NewsFactor Network

Basketball, Facebook and Gossip Are Malware Targets

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:55:29 -0500

Cybercriminals have been busy this week running scams that target Facebook users, college basketball fans, and celebrity gossip watchers. Security experts are warning about recent attacks with nasty payloads.

One widespread attack was a common ploy security researchers call the Facebook Password Reset Scam. The cybercriminals send an e-mail addressed to "user of Facebook" that reads, "Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed. You can find your new password in the attached document."

McAfee reports that this scam is global. The attachment is malware with downloaders, password-stealing Trojans, fake antivirus software, or bots. The scam ranked six on McAfee's Global Virus Map Top 10, and accounted for as much as 10 percent of the infected e-mail that its software-as-a-service unit is witnessing.

"As we had previously discussed in our 2010 Threat Predictions, social-networking sites will continue to be a favorite social-engineering lure for cybercriminals to distribute malware," said David Marcus, research labs manager at McAfee. "Make sure you are protected and educated."

March Virus Madness

At a time when college basketball fans are going wild, cybercriminals are actively pursuing opportunities for scams. Basketball fans go online to fill out bracket selections, and when they do, hackers are also playing their own game of spamdexing, i.e. manipulating search results to promote sites, according to James Duldulao, a security researcher at McAfee. In this case, he explained, cybercriminals are spamdexing malware-infected sites.

This week, the top results for terms like "ncaa bracket" and "march madness predictions" were poisoned. McAfee reports that five out of the first 10 hot searches on Google Trends are being promoted by a network of legitimate sites that were hacked to serve malware. One site had an embedded Flash file that downloads malware from another site and installs it without user interaction.

"Who would have thought...

Apple Files Patent for Mobile Social Networking

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:27:29 -0500

Apple is tapping into the social arena with plans to launch a social-networking application. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has filed a patent with the U.S. Patent & Trade Office describing a social-network application dubbed iGroups.

The application for patent, made available on Thursday, reveals that Apple is working on an ad-hoc social network that would enable users to communicate with one another without using a central access point or mobile-device networks such as Bluetooth's personal area network (PAN) or piconet (an ad-hoc computer network that links a group of devices using Bluetooth technology).

Instead, iGroups would enable users to use the Bluetooth-enabled devices to communicate by setting the devices to a Token Exchange mode.

Targeted Content

While set in this mode, all device owners or group members within a geographic range of one another would be able to broadcast and receive tokens. Tokens can be exchanged using a communication link within limited range.

The tokens received by members are stored locally on the device or sent to a trusted service operating remotely on a network such as Apple's MobileMe.

"In some implementations, the tokens can be stored with corresponding time stamps to assist a trusted service in matching the tokens with tokens provided by other devices," writes Apple in its patent application. "The trusted service can perform an analysis on the tokens and time stamps to identify devices that were colocated at the geographic location at a given contact time, which can be determined by the time stamps."

Members would then be able to set up accounts with the service by registering through a portal or web site managed by the trusted service.

User interfaces, filters and search engines would let users search and manage groups. The groups can be used with various applications, including calendars, address books, e-mail, and instant messaging.

Apple...

Browser Choice Boosts Downloads of Opera 10.5

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:38:43 -0500

In the wake of the browser choice screen in Europe, Opera Software is reporting a dramatic uptick in browser downloads. The company said more than half the European downloads of Opera 10.50 have come directly from Microsoft's choice screen since early March.

Microsoft used to configure Internet Explorer as the default browser for its Windows operating system, but under pressure from the European Commission, it agreed last October to test-market measures to give Europeans an option to download and install competing browsers like Opera, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox.

European Windows users are getting a choice through a browser screen that is displayed automatically and lets users make any browser the default. Users can even turn Microsoft's Internet Explorer off, although Microsoft has said there's no need to do that to make another browser the default.

Doubling Downloads

"This confirms that when users are given a real choice on how they choose the most important piece of software on their computer, the browser, they will try out alternatives," said H�kon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software. "A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardized and easier to browse."

According to Opera, the increase represents more than a doubling from the normal download numbers -- even only after a short period with the choice screen. The choice screen rollout will continue well into May for existing Windows computers and for five more years on new Windows installations, giving Opera reason to believe it will continue to see more downloads.

Of course, Internet Explorer remains dominant with 61.58 percent of the browser market. But Opera is nevertheless rejoicing over the browser screen and has rolled out Opera 10.50, which it bills as the fastest-ever browser for Windows computers. Opera 10.50 also has a new design and private browsing.

Mobile Competition

Opera is also pressing to...

Microsoft Eases Windows XP Mode Requirements

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:45:52 -0500

Microsoft released a software update Thursday that eliminates some of the hardware requirements for running Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 PCs. The goal is to make it far easier for small and midsize businesses to migrate to Windows 7 while retaining access to critical legacy applications that are unable to run on machines equipped with Microsoft's latest operating system.

