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April 7, 2003
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Seti@home flaw could let alien invaders in
The Seti@home project has released a new version of its software in order to close up a security hole that could let invaders into participants' PCs.
The project, which allows desktop and workstation users to contribute processing time to the search for extraterrestrials, issued the new distributed client on Friday. It fixes a buffer overflow vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer just by sending specially formatted Web requests.
The flaw is one of three reported to Seti@home by a Dutch security researcher last December. The three vulnerabilities only became public knowledge this weekend.
"This has been tested with various versions of the client," Berend-Jan Wever, a 26-year-old computer-science student from Delft University and the researcher who found the flaw, stated on his Web site. "All versions are presumed to have this flaw in some form."
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Al Qaeda Website Refuses to Die
Repeatedly tossed off the Internet, a website believed to be al Qaeda's primary online method of communication continues to resurface as an uninvited guest on other websites.
Alneda.com first appeared after the Sept. 11 attacks, hosted by legitimate Internet service providers in Malaysia and the United States who promptly evicted the site after being alerted to its contents and purpose.
Al Neda eventually lost ownership of the Alneda.com domain in August when Jon David Messner, a hacker who runs porn sites, took it over.
But the website formerly known as Alneda.com is still online. For the past eight months, it has functioned as a so-called Internet parasite -- a site that is embedded within another website without the site owner's knowledge.
Al Neda recently showed up buried inside the websites of a 14-year old student, a software security company and a horror movie fan's tribute pages to director Clive Barker.
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Nvidia set to launch new Nforce chipset
nVIDIA is gearing up in semi-secretive style. The company is planning to launch a new-generation of its Nforce chipset for the 400MHz FSB Athlon. In an interview with DigiTimes, Drew Henry, a senior director with the company, said that Nvidia is determined to stay ahead of the competition. The new chipset is how the firm will achieve that.
There are no signs as to whether the chipset will be all new, an Nforce 3 if you will, or whether it will simply be an updated Nforce 2. There can be no doubt that the Nforce 2 is the chipset du jour for Athlon XP systems. It already supports a 400MHz FSB so, in theory at least, Nvidia could have sat on its laurels.
With Via snapping at its heals, it could be that Nvidia decided to move the market more its own way. There must have been plans for the update made quite some time ago, a chipset doesn't just spring up overnight. It may be that rumours months ago that the KT400A would be a dual channel chipset got the Nvidia engineers worried enough that they decided to work on something even better.
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Adobe updates Acrobat for the XML era
Adobe has melded its Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML, updating its Acrobat family of PDF creation tools to version 6.0 in the process.
The move encourages organisations to use XML to encode their business information which retaining the popular PDF format to ensure that information can, where appropriate, be shared and published.
XML provides a framework for not only formatting documents - HTML, basically - but incorporating meta data - information about the information. That makes it possible to incorporate into the data itself workflows for taking source information and generating documents based upon it, whether for internal or external use, archiving, email or printing.
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Nintendo drops aim for GameCube sales
Japanese game giant Nintendo says that sales of its GameCube console are coming in well below forecasts.
The company announced in a statement Monday that it expects to report sales of 5.6 million GameCube units for the company's fiscal year, which ended March 31. That compares with lowered sales forecasts, provided late last year, that called for sales of 10 million to 12 million units.
Nintendo has been locked in a contest with Microsoft to claim second place in the lucrative video game market, behind market leader Sony, whose PlayStation 2 console surpassed the 50 million-unit mark early this year.
Recent signs show Microsoft pulling ahead in the race, with the company saying it expects to have sold 9 million units of its Xbox console by the end of the company's fiscal year, June 30.
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Black Holes and Space Travel
The idea that spaceships might zip across the universe using black holes as a high-speed portal is a well-worn sci-fi cliche.
But the consensus among scientists of late is that black holes are so destructive, spaceships would be torn to subatomic bits if they tried such a thing.
Then again, maybe not. A new paper by University of Utah physicist Lior Burko, building on earlier work, raises the possibility that black holes may not annihilate everything, and that the potential for hyperspace travel is still open.
"One possibility is that black holes may allow us to travel to very remote places in the universe, or another universe entirely," said Burko in a telephone interview from his office in Salt Lake City. "It depends on the topology of the universe, which we do not know very well.... I'm not arguing it's a practical thing to do, but maybe in 1,000 years from now, maybe it would be simpler."
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Comcast Rolls out Firewall Services
Cable giant and broadband provider Comcast (Quote, Company Info) is getting into the bundled services game by rolling out built-in personal firewall software for its high-speed data customers.
In an alliance with security software maker Network Associates (Quote, Company Info), the number one cable provider has begun offering advanced personal firewall services through Network Associates' McAfee anti-virus and security division.
Comcast said its high-speed Internet customers can receive the "McAfee Personal Firewall" service at no additional cost for one year. It gives customers access to the McAfee SecurityCenter, which provides users with real-time updates about alerts and security threats, along with anti-virus scanning and anti-spam features.
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Security Attacks Jump in First Quarter
Security incidents and attacks were up 84 per cent over the first three months of this year.
According to security tool firm ISS' quarterly Internet Risk Impact Summary Report (IRIS) security attacks nearly doubled from Q4 2002 to Q1 2003.
This increase was coupled with a ten-fold jump in overall security events (automatic probes, scans for vulnerabilities etc.) in the first three months of 2003 compared to the last quarter of 2002.
Viral activity is the main reason behind this increase, according to ISS. It tracked 752 new worms and hybrid threats in the first quarter of 2003, compared to 101 in the fourth quarter of 2002.
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Red Hat Delves into Applications
Red Hat (Quote, Company Info) charted a course beyond the operating system Monday, revealing its new Red Hat Enterprise Applications family, starting with the Red Hat Enterprise Content Management System (CMS) and the Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server.
The new applications give Red Hat a foothold higher up in the stack, adding a revenue stream while making its core offering -- the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating environment -- a more attractive package.
Both solutions are built on Red Hat's Web Application Framework, a platform for writing database-backed Web applications in Java. By leveraging the framework's APIs (define), applications can enable the authoring of persistent structured data and retrieve and display the data as content.
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Yahoo Wants to Be Search King
Yahoo on Monday will phase in a new search site that plays up paid listings and simple, informative query results, but it has yet to capitalize on the assets of newly acquired Inktomi.
The redesigned graphical interface and search service, called Yahoo Search, will have newfound prominence across the Web portal's collection of sites and will be marketed widely in traditional and online media starting Monday, according to Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's vice president of search.
Despite widespread talk of Yahoo's imminent plans to break away from Google, its increasingly powerful partner and rival, the new service will be powered by Google technology. In an interview with CNET News.com, Weiner discussed the potential benefits of Inktomi's technology to Yahoo Search in coming months, including benefits from its paid-inclusion program, but he declined to say whether Inktomi would take Google's place.
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Crucial launch for Europe
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket will take to the sky again on Tuesday; its first flight since the loss of a heavy-lift version of the vehicle last December.
The rocket's operator, Arianespace, has carried out an extensive review of all its systems and has cleared Flight 160 to blast off from Kourou, French Guiana, from 1950 local time (2250 GMT).
The launcher will put a double payload into orbit: an Indian TV, meteorology and communications satellite; and a US spacecraft to provide satellite broadband coverage over North America.
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