Security specialists said Saturday that hackers are taking increasing aim at iPhones and Macintosh computers as the hot-selling Apple devices gain popularity worldwide. Hackers have historically focused devious efforts on computers using Windows operating systems because the Microsoft software has more than 90 percent of the global market, promising evil-doers a wealth of targets. Macintosh computers have been gaining market share and catching the interest of hackers, according to Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) security vulnerability analyst Cameron Hotchkies. ‘There are more eyes looking over Apple products for vulnerabilities,’ Hotchkies told AFP at a notorious annual DefCon gathering of hackers in Las Vegas. ‘It has slowly been growing as a target people are more and more interested in.’ Hotchkies specializes in Apple software as part of a ZDI team devoted to scrutinizing programming holes and crafting ‘patches’ to prevent hackers from exploiting weaknesses. More than a thousand people crammed into his DefCon talk about hacking Apple software. He was peppered with technical questions at the close of the session. ‘There are a lot more people getting into it and really getting their hands dirty,’ said Hotchkies, who noted an obvious spike this year in […]
We’re sorry. That’s the message from FBI Director Robert Mueller to the executive editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, after an inspector general discovered that the agency had seized telephone records from four US reporters without a grand jury. Mueller called Times’ editor Bill Keller and Post chief Len Downie Friday, ‘expressing regret’ that agents had not followed ‘proper procedures. The ‘lapse’ occurred nearly four years ago and involved four staff members of the papers. ‘The FBI discontinued use of the emergency letters after privacy advocates and internal watchdogs cited hundreds of cases in which agents intentionally, or out of sloppiness, did not follow up their ‘exigent’ requests with paperwork that linked the submission to a genuine matter of national security,’ Washington Post reporter Carrie Johnson wrote in an article Saturday. The bureau obtained phone records for a Post reporter and a researcher in Indonesia, and Times reporters Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, also in the country at the time. The records were obtained through what is called an exigent circumstances letter, a demand made by the agency in a practice that skirts civil liberties protections that has flourished in the […]
Bad news from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline – an installation that may not normally draw much of your attention, but which is a throbbing artery of global energy supply, carrying vital oil supplies from Central Asia towards a tanker terminal on the Turkish coast. On some remote, sun-baked plain of Anatolia, an explosion sparked a fire earlier this week, temporarily cutting the flow through the pipeline. But guess what? Here’s the good news: the oil price did not zoom upwards in response, not a blip, barely a flicker. Actually the price of a barrel of crude has been falling: from a peak of $145 in early July, it came down to $117 and was trading yesterday at $120. That’s almost a 20 per cent drop in little more than three weeks. Oil barrels A return to relatively normal oil prices would take the sting out of inflation If the trend continues into September at anything like the same rate of descent, most of the inflationary spike of the past 12 months will miraculously have been sliced away. This is a dramatic reversal, and it is worth trying to work out why it is happening and what […]
The curious trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver raises still more doubts about the Bush administration’s handling of terrorism-related cases. Bush personally approved the idea of sending the driver, Salim Hamdan, to trial under the controversial military commission system that gives big advantages to the prosecution. The prosecution then portrayed Hamdan as a terrorist conspirator, a ‘hardened al-Qaida member’ who should be locked away for decades. This case was put at the head of the line of commission trials, and prosecutors apparently considered their case against him to be a strong one. But the military judge and jury clearly disagreed. They found Hamdan not guilty of the conspiracy charge, and gave him such a short sentence on another charge that he could be set free in a matter of months. The judge’s sympathetic attitude towards Hamdan at the end of the proceedings hardly supports the notion of him being a dangerous killer. So it appears that the prosecutors focused on a mere underling in the al-Qaida organization. It has been a costly exercise for the American taxpayer; the case has dragged on for years, at one point making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. […]
NEW YORK — Harvard scientists say they have created stems cells for 10 genetic disorders, which will allow researchers to watch the diseases develop in a lab dish. This early step, using a new technique, could help speed up efforts to find treatments for some of the most confounding ailments, the scientists said. The new work was reported online Thursday in the journal Cell, and the researchers said they plan to make the cell lines readily available to other scientists. Dr. George Daley and his colleagues at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute used ordinary skin cells and bone marrow from people with a variety of diseases, including Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Down syndrome to produce the stem cells. The new cells will allow researchers to ‘watch the disease progress in a dish, that is, to watch what goes right or wrong,’ Doug Melton, co-director of the institute, said during a teleconference. ‘I think we’ll see in years ahead that this opens the door to a new way to treating degenerative diseases,’ he said. The new technique reprograms cells, giving them the chameleon-like qualities of embryonic stem cells, which can morph into all kinds of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
