If you needed any more reminders about why it isn’t a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

US politics has been stung by a range of inappropriate email usage incidents, including the use of non-government email accounts to conduct official business. From the images presented as proof of email compromise, it seems that Sarah Palin was also doing this.

Various Information Security mailing lists have from time to time been filled with claims of inbox compromise, usually for free webmail services and it is always two parts voyeurism, two parts fear that it could be you next whenever someone has had their email exposed so publicly.

Some companies have decided that the economy of scale offered by services like Gmail are worth it to have their email needs handled through them rather than maintaining their own in-house systems and servers. The risk, as has been proven time and time again, is now that it only takes a simple password recovery to have your email exposed to all.

Password recovery procedures are an area where the balance between security and usability is so blurred that most times the security aspect is non-existent, despite appearances. The leading theories about how the breach to Sarah Palin’s account came about were that it was through the password recovery options associated with the Yahoo webmail interface.

Read more @ PCworld.com

The giant Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most expensive scientific experiment, will be shut down for at least two months, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva said Saturday.

The shutdown casts into doubt the hopes of CERN physicists to achieve high-energy collisions of protons in the machine before the end of the year.

“It’s too early to say whether we’ll still be having collisions this year,” said James Gillies, chief of communications for CERN, in an e-mail message.

The laboratory shuts down to save money on electricity during the winter. A gala inauguration party scheduled for Oct. 21 will still take place, Dr. Gillies said.

The collider is designed to accelerate the subatomic particles known as protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts, far surpassing any other accelerator on Earth, and bang them together in search of new particles and forces.

After the initial success of threading protons through the machine on Sept. 10, physicists had hoped they could move ahead quickly to low-energy collisions at 450 billion electron volts and then five-trillion-electron volt collisions as early as mid-October.

Read more @ nytimes.com