Cody Taylor

AP chair Dean Singleton kicked off the week by telling newspaper executives that the AP is “mad as hell.” Singleton’s tough talk about those who “walk off with our work” fueled speculation that search engines (Google) or news aggregators (The Huffington Post) are now in the AP’s crosshairs.

How powerful is Google when it comes to parceling out traffic to news sites? If you are talking about Google News, the answer is that it is not quite as powerful as you might think.

Simmons writes with news of research that demonstrated vulnerabilities in Skype and Google Voice that would have allowed attackers to eavesdrop on calls or place unauthorized calls of their own. “The attacks on Google Voice and Skype use different techniques, but essentially they both work because neither service requires a password to access its voicemail system. For the Skype attack to work, the victim would have to be tricked into visiting a malicious Web site within 30 minutes of being logged into Skype. In the Google Voice attack (PDF), the hacker would first need to know the victim’s phone number, but Secure Science has devised a way to figure this out using Google Voice’s Short Message Service (SMS). Google patched the bugs that enabled Secure Science’s attack last week and has now added a password requirement to its voicemail system, the company said in a statement. … The Skype flaws have not yet been patched, according to James.” Reader EricTheGreen contributes related news that eBay may sell Skype back to its original founders.

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CurtMonash writes “Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims’ accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole.”

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