A false Internet security certificate has been used in an apparent attempt to snoop on Google users in Iran, according to the Internet search giant and computer security firms.

A Dutch company, DigiNotar, which issues the Internet security credentials known as SSL certificates, said on Tuesday that it had revoked the "fraudulent certificate" in question.

SSL certificates are used to verify to visitors that a particular website is authentic and are issued by DigiNotar and other firms known as Certification Authorities.

Internet users whose browsers are fooled by a false certificate could unwittingly reveal their activity to another party in what is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack."

DigiNotar said it had suffered an "intrusion" into its Certificate Authority infrastructure on July 19 which resulted in the "fraudulent issuance of public key certificate requests for a number of domains, including Google.com."

"At that time, an external security audit concluded that all fraudulently issued certificates were revoked," DigiNotar said. "Recently, it was discovered that at least one fraudulent certificate had not been revoked at the time.

"After being notified by Dutch government organization Govcert, DigiNotar took immediate action and revoked the fraudulent certificate," it said.

Google said in a blog post late on Monday that it had "received reports of attempted SSL man-in-the-middle attacks against Google users, whereby someone tried to get between them and encrypted Google services.

"The people affected were primarily located in Iran," said Heather Adkins, an information security manager at Google.

"The attacker used a fraudulent SSL certificate issued by DigiNotar, a root certificate authority that should not issue certificates for Google," she said.

Adkins said users of the Google Chrome Web browser were protected from the attack "because Chrome was able to detect the fraudulent certificate."

"To help deter unwanted surveillance, we recommend that users, especially those in Iran, keep their Web browsers and operating systems up to date and pay attention to Web browser security warnings," she added.

Microsoft, maker of the Internet Explorer Web browser, said it had removed the DigiNotar certificate from the "Microsoft Certificate Trust List."

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, said it was releasing new desktop and mobile versions of Firefox "that will revoke trust in the DigiNotar root and protect users from this attack."

Computer security firm F-Secure said there was a similar incident in May that was "tied to Iran" and "it's likely the Government of Iran is using these techniques to monitor local dissidents."

F-Secure said an attacker using a false SSL certificate could potentially "impersonate Google -- assuming you can first reroute Internet traffic for google.com to you.

"This is something that can be done by a government or by a rogue ISP (Internet Service Provider)," it said.

F-Secure also said the intent would not be to monitor traffic to search engine google.com.
"This is about the Gmail servers at mail.google.com and Google Docs at docs.google.com and maybe Google+ at plus.google.com," it said.

Read More … Google users in Iran targeted in certificate scam

Mozilla's next-generation Firefox 6 browser is slated to become available for download on Tuesday -- with the final release reportedly already on the organization's FTP server. Firefox 6 will be Mozilla's third browser release this year.

Among other things, Mozilla's browser refresh will feature improvements such as extended HTML5 support, a new address bar that highlights the domain of the site being visited, and a new permissions manager that enables users to set privacy controls for each site. The goal is to keep pace with Google's Chrome, which has set a new standard for frequent refreshes containing browser innovations and enhancements.

"Both Mozilla and Microsoft have added resources and increased their rate of updates to match Google, as well as matching Chrome's speed," said Net Applications Executive Vice President Vince Vizzaccaro.

Eying Enterprises

Mozilla's share of the browser market has remained relatively stable this year, with Firefox holding 21.5 percent in July, versus 52.7 percent for Microsoft's combined IE offerings and 13.5 percent for Chrome. However, at least one expected change may have an impact on the browser market in the next two years.

In July, Microsoft announced a cutoff date for the support it offers for Windows XP. Since many small businesses are still running Microsoft's venerable OS in tandem with IE6, they will be forced to upgrade to a new operating system well in advance of April 8, 2014. According to the software giant, 9.7 percent of the world's PCs were still running IE6 in July.

