Technology in your hands.

Spammers have cracked the captcha mechanism Gmail uses to make sure you are a human before you can open an e-mail account, leading to a huge increase in the amount of spam sent from Gmail last month, security firm MessageLabs says.

We’ve all been subjected to captcha programs when signing up for Web services. They typically consist of a box with some characters, either distorted or displayed against some noisy background, and you have to type the letters and numerals in exactly as you see them before the system will accept your sign-in.

They are designed to catch, or stop, automated programs called bots that are written to create new accounts for spammers to use. Annoying as the captcha systems are, they have been successful in keeping bots out, until recently.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail captcha mechanisms were broken in July 2007, according to MessageLabs. And now, Gmail has succumbed…

Read Full Article

Microsoft Corp on Wednesday made available a test version of Internet Explorer 8, the next edition of its Web browser.

At Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, provided a first glimpse at the successor to IE 7, which was released in October 2006.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser is the world’s most widely-used Web browser with a greater market share than Apple Inc’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox. The browser is also part of the ongoing battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Google Inc.

Firefox is closely affiliated with Google, which provided around 85 percent of the revenue of Firefox’s parent organization, the Mozilla Foundation, which was $66.8 million in 2006, according to filings published last October.

Google distributes Firefox as its preferred browser software in a number of its own products. Mozilla continues to receive revenue from Google under a contract set to expire in November 20, 2008.

Microsoft’s presentation was catered heavily toward Web developers, but Hachamovitch showed some user features of IE 8. One feature allows users to save work being done on a Web site to the local computer when an Internet connection goes down.

Another feature lets users highlight an address on a Web site and then see a map within the Web site with a single click. Users can also highlight a product name and be able to see if the item is available for sale on eBay.

The new browser is available to developers at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

Read Full Article

Apple wants the iPhone to become a business email gadget - and a portable video game machine that might also help users manage their health records.

To help fuel that transformation, the company is teaming with a prominent venture capital firm to offer $US100 million to lure developers to the iPhone to create the next generation of applications.

Cupertino-based Apple unveiled new software on Thursday that reflects its intensifying effort to court business customers and placate third-party developers who want to build iPhone applications but have been locked out. A beta version of the free software update went out Thursday; the full version will be available in June.

With the announcements, Apple is foraying beyond the consumer mobile phone market while simultaneously supporting innovations for the phone that could spur sales. But not all developers will be happy with Apple’s approach, since the company will retain tight control over what programs go on the iPhone…

Read Full Article

A security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password.

Adam Boileau first demonstrated the hack, which affects Windows XP computers but has not yet been tested with Windows Vista, at a security conference in Sydney in 2006, but Microsoft has yet to develop a fix.

Interviewed in ITRadio’s Risky Business podcast, Boileau said the tool, released to the public today, could “unlock locked Windows machines or login without a password … merely by plugging in your Firewire cable and running a command”.

Boileau, a consultant with Immunity Inc., said he did not release the tool publicly in 2006 because “Microsoft was a little cagey about exactly whether Firewire memory access was a real security issue or not and we didn’t want to cause any real trouble”.

But now that a couple of years have passed and the issue has not resolved, Boileau decided to release the tool on his website…

Read Full Article

In an effort to get consumers to upgrade their older computers to its newest operating system, Microsoft said Friday that it plans to cut the prices of packaged versions of Windows Vista by as much as nearly 50% in some countries.

Effective with release of the boxed edition of Vista Service Pack 1, expected to be available at stores within the next several weeks, the price for a full, retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate in the U.S. has been reduced 20% to $320 from $400. The upgrade version of Ultimate has been cut to $220 from $260. The full version of Vista Home Premium falls 19% to $130 from $160, according to Microsoft.

Computer users in Europe and emerging markets will see even bigger price cuts. In the U.K., the price for the full version of Vista Home Premium drops 44% to 131.92 pounds from 233.60 pounds. The list price for Home Premium in South Africa will fall 41% to about Rand 1700.

Microsoft said Vista price cuts in emerging markets — where the company faces the most competition from open source software — will be as high as 48% in some countries…

Read Full Article

Having more or less recovered from Wall Street’s infectious doubt about the health of its ad business earlier this week, Google on Thursday offered a glimpse of Google Health, its upcoming personal health records management service.

“Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search and user products, in a blog post. “Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.”…

Read Full Article

Microsoft has quietly released an update to its Office Live Workspace service, which the company first rolled out in beta form in December 2007.

The just-released Office Live Workspace update, according to a posting on LiveSide.Net,includes a new activity pane for keeping track of what’s happening in your wokspace; e-mail notifications so you know when those with whom you are sharing documents make an update; support for adding multiploe documents to workspaces; and a new interface to make it easier to invite new people to participate in a shared workspace.

A quick refresher on what Office Live Workspace is (and isn’t). Office Live Workspace is Microsoft’s alternative to Google Docs. It is not a Web-based version of Microsoft Office. It is meant, first and foremost, to be a complement to Microsoft Office. As Microsoft officials have said, Office Live Workspace service can be used from a PC, kiosk or other Web-access point without Office (or another desktop productivity suite) installed; all you technically need is an Internet Explorer or Firefox browser.

Read Full Article

At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.

“I will shoot,” the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. “I’m not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don’t care.”

“I will shoot.” Listen to the Colorado Springs hostage hoax.

But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper’s hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper’s 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.

A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called “swatting,” that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target’s home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.

Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as “Li’l Hacker.” Because he’s underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li’l Hacker’s last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth…

Read Full Story