A computer hacker may have stolen “personal identity information” for 26,000 current and former Agriculture Department headquarters employees, agency officials said.

USDA announced the security breach shortly before midnight on Wednesday, nearly three weeks after it occurred. It offered one year of free credit-monitoring services to the potentially affected employees.

Source: Reuters

The U.S. Government is set to transition to IPv6 in June 2008, according to Government Computer News: ‘In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline.

Source: Slashdot

Leading French lawmakers voted Thursday to water down a draft copyright law that could force Apple Computer Inc. to make its iPod music player and iTunes online store compatible with rivals’ offerings.

But the changes did not appear to go far enough to satisfy Apple, which dropped the strongest hint yet that it might withdraw from the French download market rather than comply.

Source: AP

Playboy Enterprises, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Club Jenna Inc. a multi- media adult entertainment business founded by Jenna Jameson. The acquisition adds a premier and profitable brand to Playboy’s Entertainment Group business, with assets including a successful film production business, a library of video content, a network of web sites and a DVD retail distribution deal.

A 21-year-old British man who admitted having sex with two underage girls he met on the Internet was jailed for nine years on Thursday.

Lee Costi, from Haslemere in Surrey, southern England, was sentenced at Nottingham Crown Court after also admitting possessing 41 indecent images of children and two counts of taking indecent pictures of children.

Costi was caught after a 14-year old girl from Nottingham he was trying to seduce reported him on an international Web site set up to tackle online abuse of children.

Police said Costi was the first offender to be sentenced in the UK after being identified through the Virtual Global Taskforce Web site.

The site, www.virtualglobaltaskforce.com, is monitored around the clock by law enforcement bodies from Interpol, Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Source: Reuters

Security researchers have found a way to seize control of a laptop computer by manipulating buggy code in the system’s wireless device driver.

The two researchers used an open-source 802.11 hacking tool called LORCON (Lots of Radion Connectivity) to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards. Hackers use this technique, called fuzzing, to see if they can cause programs to fail, or perhaps even run unauthorized software when they are bombarded with unexpected data.

Using tools like LORCON, Maynor and Ellch were able to discover many examples, of wireless device driver flaws, including one that allowed them to take over a laptop by exploiting a bug in an 802.11 wireless driver.

“This would be the digital equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” said Maynor. An attacker could exploit this flaw by simply sitting in a public space and waiting for the right type of machine to come into range.

Source: PCWorld

Panasonic announced the debut of its first-ever Blu-ray Disc player (DMP-BD10 - SRP of $1299.95), matching receiver (SA-XR700 - SRP of $999.95) and speaker system (SB-TP1000 - SRP of $2999.95). Each will be available at retail in September 2006. While sold separately, these three products are designed to work seamlessly together as a complete high definition home theater system.

The Panasonic Blu-ray Disc High Definition Home Theater system components feature Panasonic’s proprietary EZ-Sync system. The system provides HDAVI Control for integrated one-touch operation of 2006 Panasonic Blu-ray Home Theater components. In addition, the receiver and player components are designed to visually complement the speakers and Plasma TV display.

20-year-old Alexander Eric Smith of Battle Ground sat in the parking lot in his truck for three months, spending hours at a time piggybacking on the coffee shop’s wireless Internet service for free.

“He doesn’t buy anything,” Manager Emily Pranger says about the man she ended up calling 911 about. “It’s not right for him to come and use it.”

When deputies told Smith to knock it off, he came back and is now charged with theft of services.

Source: katu 2

Communist Vietnam is cracking down on a new social evil, medieval swordsmen with supernatural powers who have cast a spell over the nation’s youth.

The new state enemies may be virtual creations from the Chinese Internet game ‘Vo Lam Truyen Ky’ (Swordsman Online), but this hasn’t stopped authorities from taking some very real steps against the magical kung fu warriors.

Worried about the Internet gaming craze that has swept Asia since the 1990s and hit Vietnam about a year ago, Hanoi this month unveiled an ordinance to restrict the hours per day fans can spend in the make-believe world.

Source: AFP

Millions of shoppers at 549 Wal-Mart stores across 24 states can soon get connected with Verizon Online DSL when they visit the stores’ Wal-Mart Connection Center departments.

Specially trained Wal-Mart Connection Center associates at the 549 stores will help shoppers use an easy, automated ordering system that checks eligibility for Verizon DSL service and then lets them quickly place their order. A simple three-step, do-it-yourself installation kit will be shipped directly to the customer once the order is completed. Nearly 50 of the Wal-Mart stores will have Spanish-language sales materials to assist Spanish-speaking customers with their purchasing decisions. Verizon Online DSL is already offered in 10 Wal-Mart stores and will be in all of the 549 stores by the end of June.

At Wal-Mart, Verizon Online offers a DSL speed starting as low as $17.99 a month, plus fees and taxes, for a maximum connection speed of 768 kilobits per second (Kbps) downstream and 128 Kbps upstream with an annual service agreement. Qualifying customers can also order service with a maximum connection speed of up to 3.0 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 768 Kbps upstream for a promotional price of $17.99 a month for the first six months and $34.99 a month thereafter, plus fees and taxes, with an annual agreement.

Skype plans to address the concerns of some IT managers by improving its identity authentication process.

Part of Skype’s “wish list” for further expansion into the business market is to enhance username authentication for business customers, the voice over Internet Protocol company said Wednesday.

One security concern for IT managers is that while Skype uses an encrypted public key infrastructure, it automatically authenticates users itself. This means that users cannot authenticate the identity of the people they are communicating with.

Source: News.com

A story just released by the Inquirer shows that 80% of incoming search requests from Microsoft’s domain arrived via Google’s search engine. In contrast, 64% of Yahoo! staff and 100% of Google staff use their own company’s search engine.

Source: Slashdot