Windows XP business users will not have the luxury of waiting for the arrival of Windows 8 before taking action. "We believe most organizations can't skip Windows 7 and wait for Windows 8," said Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Michael Silver. "By the time Windows 8 ships and organizations do their testing, Windows XP support will be about over -- before organizations can deploy Windows 8."

On the downside, Mozilla's new Firefox fast-development track means IT departments have less time between browser releases to prepare. By beefing up its enterprise support for new versions of Firefox, Mozilla hopes to take advantage of the opportunity that the end of Windows XP potentially represents.

"Mozilla is fundamentally about people, and we care about our users wherever they are," Mozilla noted in a recent blog. "To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff, and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise."

Microsoft's Strategy

Microsoft is betting that most businesses still running Windows XP will upgrade to more advanced computers well in advance of XP's support expiration date. The software giant intentionally skipped XP support for Internet Explorer 9 to compete more effectively on Windows 7 machines.

Microsoft has been pushing IE9 "as the best browsing experience on Windows 7 because of IE9's use of hardware acceleration and integration with the Windows 7 user interface," noted Net Applications.

The strategy appears to be succeeding. On PCs running Windows 7 last month, noted Net Applications, IE9 accounted for an 18.5 percent market share worldwide and a 24.8 percent share in the United States.
"Although Internet Explorer lost usage share on XP, on Windows 7 [PCs] Microsoft increased global usage share, going from 54.6 percent in June to 54.8 percent in July, and in the U.S., Internet Explorer share on Windows 7 grew 0.6 percent to 68.1 percent," Net Applications observed.

Read More … Firefox 6 Is Ready for Release To Match Chrome Updates

China and the United States have closed down a network of Chinese child pornography sites, in a rare instance of cooperation between the two nations on cyber crime, Beijing said.

The network comprised at least 48 pornographic sites, 18 of which contained graphic images of children, China's public security ministry said in a statement released Thursday.

The ministry said the operation to close down the sites, which were aimed at a Chinese audience, was "the first successful joint law enforcement campaign by the two nations on online crimes".

"We will continue to strengthen joint judicial cooperation with other nations to tackle international cyber crimes such as online pornography, fraud, gambling and hacking," it added.

Chinese police arrested several people suspected of money-laundering and maintaining the sites in China, the ministry said.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said earlier this week that Chinese-born Wang Yong, a permanent US resident, had been charged over the sites and faced a minimum sentence of 15 years if found guilty.

"The charges against Mr. Wang stem from a nine-month undercover FBI operation dedicated to protecting the most innocent members of our society: children," FBI official Janice Fedarcky said in the statement.

China maintains strict censorship of the Internet to curb what the government deems to be unhealthy content, including pornography and violence -- an effort that has become known as the "Great Firewall of China."

China has the world's largest online population, at 485 million people.

Read More … China and US smash child porn sites

Graduate Games’ casual indie card game, Best in Show Solitaire, is now available for Pre-Order. Pre-Purchasing the game gives you instant access to the closed Beta of the game and will save you 25% over the final release price.

Wilmington, DE (PRWEB) August 31, 2011

Best In Show Solitaire is Now Available for Pre-order for a limited time. Best in Show Solitaire is an addictive casual card game currently in-development for PC, Mac and Linux by independent game studio, Graduate Games. Best in Show Solitaire features over 40 different breeds, unique abilities for each dog, RPG elements, a pet store, achievements, and a light-hearted story about becoming the top dog trainer in the region by winning Best in Show at the National Eastminster Dog Show.

The game will completed very soon so this is your last chance to pre-order the game from Graduate Games’ website for only $14.95 and get instant access to the Beta. But that’s not all you get for preordering. Graduate Games is including the full version of Best in Show for Mac, Linux, and PC Digital Rights Management Free to all early purchasers and is also throwing in its Level Editor Tool and a Strategy Guide as a bonus. You can learn more about Pre-Ordering by visiting http://www.graduategames.com/dogsolitaire/preorder.php

For more information, screenshots, and videos of Best in Show Solitaire, please visit the game's website: http://www.bestinshowsolitaire.com

About Graduate Games

Graduate Games is small two-person company that was founded in 2006 by Michael Gnade and Zachary Gebelein in Wilmington, Delaware (The place to be somebody! That is really the city's slogan). Mike and Zak grew up next door to one another and have been friends since they were four. Our game studio, Graduate Games offers fun, creative, and polished games for the kid in all of us.

