New Sony Rolly in Motion - Uncut Demonstration : DigInfo

RISING, the well-known information security producer, is proud to announce that Rising Antivirus Free Edition has been selected to be part of the upcoming Google Pack service for China.

Google Pack China is especially designed for Chinese computer users and it provides the same services of Google Pack already does, but more adapted to Chinese market. Rising Antivirus Free Edition was selected by Google for offering to Chinese users a free personal computer security, combined with Spyware Doctor.

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Five cell phone myths. Five real answers. Net10 uncovers the truth behind the most commonly asked cell phone questions.

Not all cellular carriers are created equal. That’s why it can pay to shop around before signing up for any particular service. But it may surprise many consumers to know that if they’re unhappy with their cell service, they can change it - and that doing so is a lot easier than many people realize.

The following facts about cell phones and wireless carriers, as compiled by Net10 (a brand of TracFone Wireless, Inc., the largest prepaid mobile phone service provider in the U.S.), can help consumers who’re tired of hidden fees, overage charges, lengthy contracts and cancellation penalties:

Myth: Anyone who cancels a cell phone contract is subject to a cancellation fee of about $175.

Fact: Once a user is past the initial due date of the contract, he or she can’t be charged a cancellation fee. If the contract was for two years, at the end of those two years it automatically renews on a month-to-month basis, not for another two-year term.

Myth: Contract service plans are a better value than prepaid plans.

Fact: Those who use less than 500 minutes per month are better off with a prepaid plan. At 10 cents per minute for a prepaid plan, 500 minutes costs $50. The average monthly contract costs as much as $68. Plus, those who go over their minutes on a contract plan can pay as much as 45 cents per minute additional. That can really add up.

Myth: Users who switch to prepaid plans can’t take the old phone number with them.

Fact: Those who are already on a contract cell phone plan can move their current cell phone number to a prepaid plan with no penalty.

Myth: Users get better phone reception on a contract plan.

Fact: Reputable prepaid cell phone providers use the networks of major regional and national wireless carriers, giving them a vast national coverage area with the same quality of reception.

Myth: The only way to get the best phones is by signing a lengthy contract.

Fact: Top manufacturers such as Motorola, Nokia, Kyocera and LG now offer their top brand name phones for prepaid plans.

Consumers who are dissatisfied with their current cell phone contracts should learn their rights and options. To learn more, visit www.no-evil.net.

A recently found flaw in the internet’s addressing system is worse than first feared, says the man who found it.

Dan Kaminsky made his comments when speaking publicly for the first time about his discovery at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

He said fixes for the flaw in the net’s Domain Name System (DNS) had focused on web browsers but it could be abused by hackers in many other ways.

“Every network is at risk,” he said. “That’s what this flaw has shown.”

The DNS acts as the internet’s address books and helps computers translate the website names people prefer (such as bbc.co.uk) into the numbers computers use (212.58.224.131).

Mr Kaminsky discovered a way for malicious hackers to hijack DNS and re-direct people to fake pages even if they typed in the correct address for a website.

In his talk Mr Kaminsky detailed 15 other ways for the flaw to be exploited.

Via the flaw hi-tech criminals or pranksters could target FTP services, mail servers, spam filters, Telnet and the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) that helps to make web-based transactions more secure.

“There are a ton of different paths that lead to doom,” he said.

‘Hype’

But the DNS threat was played down by net giant VeriSign which issues many of the security certificates used in SSL. It told BBC News its system was “not vulnerable”.

The Silicon Valley company looks after two of the net’s 13 DNS root servers. It also controls the computers that contain the master list of domain name suffixes such as .com and .net

“If there is a silver lining in all of this, it’s that users will become more aware and more conscious of who they do business with.”

Ken Silva, chief technology officer at Verisign, said: “We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them.”

He believed there had been “some hype” around how the DNS flaw will affect consumers. He added that while it was an interesting way to exploit DNS on weak servers, there were other ways to misdirect people that remained.

Mr Silva said he was concerned that people would read too much into the doom and gloom headlines that have surrounded the discovery of the DNS flaw.

