Clipmarks | tabsey's 'computer' clips

Fix found for net security flaw

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:40:54 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: I read about the problem this morning and the fix tonight. Just that the first announcement was delayed till the fix was found and a bit of dramatics. Well done though.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Computer experts have released software to tackle a security glitch in the internet's addressing system.

The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake webpages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser.

Internet giants such as Microsoft are now distributing the security patch.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said that the case was unprecedented, but added: "People should be concerned but they should not be panicking."

"We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch," he said. "Something of this scale has not happened before."

Mr Kaminsky discovered the error in the workings of the Domain Name System (DNS) about six months ago.

DNS is used to convert web addresses written in words - such as www.bbc.com - into the numerical sequences used by computers to route internet traffic around the world.

The flaw revolves around the way that the servers that translate words into numbers handle the requests they get.

Tags: computer, experts, fix, black, hole, hehe

Online Service Lets Blind Surf The Internet From Any Computer, Anywhere

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:09:59 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Wonder if they are using it here. Hope something is available.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

A blind person goes to a library computer and uses WebAnywhere to read e-mail and consult an online bus schedule.

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2008) — Visions of future technology don't involve being chained to a desktop machine. People move from home computers to work computers to mobile devices; public kiosks pop up in libraries, schools and hotels; and people increasingly store everything from e-mail to spreadsheets on the Web.

But for the roughly 10 million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired, using a computer has, so far, required special screen-reading software typically installed only on their own machines.

New software, called WebAnywhere, launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.

Tags: computers

Liter Of Fuel Would Last UK 1 Year If Cars Had Kept Pace With Computers

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:17:29 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (June 20, 2008) — One litre of fuel would serve the UK for a year and oil reserves would last the expected lifetime of the solar system - if efficiency in the car industry had improved at the same rate as in the computer world - a leading computer scientist will tell an audience in Manchester, UK on Friday 20 June 2008.

Professor Steve Furber CBE, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at The University of Manchester, will deliver the inaugural Kilburn Lecture to mark Digital 60 Day -- the 60th anniversary of The Baby computer, designed and built at The University of Manchester in 1948.

In his lecture entitled 'The Relentless March of the Microchip', Professor Furber will note that computers are now 50 BILLION times more energy-efficient than the 'Baby', which weighed roughly one tonne and took up a whole room.

Tags: greed, slows, or, speeds, progress

California computer scientist, Canadian professors to receive $460,000 Kyoto Prize in Japan

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:32:48 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: mdn.mainichi.jp

TOKYO (AP)-- A California-based computer scientist, a philosophy professor and a molecular biologist will each receive US$460,000 after being selected Friday as winners of this year's Kyoto Prizes for achievement in the arts and sciences.

Computer scientist Richard Karp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, won the prize in advanced technology for his work in measuring how difficult certain computational problems are to solve -- a fundamental step in designing computer algorithms.

The award in arts and philosophy will go to Canadian professor Charles Taylor for developing a social philosophy that allows individuals from diverse backgrounds to keep their identities and still live peacefully together.

Tags: everybody's, a, winner

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:00:34 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Those mice must have to run awfully quickly.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Currently, BlueGene/L is the most powerful computer in the world

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at "petaflop speeds", the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world's fastest machine, also built by IBM.

It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile.

It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

"We are getting closer to simulating the real world," Bijan Davari, vice president of next generation computing systems at IBM, told BBC News.

It would be of particular use for calculating risk in financial markets, he said.

"The latency of the calculations is so small that for all practical purposes it is real time."

Tags: computers

A New Way To Protect Computer Networks From Internet Worms

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:11:56 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: A good discovery, if we plebs can afford the spin off.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Jun. 5, 2008) — Scientists may have found a new way to combat the most dangerous form of computer virus. The method automatically detects within minutes when an Internet worm has infected a computer network.

Network administrators can then isolate infected machines and hold them in quarantine for repairs.

They discovered how to contain the most virulent kind of worm: the kind that scans the Internet randomly, looking for vulnerable hosts to infect.

The key, they found, is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans -- a sign that it has been infected -- administrators should take it off line and check it for viruses.

Tags: computer

A quarter of US PCs infected with malware: OECD

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:25:19 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: That's a lot of malware cleaners to sell. They are at freebie sites

Clip Source: www.theage.com.au

An OECD study into online crime says that increased activity by cyber criminals has left an estimated one-in-four US computers infected with malware.

The report, entitled Malicious Software (malware): a Security Threat to the Internet Economy, gives an impression of two worlds engaged in an uneven war of virus invasion and belated defence.

Cyber crime, to steal data, spy and attack government and business computer systems "is a potentially serious threat to the internet economy," the study, published on Friday, warns.

Organisations involved in "fighting malware offer essentially a fragmented local response to a global threat," the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says.

"Over the last 20 years, malware has evolved from occasional 'exploits' to a global multi-million-dollar criminal industry ... Cyber criminals are becoming wealthier and therefore have more financial power to create larger engines of destruction."

Tags: computer

How to Add a Video to YouTube

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:51:50 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: I bookmarked this as I have no idea. There may be a couple of others who haven't been taught formally.

Clip Source: computer.howstuffworks.com

Inside This Article

Introduction to How to Add a Video to YouTube

Broadcasting Yourself on YouTube

Let's say you want to make a music video for your band. After coming up with a great concept, shooting all the angles with a digital camcorder, "logging and capturing," or importing, the footage onto a computer and painstakingly editing the video, you're ready to share your vision with the YouTube community. Where do you begin?

