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Hackers claim to crack Kindle copyright armor

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:24:00 +0000

A not-so-merry holiday gift for Amazon.com: hackers say they've successfully cracked copyright protections on the company's Kindle e-reader, making it possible to export e-books to other devices.

One hack reportedly resulted from a Kindle DRM challenge issued on Israeli forum Hacking.org. On that site, an Israeli hacker known as Labba claims to have created a tool that lets e-books stored on the Kindle be transferred as PDF files.

A U.S. hacker has written a program to crack copyright protections on the Kindle for PC application.
(Credit: Amazon)

A U.S. hacker who goes by the name "i♥cabbages," meanwhile, created a program called Unswindle that promises to convert books stored in the Kindle for PC application into a different file format.

The free Kindle for PC app lets book buyers read their books right from their PCs without having to buy a Kindle reader. Unswindle has to be used in conjunction with MobiDeDRM, a program by another hacker named "darkreverser."

Posters on i♥cabbages' blog give Unswindle mixed reviews, ranging from "works like a charm" and "worked flawlessly" to descriptions of various errors.

Unswindle's creator originally detailed the tool on December 17, and posted two updates on the program Tuesday. One noted that Amazon has demonstrated that "it (unlike Adobe Systems) takes its digital rights management, or DRM, seriously: it has already pushed out a new version of K4PC, which breaks this particular script."

In a second update, the hacker notes that "the K4PC update may not actually have been targeted at Unswindle, as Amazon seems to have done nothing in particular to make the basic approach more difficult. In any case, I've updated Unswindle to handle the 20091222 version of the executable. We'll see if Amazon throws out another new build in short order."

CNET has contacted Amazon for comment and will update this post as soon as we hear back.

The Amazon hacks are, of course, just the latest DRM hacks. In 2005, a group of hackers that included a 17-year-old and a man noted for cracking the anticopying protections on DVDs released PyMusique, a program that essentially stripped DRM from iTunes' songs.

Each time Apple tried to plug the hole that the software exploited, the hackers would find another.

(Sources: BBC News, IDG News Service)

Web to drive holiday retail sales

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:41:00 +0000

It may not be happy holidays for the retail industry overall. But the Web should provide one bit of good cheer.

Retail sales will probably be flat this holiday season, but online sales are expected to reach $44.7 billion, an 8 percent jump over last year, according to the latest data from Forrester Research.

Among 4,000 online consumers surveyed, 94 percent have made a purchase online in the past three months and plan to do the same for the holidays. As for retailers, 72 percent of those questioned for the third-quarter Forrester report "The State of Retailing Online," said they expect holiday sales to increase over last year.

But to cope with the down economy, online stores will try to weigh customer demand against the need to boost profits, says the Forrester report "US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2009," released Monday.

"Despite the lingering effects of the recession, the online space remains the retail industry's growth engine," said Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst, in a statement. "What's different this holiday from past years is that online retailers will manage to the bottom line, which will change some of the tactics they have employed in the past."

Retailers on the Web will offer sales and discounts as always, but of a more limited time and quantity. Automatic free shipping may be jettisoned in favor of free shipping only above certain price levels, says Forrester.

To drive business, online sellers may also take advantage of new trends. More detailed product information will be available, as will social networking tools that let customers share purchasing advice with friends and family.

"Tighter offline inventories may benefit the online channel as consumers go to the Web looking for products--and prices--they can't find in stores this holiday," said Mulpuru. "Online retailers will be ready for them with a special focus this year on engagement and service."

-Lance Whitney, CNET.com

Hacked Web mail accounts used to send spam

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:42:00 +0000

There has been a marked increase in the amount of spam e-mails being sent from Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail accounts, according to analysts at Websense Security Labs.

Websense said on Thursday that personalized spam e-mails had been sent from the compromised accounts to all of each user's contacts. The e-mails contain links to fake shopping sites, intended to capture sensitive information from the reader.

Earlier this week, Microsoft acknowledged that 30,000 Hotmail accounts had breached, and suggested the passwords for the accounts had been obtained in a phishing scam.

However, some security experts believe that the password breach cannot be attributed to phishing. Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer for security firm Imperva, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the information was likely to have been obtained through key logging.

