Muziic, is an application that harnesses the power of YouTube to offer music lovers access to the world’s largest searchable database of songs. Muziic lets you stream music from YouTube without ever again having to visit the site. Could this legal application be seen as not so legal by Google?
krou writes “The BBC is reporting that the Information Commissioner’s Office has shut down a company in the UK for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. It claims that the company, The Consulting Association in Droitwich, Worcs, ran a secret system that it repeatedly denied existed for 15 years, selling workers’ confidential data, including union activities, to building firms, allowing potential employers to unlawfully vet job applicants. About 3,213 workers were in the database, and other information included data on personal relationships, political affiliations, and employment histories. More than 40 firms are believed to have used the service, paying a £3,000 annual fee, and each of them will be investigated, too.” The article says that The Consulting Association faces a £5,000 fine — after pulling in £1.8 million over 15 years with its illegal blacklist.
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An anonymous reader writes “A small software company is claiming that Red Hat’s JBoss open source middleware violates one of its patents and is asking a court to stop Red Hat from distributing the product. Software Tree LLC claims that JBoss infringes on its database patent for ‘exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and a relational system.’ Software Tree’s partners include Microsoft, and that the suit was filed in Eastern Texas, which is known as a plaintiff’s paradise for patent actions.”
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BigTimOBrien writes “In this interview with O’Reilly Broadcast, Carl Malamud discusses his grassroots effort to build support for his appointment as Public Printer of the United States, running the Government Printing Office — an agency that opened its doors the day Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. Malamud has published his plans and platform on yeswescan.org: ‘For over 20 years, Carl Malamud has been publishing government information on the Internet. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, Malamud fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, Malamud fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Malamud would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.'”
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Stephen Brandon writes “It used to be that to set up a database-backed web site required at least a server guy, a database administrator, a programmer, and a designer. Joomla! and other modern CMS systems have opened the door to allow non-administrators to be able to set up complete e-commerce or informational sites, using great free software and easy-to-find commercial hosting. What then of security? A new book by Tom Canavan, Joomla Web Security, aims to bridge the knowledge gap, introducing Joomla! admins to a set of security tools, and skills sometimes found lacking in the Joomla! community.” Read on for the rest of Stephen’s review.
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 New York Times |
Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp
New York Times At the University of Utah, Prof. Juliana Freire is working on DeepPeep, an ambitious effort to index every public database online. Is Google getting too big? Sydney Morning Herald Google Upsets the Search Engine Market ShortNews.com NEBS Small Business News – Culture11 – Zero Strategy – Pandia all 32 news articles |
McGruber writes “Northrup-Grumman’s Govtrip.com website has been shut down following a security breach, according to a report by ‘Security Fix’ blogger Brian Krebs. Being a federal employee and frequent work traveler, I am (was?) a Govtrip user. My agency required me to use Govtrip to book all of my trips, including my airfare, car rentals, and hotel reservations, so Northrup-Grumman’s Govtrip databases contain my frequent flier numbers, Avis & Budget car rental numbers and frequent hotel guest (Choice Privileges, Marriott Rewards, Priority Club, etc.) numbers. Northrup-Grumman also stored all of my trip itineraries, including destinations, dates & modes of travel and the particular vendors (airline, hotel, rental car brand, etc.) used on a particular trip. Also stored on the website were my work travel credit-card (it has a ,000 charge limit), personal checking account where my travel reimbursements were deposited, my home address, and emergency contacts … just imagine what an accomplished social engineer can do with that combination of information!”
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miller60 writes “The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff recently discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned from Ma.gnolia’s experience. A lesson for users: don’t assume online services have lots of staff and servers, and always keep backup copies of your data. Ma.gnolia was a one-man operation running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis.”
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Brietech writes “Ever wanted to own your own supercomputer? This guy recreated a 31-processor SIMD supercomputer from the early 1980’s called the ‘Non-Von 1’ in an FPGA. It uses a ‘Non-Von Neumann’ architecture, and was intended for extremely fast database searches and artificial intelligence applications. Full-scale models were intended to have more than a million processors. It’s a cool project for those interested in ‘alternative’ computer architectures, and yes, full source code (Verilog) is available, along with a python library to program it with.” Hope the WIPO patent has expired.
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CrazyCanucklehead writes “At the Blackhat security conference in Washington, DC, researcher Michael Sutton has detailed how common XSS flaws in web applications employing (Google) Gears and HTML 5 Database Storage can leave local databases wide open to attack. This comes just as Gears is starting to take off, and just yesterday Google demonstrated a beta version of offline Gmail on phones, thanks to HTML 5 support in WebKit-based browsers, such as those used by Android and the iPhone. Sutton drove home the point by walking through a real world example on commercial site Paymo.biz, which has thankfully since been fixed.”
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