The 14th DefCon Convention ends today at the Riveria Casino in Las Vegas. For those of you in the know DefCon is said to be the neutral ground for hackers, security specialists and government agents alike. In a recent article on AustralianIT Kenneth Greer, Security Specialist for the US Military, commented that the convention is an excellent place to glean new hacking tactics, network vulnerabilities, and recruit “rock star hackers” to help harden his military networks - networks responsible for air craft carrier communications and missile guidance systems (source: AustralianIT). It really makes you wonder. Will the next terrorist attack be a complex, well planned attack from some extremist group or just your neighbour playing on his/her PC…
Cyber crime ranks only behind terrorism and counter-intelligence as top priorities at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Mozilla Foundation has released the first beta version of Firefox 2!
According to the Firefox Roadmap developers are striving to make sure 2 is compatible with 1.5 from a “web developer’s perspective”. Existing API’s will be kept, and new ones will be added.
Firefox 2 is said to have more of a user-focus, with improved search capabilities, integrated spell checker and an antiphishing tool. Other features may appear following the public reaction to the beta, reports ZDnet who recently spoke to Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe. For now, Mozilla hopes that software developers will download the beta and test whether it is compatible with their existing Firefox extensions and provide them with enough feedback to direct the release.
The beta is currently available for download through Mozilla’s FTP server.
ANZ EGate Merchants will feel the pinch today after the MIGS Payment Server failed at 9.30 this morning. ANZ, who say the issue is a link with Mastercard, failed to adequately alert merchants to the problem and as result have has left many online store fronts to deal with failed credit card transactions and irrate customers.
Are ANZ dropping their game? This event follows on from a recent bungle with a ANZ MasterCard tape which as a result lead to a duplication of over 400,000 transactions Australia wide.
Big News: Microsoft Founder and CEO Bill Gates will step down from his fulltime role in the Software giant in 2008.
“Our business and technical leadership has never been stronger, and Microsoft is well positioned for success in the years ahead. I feel very fortunate to have such great technical leaders like Ray and Craig at the company,” Says Gates who plans to spend more time working at his foundation on global health and education initiatives.
“I remain fully committed and full time at Microsoft through June 2008 and will be working side by side with Ray and Craig to ensure that a smooth transition occurs.”
Source Australian IT http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19486936%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
A new Google thing, “Google Trends” works similar to the regular Google but instead of producing a list of web pages it provides various statistics on how the rest of the world is searching your topic. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often. For more info http://www.google.com/trends/about.html
Other interesting Google flavours I recommend:
This week at Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced upgrades to its Xbox Live online game service, which includes a feature that will allow players on its Xbox 360 console to share games and messages between PCs and mobile phones.
More on XBox Live…
The online service launched in 2002 allows video game players to compete against one another, exchange text and voice messages and download new game levels and simple arcade titles. Xbox Live quickly became the signature of the Xbox console, and is one of the key strengths of the Xbox 360.
Sometimes referred to as ‘Spiders’ or ‘Web Crawlers’, Web Robots are automated programs which traverse the Web’s hypertext structure, retrieving a document then, recursively retrieving all documents referenced within.
In terms of web development, where most concerned with Indexing Robots, but there are plenty of proprietary and non-proprietary robots out there (see “what kind of robots are there?” - robotstxt.org) in fact there’s nothing stopping you developing your own.
Indexing Robots, such as the Googlebot, index web pages by using the following methods; reading HTML titles, reading the first few paragraphs within a page, parsing the entire HTML contents and weighting keywords, or reading META tags - FYI it has been indicated that very few robots index MEAT tags effectively.
Ultimately a Search Engine will search through the databases of HTML documents indexed by it’s robot to recall a list of relevant web pages based on a user query.
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As part of it’s Genuine Software Porgram Microsoft has started releasing an XP update which will potentially scan your computer for non-genuine Windows components. “After installation and reboot, they (users) may find their computers popping up an alert that reads: “This copy of Windows is not genuine; you may be a victim of software counterfeiting.” - Brain Kerbs, Washington Post.
Microsoft started releasing the Anti-Piracy update to Auto-Update users in the US on Tuesday and is now in the process of pushing the update out to users in Britain, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.
For some time now I have been reading the JDJ magazine published by sys-con.com. It has been a good way for me to keep in touch with the Java news and read articles that help me develop across other languages as well (such as PHP). Topics presented in the magazine often are able to be ported across to PHP and the like. It also covers topics of Ajax and Model2 frameworks.
Sys-con provide a good website with current issues available to download in PDF or view with a Flash reader (7mm). Their website covers a whole lot of topics, including:
- .NET
- Java
- Ajax
- SOA Web Services
- Linux
- Open Source
- Eclipse
- Storage/Security
- IT Solutions
- WebSphere
- Web 2.0
- XML
- ColdFusion
- MX
- PB
- SEO/SEM
- Wireless
- Hosting
I was reading about Google snapping up the Australian Developer of the Orion Search Engine Ori Allon on the weekend in The Age magazine. Sys-con provided a good quick read on this. Makes you wonder how google will be stopped with this somewhat infinite money.
View the article.
“Shares in Apple Computer surged overnight after the computer maker unveiled software to help owners of its new Intel-based Macs run not only its own operating system but also Microsoft’s rival Windows XP system.
“Wall Street is betting the move will help Apple grow its current worldwide market share beyond the current range of 3 per cent to 4 per cent by attracting more business and home users.
It was reported in a previous article Hackers get Windows XP on Mac about the possibility now that they are using Intel chipsets. I believe that this will now give the confidence to studios who has staff that feel more efficient on Windows platforms to allow staff to run cool looking “winmacs”. I wonder if that name (previously an oxymoron) will take off. 
For those of you who are interested in giving this a try, Apple have released some software that will allow you to run windows and mac side by side.
View the Apple Boot Camp here.
