As first covered by Cult of Mac, Girls Around Me is an incredibly creepy app that allows anyone to locate nearby girls based on public Foursquare checkins and Facebook data. Now the app has been officially banned by Foursquare in response to its dangerous potential — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Ukrainian authorities have shut down a long-running forum that was used to trade tips on writing malicious software, a sign the country’s law enforcement may be watching hackers more closely.
Administrators for the forum, VX Heavens, wrote that its servers were seized on 23 March for allegedly creating and intending to sell malicious software programs, a violation of Ukraine’s criminal code. The website called the accusation “absurd” but said it couldn’t offer services with the pending court case.
VX Heavens might have been easy pickings for Ukraine, which has been noted by computer security experts as being a hotbed of cybercrime — via redwolf.newsvine.com
An outspoken supporter of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning has won the right to sue the federal government over a border search-and-seizure that agents conducted in 2010 after his return to the US from a Mexico vacation.
David Maurice House, an MIT researcher, was granted the right to pursue a case against the government on Wednesday after a federal judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in May 2011 on House’s behalf, charging that he had been targeted solely for his lawful association with the Bradley Manning Support Network.
This ruling affirms that the Constitution is still alive at the US border,
ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement. Despite the government’s broad assertions that it can take and search any laptop, diary or smartphone without any reasonable suspicion, the court said the government cannot use that power to target political speech — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The calm, industrious mood inside Double Fine Production’s office masks the elation that erupted into champagne-splashed toasts earlier this month.
The San Francisco-based video games developer is making history by bankrolling its next title using only crowdsourced cash.
Within 24 hours of seeking pledges over the internet it had bagged more than $1m (£630m), overshooting its initial target of $400,000. By the campaign’s end it had reeled in a total of $3.4m from more than 87,000 supporters for its point-and-click adventure game.
The studio’s founder, Tim Schafer, is legendary in gaming circles for titles including Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, but he had still found it hard work to secure funds through traditional means. So the idea of going direct to his fans had obvious appeal.
It felt great because it was like getting validation for a project at the beginning instead of the end,
he told the BBC — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Labor Government is tightening up Australian law in areas that will have a direct impact on organisations such as WikiLeaks. Only the Greens are challenging the new bills in parliament, and they are receiving scant media attention.
There’s a new extradition law that will make it easier for foreign governments to request extradition of Australians and a new spying law that broadens ASIO’s reach, which has been dubbed the WikiLeaks Amendment.
And finally there’s a bill that will make it easier to retain digital data for Australians, and easier also to pass that information to overseas law enforcement agencies. Senator Scott Ludlam, the Greens’ spokesperson for communications, told New Matilda that the Attorney-General wants all digital records for all people for all time to be trapped and recorded so that intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and welfare agencies can mine the data.
The new extradition law contains elements that make it easier for foreign governments to request that people be extradited from Australia. The new federal law also enables people to be prosecuted in Australia for alleged crimes overseas — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Nomad lets you move a website to a new domain and have the traffic follow
Schools in Brazil have started to place computer chips in school uniforms to keep track of pupils and reduce truancy.
Some 20,000 pupils in the north-eastern city of Vitoria da Conquista will have microchips embedded in their school T-shirts.
The parents will get a text message when their children arrive at school, or if they are late for classes.
The authorities say the measure will help teacher-parent relations — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A student faces jail after admitting posting offensive comments on Twitter about the on-pitch collapse of footballer Fabrice Muamba.
Liam Stacey was arrested after his tweets were reported to police by Twitter users from across Britain, including former England striker Stan Collymore.
Stacey, 21, spent Sunday night in custody and was brought before magistrates in Swansea on Monday, where he admitted incitement to racial hatred. He was released on bail on condition that he stayed off Twitter and other social networking sites and will be sentenced next week. Stacey was told he could be jailed.
The swiftness of the arrest demonstrates how seriously police forces are taking the posting of potentially criminal comments on social networking sites by so-called trolls
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A hard-to-detect piece of malware that doesn’t create any files on the affected systems was dropped onto the computers of visitors to popular news sites in Russia in a drive-by download attack, according to security researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab.
Drive-by download attacks are one of the primary methods of distributing malware over the Web. They usually exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software products to infect computers without requiring user interaction.
Kaspersky Lab researchers recently investigated such an attack on visitors to www.ria.ru, a website that belongs to the Russian RIA Novosti news agency, and www.gazeta.ru, a popular Russian-language online newspaper.
