Robots

Posted November 7, 2008

Honda has designed a walking assistance gadget, which they have been researchig since 1999. It weighs about 14 pounds. It's purpose is to help reduce stress on people's knees by helping them up stairs and staying in a crouching position. Japan's largest automaker plans to test this gadget with their assembly line workers. To use: a person places its seat between his legs, puts on the gadget's shoes, and turns it on to start walking. There is a motor-driven metal legs to assist the person in walking. The battery-powered device also has a computer and sensors that respond to the person's movements. Honda has not decide how much this gadget will cost or how it will go into the market.

I thought this was pretty interesting but with robots humans are just getting lazier everyday.

Offshoring

IBM secured a 10-year deal wiht India's Bharti Retail to provide them with a range of technology and services, which operates a chain of convient stores. IBM will provide them with data center and project mangement services, and IBM will also help them manage their applications, networks, and IT security requirments.
IBM also signed a three-year technology service with a Russian retailer Lenta, which was worth about $1 million.

'Carding' Ring Bust

Posted October 17, 2008

For two years the FBI had been working undercover targeting an online "carding" forum called Dark Market. This "carding" forum trades stolen credit cards and other personal information. Dark Market has 25oo resgistered members. "FBI has resulted in 56 arrests around the world and saved $70 milllion in losses." FBI director says investigations like this, leads them to other internet forums, where criminals go and interact.

"Of the 206,884 complaints about Internet-related crimes received by the Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2007, more than 90,000, reflecting almost $240 million in reported lossess, were referred to law enforcement agaencies across the United States."

'Clickjacking'

posted September 26, 2008

This article is about a web browser technique called 'clickjacking', "it gives an atttacker the ability to trick a user into clicking on something only barely or momentarily noticeable. Therefore, if a user clicks on a Web page, they may actually be clicking on content from another page". The government security agency says that this flaw effects most web browsers such as Apple, Safari, Goggle Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera; and that there is no fix available. To avoid this risk, you should disable scripting adn plug-ins. They suggest the use of security plug ins such as FlashBlock, Adblock Plus, and CustomizeGoogle; these plugins should not be turned off. There was a disccusion with Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, and other major browser vendors. Adobe is not affected but it was involved because of its Flash software that can be used for clickjacking exploit. "Web sites that attempt to be more secure end up being less secure with reguard to clickjacking, because sites that try to protect againgst cross-site request forgery end up making themselves vulnerable to this attack".

Intellectual Property

Posted September 11, 2008

My article was on expanding digital copyright law. The recording industry association of America and the motion picture of America are lobbying a pair of bills to give federal government more power to police copyright violations and that it was going to run into opposition from political foes of the RIAA and MPAA. The Senate of Judiciary Committee is schedule to vote on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act, a bill passed in July. One of the latest version permits the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against any one who is committing a copyright violation such as peer-to-peer users. A group of librians and nonprofit group says copyright holders should be the ones filing the lawsuit not the government.
The second RIAA and MPAA is called the International Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Act. This act will round up copyright pressure against counties that US Trade Representatives believes is not taking privacy seriously.

"We can't let other countries repeatedly rip off the movies Americans make, the products Americans desigh and the other fruits of American ingenuity without taking some action."

I agree with this quote, that we shouldn't let other countries rip off the American industry, however, how are we going to enforce this law when the federal can't extend beyound the US border??

CookieMoster attack

Posted September 11, 2008

A CookieMonster attack is on its way, it is used to gather insecure HTTPS cookies such as web-based services that involves login credentials (email, or online banking). The cookie monster records the https cookies as well as normal http cookies to Firefox cookie files. It turns out that many web sites do not set the "Encrypted Sessions Only" properly, so this allows an attacker to retrieve related cookies. The most crucial part of this cookie moster is that it can still get a list of the insecure domains from every client IP even if you're not using the site at the time. Cookie monster is now available to a limited set of security researchers and will be available to the public shortly.

Airport body scan machines made in St. Petersburg

posted September 07, 2008

L-3 communications is the nations's sixth largest defense company, they sell products that the public is not aware of. A machine made in St. Petersburg is said to be one that explicit images of traveler's bodies to find weapons under their clothes. This machine is getting alot of attention because it is not at all favorable. The transportation security Administration is testing L-3's "Millimeter wave" at 10 major airports, and will expand to 14 more. This scanner looks like a telephone booth; travelers steps into it and lift thier arms up while harmless radio waves bounces off them. Within seconds, a security agent looks over a dark-but detailed image of the travelers naked body. Civil liberties group says this is a process called "an electronic strip search" which violates peoples privacy rights. The transportation security administration says that these images are deleted after the securities had verified that the person is not carrying anything dangerous.

I feel that this is an invasion of privacy because I got my chance to go through one of these things, and all they told me was to walk in raise my arms and that they were going to do a scan, but i didn't know that that was the kind of image they get.