Chinese researchers have recently developed a software system that is able to perform proactive defence against computer virus. The software, named Weidian proactive defence software, disinfects and protects computers from known and unknown computer viruses. With five core technologies, including dynamic simulated anti-virus expert system, new virus automated detection and software program behaviour monitor, the software adopts action-identifying and characteristic-identifying technologies, and is able to perform proactive defence against computer viruses, worms and Trojan horses

Source: Insead Iinnov Asia

Scientists have developed a new ultralight limb that can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available.

“With this hand you can clutch objects such as a ball, you can move the thumb out to one side and grip objects with the index finger in the way you do when opening a lock with a key, and you can wrap your fingers around an object in what we call the power grip–like the one you use when you hold a hammer or a microphone,” Dr. Paul Chappell, a medical physicist from the University of Southampton, said in a statement.

Source: News.com

Tom Ferris has discovered a vulnerability in Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or potentially to compromise a user’s system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an URL that contains dashes in its domain name. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.

Successful exploitation crashes Firefox and may potentially allow code execution but requires that the user is tricked into visiting a malicious web site or open a specially crafted HTML file.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 1.0.6, and is reported to affect versions prior to 1.0.6, and version 1.5 Beta 1.

The security company Secunia rates this vulnerability as Highly critical, and recommends that until this flaw is fixed you should avoid browsing untrusted web sites

Almost a million taxpayer records were accidently deleted from Inland Revenue computer systems between 1997 and 2000 due to a software problem which went unnoticed for several years.

The Department took three years to discover that software used to cleanse its database of old cases was also wiping live ones from its system.

This resulted in some 364,000 people who cannot be identified being owed £82m, while another 22,000 did not pay tax due of around £6m.

The Revenue admitted the problem last year but the full scale of the error has now only just emerged, following a report from the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee on 8 September.

Source: The Register

Access Co., a Japanese information equipment software developer, said Friday that it will acquire PalmSource Inc., a U.S. mobile-device software company, for 35.8 billion yen, or $324 million.

As a part of the agreement, PalmSource will merge with the U.S. unit of Access to form a wholly owned subsidiary.

PalmSource, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., makes Palm OS, the operating system that powers more than 39 million mobile devices, including the Palm hand-held computer and mobile phones.

Source: AP