External Brain

A newly reported vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer allows hackers to steal or corrupt cookie information on a user’s desktop through a malformed URL at a Web site or in an HTML e-mail

Gates has taken credit for the genesis of open-source software. He has said that Microsoft made it possible by standardising computers: Really, the reason you see open-source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that’s identical with millions and millions of machines — an interesting spin on things indeed

Two British PhD students have designed a computer program to crack bank security codes which potentially gives them access to hundreds of thousands of PIN numbers

When two Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor in 1947, it was as tall as the face of a wristwatch. Now, another Bell team has made a transistor from a single molecule, small enough to fit about 10 million on the head of a pin

AllTheWeb offers near real time indexing, allowing users to search more than 3000 online news sources for stories updated less than an hour earlier

It used to be pretty tough to find out your security vulnerabilities, but that’s changed. The prestigious SANS Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, working with the FBI, has developed a top 20 list of common vulnerabilities that leave Internet sites open to attacks — it comes as no surprise that Microsoft IIS is the most vulnerable

In an e-mail sent to media and the Government, Net pioneer, Robert Elz, drew the battle lines for yet another stoush with the newly installed Internet naming body, auDomain Australia (auDA) over their plans for org.au. Last month Elz found himself officially supplanted by auDA as the top dog in the Australian domain space

The liquid crystal display of the Nokia 8210 mobile phone model is defective, according to several users, with evidence supplied to ZDNet Australia seemingly giving support to the claims — no great surprise there. The 3210 was a lemon and instead of recalling the worthless piece of junk, Nokia instead withdrew them from sale

A small Australian company, InterSect Alliance, has released an innovative Linux-based security tool, in an attempt to set the open-source darling on the path towards acceptance within organisations