To learn more about Graduate Games, please visit our website: http://www.graduategames.com

Read More … Best in Show Solitaire Computer Game Last Chance to Pre-order - Includes Beta Access

Integrated solutions based on LSI® flash-based storage technologies help IT managers at small- and mid-sized organizations accelerate application performance with cost-efficient solid state storage strategies.

Redmond, Wash (PRWEB) August 31, 2011
Pogo Linux, Inc. (http://www.pogolinux.com) , the leading Open Source systems integrator, today announced the immediate availability of a line of performance servers and storage systems based on LSI Corporation’s enterprise application acceleration solutions using solid state storage technology. The all-new Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers dramatically improve system and application performance for a wide variety of I/O-intensive workloads. IT managers who oversee cloud and hosted services workloads now have a way to execute a high-performance solid state storage strategy with minimal up-front investment. The addition of solid state drives (SSDs) to a server’s hardware configuration improves the system’s I/O throughput, accelerating application performance. Previously however, the cost of SSD was a consideration for IT managers looking to explore a broad deployment of SSDs into their technology infrastructure. Now, with the introduction of the many SSD system configurations available with the new line of Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers, managers who oversee large transactional data sets or high read-write application workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP), web 2.0, and data warehousing have an effective, affordable solution available to them.
Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers are based on the broad LSI portfolio of solid state storage solutions, including MegaRAID® Fast Path I/O acceleration software, MegaRAID CacheCade™ SSD caching software, and the WarpDrive™ SLP-300 PCIe solid state storage acceleration card. The servers are available with either hybrid storage volumes, SSD RAID, or accelerated SSD options, so every server’s overall performance can be customized to address specific server application workload needs, based on SSD utilization.
LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0
The recent release of LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0 SSD caching software for select LSI MegaRAID 6Gb/s SATA+SAS controller cards further enhances the product offerings of Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers. The software dramatically accelerates application I/O performance of hard disk drive (HDD)-based Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers by intelligently caching frequently accessed, or “hot spot,” data to SSDs. The second generation software, which is compatible with LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260, 9261 and 9280 series controllers, offers both read and write caching using SSDs, extending the real-world I/O performance of HDD volumes for read-write intensive applications, such as SQL databases and OLTP.
“These solid state storage performance servers and storage system solutions show our focus and commitment to enabling the general availability of SSDs in the marketplace," said Erik Logan, CEO of Pogo Linux. “We’ve designed our Accelerated Servers product line in collaboration with LSI to best meet the needs of our hosted service providers and cloud-based end-users, who are addressing bigger data challenges and serving more customers than ever before.”
"We are excited about the launch of Pogo's new Accelerated Servers with integrated LSI flash-based storage technologies,” said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI Corporation. "Now, IT professionals that manage e-commerce, virtualized servers, OLTP and data warehousing workloads have a cost-effective way to use SSDs within their existing infrastructure to address the storage I/O bottleneck, accelerate application response time and deliver a lower total cost of ownership.”
General Availability
Pogo Linux Accelerated Servers are available now and ready for immediate deployment. To learn more about these products – and to configure a system with exact pricing – please visit http://www.pogolinux.com/acceleration.
About Pogo Linux
Founded in 1999, Pogo Linux, Inc. is a workstation, server, and storage systems integrator based in Seattle, Washington. With in-house technical expertise and a multi-OS focus, Pogo Linux offers a wide range of systems for every IT project or budget. From a single database server to a complete datacenter deployment, Pogo Linux is dedicated to providing affordable, reliable, and energy-efficient Linux, Solaris, and Windows-based systems for organizations of all sizes. Each system includes the type of world-class Linux customization and support you would expect from a company that’s served the Linux and open source communities for more than a decade.

