Hoping to deal with a growing problem, Twitter has quietly introduced a feature to prevent users from posting links to malicious Web sites. But security experts say that it can be easily circumvented
Over the years hundreds of stories of domain name theft have been reported, most famous among them of course is the theft of Sex.com. Even as recent as last week, reports of stolen domains sent a chilling reminder through the domain industry as valuable domains Before.com, Adios.com and others were stolen from Warren Weitzman. Until recently, there hasn’t been a case of a domain theft where the thief was caught and arrested. However, on 30 July, Daniel Goncalves was arrested at his home in Union, New Jersey and charged in a landmark case, the first criminal arrest for domain name theft in the United States
Human skin is a phenomenon — small scratches and cuts heal quickly, leaving no trace of a scar after just a few days. It’s a different matter with materials, such as metals — if the electroplated layer protecting the metals from corrosion is scratched, rust protection is lost. Engineers are working on transferring the self-healing effect of skin to materials. The idea behind this is to introduce evenly distributed fluid-filled capsules into the electroplated layer — rather like raisins in a cake. If the layer is damaged, the pellets at the point of damage burst, the fluid runs out and repairs
the scratch. Until now, these plans have failed due to the size of the capsules — at 10 to 15 micrometers they were too large for the electroplated layer, which is around 20 micrometers thick. The capsules altered the mechanical properties of the layer
Criminals running an ATM card-skimming scam made a big mistake this week: They tried to hit the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. As the conference was kicking off a few days ago, attendees noticed that an ATM placed in the Riviera Hotel, which plays host to the annual event, didn’t quite look right, according to a senior conference organiser who identified himself only as Priest. They looked at the screen where there would normally be a camera,
he said. It was a little bit too dark, so someone shined a flashlight in there and there was a PC
Optus has blamed a spam attack on an email outage that occurred between late Wednesday and Thursday morning. Optus’ IT security systems had detected an influx of spam directed towards its mail servers. Its engineers rebooted its email servers at around 10pm Wednesday night
Without a way to store their power, no number of solar panels will free a home from the electrical grid. Researchers at Utah-based Ceramatec have developed a new battery that can be scaled up to store 20 kilowatt-hours–enough to power an average home for most of a day. An easy sell for solar users, but it could also allow the grid-bound to stockpile energy during less expensive off-peak hours. The new battery runs on sodium-sulfur — a composition that typically operates at greater than 600 F. Sodium-sulfur is more energetic than lead-acid, so if you can somehow get it to a lower temperature, it would be valuable for residential use,
Ralph Brodd, an independent energy conversion consultant, says
Downloads of the hard-charging Firefox browser have topped one billion as the Mozilla Foundation’s browser gains on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The figure includes the current Firefox 3.5 back to the first version in 2004, and Firefox now has an estimated 31 percent of the market. The Mozilla Foundation plans to celebrate the Firefox milestone
MI5 has closed up a flaw on its web site that could have opened up visitors to malicious attacks, the UK intelligence agency said. The web site suffered a cross-site scripting vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to inject code into the site and redirect users to malicious pages
Australia Post will no longer be accepting packages that contain lithium batteries by air. The batteries have been classified as dangerous, leading the International Civil Aviation Organisation to enact more stringent controls. This follows on the exploding laptop batteries debacle of 2006, prompting a recall, and further recalls in 2008 and 2009. Lithium batteries may still be sent by road, but only if they are lithium-ion and rated for 2 grams, 100-Watt-hours or under. Most devices should fall under this requirement, although in the
official document
(PDF) Australia Post mentions that Equipment will not be safe to send if it contains more than two batteries/four cells — six-cell batteries being common in laptops
eBay is working on software to replace the guts of Skype but is worried that it may not succeed, may lose a court battle with Skype’s founders over rights to the core technology and may need to do something drastic in the next few years. The company said in a regulatory filing yesterday that if it fails in both the legal and technical avenues it’s pursuing then continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible
