Daniel Pankiller

Hackers have started on an organized
attack on major search engines with
innumerable keywords resulting in
search results that point to malicious
Web sites. Once clicked, the sites
will cause a download of Trojans, key
loggers, or elicit bogus clicks.

Simply put, damn near any Google
search term–even terms like “hospice”–
can take you to one of these malware
sites. Computerworld quotes Sunbelt
Software CEO Alex Eckelberry as
saying “this is huge.” I’m inclined to
agree, especially considering
Eckelberry’s inventory: “27 different
domains, each with up to 1,499
[malicious] pages. That’s 40,000
possible pages.”

The malicious sites seem to have made
it to the top of the results via
comment, blog spam, and rigging Web
pages with keywords solely for the
purpose of making it to the top list.

The malicious attacks were brought
into focus by security researcher Adam
Thomas of anti-spyware company Sunbelt
Software. The malware from the sites
make use of an iFrame exploit in IE
and also result in the downloading of
Trojans and keyloggers.

Search engines have begun purging the
malicious links from their indexes.

Ranking systems at search engines are
based on proprietary algorithms that
are tuned to avoid bogus links, but
the question remains whether present
day techniques are sufficient to avoid
organized large-scale malicious
attacks in the future.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has
released software that will help users
determine whether their Net connection
is being tampered with by their
service provider.

An excerpt from Associated Press:

“People have all sorts of problems,
and they don’t know whether to
attribute that to some sort of
misconfiguration, or deliberate
behavior by the ISP,” said Seth
Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.

The new software compares lists of
data packets sent and received by two
different computers and looks for
discrepancies between what one sent
and the other actually received.
Previously, the process had to be done
manually.

ISPs tampering with network users’
connection to crack down on P2P (peer-
to-peer) file sharing has been a major
issue this year. Last month, the
Associated Press in a nation-wide test
confirmed that ISPs like Comcast use
protocol-level inspections to detect
and kill P2P traffic.

Dubbed as the Test Your ISP Project,
EFF is developing software tools to
let users test their own broadband
connections.

The Software will be launched soon.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of
Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory,
in collaboration with scientists in
Turkey and Japan, have developed a
portable scanning device based on
terrahertz radiation that detects more
materials without the harmful effects
of X-rays.

An excerpt from VNUnet:

Unlike more energetic X-rays, T-rays
do not have sufficient energy
to ‘ionize’ an atom and cause cellular
damage that can lead to radiation
sickness or cancer. But T-rays are
capable of penetrating many common
materials, such as leather, fabric,
cardboard and paper.

T-rays can also penetrate the human
body by almost half a centimetre, and
have already been used by doctors to
detect and treat certain types of
cancers, especially those of the skin
and breast.

T-rays could not be used earlier for
scanning purpose because of certain
physical limitations of semi-
conducting materials. Researchers had
to deploy several techniques to
generate signals of sufficient signal
strength.

The new technology may find
application in several areas,
including security and cancer
detection.

From supercomputing applications to
financial modeling, graphics chips are
being deployed for a number of
research and development activities.

Graphics chips are great when it comes
to crunching repetitive computational
tasks, which is a reason why they are
making it to diverse applications
beyond gaming. This is in comparison
to desktop processors, which are made
to perform general applications.

The larger number of cores in graphics
chips makes them ideal candidates for
research focused on obtaining results
for various permutations of data for
the same models.

Few excerpts from the article at BBC:

Professor Susan Hagness from the
Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison has turned to
graphics cards to quickly analyse
breast scans to spot cancer in its
early stages.

The financial models that Prof Giles
is running test the same algorithm on
each core but each one gets different
random numbers as input.

PhD student Tobias Brandvik and Dr
Graham Pullan in the Whittle
Laboratory at the University of
Cambridge engineering department and
sped up simulations of turbine blade
designs by 40 times by using a few
graphics cards.

Perhaps it is with this developing
segment in mind that AMD has its focus
settled on delivering graphics
solutions tightly integrated with its
platforms. Don’t forget that it also
owns ATI, a leading graphics chipset
maker.

About a month ago, I discovered Boxbe…
by accident. It was one of those
rare “wow” moments that happens when
you run across something that you
haven’t seen before and that you think
has unlimited potential.

What is Boxbe? The Web site,
http://boxbe.com/ says that you can
think of it as “e-mail by invitation,”
where you can manage the messages that
you receive in your inbox. You can
allow certain senders permission from
the get-go, but other people have jump
through an encryption loop before
their message gets through. In a
nutshell, that means you won’t have to
worry about junk mail getting through
spam filters or worry about legitimate
mail getting filtered out as junk.

Today, November 29, 2007, is a big day
for Boxbe, according to Boxbe’s
official press release:

With the release of Boxbe’s new
service, users of Yahoo! Mail,
Outlook, and Gmail can now create
an ‘email guest list,’ which ensures
that they receive messages only from
those people who matter to them.

This sounds great, doesn’t it? If
you’re anything like me, you’re
wondering what the catch is and how
much money Boxbe is going to cost me
each month. Sure, spam is annoying,
but I’d rather delete junk mail than
have to part with even a morsel of my
hard-earned paycheck. Well, skeptics,
Boxbe’s service is free. If you don’t
believe it, drop on over to Boxbe.com
and see for yourself. For a sneak peek
at Boxbe, view these screenshots.

I had the opportunity to talk to Thede
Loder, the founder and President of
Boxbe, about the service and the
company’s recent announcements.