Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Critical and unpatched, Windows XP bug is under attack

Red meat for full disclosure critics

Five days after it was disclosed in a highly controversial advisory, a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system is being exploited by criminal hackers, researchers from anti-virus provider Sophos said on Tuesday.

The flaw in the Windows Help and Support Center was disclosed on Thursday by researcher Tavis Ormandy. His public advisory came just five days after he privately informed Microsoft of the defect, prompting fierce criticism from some circles that he hadn't given the software giant adequate time to fix the hole. That made it easier for attackers to target the bug, which allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable machines when a user views a specially designed webpage, the critics howled.

Network

Researchers probe net's most blighted darknet

150 Mbps of sustained garbage

Researchers probing a previously unused swath of internet addresses say they've stumbled onto the net's most blighted neighborhoods, with at least four times as much pollution as any they've ever seen.

The huge chuck of more than 16.7 million addresses had never before been allocated and yet the so-called darknet was the dumping ground sustained barrages of misdirected data as high as 150 Mbps, with a peak as high as 870 Mbps, said Manish Karir, director of research and development at the non-profit group Merit Network. That was about four times higher than most darknets and 20 times higher than a previously unallocated address block of addresses set up as a control group.

Laptop

Microsoft Rejects Porn, iPad Protesters Fake It

Who's got the cleanest screen?

Applications for Windows Phone 7 won't contain porn or decapitation - but while the rules may be limiting they are public, unlike Apple's.

Microsoft has published complete details of the application submission process for apps developed for Windows Mobile 7 (pdf), and porn is definitely out along with big nasty violence. But what's lacking is the Apple clause that lets companies change the rules on a whim which has rankled with so many, including these protesters who took their demand for iPad porn to the streets:

Evil Rays

PicoChip gulps another $20 million

Big money for little cells

Bath-based femtocell specialist picoChip has raised another $20m in equity funding, but with a million chips already sold it's about rapid expansion rather than running costs.

PicoChip designs chips for use in femtocells - very small base stations that connect over domestic broadband. As that market expands picoChip needs more cash to increase its own growth rate before the big boys get too interested; hence the need for shiny new offices in Bath to house more engineers working to migrate the technology to LTE and self-organising networks.

Laptop

New Interwebs extensions edge ever closer to reality

Dot-xxx porn on the brink

A new generation of dot-coms will edge closer to reality next week in Brussels, with one - dot-xxx - possibly being approved on the Friday.

The tri-annual meeting of Internet overseeing body ICANN in Brussels will focus on the fourth version of an "applicant guidebook" for those who want to start up and run new Internet extensions.

Laptop

Flashback New E-Crime Units Nabs Nine Banking Trojan Suspects

e-busted

Nine suspects in a banking Trojan case have been arrested by specialist cybercops from the UK's new Police Central E-Crime Unit (PCeU).

The suspects - four women and five men - were arrested following police raids in south east London. Investigators reckon the group of UK-based eastern European nationals used malware planted on compromised machines to steal login credentials and plunder online banking accounts.

The arrests follow the establishments of a virtual crime force, involving more than 50 officers from the PCeU and the Met's specialist crime directorate.

Laptop

US trade body decides Apple has case to answer

But would it really ban the iPhone?

The US International Trade Commission has decided to investigate HTC's allegations that Apple is infringing its patents. Its answer could see the iPhone banned from American stores.

The ITC's investigation is in response to HTC's complaint, filed on May 12th, that Apple is in breach of various patents owned by HTC. The complaint calls for a ban on the import of infringing products - an interesting prospect, but one that's pretty unlikely to actually happen.

Meteor

Hayabusa in fiery return to Earth

Asteroid sample pod lands in Oz outback

comet
© TheRegister
Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft last night ended its seven-year mission to asteroid Itokawa, burning up over the South Australian outback after releasing the sample return cannister, which survived the re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

Airborne Australian, Japanese and NASA boffins were on hand to capture the action from a specially equipped Douglas DC-8, and recorded the spectacular death of Hayabusa. The basketball-sized sample pod, protected by carbon heat shields, is the small dot on the right of the photo.

Meteor

Halley's Comet is Actually Alien Visitor

Most of Oort Cloud 'of extra-solar origin', say boffins

Halley's comet and other famous objects in our solar system may in fact have formed in orbit around alien suns far off across the vast gulfs of interstellar space, according to new research.

Comets, Halley's in particular, are old friends of the human race and their regular appearances in the inner solar system are thought to have been noted in humanity's earliest records. But in astronomical terms human intelligence is a very new thing - indeed, so is life on Earth.

According to top international boffins, long long before our home planet had even formed, the Sun and the various stars in our local neighbourhood were much closer together. The accretion discs of dust and space gumble from which all the planets and comets and everything originally formed were almost touching, and matter was routinely passed around among the young and excitable stars.

Light Sabers

Amazing "Pulse of Darkness" Ray Tech Birthed in U.S. Government Labs

IT use: Turns itself off then on again very quickly

US government boffins say they have invented a fiendishly cunning new kind of laser running on quantum dots which, rather than producing pulses of light, actually emits pulses of intense darkness.

Unsurprisingly but mildly sinisterly, the new invention has been dubbed the "dark pulse laser". It works using extremely clever quantum dots which unlike regular boring quantum dots are made out of "nanostructured semiconductor materials" grown in special US government labs.

"Quantum dots are known for unusual behaviour," according to a statement issued by the labs in question.