New software developed at the Georgia Institute for Technology can identify spam before it hits the mail server. The system, known as SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), scores each incoming e-mail based on a variety of new criteria that can be gleaned from a single packet of data. The researchers involved say the automated system puts less of a strain on the network and minimizes the need for human intervention while achieving the same accuracy as traditional spam filters
An internet filter installed by the education department gave students access to pornographic material — but blocked educational sites. One site a Year 10 student opened while searching for a type of bird contained graphic sexual material and was only barred on Monday after inquiries from The Daily Telegraph. George Cochrane said his school-aged son and daughter, who study by distance education from their farm in Grenfell, were horrified by the sites they could access. Other educational sites and harmless web pages for the local member of parliament — and even Education Minister Verity Firth’s own site — have been blocked by the filter
Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement on a search and advertising deal, with an announcement expected as soon as today, according to US media reports. The deal, which follows Microsoft’s unsuccessful bid to buy Yahoo’s search business for $1bn (£610m) last year, is not thought to involve any upfront payment. Instead, as previous speculation had suggested, it will focus on a revenue-sharing deal between the two companies. According to reports, Bing, Microsoft’s newly launched search engine, will become Yahoo’s default search service
With anti-piracy outfits warning those who share copyrighted content and ISPs threatening to pull the plug on alleged offenders, many file-sharers have decided to protect themselves by going anonymous. To accommodate this growing demand, ItsHidden is now offering a free VPN targeted at those who want to protect their privacy online
Rocket-driven spacecraft normally use strong, heavy-metal mountings to hold their fuel tanks in place within the fuselage. But there may be a better way. Burt Rutan, the aerospace pioneer whose firm Scaled Composites is designing civilian suborbital spacecraft for Virgin Galactic, is using an alternative technique to secure the fuel tanks in order to keep the weight of the space plane down. Rutan says the use of heavy mountings can be avoided completely by careful design of the tank and fuselage. His idea, described in a US patent granted last month, is to glue the fuel tanks to the inside of the craft
A major network technology vendor has revealed the potential for Labor’s $43 billion national broadband network to radically reshape the internet and pay-TV industries. Ericsson Australia and New Zealand multimedia strategy chief Kursten Leins said the network was likely to contain the intelligence and design that would allow the NBN company to let IPTV players bypass internet service providers and bolt directly on to the fibre access network. That would remove a crucial economic obstacle to the success of IPTV — the ISP broadband tariffs that sit between IPTV players and consumers
There’s a growing chorus of calls to send astronauts to Mars rather than the moon, but critics point out that such trips would be long and gruelling, taking about six months to reach the Red Planet. But now, researchers are testing a powerful new ion engine that could one day shorten the journey to just 39 days. Traditional rockets burn chemical fuel to produce thrust. Most of that fuel is used up in the initial push off the Earth’s surface, so the rockets tend to coast most of the time they’re in space. Ion engines, on the other hand, accelerate electrically charged atoms, or ions, through an electric field, thereby pushing the spacecraft in the opposite direction. They provide much less thrust at a given moment than do chemical rockets, which means they can’t break free of the Earth’s gravity on their own
Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen sent a 16-word tweet on Twitter about mould in her apartment, and now the landlord has sued for $50,000. A spokesperson for the landlord said, We’re a sue first, ask questions later
organisation. Horizon wants Bonnen to pay $3,125 per word for publishing false and defamatory information on Twitter
Google has sold its once-coveted 5% stake in AOL to Time Warner for $283 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made public this week, taking a $717 million loss on the $1 billion Google paid for the AOL share in 2005. The transaction was completed earlier this month and reported in the SEC filing, which also disclosed additional details on AOL’s finances. The Time Warner unit had a loss of $1.53 billion in 2008, but reported a profit of nearly $83 million in the first quarter of 2009
For nearly three months, malware planted by hackers on servers operated by Network Solutions intercepted more than 573,000 credit and debt card numbers used to services rendered by the domain registration and hosting service provide
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