Spam

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Mark Alvarado was hired at Mission High School five years ago to help build its activities program, he noticed the students were struggling with bigger problems than getting a date for the prom.

Situated in a tough urban neighborhood of San Francisco, Mission High School was rife with truancy problems, drugs and gang violence. Alvarado believed these kids needed to be taught practical skills to capture their interest and to keep them out of trouble.

Here is an interesting Press Release sent out by Nick Bolton, a New Zealand computer user, who has released MailWasher, a Windows package designed to fight unwanted emails and viruses. According to Bolton, heuristic checking and filtering is used to identify viruses and spam. Additionally, a very simple and easy to use interface allows the user to preview all emails as they arrive.

Security and Standards, a UK-based developer of internet security technology, has unveiled Growl, a free downloadable tool that enables consumers to check whether it is safe to enter personal details over an internet connection. Growl has two components: downloadable software that runs whenever a user opens an internet browser and a Security and Standards-hosted server that checks URLs against around 350,000 certificates issued by SSL Certification authorities.

octet sent me this link to a proggie called 'rain'. What is it? Well here's a quote from the site: "rain is a powerful packet builder for testing stability of hardware and software utilizing IP protocols. It offers its users the capability of fully customizing their own packets with a wide variety of command line options". I've attached the sample of rain --help below (read more). You can grab your copies of rain here.

WASHINGTON: Security experts on Friday warned of a rapidly spreading new virus designed to make computers launch attacks against the White House website.

A White House spokesman said that officials were aware of the reports and were taking unspecified "preventive" measures.

The threat of the "Code Red" virus - which attacks web servers rather than PCs - was serious enough to prompt a warning by the government-funded CERT Coordination Center and others.

TWO SMALL DEVELOPMENT shops are looking to help companies use .NET Web services with Linux and Java. Ximian, a small, Boston-based developer specializing in user interfaces for Linux, will formally announce on Monday an open-source project to create a Linux version of Microsoft's .NET platform.

On the Java front, San Jose, Calif.-based Halcyon Software is enabling developers to either migrate their Active Server Pages or Visual Basic code to JSP (JavaServer Pages) or Java, respectively, or to deploy .NET applications on Java-based infrastructures.

There is a hype. And it is increasingly common. Probably born from the trite site of a saree clad female behind a Buick in San Jose and her accompanying chosen male partner in crime with his preferred weapon, an IBM notebook. Rama must have an uneasy slumber knowing all his toils have come to this, many moons on. He, the Buick bloke that is, also suffers from the knee jerk reaction of yanking out his well stacked CV for any job which pays 10 clams more regardless of place or time. He is a true warrior. And every night he has dhal. But I digress.

This paper is based on a speech given during the Blackhat briefings in Singapore
and Hong Kong in April 2001. The speech was entitled "Breaking In Through
the Front Door - The impact of Web Applications and Application Service
Provision on Traditional Security Models". It initially discussed the trend
towards Web Applications (and ASP) and the holes in traditional security
methodology exposed by this trend.
Definetely a good read -- check it all out here.

A new version of the linux web browser based on the mozilla 0.9.1 engine has been
released. It has some interesting features, some of them quite new for the platform
:

A group of developers in Perth, Australia, calling themselves "The Four Horsemen" are working to
ready a new open-source browser before the end of the year.

The browser, which the group plans to release under the GNU General Public License, will be called No Limits.

The main distinguishing characteristic of No Limits will be its ability to support two rendering engines, i.e., the
code that displays a Web page. Users will be able to opt between the engine that displays a page the fastest or
the most compatibly.