Windows 7 Professional users will no longer need to deploy hardware-virtualization technology in order to run their PCs in Windows XP Mode, noted Microsoft's in-house blogger, Brandon LeBlanc. "This change makes it extremely easy for businesses to use Windows XP Mode to address any application incompatibility roadblocks they might have in migrating to Windows 7," LeBlanc wrote.

Right from the Desktop

Available on the professional and ultimate editions of Windows 7 introduced last October, Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC will enable business PC users to run multiple Windows environments from the Windows 7 desktop. This week's upgrade also includes new features such as USB support as well as one-click launch of Windows XP Mode apps.

"The applications running in Windows XP look and feel like they are installed directly on Windows 7," said Microsoft Senior Product Manager Ran Oelgiesser. "Users will see icons for their applications in the Windows 7 start menu, [and] they can even create shortcuts for them on the desktop."

Windows XP Mode will continue to harness the power of CPU-based virtualization technologies such as Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD-V if available, LeBlanc noted, though these and other hardware-based virtualization technologies are no longer an absolute requirement. For larger enterprise-class customers, however, Microsoft continues to recommend the use of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), which is part of the software giant's desktop optimization pack for software assurance.

"Windows XP Mode is great as long as you are OK...

Leftover Phones Show Palm's Market Share Is Falling

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:14:25 -0500

With more than half its latest devices left on store shelves at the end of the third quarter, things may be getting out of hand for Palm as the manufacturer struggles to hold market share in the rapidly evolving telecom market.

The company's projected fourth-quarter earnings will be about half the $300 million projected by Wall Street analysts. After Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein and CFO Doug Jeffries held a conference call with industry analysts to discuss the bad news, the company's shares fell 19 percent to $4.08, the lowest level in more than a year, and some advisers urged investors to sell.

Still Optimistic

"Our recent underperformance has been extremely disappointing to me personally and the entire Palm team," said Rubinstein in the conference call, according to Bloomberg. "We're very realistic about our near-term challenges, but the issues we're facing are far from insurmountable."

Palm said only 408,000 of the 960,000 handsets it shipped in the third quarter ending in January sold, amounting to an $18.5 million loss. That was far less than the $95 million loss during the same period last year. In January, the company introduced updated versions of its Pre and Pixi smartphones with added features and more memory.

But Palm phones, available through Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, have been losing market share amid a surge by Google's Android operating system, including the HTC-manufactured Nexus One, sold by Google and T-Mobile, and the Motorola Droid, sold by Verizon.

According to comScore, Android-based phones have doubled their share of the market to 7.1 percent, while Palm fell from 7.8 percent to 5.7 percent. At the same time, market leaders Research in Motion gained 1.7 percent to 43 percent, and Apple advanced 0.3 percent to 25.1 percent, comScore said.

Bad Marketing?

IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas sees bad marketing as at least part of...

iPad Pre-Orders Reported in 'Hundreds of Thousands'

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:25:29 -0500

With Apple's iPad scheduled to go on sale on April 3, a new report indicates there may be strong pre-order demand. This could mean the iPad is on the verge of being a breakthrough product for tablet computers.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that, according to unnamed sources, pre-orders have totaled "hundreds of thousands of units," which could also indicate that the iPad will challenge the iPhone's phenomenal debut. However, it's not clear if these reported pre-orders are actual sales or simply non-sale reservations for later pickups.

Arranging Content for Launch

To help drive sales, Apple is reportedly working overtime to make as many arrangements as possible for media content. This includes deals with publishers of newspapers, magazines and textbooks, as well as with TV networks and Hollywood studios.

Apparently, though, Apple is running into resistance from the print publishers, some of whom are wary of cutting into their existing revenue. The Journal said Apple is "backburnering" its negotiations with print publishers and focusing more on such media content as TV shows.

Industry analysts are generally bullish on the iPad's prospects. For instance, Current Analysis' Avi Greengart said he expects the iPad's long-term sales prospects will be strong, because sales will increase as the initial price points inevitably drop.

"If these numbers from the Journal's sources are correct," he said, they could indicate that the market for early adopters of this new product could be "bigger than expected."

Clear Value Propositions

The iPad, Greengart said, "is the first tablet product that has a clear set of value propositions," so price is the main issue. He said these values include web surfing, media consumption such as movie watching, reading e-books, and access to the more than 100,000 applications available for the iPod touch, "without modification."

In addition, he expects we'll soon see "a huge number" of apps that...

Court Airs Dirty Laundry from Viacom-Google Battle

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:39:45 -0500

The Viacom-Google battle over YouTube's alleged copyright infringement has been going on mostly behind the scenes for years. But court documents made public this week shed some light on the unfolding drama.

