Archive for November, 2009

IBM’s ‘enterprise Facebook’ is a hit

Lotus Connections is “the fastest-growing software in IBM history when it comes to market adoption,” said an IBM social software strategist on board the Lotus Bus. IBM discussed iNotes, Symphony, security and boundary workers during its stop in Toronto. IBM Corp. has embarked on an 18-city tour across North America to promote Lotus and LotusLive, [...]

Skype’s legal storm clears up

The legal war over Skype has ended. Skype’s cofounders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, have agreed to transfer ownership of the remaining Skype technology that eBay didn’t own, paving the way for eBay to complete its sale of a majority stake in Skype to an investor consortium. In exchange, Friis and Zennstrom will join the [...]

Botnet authors crash WordPress sites with buggy code

Webmasters who find an annoying error message on their sites may have caught a big break, thanks to a slip-up by the authors of the Gumblar botnet. Tens of thousands of Web sites, many of them small sites running the WordPress blogging software, have been broken, returning a “fatal error” message in recent weeks. According [...]

Developer finds major coding errors in Facebook, MySpace

Social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook have apparently fixed coding errors that could have allowed an attacker access to all of their users’ data and photos. The simple coding errors are alarming considering the extent to which social networks have gone to reassure their users that their data will be safe. The problem involved the way [...]

World’s first iPhone worm Rickrolls angry fanbois

iPhone owners in Australia awoke this weekend to find their devices were targeted by self-replicating attacks that display an image of 1980s heart throb Rick Astley that’s not easily removed. The attacks, which researchers say are the world’s first iPhone worm in the wild, target jailbroken iPhones that have SSH software installed and keep Apple’s [...]

Free Microsoft open-source content management app to get its debut next week

Microsoft is working on a set of free open-source content-management application and set of reusable components for it that is codenamed “Orchard.” The company is slated to share details about its plans for Orchard at TechEd Europe next week. I asked Microsoft officials for more information on Orchard and got back a no comment. But [...]

Bug in latest Linux gives untrusted users root access

A software developer has uncovered a bug in most versions of Linux that could allow untrusted users to gain complete control over the open-source operating system. The null pointer dereference flaw was only fixed in the upcoming 2.6.32 release candidate of the Linux kernel, making virtually all production versions in use at the moment vulnerable. [...]

Feeling grumpy ‘is good for you’

In a bad mood? Don’t worry – according to research, it’s good for you. An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly. In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed. While cheerfulness fosters creativity, [...]

Agility EX is a high-end SSD for the masses

OCZ touts its latest solid-state disk (SSD) drive, the Agility EX, as the first “truly affordable” single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash-based drive available. With a retail price of $US399, it’s half the price of HD Tach v3.0.4 benchmarking utilities. But paying that kind of money for 60GB still seems a bit out of the average [...]

New software detects bots scraping Web site data

The software is aimed at protecting Web sites whose intellectual property can be easily copied Web sites such as job boards face a persistent problem: their data is constantly pilfered by automated bots. The data ends up on other competing job boards, which have stolen the content. It’s a problem that plagues any Web site [...]