For more information about Pogo Linux, please visit http://www.pogolinux.com or call 1 (888) 828-POGO (7646).
LSI, the LSI & Design logo, CacheCade, MegaRAID and WarpDrive are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation.

Read More … Pogo Linux Launches All-New SSD-Based Server Solutions to Meet the Broad Cloud and Service Provider Market Segments

Facebook has decided to shut down Facebook Deals, its four-month-old Groupon competitor.

"After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks," Facebook told Reuters in a statement.

The product, which launched in late April, was an attempt to bring the popular daily deals phenomenon to Facebook's 750+ million users. It launched in San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego, but quickly rolled out to other cities.

The market for daily deals has become more competitive in recent months, however, and many are questioning the entire business model in light of Groupon's questionable financials.

"We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses," Facebook said in its statement. "We've learned a lot from our test and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses."

We have reached out to Facebook for more information.

Read More … Facebook kills off Groupon competitor

LOS ANGELES — Annapurna, a Hindu goddess of nourishment, has her name on a section of the Himalayas. Annapurna Pictures operates from a cluster of three multimillion-dollar homes in the Hollywood Hills.

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Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for BlackBerry

Megan Ellison with, from left, Michael Benaroya, Randall Emmett and Brandon Grimes.

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Claudio Onorati/European Pressphoto Agency

Kathryn Bigelow is being backed by Megan Ellison.

Instead of a goddess, Annapurna Pictures has Megan Ellison, a 25-year-old scion of Silicon Valley, who over the last year or so has been feeding what may soon be hundreds of millions of dollars to the hungriest part of the movie business: the writers, producers, directors and stars who make sophisticated dramas and adventure films that are too risky for studios and their corporate owners.

At least six movies set for release in the coming months received substantial backing from Ms. Ellison and her company. They include “The Master,” a drama about a cult that resembles Scientology that stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and is being directed by Paul Thomas Anderson of “There Will Be Blood” fame. Another high-profile project, still untitled, tackles the killing of Osama bin Laden; it is being written and produced by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, both Oscar winners for “The Hurt Locker.”

Earlier this year, Ms. Ellison bought the rights to the well-worn “Terminator” franchise for a reported $20 million. She is developing a film based on “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” an article about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by the departing executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller.

In all, it is a remarkable surge for a young woman who earlier this year was such a minor player that her executive producer credit on Paramount’s “True Grit” almost escaped notice: One player on the eight-member producing team said he was unaware of her credit until last week.

But the jury is still very much out on Ms. Ellison, whose father, Lawrence J. Ellison, is the chief executive of Oracle. She is spending money in a particular corner of moviedom, and doing it with a spirit more akin to the freewheeling world of technology start-ups than a film industry entering its second century. But there have been plenty of outsiders — the Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., eBay’s Jeff Skoll and Microsoft’s Paul Allen — who have been frustrated when they tried to make waves in the movie business.

Ms. Ellison invested in “True Grit” with her 28-year-old brother, David, who last year raised about $350 million in equity and borrowed funds for his own film company, Skydance Productions.

Since then, she has grabbed the limelight by diving into complex — and sometimes expensive — films that might not exist without her backing. Meanwhile, David counts on an alliance with Paramount Pictures and hews closer to the mainstream, making bets on safer pictures like the forthcoming “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.”

“She has this grand vision; she wants to be the one-stop shop for filmmakers,” said Michael Benaroya, 30, a member of a Seattle real estate family who has joined Ms. Ellison in financing a thriller called “Catch .44” and “The Wettest County in the World,” a Prohibition-era crime drama, both of which still await release.

Ms. Ellison declined interview requests.

Friends and business associates describe her as shy, though not too shy to have reportedly posted on MySpace a photo of herself with the caption: “Drunk dialing Dad in Paris after 3 bottles of Dom.” Like her father and brother, Ms. Ellison is not a college graduate, though both she and David attended the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts (David is enrolled there, and planning to graduate, according to the school.)

