4/20/2009

Oracle Buys Sun

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

SMS messages could be used to hijack a phone

Filed under: — Aviran

Be careful who you give your mobile phone number out to. An attacker with the right toolkits and skill could hijack your phone remotely just by sending SMS messages to it, according to mobile security firm Trust Digital.

In what it calls a “Midnight Raid Attack” because it would be most effective when a victim is asleep, an attacker could send a text message to a phone that would automatically start up a Web browser and direct the phone to a malicious Web site, said Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing at Trust Digital. The Web site could then download an executable file on the mobile phone that steals data off the phone, he said.

Dearing demonstrates how this can be done in a video on YouTube.

In another type of attack, an attacker could hijack a phone by sending a type of SMS message called a control message over the GSM network to a victim’s phone that is using a Wi-Fi network and then use special toolkits to sniff the Wifi traffic looking for the victim’s e-mail log-in information. This attack is explained in another YouTube video.

Google Earth Blurs Poland’s Death Camps

Filed under: — Aviran

Exploring Poland on Google Maps shows an interesting pattern.

Many areas in Poland have hi-res satellite images however when you get close to a death camp like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór and others you for some reason see only low-res imagery, which will not let you see any details of the death camps.

In some cases you can clearly see the difference in the image resolution as you get close to the camps.

Google is known to blue sensitive buildings like military facilities or government buildings, but to blur the Holocaust death camps it seems inappropriate.

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