Viacom filed suit against Google in 2007 for allegedly allowing users to upload more than 100,000 videos clips containing copyrighted Viacom content, including parts of shows from MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. The suit, which seeks $1 billion in damages, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Now the court is making documents public. Revelations include a Google claim that Viacom employees posted clips on YouTube and complained about YouTube hosting them. The documents also reveal Viacom's unsuccessful bid for YouTube in October 2006. Google won the bidding wars and paid $1.65 billion for the video-sharing site.

"Google beat out Viacom, and Viacom has had sour grapes ever since," said Ilan Barzilay, a litigator at Seyfarth Shaw in Boston. "As far as immediate impact on these things on the lawsuit, this isn't going to mean much. The parties are filing motions and the court will be addressing issues on summary judgment. The court may or may not ultimately decide the case on summary judgment or may cue it up for trial, which would be a circus."

Built on Infringement?

As Viacom sees it, YouTube was "intentionally built on infringement." In a published statement, Viacom said there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube's founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement.

"By their own admission, the site contained 'truckloads' of infringing content and founder Steve Chen explained that YouTube needed to 'steal' videos because those videos make 'our traffic soar'," Viacom said. "Google bought YouTube because it was a haven of infringement. Google knew that YouTube's popularity depended on infringing materials, with several...

FCC Faces Battle To Pay for a Public-Safety Network

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:03:37 -0500

Even as congressional Democrats discuss an opt-out provision for national health-care reform -- a move that undercuts the basic premise of President Obama's proposal, that real efficiencies can only be created when everyone is insured -- private interests are taking aim at the administration's proposal to impose a national broadband tax.

Part of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski's far-reaching broadband plan -- which calls for broadband penetration rates in excess of 90 percent -- is an interoperable public-safety network. That would let disparate public-safety networks run by all levels of government to seamlessly communicate.

"The country must do better," the FCC says in the 376-page plan. "With broadband, 911 call centers ... could receive text, pictures and videos from the public and relay them to first responders, [and] the government could use broadband networks to disseminate vital information to the public during emergencies�in multiple formats and languages."

Years of Stagnation

There has been a consensus on the need for interoperable public-safety networks since 9/11/2001, when state and local agencies failed to communicate key information due to a lack of interoperability. Under former Chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC ran a high-profile auction of spectrum -- the so-called "D block" -- that came with myriad requirements that the private sector provide support for public networks.

No company was interested and the auction failed to fetch its $1.3 billion reserve price.

Genachowski is suggesting the creation of an Emergency Response Interoperability Center under the FCC that would ensure that devices and networks work together.

"Focusing on interoperability from the beginning should help the public-safety broadband network to overcome the difficulties faced by other earlier voice efforts," the report says.

Paying the Bill

But if having a public-safety network that really works is good for everyone, it's not the sort of thing that can be handed off to the private...

Yahoo Buying Fantasy Sports Company Citizen Sports

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:17:50 -0500

Yahoo is buying a fantasy sports company co-founded by an MIT graduate whose card-counting skills helped him win millions of dollars in blackjack and spawned a film and a best-selling book.

Citizen Sports offers fantasy leagues for sports such as football, soccer and basketball that fans can manage online at social-networking sites and through mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and smart phones running Google Inc.'s Android operating software.

With Citizen Sports, Yahoo is looking to boost its social-networking offerings, an area the company has struggled in even though, according to comScore, it commands the largest U.S. Internet audience in news, sports and finance.

Yahoo did not release financial details of its purchase, which it expects to close by June.

Millions of people participate in fantasy leagues. Participants rack up points based on the performance of the sports players they pick to be on their make-believe teams.

Jeff Ma, whose antics in Las Vegas and Atlantic City inspired "Bringing Down the House" and, more recently, the movie "21," started Citizen Sports with business partner Mike Kerns in 2004.

Yahoo said Wednesday that Citizen Sports will be integrated with content from its sports news and information site, Yahoo Sports, and vice versa.

Citizen Sports, which is privately held, now has 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. each month.

Hacker Wreaks Wireless Havoc on Vehicles

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:45:10 -0500

A man fired from a Texas auto dealership used an Internet service to remotely disable ignitions and set off car horns of more than 100 vehicles sold at his old workplace, police said Wednesday.

Austin police arrested Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, on Wednesday, charging him with felony breach of computer security.

Ramos-Lopez used a former colleague's password to deactivate starters and set off car horns, police said. Several car owners said they had to call tow trucks and were left stranded at work or home.

"He caused these customers, now victims, to miss work," Austin police spokeswoman Veneza Aguinaga said. "They didn't get paid. They had to get tow trucks. They didn't know what was going on with their vehicles."

Ramos-Lopez was in the Travis County Jail on Wednesday with bond set at $3,000. The Associated Press could not find a working phone number for his family.