"The quantity of people hit makes me think that it was key logging--the success rate for phishing is only about one in 1,000," said Shulman. "Secondly, when I went through the list of email account credentials...

-Carly Newman, CNET.com

Week in review: Net theft, under your nose

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:13:00 +0000

A new type of banking Trojan horse actually steals money from your account while you are logged in and displays a fake balance.

The bank Trojan, dubbed URLZone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems that are triggered by unusual transactions. For instance, the software is programmed to calculate on-the-fly how much money to steal from an account based on how much money is available.

The Trojan, which exploits a hole in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, IE7, IE8, and Opera, was responsible of the theft of nearly $438,000 during a 22-day span in August.

This is reportedly the first Trojan that hijacks a victim's browser session, steals the money while the victim is doing online banking, and then covers its tracks by modifying information displayed to the victim, all in real time.

Meanwhile, Payroll processor PayChoice said it is investigating a breach in which customers received targeted e-mails purporting to be from the company but were designed to trick people into downloading malware. Workers received e-mails last week that directed them to download a browser plug-in or visit a Web site so they could continue accessing the Onlineemployer.com PayChoice portal.

The e-mails were targeted to individuals and included their user names, log-in IDs and partial passwords, thus increasing the chance that recipients would be likely to fall for the ruse.

-Steven Musil, CNET.com

New botnet hides commands as JPEG images

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Security researchers have stumbled on a new botnet that uses an interesting technique to mask its nefarious intentions.

The Monkif/DIKhora botnet, which is pushing out Trojan downloaders to infected machines, is encoding the instructions to appear as if the command-and-control server is returning a JPEG image file, according to SecureWorks researcher Jason Milletary.

Milletary explains:
The server sets the HTTP Content-Type header to “image/jpeg” and prefaces the bot commands with a fake 32-byte JPEG header. The bot checks if the header matches and decodes the rest of the response to retrieve its commands. The commands are encoded using a single byte XOR with 0×4. The malware that CTU has observed being installed by Monkif is a BHO (Browser Helper Object) trojan commonly referred to as ExeDot, which performs Ad Hijacking and Ad Clicking.

The Trojan associated with this botnet also attempts to disable anti-virus and personal firewall software to maintain its foothold on the system.

-Ryan Naraine, ZDNET.com

Google Wave ready for wider testing

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Google Wave is ready for its next step: a more thorough test of its scalability and stability as more than 100,000 new users crowd onto the service.

As promised, Google plans to open Google Wave beyond an extremely limited preview on Wednesday, granting access to users who have signed up in hopes of getting a chance to try the service. Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project.

Google Wave is an attempt to re-engineer Internet communication, blending elements of e-mail, instant messaging, social networking, and workplace collaboration software into a single Web application. It was first unveiled at Google I/O in May before Web developers who were a bit dazzled by the possible uses of the technology.

At present, however, Google Wave is one big bug bash, perhaps half a year away from launching as a stable product. Google engineers have solved many of the more persistent bugs that were hampering the product a few months ago, but there is still a long way to go and Wave should not be considered anything but a "preview," Rasmussen said. Still, that's better than "developer preview," the status previously attached to Wave that implied only hardcore techies should venture within.

In addition to the developers and waiting list, Google also plans to open Wave up to a limited number of Google Apps enterprise customers for testing, Rasmussen said. A few companies, such as SAP and Salesforce.com, have already started playing around with the technology but Google is seeking feedback from other organizations on how Wave might work within their environment.

-Tom Krazit, CNET.com

Server....are we ready?

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:53:00 +0000

I visit a lot of my small business customers on a regular basis to remove viruses, recover data, fix cd-rom drives (the typical break-fixes). One thing they always ask me about is "Servers"; Do we need one? How will it benefit our current configuration?

Well the simple answer to all the questions is YES!!! Servers play a key role in expanding your company and you don't even know it. Yes, they are great to have if you want to host your own website or email but they are more of a work horse than you think. Having a server allows you to network ALL of your office computers together (like a work group but more efficient), backup data from all networked computers, manage email, network printers and much more.