The attack code loaded an exploit for a known Java vulnerability (CVE-2011-3544), but it wasn’t hosted on the affected websites themselves. Instead, it was served to their visitors through banners displayed by a third-party advertising service called AdFox — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google’s Web Font service has been around for a while now, but in the last few months the company’s been working hard to optimise and simplify its use. If you’re an old-school developer like me, you’ve probably stuck to classics like Tahoma, Verdana and Arial. Now, with modern browsers that better follow W3C standards and the chunky bandwidth of today’s internet, there’s really no reason to limit yourself.
If you’re worried about compatibility, don’t be. As Google’s FAQ on the service points out, Web Fonts has excellent support for all popular browsers — via Lifehacker
Google is planning to penalise sites that overuse search-engine-optimisation techniques, according to a report.
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has posted an audio clip from a panel discussion at the recent South by Southwest confab, in which Google engineer Matt Cutts discusses the plans.
In search results, Google wants to level the playing field
regarding all those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO — versus those making great content and great sites,
Schwartz quotes Cutts as saying, in a rough transcription — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.
Senior lecturer at the university’s School of Chemistry, Dr Matthew Todd, told Computerworld Australia that the current method of drug discovery is extremely competitive and mostly carried out behind closed doors to protect certain ideas and any commercial benefits down the track.
University of Sydney researchers are openly sharing their lab notes, primarily through a blog — The Synaptic Leap — as well as Twitter and Google+ and currently have around 15 contributors to a malaria project that is in pilot stages — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Security firm Kaspersky Lab Thursday said it’s identified a malicious program that appears to make use of a compromised Symantec VeriSign digital certificate issued to Conpavi AG, which is known to work with Swiss government agencies. Kaspersky says it has asked Symantec VeriSign to revoke the compromised certificates.
Kaspersky says the malicious program contains what’s being called Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Mediyes. A dropper file is a type of malware commonly used by attackers to seed targeted computers in order to easily drop other malware into it in the future for a wide variety of purposes — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Likely the very first non-email application you ever used to speak with your friends and relatives is about to be shut down for good, AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, has been all but slashed entirely from the AOL family. This application’s 40 employees in charge of development as well as everything outside of basic maintenance has been let go entirely. While support staff for the ecosystem will remain, no future upgrades to the software will exist from this point on — via SlashGear
The California city of about 1 million intends to offer high-speed Wi-Fi throughout its downtown, covering an area of 1.5 square miles (3.9 square kilometres) in the middle of this year. But unlike earlier municipal Wi-Fi initiatives, such as a Google-sponsored network that would have covered San Francisco, the San Jose system will be able to pay for itself entirely by helping the government do its job.
In the middle of the past decade, ambitious projects in several cities, including parts of San Jose, promised to blanket outdoor areas with Wi-Fi and provide built-in sources of revenue. Home broadband subscriptions, browser-based advertising or small-business use would help to pay for equipment and operations. But those complicated business models depended on assumptions that often proved unfounded — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit all of
its intellectual property and other “intangible property” to settle its debts.
The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission — via ars technica
Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity’s achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.
And now it’s going out of print.
The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 instalment, it turns out, were the last. Future editions will live exclusively online — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The American internet entrepreneur, 45, will become an unpaid adviser across all government departments to help civil servants develop innovative
new technology.
Under his role, it is expected that Mr Wales will also advise civil servants on how the public can be better engaged through the internet as part of its open government
initiatives.
A Whitehall source told The Daily Telegraph on Sunday night that Mr Wales was one of a number of unpaid advisers
who would provide help to civil servants rather than ministers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter has bought the microblogging service Posterous and will be running it as an adjunct to its main client — for the time being, at least.
This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple — a goal we share,
said Twitter in a statement. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Spammers are abusing a Dropbox feature that lets users share a shortened link, directing people to websites selling questionable pharmaceuticals, according to security vendor Symantec.
Dropbox, the file-sharing and synchronisation service, has a public folder that is dedicated to sharing content. Dropbox’s URL (uniform resource locator) shortening service can be used to create links to content in that public folder.
Spammers have seized on this and are creating shortened links to images stored in the public folder. The images contain a link to online pharmaceutical retailers, wrote Nick Johnston, a senior software engineer at Symantec.
We saw over 1,200 unique Dropbox URLs being used in spam over a 48-hour period,
Johnston wrote. We have informed Dropbox, providing them with the full list of URLs
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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