If patenting the obvious is considered something of an art form in the world of IT, then Microsoft is undoubtedly an old master. The Page Up Page Down patent it has been granted would seem to confirm this…

US Patent 7,415,666 goes under the snappy title of: “Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments” and is the latest to be granted to that serial patent application junkie better known as Microsoft.

Anyone who has ever looked at technology patents will know that there is a trick to quickly scanning these application titles in order to weed out the genuine ones from those that are, to be fair, just attempting to patent something that already exists.

So what could a method of navigating paginated content, or stuff on the page, using page-based increments possibly refer to? Ding! Of course, the PgUp and PgDn

Sunday Herald uncovers theft of data from every guest in 1300 Best Western Hotels in past 12 months

An international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007.
advertisement

Amounting to a complete identity-theft kit, the stolen data includes a range of private information including home addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.

“They’ve pulled off a masterstroke here,” said security expert Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx. “There are plenty of hacked company databases for sale online but the sheer volume and quality of the information that’s been stolen in the Best Western raid makes this particularly rare. The Russian gangs who specialise in this kind of work will have been exploiting the information from the moment it became available late on Thursday night. In the wrong hands, there’s enough data there to spark a major European crime wave.”

Just about the most serious breach of security possible at an OS vendor happened to this company. Red Hat is releasing updated OpenSSH packages to address the compromise of its internal systems.

In perhaps the most appalling breach of security at a major operating system vendor, Red Hat has revealed that a compromise of its internal systems included the digital signing keys for its distributions. An Aug. 22 advisory from Red Hat announces new OpenSSH packages to deal with the problem:

In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only). As a precautionary measure, we are releasing an updated version of these packages, and have published a list of the tampered packages and how to detect them at http://www.redhat.com/security/data/openssh-blacklist.html.

In other words, the attacker was able to sign files with Red Hat’s keys. Presumably these were not benign versions he signed. Red Hat stresses that there is no evidence that any such hacked copies got out through its normal distribution channels to its own customers, but it’s possible that some mirrors picked up the code.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

A Chinese medical team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an has successfully completed the first transplant to include facial bone in a transplant on a man whose face was slashed by a bear. The Chinese graft included muscles, nerves, blood vessels, cartilage and skin and included an intact salivary gland, another first.

Two years after the procedure, the man can eat, drink and speak, thanks to the gradual fusing of transplanted nerves and muscles with what remained of the patient’s own. This transplant together with the another ground breaking transplant last year by French doctors that removed a huge tumor that had completely infiltrated and disfigured their patient’s face, now sets the stage for a full facial transplant