Look! Even the Queen of England's added her own videos to YouTube!

Tags: computer.

Internet serves up 30 years of spam

Mon, 05 May 2008 08:42:04 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: 100 billion spam messages are sent everyday, Is that all, you say?

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the computer phenomenon - spam email.

Now a nuisance for tens of millions of computer users worldwide, three decades ago someone sent what is considered to be the very first spam email.

Now 100 billion spam messages are sent everyday - three quarters of all the messages sent.

They are expensive to block and can slow down or crash computers across continents.

Spam reputedly got its name from a skit by the British television comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant that serves all of its food with spam tinned meat, sing a song repeating the word ad nauseam.

Tags: computer

What do computer viruses look like?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:51:48 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: "Blinded by the beauty of a computer virus," may not have that "ring" to it but this art is fine.

Clip Source: www.theage.com.au

Virus art ... clockwise from left, an artist's depiction of a phishing attack, sex dating spam, encoded trojan attack and email worm.

Cyber threats like NetSky, Mydoom and Parite are the bane of IT departments around the globe, but artist Alex Dragulescu has found subtle beauty deep within the dangerous computer code that can bring down networks and bombard email inboxes with murderous spam.

Dragulescu has peeled back the code behind the world's worst tech bugs and rendered stunning images from it. The Romanian-born MIT researcher and artist was commissioned to do the artwork by MessageLabs, a computer security company that sought to put a face - or at least a shape - on computer viruses.

Dragulescu found interesting, recurring patterns. He used the data to coax pointy green tentacles from the dreaded 'Mydoom' email worm and grew pretty peach petals from the epicenter of the 'Degreediploma5' spam file.

Tags: computer, art

Exa! The World's 1st Cosmic Supercomputeris

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:15:46 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: I think this is bigger than my computer.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

"Hello, Dave." Like a casting call for "2001 A Sapce Odyssey," the American Institute for Advanced Architectures (IAA) has designed the worlds first exaflop computer -a machine that would give HAL extreme paranoia. Unless you work for NASA or Dr Scorpio, exa- isn't a prefix you'll have seen much: it means a billion billion. A quintillion. Eighteen zeroes. Frickin' loads.

An exaflop computer could perform a thousand million billion FLoatin point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), made even more impressive by the fact our most advanced computers currently can't do one percent of that.

Tags: computer

Who owns the Internet?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:16:01 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: If you need to check on "basics overlooked at the time". this may help.

Clip Source: computer.howstuffworks.com

Imagine you're in a room full of people from different countries, and everyone only speaks his or her native language. In order to communicate, you'd have to come up with a standard set of rules and vocabulary. That's what makes the Internet so remarkable: It's a system that lets different computer networks communicate with each other using a standardized set of rules. Without rules, these computer networks wouldn't be able to communicate with each other.

Think for a minute about the scope of the Internet. It's a collection of inter-networked computer systems that spans the entire globe. It depends on several sets of rules called protocols. These protocols make it possible for computer communication across networks. It also relies on a huge infrastructure of routers, Network Access Points (NAPs) and computer systems. Then there are the satellites, miles of cable and hundreds of wireless routers that transmit signals between computers and networks.

Tags: computer

Can the government see what Web sites I visit?

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:09:29 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: For anyone wondering what can happen.

Clip Source: computer.howstuffworks.com

Can the government see what Web sites I visit?

Inside This Article

Can the government see what Web sites I visit?

Keeping Track of Web Activity

Government Policy on Internet Tracking

Lots More Information

See all Computer & Internet Security articles

Many people fear that a similar thing is happening on the Web. They're worried that someone, usually the government, is recording and analyzing their Web browsing activity. They argue that these acts are an invasion of privacy. Are they right to be worried? Can the government keep track of all the Web sites everyone visits, and would it be able to act on that information?

It's easy to understand why some people are worried. The United States Patriot Act expands the government's ability to perform searches and install wiretaps. It doesn't seem like a big stretch to add tracking people's Internet activity to the list. These people fear that they'll be spied on whether they've done anything to justify it or not.

Tags: computer, surveilance

Mind-Reading Game Headset to Hit Market

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:08:41 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Some will worry that the computer will fill the vacuum they imagine as a brain. Probably too late if they're thinking that way.

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Meet the Epoc

March 7, 2008 -- Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that.

While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas.

The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications.

The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain.

Tags: computer

Look, no browser! New tool offers offline websites

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 05:53:17 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Looks good and computer buffs will already have trialled it.

Clip Source: www.smh.com.au

eBay's customers don't need to open a web browser to search the site or auction an item anymore.

After a quick download, the online auctioneer's users can click the company's logo on their desktop and launch an application that will allow them to do their business directly - no browser required.

eBay is one of several companies, including Nasdaq Stock Market, Time Warner's AOL, Nickelodeon and Salesforce.com, that have created downloadable, desktop versions of their websites using software developed by Adobe Systems.

Adobe is launching the application, called AIR, on Monday. Adobe says AIR will allow any company with a website to inhabit a permanent spot on people's desktops.

It also reduces the wait time for downloading images and data, because the desktop is constantly updated while the computer is online.

Adobe says AIR runs on any operating system. It's a more powerful version of widgets, the customizable little web pullouts often provided by third parties like Google.

Tags: computers