Cingular Wireless Corp. promised to provide uninterrupted service to AT&T Wireless customers when it acquired that company in 2004, but instead it nickel-and-dimed them and degraded their reception in an effort to persuade them to sign new contracts, a federal lawsuit said Thursday.

The lawsuit, which alleges breach of contract and violations of consumer protection laws, seeks class-action status on behalf of the more than 20 million customers AT&T Wireless had at the time of the merger. Many paid $18 “transfer” fees to switch to Cingular plans and were required to buy new phones or pay other fees, said the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Source: AP

Borland Software’s chief financial officer is quitting running the company’s books, and is being temporarily replaced by Segue Software’s ex-CFO Michael Sullivan.

Borland said CFO Kenneth Hahn was leaving the firm “to pursue another opportunity”. The company is currently looking for a buyer for its software development tools business amidst a corporate focus on application performance and business “optimisation”.

Source: TheRegister

Google has made a downloadable file, available on the Tour’s official Web site, that maps the winding course onto Google Earth’s satellite imagery. Cycling fans can browse day-to-day information, learn fun facts about the places that the riders traverse, and even use Google Earth’s 3D feature to get an idea of just how steep those Alps climbs are.

Source: news.com

Britain on Thursday approved the extradition a computer expert accused by the United States of perpetrating the world’s “biggest military hack of all time.”

Gary McKinnon was arrested in June last year following charges by U.S. prosecutors that he illegally accessed 97 U.S. government computers — including Pentagon, army, navy and NASA systems — causing $700,000 worth of damage.

McKinnon, who could face up to 70 years in jail and fines of up to $1.75 million, said he was planning to appeal against the decision, telling BBC News 24: “I am very worried and feeling very let down by my own Government.”

The ministry said McKinnon now has 14 days to appeal.

Source: Reuters

Movies created in film tend to lose original characteristics and details when compressed and decompressed. “Thomson has come up with a way that allows the film grain to be put back, or at least simulated, into the movie after its been compressed and decompressed. Code embedded in HD DVD discs will decode the visual effect during playback in consumer devices.

Source: InformationWeek

A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI’s classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection program and details on counter-espionage activity, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. As a direct result, the bureau said it was forced to temporarily shut down its network and commit thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to ensure no sensitive information was lost or misused.

eBay is banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google’s new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.

Source: auctionbytes

Samsung and Verizon Wireless announced the availability of the SCH-a990, the first 3.2 mega pixel digital camera phone available to Verizon Wireless customers. The SCH-a990 enables photo enthusiasts to take high-resolution photos of a similar print quality as a standalone digital camera. In addition, the SCH-a990 boasts a number of media features, including video recording capabilities, V CAST to view video and V CAST Music to download music directly to the phone and Bluetooth wireless technology, to allow a customer to print pictures wirelessly from the SCH-a990 to a Bluetooth-enabled printer basic print profile.

The SCH-a990 has a unique design that looks first like a phone and then, when the screen is rotated 180 degrees, like a camera. This innovative design, along with the high resolution and features such as a flash and in-camera photo editing software, make the SCH-a990 the first mobile device that is as much a camera as it is a multimedia phone.

Responding to government requests for interoperability, Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it will offer free software that will allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.

The translation tools will be developed and licensed as open source software, and will be offered as downloadable add-ins for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, the Redmond, Washington-based company said.

Source: Reuters

In the israelforum.com message board there was an interesting post from someone who claims to be an Iranian. The poster, goes by the name armin_pg asks for the help of Israeli hackers to hack into a suicide-attacker’s weblog . armin_pg claims that the suicide-attacker blogger lives in Iran and tries to “gather members for his group ( Almohammad Jeish = Almohammad’s Army ). His goal is to explode an public israeli building by exploding himself.”

Here is the post:

Hi guys , I’m Iranian and I know I’m not probably welcome here !
First of all I’m not muslim ( Atheist or something … ) and I believe in Israel and jewish rights …. .
Then listen to me please :

In the link below you can see a suicide-attacker’s weblog . he lives in Iran and he tries to gather members for his group ( Almohammad Jeish = Almohammad’s Army ). His goal is to explode an public israeli building by exploding himself . He mention this as his final goal and he call it ” Martyrdom For Islam . ”
The name of his weblog is : A suicide-attacker’s notes .
Please hack his weblog . There are a lot of other islamic and anti-jewish links in his weblog that you can hack .
Maybe you think I’m lying to you and because of an personal animosity I’m trying to attract your attention against him , if so , simply ask a guy who knows farsi to translate his notes for you . I’ve heard there are alot of migrated Iranian jewish in Israel , you can ask them to do that .
You’ll see i’m right .
I thought that’s my duty to prevent the death of hundreds of innocent people , then I told you that . Rest of it is up to you .

P.s 1 : I searched for Israeli hackers but most of their websites were in Jewish language and I don’t know jewish language , that’s why I explained it here .

p.s 2 : Don’t mail to me please , because of security affairs I won’t be able to answer you . Here , the government takes control of everything…. .

Regards .
A.P

And the Link :

http://www.masihm.com/

Although I don’t speak Farsi, and I could not find an online translation tool that will translate the mentioned web site and to validate that this is true, I think this is an interesting story and I decided to post it here (Thanks for Gary for the tip). What do you think, is this true? Should hacktivism take place in case this is true?

Virus writers have created a proof-of-concept virus, dubbed Gattman, that targets an analysis tool widely used by anti-virus researchers.

Only the most inept anti-virus researchers are likely to become infected, according to one expert, so the interest in the malware is its curiosity value rather than any threat it poses, which is virtually nil.

Gattman spreads using a program called Interactive Disassembler Pro (IDA), a popular reverse engineering tool from Data Rescue, widely used in anti-virus research labs, which converts machine code inside program files into a human-readable source code format. The tool allows the behaviour of code to be analysed.

The malware infects the scripting language used by IDA, elements of which are sometimes shared between researchers during joint analysis efforts, to create a Windows executable file. This executable searches out new IDC files to create a new executable file. Gattmann is programmed only to spread and doesn’t feature any malicious payload.

Source: TheRegister

Google said it fixed a security flaw in Google Reader on Wednesday that could have allowed a hacker to steal sensitive information from Web surfers.

A Google RSS feed addition tool was vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack, a poster to the Ha.ckers.org blog wrote on Tuesday. Such attacks involve an attacker embedding HTML scripts in Web postings or input fields on a Web site.

Late Wednesday, Google issued a statement that said: “We learned of a minor security flaw in Google Reader earlier today and worked quickly to fix the problem, which has now been resolved.

Source: News.com