Internet » Foxcrawl

IT giants IBM and Hewlett-Packard involved in corruption scandal in Poland

Posted by foxcrawl at 5:07 pm No Responses »

May 172012

IBM and Hewlett-Packard keep the headlines of the media in Poland as the IT groups would allegedly be involved in a corruption case over the informatics data management of country’s public administration, informs the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita cited by AFP and Realitatea.net.

A spokesman for the anti-corruption police (CBA) Jacek Dobrzynski refused either to confirm or refute the information published by the Polish newspaper.

Rzeczpospolita published the information after CBA announced on Wednesday the arrest of a senior management official of the Polish National Police and two high-ranking members of the Polish IT company NetLine, – the three being accused of corruption acts such as bribery.

“NetLine’s presidents, who were arrested yesterday, had close ties with computer giants IBM and HP,” reveals the Polish newspaper.

Earlier this year, CBA arrested several senior officials and two former executives of computer companies who were charged with corruption, Dobrzynski said.

Representatives for IBM and HP in Poland confirmed the involvement of former employees in the scandal.

“Hewlett-Packard Polska cooperate fully with the authorities and do not comment the ongoing investigation,” the company spokeswoman, Anna Marciniak told AFP, noting that one of the men indicted, Tomasz Z.,” has not been working for HP Polska since February 2010 “.

In turn, IBM “takes note of press information regarding a former IBM employee,” said group’s spokesman in Poland, Tomasz Stachera.

“We take this case very seriously and cooperate with all institutions involved in the investigation. We do not make comments at this stage,” he added.

Twitter user claiming to be Eminem's Daughter Hailie was just a sham

Posted by foxcrawl at 9:15 pm No Responses »

May 012012

Virtual Angry Blonde impersonated Hailie on Twitter

A young lady apparently posting behind Twitter account @Angry_Blonde and claiming to be Eminem’s daughter Hailie turned out to be just a trickster. It looks like the whole blogosphere and social environment was misleaded by the Angry Blonde (AB) girl.

The deceiver tweeted for long time very persuadable messages and arguments related to the private life of her alleged famous father and singer.

In a statetement for a media publication (E-Online), Eminem’s representative rejected the allegations saying that Hailie does not even own an account on the microblogging social website Twitter.

However, whoever is behind “Angry Blonde” nickname gained a lot of respect for successfully managing to become the most original imposter on the web so far.

Eminem’s manager stressed in a twitter post that the account is entirely fraudulent and there are at least 6 similar accounts impersonating Hailie.

Last Wednesday, Hailie’s bogus account @AB was removed.

Here below you can see a few messages posted from the false account which had impersonated Hailie:

Convincing deceiver tweeted on behalf of Eminem's daughter Hailie

Counterfeit: message from misleading Twitter account Angry Blonde

British Court Decision to Blow Pirate Bay Website

Posted by foxcrawl at 10:33 pm No Responses »

Apr 302012

The file-sharing Site The Pirate Bay should be blocked by the Internet providers, said the British Supreme Court.

The Pirate Bay, which provides pirated materials to its users will soon be unavailable for most people in Britain.

Internet providers such as Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media will be required to block their customers’ access to the controversial file-sharing website. A sixth ISP, BT, demanded the court a couple of weeks in order to analyze the situation before taking a decision.

“Websites like The Pirate Bay jeopardize jobs in the UK and undermine the investments in new British artists,” said British Phonographic Industry.

File-sharing website "The Pirate Bay" will become inaccessible following decision of British Supreme Court

Google Penguin Update Release To Kill Webspam

Posted by foxcrawl at 9:22 pm No Responses »

Apr 292012

Traffic slowing down? Panda replaced by Penguin!!!
All bloggers have been blurry because of the syndrome called Panda which is now turning into Penguin.
For a long time, -probably more than a year-, all SEO guys, Webmasters, etc., showed disgust for Panda and it appears that recently (last week) another animal took over the stage: Penguin.

What is Penguin? Well, it is nothing else than Google’s latest update in terms of website rankings or (better said) page rank classification which is targeted by almost everyone.

What is the new update doing? Obviously Panda was released to serve a few purposes and I list a few of them here: web spam killing, cloaking avoidance, bad links removal, etc.

What can you do? (in case your blog/site ranking decreased)
According to webpronews.com there are a couple of guidelines you should follow if you wish to retrieve your PR and get back in business. These guidelines are displayed next in a random way: 1. avoid having pages featuring irrelevant keywords; 2. do not make use of cloaking tricks to deceive users or search engines; 3. do not develop subdomains or pages with pretty similar or duplicat content; 4. get rid of hidden text or links; 5. clean your site of viruses, malware or trojans; 6. pay attention to your affiliate programs which lacks genuine content; 7. unlink from websites which belong to “bad neighborhoods”; 8. do not use programs which submit automated queries to Google; such tools are known to violate search engine’s TOS.

