A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals. The Srizbi
botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia. Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp, a hosting company that had been accused of harbouring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers
Until today, uTorrent — the client of choice for most BitTorrent users — was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition
YouTube, after years of complaints over the size of its video player, expanded the size of its screen, adopting a widescreen format
Facebook’s leaders are smiling as the company announced an antispam victory. The popular social-networking Web site was awarded more than $873 million in damages against a Canadian spammer
Samsung has announced that it is mass-producing 256GB solid-state disk drives that deliver double the performance rate of its earlier 64GB and 128GB drives. The new SSDs are designed for use in laptop and desktop PCs and are available for resellers today. Samsung said it has been able to narrow the disparity between read and write speeds on the drive from previous models to about 10%. That yields a sequential read rate of 220MB/sec. and sequential write rates of 200MB/sec
The Australian subsidiary of the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation today said it would commence a local “Give 1, Get 1” program on November 30 that would deliver the machines to both geeks and disadvantaged children. The initiative will provide a XO laptop to a child in remote Australia or the Pacific Islands for each laptop purchased. The cost of a laptop is US$399 (plus shipping and GST). The devices can be ordered online
An analysis of ISP filtering schemes in Europe has shown that none have adopted mandatory filtering — a claim Senator Conroy has used to justify such a scheme in Australia. With the limited exceptions of Germany and Italy, mandatory ISP level filtering is not a feature of any of the countries reviewed,
Tom Edwards and Gareth Griffith wrote in a special research note published by the NSW Parliamentary Library Service
iiNet’s managing director Michael Malone yesterday vowed to fight the action filed against it in federal court by film and television giants, which alleged iiNet had failed to prevent customers from downloading pirated content
Chrome, apparently, will not remain in an indefinite period of beta testing for the rest of its life. Speaking to The Times, Sundar Pichai, Google vice president, stated that the browser will exit beta in January. Google, meanwhile, is exploring its distribution options and examining the various ways it might improve its market share. We will probably do distribution deals,
Pinchai told The Times. We could work with an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and have them ship computers with Chrome preinstalled
Department of Defence computers have been hit with an old worm that the DoD won’t discuss other than to say it is taking steps to mitigate its effects. One report identified the virus as W32/SillyFCD-W, which spreads via thumb drives that move from machine to machine. Once the virus is on a machine, it may download other malware, according to Sophos. Protection against the worm has been available from Sophos since April 2007
Microsoft has announced that its final update of the current beta Internet Explorer 8 browser will be released in next year’s first quarter — after which it will launch the final release
BT has banned all future discussion of Phorm and its WebWise
targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February
Foxtel has expanded its online Electronic Program Guide (EPG) to fourteen days in advance. The online EPG has the full 14 days, along with some extra search functions. For its 450,000 iQ and iQ2 subscribers it means extra use of the Remote Record function
McColo, a network provider that was yanked offline following reports it enabled more than half the world’s spam, briefly returned from the dead over the weekend so it could hand-off command and control channels to a new source. The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to Paul Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus software maker Trend Micro
NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.
Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,
said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington
The Australian film and television industry has launched a major legal action against one of Australia’s largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows. The action against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court today by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network. Mark White, iiNet’s chief operating officer, said the company did not support piracy in any form but it could not disconnect customers just because the movie industry claimed they engaged in illegal downloading
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today. Google have announced the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This collection of newly-digitised images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s
High Definition Content Protection (HDCP) — you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well
Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, will step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement for the internet company
Axia Netmedia has put down in black and white its intention to lodge a bid for the government’s $4.7 billion national broadband network. Although it was believed to have paid the $5 million bond and had put together a regulatory submission on the network, until now there was no certainty around whether the Canadian company actually intended on bidding
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