Liudvikas Bukys

StarOffice to eat MS share (probably). Gartner fixes odds [The Register]

NewsBytes:

Hackers Continue ‘Early Warning’ Attacks On U.S. Web Sites

A team of hackers, cutting a wide swath of Web-site defacements across the country in what they say is the interests of national security, added servers from Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to a list of conquests today.

But the team that calls itself the “Deceptive Duo” continues to shy away from requests that they reveal the security holes they claim open “critical infrastructure” to attacks by America’s foes.

IBM developerWorks:
Using JSSE for secure socket communication
The JDK 1.4 Java Secure Socket Extension is easy enough to use — once you understand all the steps necessary for the initial setup and configuration. In this tutorial Greg Travis offers cookbook-style instructions for creating and installing JSSE encryption keys in a client/server application environment. Upon completion of this tutorial, you will know how to easily convert any existing client/server application to use encryption, as well as how to create a secure application from scratch.

IBM developerWorks:
Data binding with Castor
XML data binding for Java is a powerful alternative to XML document models for applications concerned mainly with the data content of documents. In this article, enterprise Java expert Dennis Sosnoski introduces data binding and discusses what makes it so appealing. He then shows readers how to handle increasingly complex documents using the open source Castor framework for Java data binding.

WinAmp bug opens door to MP3 viruses. Interactive Week Apr 30 2002 9:22AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

NY Times: Fun With Your Zip Program. “Using little more than the zipping programs found on most personal computers, [Italian scientists] can easily distinguish between texts written in 10 different languages and almost unfailingly tell which of a large group of texts were written by the same author.” …
“The scientists performed a further test of their technique by analyzing a single text that has been translated into many different languages — in this case the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The researchers used their method to measure the linguistic “distance” between more than 50 translations of this document. From these distances, they constructed a family tree of languages that is virtually identical to the one constructed by linguists. “
[Scripting News]

AP via NY Times (April 25, 2002):

China Incapable of Hacking US Files

The Chinese military is seeking to develop the ability to disrupt Taiwanese and U.S. computer systems, but doesn’t have the sophistication to cause widespread problems, U.S. officials said Thursday.

…
“These are … not people from the government,” the official said. “For the most part, it’s students who are doing this during school breaks.”

Can you really click ‘No’?

Mr. Fine contacted Symantec and was told that as of Nov. 1, 2001, Symantec had changed its policies and that his users could no longer use NAV updates on their home systems. (Because Symantec’s licenses are perpetual, in theory the home users could keep the original software on their systems, but without new virus definitions the software would soon be of little use.) “I was pretty disgusted,” says Mr. Fine. “Since we were on maintenance at the time of this change in policy, the right thing for them to do would have been to notify customers at that point. To ‘notify’ me by allowing me to renew, so I can read it in the fine print, is not the best way to find out that a feature that was a big plus for us in choosing NAV is now gone.”

LA Times:
CIA Warns of Chinese Plans for Cyber-Attacks on U.S.

Moreover, U.S. authorities are bracing for a possible wave of hacking attacks by Chinese students against the United States in coming weeks, according to the analysis. The confidential alert, which was reviewed by The Times, was sent to intelligence officials a week ago.

No kidding. We’ve had the interest of a Chinese hacker trying to disrupt our operations for at least a couple of months.

Hackers turn tables on file-swapping firms. ZDNet Apr 25 2002 6:07AM ET
For the past several weeks, the pseudonymous programmer, a college student who declines to give his real name, has been releasing versions of popular file-swapping programs online with the advertising and user-tracking features stripped out.
[Moreover – Computer security news]