The Texas Auto Center dealership in Austin installs GPS devices that can prevent cars from starting. The system is used to repossess cars when buyers are overdue on payments, said Jeremy Norton, a controller at the dealership where Ramos-Lopez worked. Car horns can be activated when repo agents go to collect vehicles and believe the owners are hiding them.

"We are taking extra measures to make sure this never happens again," Norton said.

Starting in mid-February, dealership employees noticed unusual changes to their business records. Someone was going into the system and changing customers' names, such as having dead rapper Tupac Shakur buying a 2009 vehicle, Norton said.

Soon, customers began calling saying their cars wouldn't start, or that their horns were going off incessantly, forcing them to disengage the battery. Norton said the dealership originally thought the cars had mechanical problems.

Then employees noticed someone had ordered $130,000 in parts and equipment from the company that makes the GPS devices.

Police said they...

HTC Vows To Fight an Apple Lawsuit

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:00:59 -0500

HTC Corp., the Taiwanese cell phone maker sued by Apple for patent infringement, said Thursday it will defend itself against charges that it lifted iPhone technology.

In his first public comment on the suit, HTC chief Peter Chou said the company "disagrees with Apple's actions," though he did not go into specifics.

Apple says HTC's phones -- several of which use Google Inc.'s Android mobile operating software -- infringe on 20 of its patents. The patents cover technology like iPhone two-finger screen recognition, which allows users to perform multiple functions on the gadget.

The suit, filed earlier this month, served as a warning to rivals that Apple Inc. is ready to aggressively defend its technology amid intensifying competition in the smart phone market. Phones based on Google's Android software have emerged as a major threat.

In his statement Thursday, Chou avoided addressing Apple's claims directly. He said, "HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done."

He added, "We will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible."

Seattlepi.com Celebrates a Year of Web-Only News

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:01:27 -0500

Seattlepi.com, the online successor to the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, celebrates its first birthday Thursday with music, free cupcakes and cheap beer.

For a Web-only publication that launched in the depths of the Great Recession, just sticking around 12 months may be reason enough to party.

Seattlepi.com formally launched March 18, 2009, a day after the nearly 146-year-old P-I published its last edition on newsprint, leaving The Seattle Times as the city's only newspaper printed daily. The P-I's owner, New York-based Hearst Corp., had been losing money on the newspaper for years and hopes the online version will change that.

"The site is doing really well," said Seattlepi.com's executive producer, Michelle Nicolosi. She said about 4 million people are visiting the Web site each month, about the same as were visiting the Post-Intelligencer's site before the print version ceased publication.

"It's gratifying that people are still finding value in what we do," she said.

While readership may be stable, whether there's enough money to be made on the Internet is still an open question.

"Overall they are a journalistic success and a financial work in progress," said industry analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell Inc. in Burlingame, Calif.

For Hearst, Seattlepi.com is "a good learning lab," Doctor said. "They're learning how to be an effective online-only newspaper."

The P-I was the first major metropolitan daily in the country to go Web-only. Few have followed suit, Doctor and other analysts said, because print versions still provide the vast majority of newspapers' income and it's far from clear how online sites can be profitable, especially in a bad economy.

When it made the switch, the P-I let go most of its 181 employees. About two dozen now report the news and run the Web site.

With the smaller crew, Nicolosi said, the Web site has focused on "core news," such as...

Verizon, AT&T, Google in a Broadband Speed Race

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:00:21 -0500

The race to provide ultrafast broadband is on. In May, Cleveland will become a test bed for a service, spearheaded by Case Western Reserve University, that lets residents of more than 100 homes download data at about 1 gigabit per second. In February, Google said it plans an ultra-high-speed broadband network covering as many as 500,000 users. "The purpose of this project is to experiment and learn," Google said in a blog introducing the idea. "Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there's still more to be done." The U.S. government's National Broadband Plan, released on Mar. 16, also urges that speedier broadband be more extensively deployed.

The plans by Google and Case Western may add to pressure on the largest broadband providers such as Verizon Communications, AT&T, and Comcast to accelerate their own deployments and could create a windfall for the makers of networking equipment, analysts say. "Pre-Google announcement, it would have been five years" before such speeds became common, says John Mazur, a principal analyst at Ovum, a telecom market researcher. "Post-Google announcement, it could be sooner."

A download speed of 1 gigabit per second [Gbps] is 20 times faster than top speeds Verizon offers consumers and more than 256 times faster than the speeds available to the average broadband subscriber. Broadband providers are trying to meet a surge in demand for video and other services delivered over networks, sometimes wirelessly. Global data traffic may increase fivefold by 2013, according to Cisco.

Government Goals

The National Broadband Plan proposes that the Defense Dept. make 1 Gbps connections available on select military bases. It also wants American schools, hospitals, and government buildings to have access to such connections by 2020. The plan outlines measures designed to create more broadband providers through auctions of airwaves needed...