If you want to find out more information just read the quality, technical and content guidelines provided by Google.

Facebook-Instagram, a shocking 1 billion dollar deal

Posted by foxcrawl at 8:54 pm No Responses »

Apr 092012

When it comes to mobile photo marketing, Facebook apparently prefers to buy instead of developing. Zuckerberg’s network just revealed its largest acquisition so far as it bought the widespread photo-sharing application Instagram for a dizzying $1 billion amount in cash and stock.

It turned out to be a striking decission from Facebook which ,until now, chanelled its investments on lower valuable acquisitions, usually worth under $100 million.

Instagram photosharing app aims at being Facebook’s mobile player – which was a weak point for dominating social network. Instagram came to life in 2010 and its service helps folks share photos and apply custom filters. Meanwhile it turned into one of iPhone’s most downloaded app, with about 29 million registered users. Instagram did not stop here as it developed for Google Android OS a version of its mobile photosharing app which was released just… last week.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Instagram will remain independent and therefore able to work with rival social networks. Instagram independence will grant users to possibility to post on other services, follow people outside Facebook’s range and opt out of sharing on Facebook.

Amazing side? San Francisco-based Instagram has just 13 employees who actually heared about Facebook deal from company’s co-founder Kevin Systrom during a meeting on Monday (9 April 2012).

Instagram-Facebook deal is expected to be finalized later this quarter. Instagram, which is believed to almost reach a new funding amount that would make the startup worth $500 million, had turned previously down an offer from Facebook.

Facebook and Instagram just agreed a $1million deal to dominate the mobile photo-sharing market

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, wrote on his Facebook page a statement about FB-Instagram transaction:
“I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

“We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

“That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

“These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

“We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.”

Backdoor Flashback trojan infects half million Mac computers. See infection map

Posted by foxcrawl at 1:19 pm No Responses »

Apr 062012

Doctor Web—the Russian anti-virus firm—performed a stufy to determine the scale of spreading of Trojan BackDoor.Flashback that takes over computers running Mac OS X. Now BackDoor.Flashback botnet rules over more than 550 000 infected machines, most of them from the United States and Canada. This once again refutes claims by some experts that there are no cyber-threats to Mac OS X.

Systems get infected with BackDoor.Flashback.39 after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system. JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit. Doctor Web’s virus analysts discovered a large number of web-sites containing the code.
The recently discovered ones include:
godofwar3.rr.nu
ironmanvideo.rr.nu
killaoftime.rr.nu
gangstasparadise.rr.nu
mystreamvideo.rr.nu
bestustreamtv.rr.nu
ustreambesttv.rr.nu
ustreamtvonline.rr.nu
ustream-tv.rr.nu
ustream.rr.nu
According to some sources, links to more than four million compromised web-pages could be found on a Google SERP at the end of March. In addition, some posts on Apple user forums described cases of infection by BackDoor.Flashback.39 when visiting dlink.com.

The global map of the Mac OS computers infected with Backdoor Flashback trojan

Attackers began to exploit CVE-2011-3544 and CVE-2008-5353 vulnerabilities to spread malware in February 2012, and after March 16 they switched to another exploit (CVE-2012-0507). The vulnerability has been closed by Apple only on April 3 2012.

The exploit saves an executable file onto the hard drive of the infected Mac machine. The file is used to download malicious payload from a remote server and to launch it. Doctor Web found two versions of the Trojan horse: attackers started using a modified version of BackDoor.Flashback.39 around April 1. Similarly to the older versions, the launched malware first searches the hard drive for the following components:
/Library/Little Snitch
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
/Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app
/Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app
/Applications/avast!.app
/Applications/ClamXav.app
/Applications/HTTPScoop.app
/Applications/Packet Peeper.app

If the files are not found, the Trojan uses a special routine to generate a list of control servers, sends an installation success notification to intruders’ statistics server and sends consecutive queries at control server addresses.

It should be noted that the malware utilizes a very peculiar routine for generating such addresses. It can also switch between several servers for better load balancing. After receiving a reply from a control server, BackDoor.Flashback.39 verifies its RSA signature and then, if successful, downloads and runs payload on the infected machine. It may get and run any executable specified in a directive received from a server.

Each bot includes a unique ID of the infected machine into the query string it sends to a control server. Doctor Web’s analysts employed the sinkhole technology to redirect the botnet traffic to their own servers and thus were able to count infected hosts.

