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After Mac was hacked in 2 minutes at the CanSecWest Conference, it was now the time for Vista to get hacked on the 3rd day. Vista’s security was compromised through the popular 3rd party software, Adobe Flash.
“The contest, which saw a MacBook Air get hacked on Thursday, relaxed the rules even further. On the first day of the contest, only the operating system could be targeted, but on the second day that was expanded to include standard applications. An undisclosed Safari flaw led to the MacBook Air’s downfall through the OS X operating system.”
The MacBook Air went first; a Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks. It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced. Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade. Noting that malignant brain tumours represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual”. It believes he “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews”.

According to a government official, hackers have defaced the Web site of Indonesia’s information ministry in response to a government move to restrict access to pornographic material on the Internet. On Tuesday, Indonesia’s parliament had passed a new information bill that criminalises the transmission of pornographic material on the Web. Under the law, anyone found guilty of transmitting pornographic material, false news or racial and religious hate messages on the Internet could face up to six years in prison or a fine of 1 billion rupiah ($109,000).
In response, hackers posted a message two days later on the information ministry’s Web site (http://www.depkominfo.go.id) saying: “Prove that the law has not been made to cover government stupidity.” The message was accompanied by a mocked-up photograph of a local information technology expert, who has been advising the government on the new law, depicted with a bare chest. The message has been removed and the Web site was now running normally, said Gatot Broto, an official at the ministry.

View: Full Story at Reuters

It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.
He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.
Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810, and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system using a previously undisclosed “0day” attack.
Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest’s organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems.
Miller was quickly given a nondisclosure agreement to sign, and he’s not allowed to discuss particulars of his bug until the contest’s sponsor, TippingPoint, can notify the vendor.
Contest rules state that Miller could only take advantage of software that was preinstalled on the Mac, so the flaw he exploited must have been accessible by, or possibly inside, Apple’s Safari browser.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20080327…infoworld/96676

Mozilla Corp. Thursday confirmed that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly, and that it expects to deliver the finished browser to users in June. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been code-frozen, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, and is working its way toward release. “That will be the last beta for Firefox 3.0,” he said. Once Beta 5 is out of the way, developers will move to the Release Candidate (RC) stage.
Release Candidate 1 (RC1) should be ready sometime in early May, said Schroepfer, assuming Mozilla meets its current schedule. “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta,” he continued, noting that the company must make allowances for public feedback.

Source: PcWorld

Microsoft’s latest efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to its much-maligned Vista operating system have met with a cool response from users. Historically, Microsoft’s first service pack for one of its marquee products – such as Windows – provides the impetus for users to upgrade. As Gartner analyst, Stephen Kleynhans recently noted, customers see SP1 as the sign that the OS has reached maturity and is ready for enteprise deployment.
But even the offer of free support for using installing Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and tools to lower implementation cost, the user response has been one of stony indifference. Vista SP1 includes a number of fixes for bugs that have plagued the operating system, as well as improved support for drivers. It initially became available to download from Microsoft’s website and will be included as part of the Window’s Update feature from mid-April.

View: vnunet

Apple took a quiet step forward this afternoon with the launch of the second beta of its iPhone software development kit (SDK). Apple sent an email to developers in its program informing them that the second beta was available for download on the company’s Developer Connection web site.
“The second beta version of the iPhone SDK includes Interface Builder, Xcode IDE, Instruments, iPhone simulator, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis tool,” the site reads. Interface Builder is “an application for designing and testing user interfaces. Developers can use Interface Builder to create user interfaces that follow the Mac OS X human-interface guidelines by dragging user-interface elements from a palette of predefined controls and dropping them into the window or view they are configuring,” according to Apple.

View: The full story at CRN

Microsoft has just released a public beta of Windows Search 4.0, an update to the existing search technologies in Windows XP and Windows Vista. The knowledge base article lists the main updates as:

• Support for the Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost) 
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations (ie you can search other PCs running Windows Search 4.0)
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors
• Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy objects:

While this is definitely an update aimed at the enterprise market, most probably removing some disincentives for adoption of Windows Vista too, there are some significant performance benefits to be had for consumers as well.

Installation on Vista took me just a few minutes, and after a reboot the first thing you’ll notice is that nothing has changed. No new icon in the system tray, no splash screen on startup, nadda. You’ll know something is different when you start a search from the taskbar, as results load significantly quicker. Unfortunately I’m unable to search for music files at the moment, but hey that’s why the beta tag is on.

This technology is something we’ve spoken about before over a year ago when Steve Ballmer demoed it as Windows Live Search Center. (Quick recap, it was also called OneView and Casino). As Microsoft PR tell MJF, Windows Search 4 provides an “update to Windows search functionality, while Casino was a research project.” It just happened to be a research project demoed at the Worldwide Partner Confererence. 

Download Windows Search 4.0 Preview

A few months ago the new Virtual Earth marketing site www.microsoft.com/virtualearth launched. This site is a great place for a business decision maker to read up on Virtual Earth. You will find News, Events, Case Studies and Product Sheets.

The News page is new and contains some of the latest development announcements and features blog posts from people in the Virtual Earth Product Group such as Chris Pendleton, Steve Lombardi and Jerry Skaw.

The Events page is the page where all Virtual Earth Events (Webcasts, Conferences) will be posted so you can learn more about how Virtual Earth can help your organization. You will also find a rotating “Featured Site” there, which showcases some unique implementations using Virtual Earth.

Source: Virtual Earth, An Evangelist’s  Blog - Virtual Earth Site for Business Decision Makers - Liveside.Net

A new “Refresh” version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2 was made available Tuesday on Microsoft Update, according to Microsoft representatives.
The primary goal of the release is for its developers to validate improvements to the Windows Update procedure, but a couple of minor additions were also included. As with the previous RC2, you need to download and run a small program available from Microsoft Download Center that makes a registry change on your PC in order for the update to be offered.

View Source: Full Article at PC Magazine