Russia Moves To Hold ISPs Responsible For Illegal File-Sharing
The cyber crime department of Russia’s Interior Ministry says it intends to get tough on the country’s ISPs when their customers share copyrighted or otherwise illegal material. Authorities say they are currently carrying out nationwide checks on ISPs’ local networks and could bring prosecutions as early as next month.
Having largely failed in their earlier bids to aggressively target individual file-sharers, in recent times copyright holders and authorities have been forced to look elsewhere for someone to blame.
Worldwide lobbying efforts have borne fruit and now it’s almost routine to see ISPs dragged into the debate on illegal file-sharing and treated as if they are the reason the problem exists, or at the very least that it’s their place to take responsibility. Read more...
NEC launches software to quickly find video clips in large archives
NEC has begun sales of new software to quickly find video clips in large archives, which is well-suited for finding illegal content on video sharing websites, it said Tuesday.
The company's "Media-Serpla" software makes digital signatures for each frame in a video and stores them in a searchable database. NEC says it allows for 1,000 hours of video to be searched for a five-second clip in about a second on a standard desktop computer.
Quickly finding the source of a single video clip within a large archive has long been a problem for broadcasters and video producers. It has also become a major legal issue for video sharing sites like YouTube, which have faced lawsuits from copyright holders who feel their content has been posted online without permission. Read more...
Free tool detects Flashback Mac malware pestilence
A Mac developer has posted a tool that detects a Flashback malware infection on Apple's computers.
The tiny tool -- it's just a 38KB download -- was created by Juan Leon, a software engineer at Garmin International, the Kansas-based company best known for its GPS devices.
Ars Technica first reported on Leon's FlashBack Checker.
The tool spots the malware by automating a tedious process first described by security firm F-Secure last month. F-Secure's procedure required entering multiple commands in Terminal, the Mac OS X command line utility. Read more...
Computer science enrollments rise again by 10%
Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergrad students, who pushed enrollments up nearly 10% in the 2011-12 academic year. This marks the fourth straight year of increases.
The numbers might have been even higher if not for enrollment caps that some schools have put in place because they don't have enough faculty members, equipment or classrooms to meet demand, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA), which conducts the annual Taulbee survey.
"We don't have a way to gauge -- at least in the current survey -- how many students wanted to be admitted," said Peter Harsha, the CRA's director of government affairs. The association reported a 10% enrollment gain last year as well.
The steady gain in enrollments is a turnabout from what happened after the tech bubble burst in 2001. Read more...
US carriers join forces on stolen phones database, play catch up to rest of world
Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile are joining forces with the Federal Communications Commission to work on curbing phone thefts using a central database that will store information about stolen phones, according to reports.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, along with law enforcement and representatives from the wireless industry, will announce the plan Tuesday. Operators will disable and block further use of a device once it is reported stolen, according to the New York Times.
It is too easy for thieves to steal phones and sell them on the black market, the Times quoted Genachowski as saying. "This program will make it a lot harder to do that. And the police departments we are working with tell us that it will significantly deter this kind of theft," he told the newspaper. Read more...
Facebook to acquire Instagram for $1bn
Facebook has announced that it will acquire photo-sharing service Instagram in a $1bn cash-and-stock deal.
"I'm excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement announcing the acquisition of what the release referred to as the "fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices." Read more...
Twitter open sources MySQL enhancements
Go get the code at GitHub Twitter has open sourced numerous tweaks it has made to MySQL, stating in a blog post that the open source database “is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves.”
The post says that “Due to our scale, we push MySQL a lot further than most companies,” and that the code it has released was developed “to improve the predictability of our services and make our lives easier.” It goes on to say that “we believe in sharing knowledge and that open source software facilitates innovation” and has therefore released a heap of code to GitHub. Read more...
Microsoft starts XP retirement countdown
Microsoft yesterday kicked off what it called a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP, its longest-lived operating system.
Windows XP and the business productivity suite Office 2003 both exit all support on April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a Monday blog post.
On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for XP and Office 2003.
XP went on sale in October 2001 while Office 2003 launched October 2003. Read more...
Google answers less than half of watchdog’s privacy tweak questions
Google only partially responded to French data protection regulator CNIL late last Thursday about the company's controversial privacy policy tweak in March.
The world's largest ad broker asked for more time to answer the 69 questions put to it by the watchdog, which had been tasked with investigating the company's actions by the EU's independent advisory group the Article 29 Working Party.
However, Google said it was unable to respond in time. Instead the search giant submitted answers to just 24 of those questions on 5 April.
It is expected to complete answers to the remaining 45 questions within the next few days.
In a letter accompanying those 24 responses, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer defended his firm's decision to ignore requests from data protection authorities in Europe who had asked the Chocolate Factory to halt its terms of service changes. Read more...
Red Hat announces availability of Storage 2.0 beta
A beta version of Red Hat Storage 2.0 was announced Monday by the Massachusetts-based open-source software company.
The product -- which is based on RHEL 6 -- provides a host of new options for software-based management of scalable storage, according to Red Hat, as well as integration with many top enterprise storage technologies like virtualization and Hadoop.
"This new functionality enables faster file access and opens up data within Hadoop deployments to other file-based or object-based applications," Red Hat said in a statement. Read more...
HP advances public cloud as part of ambitious hybrid cloud strategy
After a year of chatter and several months of private beta testing, HP today announced the public beta of its public cloud services, which the company is billing as part of its overarching hybrid cloud-solution dubbed HP Converged Cloud.
HP Cloud Services -- built on OpenStack, HP Converged Infrastructure, and other HP-grown software -- aims to deliver an open-source public cloud infrastructure. HP's Cloud Services comprise five core components: HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage, and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), which will enter public beta on May 10, and HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Relational Database (RDB), which will enter private beta the same day. Read more...
It’s time to run Java out of town
I've been railing about Java for years, but enough is enough. Java exploits top all other infection vectors, on any platform, year after year. Oracle has shown repeatedly that it's organically incapable of keeping the Java Runtime Environment secure. If your company makes Java apps, either for internal use or for release to an unsuspecting world, it's time to stop. If your clients are using Java, it's time to give them the tools and the support they need to block Java.
Java's done. Put a fork in it.
No doubt you've heard about the Flashback Trojan/virus. You might not have heard that Kaspersky now has hard, cold details on 670,000 infected Macs -- that isn't an estimate, it isn't an extrapolation, it isn't some sky-is-falling scare tactic. The folks at Kaspersky have ID numbers for 670,000 Macs that are actively participating in the Flashback botnet.
Windows users shouldn't be feeling complacent or smug. The Java holes used to infect those Macs also appear in Windows versions of Java. We just dodged the bullet this time because the Flashback author(s) decided to pick on Macs. Read more...
Obama signs bill to boost business startups
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama signed into law on Thursday a bipartisan bill to kickstart small business growth and he promised rigorous oversight to make sure the measure does not harm investors, as critics have warned.
The bill to make it easier for small firms to raise capital and go public marked a rare accomplishment in an gridlocked Congress. Obama, his fellow Democrats and his Republican foes were all eager to show voters in an election year that they could agree on something to boost the fragile economic recovery and fight high unemployment.
"For startups and small businesses, this bill is a potential game changer," Obama said at a White House signing ceremony flanked by lawmakers from both parties. "Startups and small business will now have access to a big new pool of potential investors, namely the American people."
The bipartisanship on display on Thursday is unlikely to last.
Both parties are busy sharpening their election year messages and there is little left on the congressional agenda that has the support of both Read more...