After visiting a cybercafe, a Hotmail user returned to find the Web mail account empty except for a note demanding payment for the return of the messages and address book, a security firm said Monday.

The affected person had accessed the Hotmail e-mail account from an unspecified Internet cafe in Mexico, said Dan Hubbard, senior director of Websense Security Labs in San Diego.

“When the user came back and logged into Hotmail, all ’sent’ and ‘received’ e-mails were deleted, along with all the online contacts,” Hubbard said. The only message that remained was one from the attacker, requesting payment in order to get the data back, he said.

Source: News.com

Mozart’s year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available from Monday for the first time free on the Internet.

The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria has put a scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart’s more than 600 works on a Web site.

The site allows visitors to find specific symphonies, arias or even single lines of text from some 24,000 pages of music.

Source: Reuters

Virginia just became the first state to require that sex offenders register their online identities. The new state law will require offenders to register e-mail addresses, instant messaging screen names, and any chat room handles with the government.

But more important than the Virginia law was a bill introduced by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) on December 6 that requires the same sort of registration at the federal level. The new law, titled “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act,” was introduced with a speech by McCain.

Source: arstechnica

Dell announced Dec. 11 that its XPS M1710 consumer notebook will now feature Blu-ray Disc technology, offering users more storage space and an array of DVD features.

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc format that was developed by the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) to allow storage of large amounts of data and the recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video features.

Blu-ray technology supports up to 50GB of data and up to 4GB of 667 MHz DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory.

Marc Spier, senior manager of Peripherals Marketing at Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, said, “Blu-ray Disc technology will give small and medium-sized businesses a storage tool that will allow them to back up and archive their data for 10 or more years while also enabling them to back up [an] entire hard drive onto a single medium. It gives them a capacity advantage in the corporate space.”

This emerging technology will also allow XPS M1710 consumer users to store large data sets without having to use an external hard drive.

Source: eWeek

Your World. Your Game. With today’s release of Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express and the launch of the XNA Creators Club, this phrase has never been more true. Based on the easy-to-use Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft .NET Compact Framework, XNA Game Studio Express opens up the world of game development to the masses and is now available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC. With the release of XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft Corp. unveiled the XNA Creators Club, opening up video game development to untapped creative minds, enabling anyone to affordably build and play amazing game ideas on Xbox 360 systems for the first time ever.

Sun has announced the availability of Java Standard Edition 6′ final release, the result of two years of open review, external contributions, and weekly releases.

Many deployers in the field, using pre-release versions, have reported noticeable runtime performance improvements, in the “two-digit range” according to Sun, which translates to anywhere from 5% to 24% improvement. Note that this is anecdotal, of course, and depends on what tasks you’re performing. However, the JIT has been improved, with better runtime analysis of program characteristics, and the performance improvements have been agreed with by external users.

Desktop support may not be as relevant for the enterprise community, except for rich clients. System tray support, splash screen support, and other elements have been added.

JSE6 now has dynamic language support. It comes pre-delivered with Netscape’s Rhino, a Javascript engine, and the scripting project’s home page documents many other available scripting languages, including Ruby, Python, awk, Jelly, Pnuts, and Scheme.

Source: theserverside

Information Week magazine runs a brief report from Microsoft Research, showcasing some of the new technologies the company’s research division is working on. Among them — a rootkit that eliminates other rootkits, a firewall that blocks the traffic exploiting published vulnerabilities, a system for catching lost e-mail, a honeypot targeted at discovering zero-day exploits, and some anti-phishing applications.

Source: Slashdot