But she is not without focus. A competitive equestrian, she trained on jumpers at the Wild Turkey Farm in Woodside, Calif. Seven years ago, Ms. Ellison rode in the North American Young Rider Championships.

Read More … Silicon Valley Scion Tackles Hollywood

Wireless phone networks held up well againstHurricane Irene despite widespread losses of power.
Many people who lost electricity were able to communicate using e-mail and social networks, thanks to battery-powered mobile devices.
As cleanup crews and homeowners began to assess the scope of the damage on Sunday, wireless phone companies were reporting that the storm’s effect on their networks was minimal and that most customers did not experience cellular disruptions, despite the high winds and ferocious rains. The providers said the full extent might not be known until after the storm moved offshore.
The Federal Communications Commission, which activated the Disaster Information Reporting System, an online tool that helps the agency gather information and assess the breadth of damage to the communications networks, is still gauging the extent of the disruptions. It said Sunday that no 9-1-1 center was without service and that it had received no reports of public safety communications disruptions.
Late Sunday afternoon, Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the F.C.C., said that a handful of radio sites and thousands of wirelines went down during the storm, leaving 132,000 landline subscribers without service. The majority of those were concentrated in North Carolina and Virginia. The F.C.C. said that 1,400 cell sites along the coast were down, and several hundred were running on backup power.
Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said Irene battered the company’s network in several areas, including North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C. The company is still working to assess the storm’s effect in New York, he said. “We are ready to respond as soon as our crews are safely able to,” he added.
Representatives at T-Mobile reported similar findings, saying that the damage to their networks was minimal. “We’re seeing, on average, a 10 percent impact across the East due to power outages and flooding,” said Troy Edwards, a spokesman for T-Mobile. “The majority of these outages are in our Virginia and Carolinas footprint.”
Crystal Davis, a spokeswoman for Sprint, said wireless service was spotty in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut because of a loss of commercial power and local landline service.
Verizon’s network was “performing well,” said a spokesman, Howard Waterman. “Some cells in areas that lost commercial power have backup generators helping us continue to deliver wireless service,” he said.
What at first could appear paradoxical — Twitter and Facebook users posting that they had lost power — was feasible thanks to smartphones, laptop computers and tablets. In the days leading up to the hurricane’s arrival, advice to charge all portable devices became almost as commonplace as old standbys like making sure flashlights had batteries and bottled water was in supply.
Indeed, many people who lost power and access to news on television could view news over the Internet on battery-powered computers or cellphones. People with mobile battery chargers in their cars could recharge.
The rise of mobile devices turns the conventional wisdom about landline telephones on its head. For decades, the landline phone was trusted to be more reliable than the electricity grid because the phone network’s dedicated power supply often survived blackouts.
But the evolution of the landline — which first saw cordless phones (that do not work in blackouts) and Internet-based telephony (which requires a battery backup in case of blackouts) — has led to a decrease in its reliability. That hole has been filled, to some degree, by wireless voice and data networks.
Sam Grobart contributed reporting.

Read More … Wireless Phone Networks Stood Up Well to Hurricane

IT is still possible to distinguish between a living, breathing character in a movie and an animated one — but it is getting harder.

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20th Century Fox/Weta Digital

A video camera mounted on a helmet recorded the expressions made by the actor Andy Serkis. The footage became the basis for the computer animation of Caesar the chimp.

The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that star in the hit film“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” are all computer animations. But they look a lot like the real thing, even to a primatologist.

“It’s astonishing how far the technology has come,” said Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory

“We have the illusion we are looking at chimpanzees,” Dr. De Waal said of the computer-generated figures. “They are remarkably convincing.”

Producing computer-animated chimps that people will accept as realistic is a signal accomplishment, said Chris Bregler, an associate professor of computer science at New York University.

