Blackhacker

EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing AT&T for rolling over and helping the National Security Agency execute illegal warrantless wiretaps against American citizens:
(link)

update Google on Tuesday posted fourth-quarter earnings that missed analyst estimates, although revenue, at $1.29 billion, rose from the same period a year ago and was in line with expectations. The stock was nevertheless punished in after-hours trading on the news.(link)

Google missed analysts expectations by 2 pennies and that triggered a sell-off. The FOOLS. If I had the $382 to pickup one share of the stock I would grab it.

Spike Green-Lights Blade Series

Spike TV—which had previously announced a two-hour TV movie based on the Blade movies and Marvel Comics franchise—has given the green light to 13 hours of the vampire drama as a TV series from New Line TV, Variety reported.

Batman Begins writer David Goyer, who also wrote the three Blade movies, will executive-produce the series, along with show runner David Simkins, Marvel Entertainment principal Avi Arad and New Line’s Jim Rosenthal and Jon Kroll. Goyer wrote the two-hour TV movie pilot with comic author Geoff Johns, the trade paper reported. (link)

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.
“Her daughter was with her at the time she passed, probably about 1 to 1:15 this morning,” said Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, the pastor of King’s youngest child Bernice. Link

I do not possess the eloquence to convey what we have lost this day, Or convey what this woman’s life has meant to me, to black people in America, and to the Nation in general. What she has given, what she has stood for. She is among the giants on whose shoulders all Americans must stand. And she hold the standard by which all of us must be judged.

Mrs. King, Thanks you for you life.

IBM is the latest big software producer to come to the realization that if you put your product in the hands of developers they will use, and build products on top of it and increase your sales.

IBM sets DB2 database free | Tech News on ZDNet

DB2 Express-C is the same database as IBM’s commercial offerings but the company places limits on what kind of hardware it can run on.

It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on Advanced Micro Devices- or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users.

I still feel it is too little to late. Before Mysql got stored procs and transactions, there where places that you just couldn’t MySQL. But that was before version 5.0. Now there is an open source RDBMS that can be a platform for any enterprise. I don’t see why anyone would pay for one of the proprietaries ever again. But we’ll see.

MS To Omit Anti-Virus From Vista - OSNews.com

Microsoft will omit anti-virus protection in Vista, the next version of Windows, which it plans to ship late this year. As with previous versions of Windows dating back to Windows 2000 at least, Redmond is promoting Vista as a landmark improvement in Windows security.

One of teh BIGGIEST criticisms of MS in the past has been security.
And while anti- virus on MS has been sub par, they at least gave you something in the last version of the OS.

Now they think that can actually make money on their crap, but the WHOLE reason Norton and Symantic has been able to exist is because MS antivirus SUX.

This will be standard issue for the privacy minded, security conscious and the paranoid.

NASA - SuitSat
January 26, 2006: One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd. That’s when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard.

The spacesuit is the satellite — “SuitSat” for short.

“SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm,” explains Frank Bauer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites.” SuitSat is a first test of that idea.

Dap: /.

Researchers: Rootkits headed for BIOS

A collection of functions for power management, known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), has its own high-level interpreted language that could be used to code a rootkit and store key attack functions in the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) in flash memory, according to John Heasman, principal security consultant for U.K.-based Next-Generation Security Software.

The researcher tested basic features, such as elevating privileges and reading physical memory, using malicious procedures that replaced legitimate functions stored in flash memory.

(link added is mine)

The protection for this is VERY simple. Manufacturers should turn of by default the ability to flash the BIOS. And trigger the ability to a jumper switch directly on the mother board. Flashing your BIOS is not a basic maintenance function is a serous thing. That should be done by some one who knows what they are doing. Only those who have the confidence to pull out a screw driver and open your PC should be attempt this.

by disabling this feature by default malware can’t sneak on a PC and flash the BIOS on the sly.

Dap: /.

Bob Cringly

Talked about the NSA wire tap program and gave a interesting revelation at the end.

“Here’s one more tidbit on wire-taps: They get you free phone service! The feds tapped the phone of the Sisters of Mercy in Washington D.C. because of some anti-war stance or something they took in the 1980s. The good sisters noticed some kind of clicking on the phone at times, and finally decided that someone must have tapped into their phone. Their solution: Don’t pay the bill so the phone company will have to shut off the phone. The phone never went dead, and they quit sending them bills! The Feds wouldn’t let Ma Bell shut them down, and probably began paying the bills. The sisters talked long and free with their friends across the country!”

Drug Dealers, Dissidents, Terrorist that dime is ours !!