July 31, 2007 by dinofond.

To All my friends and family that are still using M$ Windows please read the following:

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/zango-violations/

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July 29, 2007 by dinofond.

Steven Friederich Seattlepi.com

AUBURN — Call it Ozzfest lite, if you want.

But, truth be told, Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution probably had better, more energetic bands than Ozzy’s “Freefest” this year.

But that’s what you get what you charge a few bucks for fans to get into a venue, rather than have your diehard fans spend countless hours at a computer only to be rejected. Bands rocking the nu metal’s summer tour 2007 debut, here at the White River Amphitheatre, included My Chemical Romance, HIM, Taking Back Sunday, Placebo and Julien-K and The Bled, among others.

Not that the Linkin Park crew is entirely without their own generosity. Not at all.

As Linkin Park rapper Mike Shinoda pointed out to the thousands of fans in attendance, a buck from each ticket goes to the American Forest for the Global Relief Event. (There was also a global warming awareness booth prominently on display during the festival).

“I love this (Bleeping) planet,” lead singer Chester Bennington succinctly put it.

“We also converted most of our fleet of trucks and buses into biodieisel for this event,” Shinoda said. ” … And those two things alone are worth about 350 tons of carbon dioxide that we didn’t waste.”

“That’s like if we had one car and didn’t drive 400,000 miles or 14 times around the earth,” Bennington said.

“And that’s just the biodiesel part,” Shinoda added.

Read the complete Blog here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/earcandy/archives/118899.asp

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July 25, 2007 by dinofond.

I’m on a great adventure, maybe I will tell you more later if you ask =)

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July 8, 2007 by dinofond.

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Psst. Want to buy a zero-day?

A Swiss startup called WabiSabiLabi Ltd. has some for sale, but to qualified buyers only.

Last week, the company launched a security vulnerability marketplace, where details on unpatched software flaws can be bought and sold. By week’s end, the site was offering details on four bugs in products such as the Linux kernel and Yahoo Messenger. No bids had yet been registered, and asking prices for the research ranged between $681 and $200 (in U.S. currency figures).

A zero-day vulnerability is a previously undisclosed bug that has not been fixed by the vendor.

WabiSabiLabi argues that the computer industry’s ethical disclosure policies have led to a raw deal for security researchers, who typically are not paid for disclosing vulnerabilities. “Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry is blackmailing researchers (or the companies that are financing the research), to force them to release the results for free under an ethical disclosure policy,” the WabiSabiLabi Web site states. Representatives from WabiSabiLabi could not immediately be reached for comment.

The company bills its marketplace as a way for “security researchers to get a fair price for their findings and ensure that they will no longer be forced to give them away for free or sell them to cyber-criminals.”

But to David Perry at Trend Micro Inc., it looks like something else. “It’s going to be eBay for vulnerabilities,” he said.

Although WabiSabiLabi says it will sell details only to legitimate buyers, Perry is concerned that the site could be used to put dangerous information into the hands of criminals. “We’re looking at the potential of cyber warfare coming up,” said Perry, who is Trend Micro’s global director of education. “Now we’re going to peddle vulnerabilities in a winner-takes-all auction. How do we know who’s good and who’s bad when we do this?”

Security researcher Cesar Cerrudo said that while it’s uncommon for researchers to go underground to sell their vulnerabilities, it does happen. “Researchers will try to get money in the easier and faster way, and sometimes that can only be done in the black market,” said Cerrudo, CEO of Argeniss Information Security.

WabiSabiLabi is run by Herman Zampariolo, formerly CEO of Italian networking vendor iLight SpA. It lists Roberto Preatoni, founder of the Zone-h.org cyber-defacement Web site, as its strategic director.

Like eBay Inc., WabiSabiLabi offers sellers a variety of options. Research can be offered at a fixed price, sold at auction, or sold to a number of different buyers in what is known as a Dutch auction.

WabiSabiLabi will test the research to make sure the vulnerabilities operate as advertised, and the company will also vouch for the sellers and buyers, who can remain anonymous and trade under nicknames.

Companies such as 3Com Corp.’s Tipping Point division and VeriSign Inc.’s iDefense Labs have offered cash for this type of research before, but this is the first time that such an open marketplace has been created, Perry said.

Argeniss’s Cerrudo doesn’t share Perry’s fear of the vulnerabilities being misused. “This is already happening in the underground,” he said, “but with a public service like this, I think things are a little clearer.”

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July 8, 2007 by dinofond.

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Credit card thieves are becoming big-time charity donors, but it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts.

According to Symantec Corp. the criminals are starting to use charitable donations as a way to check whether their stolen credit card numbers are working.

Fraudsters have been using a similar technique for years, but until recently they tended to make minor purchases on online retail sites. Now, as these sites have become better at identifying and blocking these transactions, the criminals have begun looking elsewhere, said Zulfikar Ramzan, senior principal researcher with Symantec Corp. “Using a charitable organization as a way to verify a credit card number is a relatively new technique, and it’s probably being used by a minority of the more innovative guys,” he said.

Credit card numbers are bought and sold in underground “carder” forums, which bring together the people who have stolen the credit card numbers with those who want to use them. These charitable donations are typically made by the person buying the card numbers as a final check to ensure that the numbers will work, Ramzan said.

Last month the Red Cross was forced to return nearly US$7,000 that was donated in the course of 700 fraudulent transactions, said Carrie Martin, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross. “We routinely see this kind of activity,” she said. “We have someone in place who deals with this on a regular basis.”

This fraud accounted for a tiny sliver of the Red Cross’s $6 billion in revenue last year, but the organization also has to pay staff to stay on top of the fraud, Martin said.

This is not the only time that fraudsters have found ways to misuse charities. In another common scam, the criminal will give the charity a fake check and ask that a portion of it be returned in cash. Though the check will initially clear in the charity’s bank account it will eventually be returned. By then, however, the charity will have already paid out to the thieves.

“These kinds of things have hit charities before,” said Ramzan “I feel bad because all these charities are trying to do good and you have these fraudsters that try to take advantage of them because of the way they work.”

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July 6, 2007 by dinofond.

Oddly enough the only negative report I have uncovered (oh and I have looked) on the iphone comes from MSNBC…. as in Microsoft and NBC’s lovely cable news network. How handy!

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July 2, 2007 by dinofond.

The guy can do anything can’t he. We are all to blame, we Americans don’t do anything about it. America is practically silent when plethoras of voices that should be singing in the streets in a non stop vigil and purpose. Wait till he starts another war front before his term is up, wait until there are no 2008 elections because of marshal law. You don’t think this regime wont do it?

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