“It’s been overplayed in a sense. I think it has served to confuse the consumer into believing there is somehow now a way to misdirect them to a wrong site.

“The fact of the matter is that there have been many ways like phishing attacks to misdirect them for a long time and this is just yet another of those ways that will be surgically exploited.”

Security gap

Mr Kaminsky kept news of the flaw out of the public domain for months after its discovery to give companies time to patch servers.

Mr Kaminsky said that 75% of Fortune 500 companies have fixed the problem while around 15% have done nothing.

Major vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and others have issued patches to close the security hole.

“The industry has rallied like we’ve never seen the industry rally before,” said Mr Kaminsky.

Computer users need to be educated to surf the superhighway more safely

DNS attacks are not new but Mr Kaminsky is credited with discovering a way to link some widely known weaknesses in the system so that the attack now takes seconds instead of days or hours.

“Quite frankly, all the pieces of this have been staring us in the face for decades,” said Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, a non-profit that makes the software run by many of the world’s DNS servers.

Mr Silva at VeriSign said even though patches have been put in place, this doesn’t mean users can sit back and relax.

“The biggest gap in security rests between the keyboard and the back of the chair,” he said.

“The look and feel of a website is not what a consumer should trust. They should trust the security behind that website and do simple things like use more secure passwords and change their password regularly.”

Mr Silva said education is fundamental in making the net a safer place.

“We have been trained since we were young to lock the door to our house, our car. We take these sensible security measures in the environment we are functioning in.

“Yet when it comes to computer safety we forget to look both ways before crossing the internet highway.”

Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences.

Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.

Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.

Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies.

Virtual adoption

“The virtual world provides the body,” said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente.

He said the company had developed a “Cognition Engine” that acted as the thinking part of the artificial intelligences it wanted to create.

This engine had some partially scripted behaviours and goals for the avatar under its control but was also capable of reasoning to work out novel ways to achieve its aims.

Dr Goertzel said business and research reasons drew Novamente towards using virtual worlds for its AI development.

There was likely to be a ready market for smart virtual pets in worlds such as Second Life and many others, he said.

“There are a lot of virtual pets out there and none of them have much intelligence,” he said.

“We have a pretty fully functioning animal brain right now and we are hooking it up to the different virtual worlds,” said Dr Goertzel. “There’s not much doubt that we can make really cool artificial animals.

“They could be ambient animals that go around and try to achieve their own goals, or pets that you can give people so they teach them.”

Initially Novamente would focus on pets such as dogs or monkeys but aimed to branch out afterwards.

“I’d really like to do virtual talking parrots,” he said, “and then virtual babies. You would get one and it would be yours for the next 18 years.”

It’s a lot more practical to control virtual robots in simulated worlds than real robots

Dr Ben Goertzel

Also, said Dr Goertzel, smart virtual animals were likely to get a good reception among gamers and those that spend time in online worlds.

“The gaming industry has been one of the few places where AI has not been a dirty word,” he said.

Many of the computer controlled characters in games are driven by basic AI programs that dictate how they behave when attacked, when they spot a player’s character or how they interact.

Body language

On the research side, said Dr Goertzel, virtual worlds also solved the problem of giving an AI a relatively unsophisticated environment in which it could live and learn.

“I’m one of many AI theorists who believe that embodiment is important,” he said. “Typing stuff back and forth does not give the AI much to go on in terms of understanding the world around it, or itself or its place in that world.”

This desire to embody artificial intelligences led many to robots, he said, but that approach presented its own problems.

“Robots have a lot of disadvantages, we have not solved all the problems of getting them to move around and see the world,” he said. “It’s a lot more practical to control virtual robots in simulated worlds than real robots.”

Novamente is working on avatars for different virtual worlds with The Electric Sheep company that specialises in producing artificial entities for online environments.

Dr Goertzel said Novamente was due to announce its first products and which worlds they would appear in at the Virtual Worlds conference being held in San Jose in early October.

BlueFire Digital based in Silicon Valley provides Bluetooth and SMS mobile interactivity solutions for the digital signage industry.

