On 17 May 2011, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released its Vulnerability Summary for the week of 9 May 2011. As usual, some programmes in widespread use appear, as does more specialist software such as that used in back offi...
Comms: Apple modifies iOS to limit tracker
Apple says that its iOS users with iPhone, iPad, etc. can rest easy. The fuss over the fact that the operating system tracked the location of the phone and how that data was stored and made available has been fixed with a download available free...
IT Security: Drive-by downloads? How about drive-home monitoring?
Bryan and Crystal Byrd are mightily angered by the actions of a computer hire shop, according to a court action they have issued in a US Federal Court in which they allege that video camera software installed by the hirer was watching when they...
Internet: killing mad-ads without killing ad revenue model
Google may be trying to improve the quality of its search engine results, but it is doing its advertisers and publishers no favours as pages are swamped with one of the most hated ads on the internet, prompting users to turn to ad blockers in th...
Internet: Web 2.0 turns into Fraud 1.0 with better tech.
"The trouble with the internet is that everyone knows your name, but has no idea who you are." So said Nigel Morris-Cotterill, now Head, The Anti Money Laundering Network (*) in a conference paper in the mid 1990s. He likened the inter...
You may not always know where your iPhone is, but the phone itself does. And it stores its location in a history file which tracks movement over...
Comms: What's up with WhatsApp?
Since the dawn of the PC age, the counterpoint to bloated multi-function software has been small, fast, single purpose applications that do one j...
IT Security: USA's FBI blocks Coreflood botnet
The FBI says "The Coreflood virus infects only Microsoft Windows based computers. Generally most users will not be able to tell if their com...
Tech: swipe cards and smart phones - an easy way to pay
The idea of beaming payment from a phone to a vending machine is nothing new. And one or two apps have appeared for some smart phones to allow pa...
IT Security: purchase of fraudulent SSL certificates "state driven."
Comodo, a provider of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates which verify the authenticity of a website, says that it has uncovered a fraud in wh...
