News

Some questionable sites associated with the Winigard family of rogue security products pulls it from this location, which appears to belong to a graphic designer in Canada. It’s funny and here’s waaaay too much truth there:

The Danwei web site (Chinese media, advertising, and urban life) is carrying a rippingly funny blog piece by Alice Xin Liu about a recent Chinese government program that would have China Mobile monitor mobile telephone text transmissions for conversations of a sexual nature. Offenders’ (messaging) service would be cut off until they wrote a “self-criticism.” Xin Lilu said bloggers in China are having a ball with the idea that the government is trying to censor dirty jokes, which apparently are a significant part of the culture of Chinese people (as if they were any different than the rest of us). ...

Virgin Media, the UK telecommunications giant that supplies TV, phone and Internet services, has begun to use deep packet inspection determine if its Internet customers are sharing music or films. The monitoring system will check transmitted data against a database of copyrighted music and video to spot illegal file sharing. Virgin Media said the system isn’t keeping track of IP addresses of the transmissions and the technology isn’t designed to catch illegal downloaders, but it could. ...

(CNN) — This week, 100 charities are battling for votes on Facebook to win $1 million. The competition is a new approach to philanthropic giving and is led by JPMorgan Chase, which throughout the competition will donate a total of $5 million to 100 charities chosen by Facebook users. Traditionally, organizations would go through a grant process, and Chase would choose who would get its money and how much. However, late last year, Chase decided to take a different approach and put the power of choosing charities into the hands of Americans. Chase took a database filled with 500,000 nonprofit organizations and uploaded the information on to Facebook. The bank then allowed “crowdsourcing” to choose which charities should be recognized. The top 100 charities won $25,000 and advanced to the second round, where another vote will determine which organization will win $1 million. The five runners-up in the second round will receive $100,000 each. Another $1 million will be given to a single charity chosen from the original group by a Chase board of directors set up to oversee this competition. The concept of crowdsourcing corporate giving via online communities and voting was first used by American Express in 2007. In the Members Project, American Express would donate $5 million to charities submitted and selected by card members. But Chase has taken a huge leap by moving the entire competition to Facebook. “We wanted to find a way where we could hear from the communities we were operating in and hear what was important to them,” said Chase Community Giving foundation President Kim Davis. The philanthropic arm of the large bank donates annually $100 million to organizations around the world, Davis said. “This, for us, is very much about testing out a new way of doing corporate philanthropy for the firm.” More than a million fans have participated in the Facebook program. Along the way, obscure charities have joined better-known ones near the top of the rankings. Because the winners of the first round worked hard to organize their online communities, smaller charities with get-out-the-vote passion were able to compete with larger organizations. Thus, the final 100 charities range from the large Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which claims on its Web site to be the “world’s largest grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists”) to the Feel Your Boobies foundation, started by a woman in her garage, who wants to increase awareness of breast cancer screenings in young women. As of midday Thursday, the top vote-getting charity on the contest’s Facebook page was Invisible Children Inc., a nonprofit that seeks to combat child-related violence in Africa through documentary storytelling. Other companies are starting to pick up on crowdsourcing corporate philanthropy. ...

Have you stood outside the restaurant and thought whether to go inside? Google solves this problem very easily. It has come out with yet another mind bobbling feature with Andriods and the iPhone. This Feature is known as ‘Near Me Now’. When you open google.com in your mobile like Andriods or iPhone, you see a small new addition to homepage that is ‘Near Me Now’ option below your search box. ...

California software company Cybersitter LLC, has sued the People’s Republic of China and seven computer manufacturers in U.S. Federal court for stealing 3,000 lines of its Internet filter software code and using it in last year’s Green Dam fiasco in China. The suit, “Cybersitter v. the People’s Republic of China,” was filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). It also names Acer, Lenovo, Sony Corp., Toshiba, Asustek Computer Inc., Benq Corp. and Haier Group as defendants. ...

There has been extensive news coverage this week of Adobe’s plans for ramped-up security in its popular Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player applications, especially the Reader and Acrobat updates promised next week. A vulnerability that was publicized in December in Reader and Acrobat allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with a specially crafted PDF file using ZLib compressed streams. In a short time, proof-of-concept code was made public. In the past week, anti-virus companies began intercepting malicious .pdf files that exploit the vulnerability to install a back door on victims’ machines. ...

Seal Shield, a Jacksonville, Fla., company that makes washable computer keyboards and mice, said it will introduce the world’s first washable cell phone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The company’s washable mice, keyboards and TV remotes can be cleaned in a dishwasher. This might be good. I have three 20-something step children who have discovered that cell phones as we have come to know them do not survive being dropped in toilets. ...

Mike Cardwell, an IT consultant in Nottingham, UK, reported on his blog finding a Y2010 bug in Spam Assassin. He found an error in a rule that Spam Assassin folks thought they fixed. “I think a lot of systems will be experiencing false positives on their ham because of this at the moment. It is a particularly high scoring rule considering that the default threshold is 5.0,” he wrote. For further information see: SpamAssassin Rule: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX ...

With a dazzling laser show, the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26c3) in Berlin, the last big security conference of 2009, has ended. If you haven’t been here, you might have missed fewer of the sessions than people on site, thanks to the worldwide availablility of live streams (and recordings). What you did miss was meeting all these people, though! 26c3 has simply outgrown the location it has occupied for the last few years, but this may be offset by a very successful experiment: allowing full remote access to the conference network via VPN for those who couldn’t attend. Other conferences should consider this (hey, Defcon team, are you reading this? 😉 ) as well, especially as air travel becomes less and less attractive. ...