Google Inc. has opened an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine’s archives that have never been seen by the public before. The new service, available at images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life’s library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection. About 97 percent of Life’s archives have not been publicly seen, according to Life.

The photos can be printed out for free as long as they aren’t being used as part of an attempt to make money. Time Warner Inc., Life’s parent company, hopes to make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints. The orders will be processed through Qoop.com. Life’s archives include photos from the Civil War as well as some of the most memorable moments from the 20th century, including the Zapruder film capturing John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Go check it.

Source: AP

Spam levels could take an upwards spike after researchers detected a malicious network of computers designed to push out junk mail and malware was brought back to life Tuesday. The Srizbi botnet, comprising more than half a million PCs, was deemed responsible for approximately 40 to 50 percent of the world’s spam. Up until recently, security experts believe that Srizbi was completely defunct after botnet was knocked offline two weeks ago as part of a collaborative effort within the security community. Now that Szribi is partially revived, it is anticipated to spew out malicious content at alarming rates, experts say.

According to MessageLabs, now part of Symantec, the spike in spam levels was only at 37 percent of what they were before Internet Service Provider McColo was disconnected from upstream provider Hurricane Electric, who disassociated with the provider because of its connection to some of the world’s largest malicious botnets. McColo’s shut down came shortly after the release of a scathing report by a group of notable security researchers and vendors lambasting McColo for hosting numerous Web sites known to cater to child pornography and malware. Spam levels experienced a sharp drop — anywhere from 60 to 80 percent– in the weeks following McColo’s takedown. However experts say that spam levels are steadily returning to “normal” levels, rising to two thirds of what they were before the McColo shut down as the spammer reconnected with other providers.

Source: CRN

Opera has long been the pioneer of the browser world; many of the features that we take for granted in Firefox, IE and Safari actually began life in Opera. The browser also tends to have the best web standards support around, and the latest alpha preview of Opera 10 is no exception. Although the new Opera 10 is an alpha preview, and not recommended for anything more than testing, its noteworthy for being the first release to grab a perfect score on the ACID 3 browser stress test. The ACID tests are designed to push a browser’s limits when it comes to rendering web pages. The idea is that if browsers can render the ACID test pages, then they should be able to handle just about anything on the web.

Although the ACID 3 test has been around for some time, Opera 10 is the first release to pass it. Apple’s Safari browser, which was the first to pass the ACID 2 test, also passes ACID 3, but only using the developer nightly builds. Of course cutting edge web standards support isn’t the only thing coming in Opera 10. The first alpha also packs in revamped and much faster rendering engine, on-the-fly spell checking for text fields, support for HTML messages in Opera Mail, and an auto-update feature to force browser updates. We don’t recommend rushing out and downloading Opera 10 in its current alpha state, but the preview release is good news for Opera fans. So far Opera has not announced a time line for the final release of Opera 10.

Attention new viewers: those 5000 “friends” you have on Facebook? They might not actually be your friends. In fact, some of them might be scammers trying to infect your computer with a new virus dubbed “Koobface”. Koobface, which already made the rounds on MySpace, is now worming its way through Facebook. The Koobface virus uses Facebook’s private messaging system to infect computers via a shared video. Unsuspecting users will see a video link (shared by an infected friend) with the message, “You look just awesome in this new movie.” Click the link will lead you to an outside site where you’re told that you need to download a Flash update, which is actually a virus file. Once the virus is installed, it will try to grab sensitive data off your PC, like credit card numbers.

In a way this a very old virus; it operates much like mass-mailing worms that used to infest Usenet and e-mail lists. But it’s proving an effective tactic on social networks where private messages from friends seem more trustworthy than traditional e-mail, which even the most neophyte web users have come to distrust. With its some 120 million users, Facebook is not only a potentially lucrative target, but it’s well into the mainstream, which means more gullible, less internet-savvy users for virus creators to prey on. The virus watchdog blog for McAfee labs reports that Facebook is aware of the Koobface attack and is already working to remove the spammed links from its system. But with dozens of Koobface variants known to exist, McAfee warns that “the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.” Should your PC be infected the Koobface worm, the Facebook security blog suggests resetting your password and running updated anti-virus software to purge the worm from your system.

There are at least 12 million “active” bots or zombie computers, in the world, according to a new report from security company F-Secure.

The F-Secure Data Security Wrap-up 2008 for July to December noted that botnet activity around the world increased this year. While there are no available figures for the actual numbers of bots, the estimates are “staggering”.

Applying a 1 percent infection rate on the 1.2 billion computers globally, F-Secure said about 12 million would exhibit bot-like behavior. The vendor pointed out that the infection estimate was very conservative and the actual number could be many times higher.

According to F-Secure, bots remain a major challenge to the IT industry, as they contribute to unprecedented levels of spam and malware distribution. Its malware count in 2008 of 1.5 million was triple that of 2007, the company added.

Many of the world’s bots are “orphans” without a botmaster, that waste computing resources and bandwidth, F-Secure reported. These could be machines whose command and control servers have been discovered, or those that have been taken out of service. However, such bots can still attempt to call home or carry out their assigned tasks.

During the year, F-Secure conducted a study that examined about 60 of such orphaned bots. By monitoring the communication attempts of these bots, over 200,000 unique IP addresses were yielded within a 24-hour period. “We know that 200,000 is just the tip of the iceberg and are planning for more extensive research and anti-bot services in 2009,” the company said in the report.

Botnets, warned F-Secure, will continue to grow and also adopt new technologies, such as Storm worm variants which created clamping down of rogue ISPs, malware authors may implement or beef up disaster recovery plans. Stepped-up efforts of shutting off command and control servers, could also force cyber gangs to compete with fewer resources.

Source : zdnetasia

Congratulation Chupr.com hosted by Limebox
site of the month.

Site : Chupr.com
About Chupr:

ChupR was set up to be the a fun and simple online auction website based in Singapore where people to buy and sell their stuff.

They felt that there was a lack of such a space — a simple, easy-to-use, and yet effective place where everyone in Singapore can be a part of and trade off things which they no longer need or find things they are looking.

The ChupR vision is more than just that and we believe that having this website can allow more entrepreneurs out there to have simple avenue for bringing more variety of stuff into Singapore for all of us to enjoy. We also hope that through ChupR, folks like you and me can meet more like-minded people and make new friends while trading with one another.

Hence, ChupR was born