It looks like the efforts of the anti-scammers at sites like 419eater, Scamwarners, Artists Against 419 and possibly others have become the target of the Storm botnet. Spamnation has a post about it, and as of this writing none of the above listed sites are responding. Spamnation reports that CastleCops and other anti-spam forums are being DDoSed as well. Sounds like a massive, concerted effort against the folks who are fighting the good fight. If the scammers have gone to these lengths, perhaps the efforts of the anti-scam groups are working — via Slashdot
Microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs. A series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumours originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices. To date, about 2,000 RFID devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip — via Slashdot
A police operation to covertly follow a Central Otago man came to an abrupt halt this week when the man found tracking devices planted in his car, ripped them out and listed them for sale on Trade Me. Police have neither confirmed nor denied they placed the devices, yet they demanded Trade Me yank the auctions
US District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in favor of the ACLU and struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act this morning, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter. In the words of Judge Marrero, this use of National Security Letters offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers
— via Slashdot
The UK government has responded to an electronic petition that called on it to ensure the BBC’s iPlayer works on non-Windows PCs. More than 16,000 people have signed the petition since it was created. In its response, the government said the BBC Trust had made it a condition of launching the iPlayer that it worked with other operating systems. The iPlayer on-demand TV service lets people catch up with BBC programmes by downloading them via the net
Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of quantum intuition
which Albert Einstein referred to as spooky
. In doing so, the researchers have made an advance towards super-fast quantum computing and even a quantum internet
Computers inside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s network are spamming the internet with e-mails touting the company’s flagship erectile-enhancement drug Viagra, along with ads for knockoff Rolexes and shady junk stocks. But the e-mails are not part of Pfizer’s official marketing efforts. Pfizer’s computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public’s inboxes with ads for the company’s own product
This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk, said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own — via Slashdot
Security firm SunBelt, which discovered the Bank of India’s hacked Web site was serving dangerous malware, says the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN) — an ISP linked to child pornography and phishing — is behind the attack. The service provider in question has developed a notorious reputation, with Verisign classifying it as the baddest of the bad
in the ISP world in June 2006. According to Verisign threat intelligence analyst Kimberly Zenz, RBN is different to other service providers because unlike many ISPs that host predominately legitimate items, RBN is entirely illegal
The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American officials. The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army
Swedish ISPs may soon be required by law to take greater responsibility for unlawful file-sharing. Although rejecting the ludicrous idea of an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders, a government report published on Monday called for internet providers to be bound to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end
. Under the proposal, copyright holders whose material is being shared illegally would be entitled to compensation from ISPs which did not ban users. Needless to say, the country’s ISPs are not happy — via Slashdot
Quietly over the weekend, Network TEN has joined the Foxtel EPG. It’s been a long running negotation
, but finally Foxtel users, and iQ users in particular, gain the benefit of actually seeing the stations programming in the schedule. So it’s now just Channel Seven still holding out on Foxtel
A group of anonymous programmers are planning to sell iPhone unlocking software on the Internet. They demonstrated the software hack for CNN and had a T-Mobile sim card working moments after removing the AT&T sim card. This is bound to stir up a lot of controversy: in the US iPhones are supposed to work only on the AT&T network in the first two years according to their agreement with Apple — via Slashdot
According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China — including Hong Kong — hosted 44.8 percent of the world’s infected sites in August 2007. The United States ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of Web sites that contain malicious code. The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said that it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August
Since 30 August, there are massive problems with PayPal subscriptions. The automatic renewal of subscriptions stopped that day, causing headaches for lots of web site owners that rely on this kind of revenue. The problem is global, as this thread in the PayPal Developer Community shows. PayPal is aware of the problem but hasn’t indicated any progress yet; some posters are wondering whether they have stopped working on it over the long (US) holiday weekend — via Slashdot
Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango’s programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab’s security software from blocking Zango’s potentially undesirable programs. In the important ruling for the anti-malware industry, Judge Coughenour of the Western District of Washington threw out Zango’s lawsuit on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act — via Slashdot
The Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. The 1970s hardware is now our world’s only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system’s outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity’s most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. The Voyager technology is so outmoded,
said Tidbinbilla’s spokesman, Glen Nagle, We have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them
— via Slashdot
The latest version of Google Earth contains a hidden feature: a full-fledged flight simulator. Press Command+Option+A in OS X or Ctrl+Alt+A on a PC or Linux box and you’ll be greeted with a hidden dialogue box that lets you choose an aircraft (F16 or SR22) and an airport. Once you’ve made you selection, you’ll be placed inside the aircraft. You can then fly around the globe in a free flight simulator, viewing the scenery that is pulled from Google Earth’s map files
Google on Friday began hosting material produced by The Associated Press and three other news services on its own Web site instead of only sending readers to other destinations. The change affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies’ Web sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce those companies’ revenue from online advertising
Amazon will probably launch its DRM-free music store in the next few weeks, joining Wal-Mart and others in posing the first real threat to the iTunes Music hegemony. Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos adopted an MP3-only strategy so that the music Amazon sells can play on iPods any device
. Trouble is, it may be a half-assed music store, with Sony and Warner still mum on the subject of stripped DRM
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