Digital Signage SoftwareBlueFire Digital’s Bluetooth product, BlueFire MS SE, can be integrated or synchronized with Navori Tycoon software via Tycoon’s Mosaic feature. Such integration or synchronization provides delivery of mobile content via Bluetooth, based on content playing on digital sign to mobile phones. With Tycoon software it is now possible to deliver coupon/voucher, wallpaper, ringtones, videos, PDF files and vcards to mobile phones. BlueFire MS SE keeps track of mobile activity for proof-of-download and reporting purposes.

BlueFire Digitals’ BlueFire SMS platform in conjunction with Navori Tycoon’s Boost Media feature enables mobile phones to act as a remote control device. By doing so, Navori users can allow their customers to view specific video clip or other multimedia content instantly via SMS. And best of all, this can be performed while promotional SMS messages are delivered to the customer. Combining the BlueFire SMS platform with Navori Tycoon software can greatly enhance retail and entertainment related digital signage networks.

The applications are abound with Navori Tycoon software and BlueFire Digital’s Bluetooth and SMS interactivity solutions.

For more information about the technology behind this project, please contact Navori SA.

BlueFire Digital’s website can be reached at: http://www.bluefiredigital.com

icro blogging site Twitter is the latest target of cyber criminals who are increasingly finding fertile ground on social networks.

A fake Twitter profile with a malicious payload has been spotted by security firm Kaspersky.

It purports to link to a pornographic video but downloads a fake version of Adobe Flash which installs programs capable of stealing data.

The attack is believed to be the first to target Twitter.

Social net

The attack is believed to have originated in Brazil because of the language it uses, the servers it calls on to download trojans and the e-mail address used to collect stolen data.

The fake profile has a name that means “pretty rabbit” in Portuguese. It tries to convince users to download the fake Flash video viewer in order to watch the associated video.

It comes as Kaspersky also releases details about two worms that target social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. More variants of these worms are also starting to turn up.

The worms transformed victims’ machines into zombie computers, used by criminals to send spam, launch phishing attacks and harvest data.

They were disguised as a link to YouTube which also installed a fake version of Flash Player.

“Unfortunately users are very trusting of messages left by friends on social networking sites so the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high,” said Alexander Gostev, a senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

Only those using Microsoft Windows are vulnerable to infection from these malicious programs.

A businessman whose personal details were “laid bare” in fake entries on the Facebook social networking website has won a libel case at the High Court.

Mathew Firsht was awarded £22,000 in damages against an old school friend, Grant Raphael, who created the profile.

The judge ruled that Mr Raphael’s defence - that the entry was created by mischievous party gate-crashers at his flat - was “built on lies”.

The profiles were on Facebook for 16 days until they were taken down.

The court heard that Mr Raphael created a false personal profile for Mr Firsht, and a company profile called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”.

It’s important that if anybody does have information which is written about them which is totally untrue… there is now a chance of finding out who those people are

Mathew Firsht

The judge heard that the private information concerned Mr Firsht’s whereabouts, activities, birthday and relationship status. It falsely indicated his sexual orientation and political views.

Mr Firsht said it included allegations that he owed substantial sums of money which he had repeatedly avoided paying by lying, and that he and his company were not to be trusted.

He was awarded £15,000 for libel and £2,000 for breach of privacy. His company was awarded £5,000.

Speaking to the BBC after the case, Mr Firsht said the false profile had made him “extremely angry”.

It had taken a “lot of energy, a lot of effort and a lot of time, and a lot of expense” to trace who was behind it, he said - and to win the case was “amazing”.

“It’s important that if anybody does have information which is written about them which is totally untrue… that people realise there is now a chance of finding out who those people are.”

BBC NEWS | UK | Payout for false Facebook profile.

A call to save Bletchley Park has gone out from the UK’s computer scientists.

More than 100 academics have signed a letter to The Times saying the code-cracking centre and crucible of the UK computer industry deserves better.

They say Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, should be put on a secure financial basis like other “great museums”.

“We cannot allow this crucial and unique piece of both British and World heritage to be neglected in this way,” the letter to The Times said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘Neglect’ of Bletchley condemned.