TechBlog

New Scientist is reporting that a massive database culled from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users has been destroyed before its anticipated — and controversial — release to researchers. Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer, reluctantly deleted the data after Facebook threatened legal action, saying he could not afford to fight a lawsuit. He said Facebook was not aware that such information was available and that the flaw is being patched. ...

Scum on the run Security blogger Brian Krebs is reporting some good numbers that show spammers are no longer registering their domains in China (.cn) since that country started requiring actual on-paper registrations and business licenses, which precludes anonymous registration. AND their new top-level domain of choice, Russia (.ru), is going to make life for sca/spammers difficult there. “Russia’s Coordination Center for domain registration will require individuals and businesses applying for a .ru address to provide a copy of a passport or legal registration papers.” Krebs wrote. ...

Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, was extensively quoted in news stories today as he described how his group found 1,800 software flaws in Office 2010 by running millions of “fuzzing” tests. According to ComputerWorld, “Microsoft was able to find such a large number of bugs in Office 2010 by using not only machines in the company’s labs, but also under-utilitized or idle PCs throughout the company. The concept isn’t new: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project may have been the first to popularize the practice, and remains the largest, but it’s also been used to crunch numbers in medical research and to find the world’s largest prime number. ...

As Easter approaches, spam related to this upcoming holiday is expected. Spammers didn’t send malicious greetings like last year—they sent out various product promotion ads instead. One particular coupon promotion page offers recipients a free coupon for digital TV service for Easter. A domain attack was observed from this spam attack, and the offer page changed to different product coupons on a daily basis. 1 2 _From: “The Easter Bunny” <easterbunny removed> Subject: How to make this Easter even more magical…</easterbunny>@>_ ...

iPad apps seems to be getting more faster approved than apple iphone apps, we have seen many iPad apps being released. WordPress official app has been released for iPad today. As there lot more space on iPad for bloggers to write a web blog post through this wordpress app, this app seems to be useful. However it does not have any new features so it is just the iphone app being ported for iPad on apple ipad store, Below are some screenshots with which you can get the idea on how does this app will look like on iPad. ...

Want to know what makes Apple’s iPad tick? Well wait no longer: thanks to the FCC and some analysis from the people over at iFixit, we now know what the internal guts of the iPad look like. The Federal Communications Commission has publicly posted a series of images and documents sent to it by Apple — they are documents ranging from calibration tests to photos of the internal components. Apple requested that these pictures not be posted for 180 days, but clearly that request was denied. ...

There’s at least one company that isn’t scrambling to get an iPad app ready for launch day, and that company is Microsoft. Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company will “wait and see” how iPad sales perform before adapting Microsoft Office 2010 for the device. “We never say never, but we have no current plans [to develop a version of Office for the iPad],” Elop claimed. ...

I’m almost certain this shouldn’t be on the Nokia.de webspace, lurking under the “online.nokia.de” subdomain: Don’t worry though, Admin – they “just changed your index”. This isn’t the first time Nokia domains have come under attack. The above defacement – by an Albanian hacker called “Spammer” – seems eager to let the webmaster know they can help with the bugs, but I’m pretty sure an email would have been just as useful. Nokia.de have been notified of the defacement, but I’ve had no word back as of yet.

Google today announced its strategy for delivering services on the iPad, and unveiled a new mobile Gmail interface optimized for bigger touchscreens. Since the iPad lies somewhere between a notebook and a smartphone, the Mountain View search company is taking a hybrid approach, offering some services in their desktop format, some in their mobile format, and some as standalone apps. “We’re particularly excited by how tablet computers create the opportunity for new kinds of user interaction,” Punit Soni, Product Manager for Google Mobile wrote in the official Google blog. “Here on the mobile team, we often talk about how mobile devices are sensor-rich: they can sense touch through their screens, see with a camera, hear through a microphone, and they know where they are with GPS. The same holds true for tablet computers, and we’re just starting to work through how our products can become even better on devices like the iPad.” ...

Don’t run your PC with admin privileges Sometimes in life you know something is a risk, but you don’t know how BIG a risk it is until somebody actually checks it out. There was a German scientist in Russia who repeated Ben Franklin’s kite-in-the-thunder-storm experiment but didn’t live to write up his results. Los Angeles security firm BeyondTrust has released an analysis of Microsoft’s 75 security bulletins last year. They came to the startling conclusion that if users had operated their computers without administrative rights they would have eliminated 64 percent of their risk from Microsoft vulnerabilities! ...