Archive for October, 2009
AP – The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.
AP – Hidden data embedded in electronic public records must be disclosed under Arizona’s public records law, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a case that attracted interest from media and government organizations.
AP – Google Inc. says its free messaging and calling service, Google Voice, blocks calls to fewer than 100 phone numbers likely to be adult chat lines and free conference call services.
AP – When people sign up for Twitter, the popular social-networking site presents a list of suggested users to follow, driving significant traffic to sports figures, celebrities, politicians and other prominent posters.
AP – Google Inc. wants to answer your mobile phone calls when you can’t or just don’t want to talk.
AP – Fans scrambled to see 3-D movies such as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” in theaters this year and new 3-D televisions could soon have home viewers feeling as if they’re surrounded by a spaghetti hurricane on their couches.
In cross-site cooking, the attacker exploits a browser bug to send an invalid cookie to a server.
Cross-site cooking is a type of browser exploit which allows a site attacker to set a cookie for a browser into the cookie domain of another site server.
Cross-site cooking can be used to perform session fixation attacks, as a malicious site can fixate the session identifier cookie of another site.
Other attack scenarios may also possible, for example: attacker may know of a security vulnerability in server, which is exploitable using a cookie. But if this security vulnerability requires e.g. an administrator password which attacker does not know, cross-site cooking could be used to fool innocent users to unintentionally perform the attack.
Cross site. Cross-site cooking is similar in concept to cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, cross-site tracing, cross-zone scripting etc., in which that it involves the ability to move data or code between different web sites (or in some cases, between e-mail / instant messages and sites). These problems are linked to the fact that web browser is a shared platform for different information / applications / sites. Only logical security boundaries maintained by browsers ensures that one site cannot corrupt or steal data from another. However a browser exploit such as cross-site cooking can be used to move things across the logical security boundaries.
The name cross-site cooking and concept was not coined by Michal Zalewski in 2006. It was in use much earlier. The name is a mix of cookie and cross-site, attempting to describe the nature of cookies being set across sites.
In Michal Zalewski’s article of 2006, Benjamin Franz was credited for his discovery, who in May 1998 reported a cookie domain related vulnerability to vendors. Benjamin Franz published the vulnerability and discussed it mainly as a way to circumvent “privacy protection” mechanisms in popular browsers. Michal Zalewski concluded that the bug, 8 years later, was still present (unresolved) in some browsers and could be exploited for cross-site cooking. Various remarks such as “vendors [...] certainly are not in a hurry to fix this” was made by Zalewski and others.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
AP – Low prices, solid customer service and an increasing willingness by consumers to spend on discretionary items contributed to Amazon.com Inc.’s solid third quarter, and the growth should continue despite weakness elsewhere in retail.
AP – Amazon.com Inc.’s third-quarter results blew past analyst expectations, showing that consumers are comfortable opening their wallets to the online retailer despite the still-shaky economy.
Telecommunication is the extension of communication over a distance. In practice it also recognizes that something may be lost in the process; hence the term ‘telecommunication’ covers all forms of distance and/or conversion of the original communications, including radio, telegraphy, television, telephony, data communication and computer networking.
The elements of a telecommunication system are a transmitter, a medium (line) and possibly a channel imposed upon the medium (see baseband and broadband as well as multiplexing), and a receiver. The transmitter is a device that transforms or encodes the message into a physical phenomenon; the signal. The transmission medium, by its physical nature, is likely to modify or degrade the signal on its path from the transmitter to the receiver. The receiver has a decoding mechanism capable of recovering the message within certain limits of signal degradation. In some cases, the final “receiver” is the human eye and/or ear (or in some extreme cases other sense organs) and the recovery of the message is done by the brain.
Telecommunication can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or broadcasting, which is a particular form of point-to-multipoint that goes only from the transmitter to the receivers.
One of the roles of the telecommunications engineer is to analyse the physical properties of the line or transmission medium, and the statistical properties of the message in order to design the most effective encoding and decoding mechanisms.
When systems are designed to communicate through human sense organs (mainly vision and hearing), physiological and psychological characteristics of human perception will be taken into account. This has important economic implications and engineers will research what defects may be tolerated in the signal yet not affect the viewing or hearing experience too badly.
In a simplistic example, consider a normal conversation between two people. The message is the sentence that the speaker decides to communicate to the listener. The transmitter is the language areas in the brain, the motor cortex, the vocal cords, the larynx, and the mouth that produce those sounds called speech. The signal is the sound waves (pressure fluctuations in air particles) that can be identified as speech. The channel is the air carrying those sound waves, and all the acoustic properties of the surrounding space: echoes, ambient noise, reverberation. Between the speaker and the listener (the receiver), might be other devices that do or do not introduce their own distortions of the original vocal signal (e.g. telephone, HAM radio, IP phone, etc.) The penultimate receiver is the listener’s ear and auditory system, the auditory nerve, and the language areas in the listener’s brain that will “decode” the signal into meaningful information and filter out background noise.
All channels have noise. Another important aspect of the channel is called the bandwidth. A low bandwidth channel, such as a telephone, cannot carry all of the audio information that is transmitted in normal conversation, causing distortion and irregularities in the speaker’s voice, as compared to normal, in-person speech.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
AP – AT&T Inc.’s net income dipped as revenue from traditional landlines fell faster than the company could cut costs. But in the growing wireless industry, AT&T is thriving, adding a record 3.2 million iPhones.
AP – Microsoft Corp. put a new edition of Windows on sale Thursday, hoping for a fresh start after a bad reception for the previous version of the software that runs most of the world’s personal computers.
AP – Twitter Inc. is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Internet search leader Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what’s on people’s minds at any given moment.
AP – Search engine powerhouse Google is facing new complaints over its book-scanning digital library project — from Chinese authors who say their copyrights are being violated.
AP – Yahoo Inc. has pumped up its profits by laying off workers and weeding out unpopular Internet services.
AP – Some of technology’s best-known companies are betting there’s pent-up demand for on-demand books.
AP – Apple Inc. updated its iMac desktop computer line Tuesday and introduced a mouse that responds to the touch of fingers instead of using buttons or scroll wheels.
AP – Barnes & Noble Inc. is expected to unveil an electronic-book reader to compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle in the still-small arena where some see book-selling’s future playing out.
AP – After six straight months of double-digit declines, U.S. video game sales finally saw an improvement in September.
AP – An aggressive TV ad campaign from Verizon Wireless is adding to the support building for a software package from Google Inc. that is shaping up to be the most formidable challenge yet to Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
AP – Research group Gartner Inc. says the information technology industry is closing its worst year on record, with worldwide tech spending on track to decline 5.2 percent in 2009.
AP – IBM Corp. has placed a top executive on leave after he was charged in an insider trading scandal for allegedly leaking secrets about IBM’s earnings and financial dealings with corporate partners.
AP – With Democrats in charge in Washington, supporters of so-called “net neutrality” rules seem poised to finally push through requirements that high-speed Internet providers give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.
