Times Online UK reports that Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company. Should Google successfully launch an alternative internet, it is theoretically possible for them to block out competitor websites and only allow users to access websites that have paid Google to be shown to their users.

Source: Slashdot

A computer virus disrupted trading on Moscow’s Russian Trading System (RTS) stock exchange on Thursday, the exchange said in a statement on Friday.

The virus, which knocked out trading on all of its three markets between 1315 and 1420 GMT on Thursday, was a deliberate attack, RTS said.

Once the offending program had been traced to one computer, which was then turned off, there were no irreversible effects, it said.

“The virus got into a computer connected to a test trading system from the Internet,” RTS Vice President Dmitry Shatsky said in the statement.

“The infected computer started generating huge volumes of parasitic traffic, which overloaded the RTS’s support routers. The result was that normal traffic — data going into and out of the trading system — was not processed.”

Source: Reuters

When firefox gets updated some of the extensions gets disabled. The reason for that is that Firefox extensions need to define in what version of Firefox they work. But in many cases extensions authors don’t update their extension version, or it takes some time after a new version of Firefox is introduced until a new version of the extension is out.

Firefox by default disables extensions that do not match the version, although thet can still work without problems.

Fortunately you can still make these extensions work with a new version of Firefox, by using this simple hack.

• In the address bar type about:config
• In the Filter line type: app.extensions.version
• Now you should have a single line in the preferences saying app.extensions.version. If it does not exist just right click on the empty list and select New->String to create one
• Now double click the value and set the value to the previous version of Firefox. In our case set it to 1.5 (from 1.5.0.1).
• Restart Firefox
• Open the extensions and find the disabled extensions. Right click on the disabled extension and select Enable.
• Restart Firefox

Note this is just a temporary solution and some extensions might crash Firefox - so be careful with this solution.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to review the lucrative and controversial “JPEG patent” held by Forgent Networks. The reexamination comes at the request of the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat), an advocacy group that has been seeking to overturn the so-called ‘617 patent since it was effectively enforced. At the heart of the matter is a data compression patent granted in 1987, currently held by Forgent Networks. The patent was acquired when Forgent purchased Compression Labs in 1997, and Forgent later came to claim that the patent covers technology that is used in the JPEG image file format. Forgent has sued dozens of companies while signing licensing agreements with dozens more, generating the company more than US$1 million a year in gross revenues.

Source: arstechnica

Police are investigating whether as many as seven teenage girls have been sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace.com.

The girls, ages 12 to 16, are from Middletown and say they were fondled or had consensual sex with men who turned out to be older than they claimed. None of the incidents appeared to be violent, said Middletown Police Sgt. Bill McKenna.

He said it was difficult to determine the exact number of victims because some girls have been reluctant to disclose that they met their assailants online.

Source: AP

A vulnerability has been identified in Microsoft Windows, which could be exploited by malicious users to obtain elevated privileges. This flaw is due to an access validation error in the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) and the Universal Plug and Play Device Host (UPnP) services that fail to properly validate user permissions, which could be exploited by local unprivileged attackers to bypass security restrictions and execute malicious programs with elevated privileges.

French Security Incident Response Team rates this vulnerability as moderate and published a proof of concept that exploits this flaw.