The main benefit for all of this is when that day comes when the power decides to go out and you have 20 computers with sensitive data on them and they get an electrical spike everything will be backed up on the server (which has a battery backup).

So with that being said "Yes" servers have many benefits but most importantly it allows your company to grow and expand without having to worry about your critical data being lost.

Contact us if you would like to learn more about Servers and Networking.

Is your business online?

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:59:00 +0000

This year being 2009 and 2010 around the corner there has been a lot of changes in technology and the internet. The one thing that has not changed is your companies presence on the Internet. It doesn't matter if your a small mom & pop shop in New Hampshire or a Locksmith in Rhode Island your company should have a web presence.

Think about back in the day when the phone book was popular, everyone and there mother was in there. You could flip through the business pages alphabetically and find just about any service you wanted. Well now the phone book is almost extinct due to the fact the Internet is easier and more efficient to use when searching for business and even people. You can goto Google and do a search for "Sub Shops" and not only does it list sub shops in your area by distance it also shows you reviews and where it is located on a map. Pretty crazy but not that difficult to do.

All business owners know that marketing and keeping your name in potential customers mouth is vital to your companies success. Whether your passing out coupons, fliers, business cards, t-shirts you need to stay ahead of the game and your competitors. The one way we can help you stay ahead of that game and your competitors is your "Web Presence". It could be setting up Local Business Listing with the top search engines or creating a company website, either way TeKnology Consulting Group can help you.

Sony Sells PCs with Google Web Browser Installed

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Sony Corp. is giving Google Inc.'s fledging Chrome browser a boost by installing it as the primary browser on Vaio-brand computers sold in the United States and Europe.

The Sony devices continue to provide Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer -- the world's most widely used Web browser -- allowing users to have a choice between the two. But many users stick with the browser that is preset as the default, meaning they are likely to experience Chrome as their primary -- perhaps only -- gateway to the Web.

Sony is the first PC maker to sell computers with Chrome pre-installed. Sony said Wednesday it has been doing so on Vaio computers in the U.S. and Europe since May.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the most widely used Web browser in the world; the distant No. 2, Mozilla's Firefox, is gaining in popularity. Google's Web browser launched in 2008 and commands only a sliver of the browser market.

Distribution deals such as this could help Google win over consumers who think of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company only in terms of its Web search dominance. Google has also built a smart phone operating system and is now working on a free PC system to challenge Microsoft's Windows.

"Users' response to Google Chrome has been outstanding, and we're continuing to explore ways to make Chrome accessible to even more people," Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said in an e-mailed statement. "We are in the process of testing one such channel with Sony."

It's not clear how much this particular deal with Sony can help improve Google's standing. Sony's PC business is too small to be counted on lists by industry research groups IDC and Gartner Inc. of the top five computer makers by unit shipments.

The company doesn't disclose breakdown of sales figures, but said that it expects to sell 6.2 million PCs globally in the fiscal year through March 2010.

Microsoft to offer cheap Windows 7 for students

noreply@blogger.com (Cole) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Microsoft plans to offer a substantial discount for college students who want to pick up a copy of Windows 7.

Starting October 1--and for a limited time--those in the U.K. will be able to preorder Windows 7 for 30 British pounds, according to a Microsoft Web site. In a Twitter posting, Microsoft said that U.S. college students will be able to get the software for $30, but the Web site it linked to does not yet have details on the offer.

"This offer is specifically designed for those students who are not planning to purchase a new PC this year but would still like to take advantage of what Windows 7 offers," a Microsoft representative said. Those who order the software will be able to download it when Windows 7 ships on October 22. Students interested in the deal need a valid college e-mail address.

Microsoft plans similar offers in Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico, France, and Germany, though the prices will vary somewhat.

In the U.S., students can preorder their copy of Windows 7 beginning later Thursday, while those in most other countries where the deal is being offered will have to wait to order until October 22. In most markets, the offer will end on January 3, though it will run longer in some places, such as Australia, where it will be available through the end of March.

The offer was noted earlier by Microsoft enthusiast site Neowin.net.

This is the latest deal from Microsoft, which earlier offered a preorder offer the let users buy the upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium for $49. That deal ended July 11 for those in the U.S. Microsoft is also offering a "family pack" option.