Over 550 000 infected machines running Mac OS X have been a part of the botnet on April 4. These only comprise a segment of the botnet set up by means of the particular BackDoor.Flashback modification. Most infected computers reside in the United States (56.6%, or 303,449 infected hosts), Canada comes second (19.8%, or 106,379 infected computers), the third place is taken by the United Kingdom (12.8% or 68,577 cases of infection) and Australia with 6.1% (32,527 infected hosts) is the fourth.

How to fix the vulnerability problem? (Flashback botnet removal)
Doctor Web recommends Mac users to download and install a security update released by Apple from support.apple.com/kb/HT5228 to prevent infection of their systems by BackDoor.Flashback.39.
Source: drweb.com

Big troubles: Yahoo! to fire 2,000 employees

Posted by foxcrawl at 2:26 pm No Responses »

Apr 052012

Yahoo plans to lay off 2,000 employees, representing 14.3% of company’s total employment, and this decision signals a broad reorganization of the Internet giant, reports Reuters.

The measures announced Wednesday represent an important step toward a Yahoo! company which aims to be smaller, faster, more profitable and better equipped in order to innovate as fast as required by customers and industry,” said general manager Scott Thompson. He noted that Yahoo! inention is to return to its primary objective, to focus on users and advertisers. Yahoo!, which had 14,000 employees at the end of 2011, will achieve annual savings of 375 million dollars following redundancies. The company will feature in the second quarter costs of $ 125-145 million due to its reorganization plan.

Yahoo to dismiss 2000 employees from work as a revenue growth measure

However some analysts are skeptical about the effectiveness of redundancies, which were largely anticipated. “You can not return to revenue growth through layoffs. People want to see a plan and statistics on the revenue growth,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. Yahoo! revenues are declining due to harsh competition coming from Google and Facebook. Last year Yahoo’s profit dropped by 14.6%, from 1.23 billion dollars in 2010 to $1.05 billion, in the context of a 21% revenue decline to $5 billion.

Genealogy: 1940 census, an excellent method to find family roots

Posted by foxcrawl at 12:35 am No Responses »

Apr 052012

The internet represents world’s largest information database nowadays and everyone connected to it can scramble through an infinite amount of well-organized records which offer the possibility to go back into the past and verify the genealogic tree of the family.

Recently the U.S. National Archives just made available a brilliant tool for discovering this kind of information: a website that hosts records of the full 1940 U.S. census.

In case you are curious to “meet” your predecesors, the 1940 census comes up with extremely detailed info you might find interesting. The website comprises high-resolution scans of the handwritten documents, but the only inconvenience is that the records can not be verified by name. Yet, you can give it a search by city, country, or street name and that certainly will be helpful.

Census: perfect tool for researching family tree, but other genealogy resources are available over the web

Now that you set up the location of the person of interest, each entry is filled with standard census data that can help depict an image of life in 40s.

Individuals are listed with information featuring: Age, Marital Status – usually marked with either “S” for single or “M” for married, Education history – revealing the highest education achieved at the moment the census was registered, Financial situation – Listing of homes and individual’s connection to the owner of the household, Employment status – wether jobless or employed and what that job is, Place of birth – the U.S. state in which the person was born or (international) country, Annual Income.

How to search for genealogy for free!
Besides government census website, there are also plenty of sites allowing you to follow your family tree. Of course you might encounter sites which will impose a membership charge but you have to disregard them.
The good news is that the web environment has dozens of free options containing overwhelming data that you can browse, download for free. Here below is a brief list of such resources:
U.S.GenWeb
Cindy’s List
FamilySearch-FamilyHistory

Microsoft leave Germany, move to The Netherlands after Motorola's patent litigation

Posted by foxcrawl at 6:08 pm No Responses »

Apr 022012

Microsoft decided to transfer from Germany to the Netherlands its European software distribution center, after being sued by Motorola Mobility for allegedly infringing a video tech patent, informs Reuters.

A Microsoft spokesman said Monday that the transfer operations are already underway. So far, the distribution of Microsoft products in Europe, has been done from Germany by the media group Bertelsmann’s division Arvato.

The news on Microsoft’s move comes before a 17 April decision of the German justice over a patent litigation by which Motorola accuses Microsoft of breaking an agreement by employing some video-compression software in Windows 7 and the Xbox 360 videogame console.

Motorola is about to be bought by Google. Google buys Motorola Mobility Holdings for about $12.5 billion and the acquisition gives the search internet giant access to its IT patents, necessary to compete more effectively on the smartphone market.