of a user’s account and reads Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…
along with the location associated with the log-on. If an account is accessed from one country, then again a few hours later from a different country, Google would likely sound the alarm. The assumption: The multiple and geographically divergent log-ons would be a clue that the account had been hacked, and was now being used to send spam, spread scams or distribute malware
The new UK Space Agency (UKSA) will take over responsibility for government policy and the key budgets for space, according to ministers. The agency, which comes into being on 1 April, will also represent Britain on space matters in all negotiations with international partners. The UKSA’s name, logo and remit were announced at a conference in London
Four countries and two territories have won preliminary approval to have Internet addresses written entirely in their native scripts as early as this summer. However, proposals for Internet addresses that would say China
and Taiwan
in Chinese will require a few more months of technical review. The delay is not over political disputes, but rather because the Chinese language can be written in two ways — using simplified and traditional scripts. Rules are being developed to make sure that addresses in either script go to the same Web sites
The military in India is looking to weaponise the world’s hottest chilli, the bhut jolokia or ghost pepper
. The Bhut Jolokia chili pepper from Assam, India is no ordinary pepper. In tests first conducted by the New Mexico State University in 2008 and subsequently confirmed by Guinness World records and others, the Bhut Jolokia reached over one million Scoville heat units (SHUs), while the next hottest, the Red Savina Habenero clocks in at a mere 577,000. Scoville units are a universally accepted measure of chilli hotness
Companies have been urged to start budgeting for a new domain name scheme to protect their brands and prepare themselves for bidding wars that could cost tens of millions of dollars. Towards the end of the year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will start accepting applications for generic top level domain names (gTLDs). Unlike the current scheme, under which a string of characters appears before the dot in an internet address, gTLDs appear after the dot — for example, .qantas, .holiday or .woolworths. It would be a tight race to the finish line as the application window was only open for 45 days, warned AusRegistry chief executive Adrian Kinderis
Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast. Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed malvertising
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