“It’s easier to fool us when you animate a dragon or another mythical or fairy tale creature,” Dr. Bregler said of characters created in earlier movies using the technology, called performance capture. “But humans or their closest relatives, chimps — that’s more difficult to do. Our human eyes are finely tuned to detecting problems with those depictions, and the illusion breaks down.”

If the illusion holds in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” he said, it is because of several small but significant engineering steps that can take audiences past what is called the “uncanny valley,” the spot at which an animation loses credibility.

In particular, “Rise” uses a video system that analyzes the facial expressions of the actors playing the apes. “The system can capture every subtle nuance of expression down to the pixel,” Dr. Bregler said, “and every wrinkle. The wrinkles are especially important.”

Performance capture technology, as its name suggests, is based on actual performances by human actors. But In “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” actors playing chimps do not wear heavy makeup and wigs, as Roddy McDowall did in the 1968 “Planet of the Apes.”

Instead, they wear special electronic gear. In “Rise,” the actor Andy Serkis, who plays the chimp protagonist Caesar, wears a lightweight helmet with a video camera mounted directly in front of his face to record every nuance of expression, outdoors as well as indoors.

These cameras were also employed in “Avatar,” but were used outside for the first time in “Rise,” said Mark Sagar, special projects supervisor at Weta Digital Ltd. and an Oscar winner for his facial motion capture techniques. Weta, a visual effects studio in New Zealand, provided the performance capture technology for “Rise” as well as for “Avatar” and earlier films including the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

The technology of performance capture was well on its way when Mr. Serkis played the mythical character Gollum in “Lord of the Rings,” but facial capture then was at lower resolution and more rudimentary. “The burden was much more on an animator to craft the facial expressions frame by frame,” Dr. Bregler said. “You couldn’t track every pixel in Gollum’s face.”

Moving the technology outside for filming has been another improvement in the evolution of motion capture." You need to do a lot of new engineering to make this work outside, Dr. Bregler said, but the effect is striking. “The actors are set in a natural environment. It’s much more realistic.”

All of the motion capture footage is analyzed and modeled, becoming the basis for computer animation of the ape characters.

For example, when Caesar is called upon to frown — and Caesar does a lot of frowning as the plot thickens — the camera pointing at his face tracks the motion of his skin.

Software analyzes how the underlying human muscles move, and then translates the movement to a chimp counterpart. “For example, an ape’s brow moves in a different way than an actor’s human brow,” Dr. Sagar said.

Software may do most of the animating, but human artists still apply their skills, adjusting the rendering if Mr. Serkis’s protruding human nose is not squashed exactly as it should be to become a chimp’s nose, or if the emotional intent of the performance is not conveyed properly.

“The process is not completely mathematical,” said Joe Letteri, a four-time Oscar winner and senior visual effects supervisor for Weta.

Weta worked closely with Standard Deviation, a motion capture hardware company in Santa Monica, Calif., to design and build many of the cameras used in “Rise,” said Dejan Momcilovic, head of performance capture at Weta. Cameras from the Motion Analysis Corporation in Santa Rosa, Calif., were also used, he said.

The live action shots, combined with the convincing computerized faces of the chimps, work to increase realism, said Steven R. Quartz, a professor of philosophy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Caesar really seems to be interacting with the other actors. It really does seem to capture subtle nuances in the interaction and the exchanges,” Dr. Quartz said, even though Caesar is artificial.

HOWEVER plausible the animation, movie audiences are not actually seeing a true representation of a chimp’s brow, or eyes either, when they look at Caesar, Dr. De Waal of Emory said. There is plenty of digital fine-tuning to humanize the apes, making them a bit more like us and a bit less like them.

“The head and shoulders of an actual chimp are more massive than Caesar’s,” he said. And Caesar’s eyes have been altered, too, for example, to add white to them.

But Dr. De Waal is glad the filmmakers used actors rather than chimps that are dressed up to play parts. The animals “have miserable lives dancing to our tune,” he said. We are very pleased there is a movie that has been able to circumvent this.”

Read More … Animated Or Real