Aidryane's blog

 13-year-old girl convicted of attempting to kill two classmates by slipping rat poison into their milk was sentenced to up to 12 years in a juvenile detention center.Holley Sweeney was ordered Friday to remain at the Hillcrest Girls’ School in Salem until she is 25 with early release possible if she responds to treatment, the judge ruled.Earlier this month, the judge found the Lakeview girl and her friend, Stephanie Quesnoy, 12, guilty of plotting and executing a plan to kill two classmates they disliked.  Read More »

What do Cuba’s fatigue-wearing president Fidel Castro and Monaco’s playboy bachelor Prince Albert have in common? Not much other than lofty positions and vast fortunes. It's a diverse group that includes a British queen, an African dictator and a few Middle Eastern potentates. This year, several new faces appear on our list, in part because of the deaths of some well-known rulers, such as Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. Taking his spot: his half-brother Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, who became king in August 2005.Entrepreneurs they’re not. These fortunes are largely derived from inheritances or positions of power. And the lines often blur between what is owned by the country and what is owned by the individual. No surprise then that these estimates are more art than science. For instance, we figure Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum gets substantial wealth from his government’s stake in banks, aluminum and real estate companies. In contrast, we don’t count Buckingham Palace or the crown jewels as personal possessions of Queen Elizabeth II. Rather they belong to the British nation, and are only entrusted to her care.

Silicon.com was contacted by one customer of the Clydesdale Bank, who was told that her MasterCard details, along with those of 2,000 other people, were "in the hands of a fraudster." The theft was detected and the card stopped before it could be used by the fraudster.The Clydesdale Bank would not comment except to say it was advised of the problem by MasterCard.MasterCard said it took immediate action together with all the banks concerned as soon as the breach was discovered."In order to protect cardholders, MasterCard and its card-issuing banks operate state-of-the-art, multilevel fraud-monitoring systems," MasterCard said in a statement. "Together, we look for patterns of activity consistent with fraud. Issuers can then monitor their cardholders' accounts closely for fraudulent activity and may reissue cards or take other actions if they suspect fraud has occurred."MasterCard refused to say how the breach occurred, whether it was limited to the U.K. or which issuing banks were affected besides the Clydesdale.

The user oriented source getting most attention recently is AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Suddenly the power of asynchronous user interface handling is becoming evident and it is generating a lot of XML traffic--it is already coming across your enterprise boundaries. Each of your users accessing Google Maps, Gmail or the new Yahoo mail client, or using the upcoming Microsoft Web Mail Browser (kahuna), is already driving XML across your firewall.  Read More »

The data includes names, addresses and Social Security numbers, spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said. No personal banking information or health claim data was on the laptop, she added. The members are employees of two companies that are Aetna customers, the company said in a statement. Michener said the two companies had asked that their names not be disclosed. "They wanted all of their employees to have received their notifications directly before releasing their name," Michener said. According to the statement, there was no indication that data on the laptop had been compromised. "We have no reason to believe that there has been any unauthorized use of it," the company said. Aetna, with about 27.9 million members, is one of the largest health care insurers in the United States. The company said it is working to notify all affected members by letter. Aetna has offered to pay for credit monitoring services for the affected members to help prevent potential misuse of the information.

The tool, called SocketShield, monitors Internet traffic as it enters a PC and takes action based on a blacklist of known bad Web sites and vulnerability signatures, Roger Thompson, chief technology officer at Exploit Prevention Labs, said in an interview Friday. "Before you can open a poisoned page and get infected, we can stop it," he said. Exploit Prevention Labs is a new company, founded by Thompson and Bob Bales, two former executives at PestPatrol, an early antispyware company that CA (formerly Computer Associates International) bought two years ago. SocketShield is aimed at shielding Windows users against what's known as drive-by installs, the surreptitious installation of malicious software as people surf the Web. Cybercrooks often exploit security holes in Windows, Web browsers and other applications in order to drop spyware, adware, Trojan horses, bots and other software onto the computers of unwitting people. Recent examples include the Windows Meta File flaw and the CreateTextRange bug. The new tool can provide protection in the time between the publication of a security flaw and the release of a patch by the maker of the flawed software, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "It will always take Microsoft and other software vendors time to patch vulnerabilities," he said. "Having the ability to protect systems while waiting for a patch from the software vendor or while waiting to get the patch distributed would be valuable." The SocketShield client software is updated continuously with information on known bad Web sites and vulnerability signatures. The vulnerability signature approach is similar to antivirus software; SocketShield checks potentially malicious Web sites against a database of known security exploits. SocketShield is designed to work alongside other security applications such as antivirus, antispyware and firewall software, Thompson said. "We are providing something they are not," he said. "We're another layer of protection and have done a huge amount of work to make sure we're compatible."

When activated, the Trojan horse, dubbed Ransom-A by antivirus company Sophos, displays some explicit images. It then shows an expletive message that demands a $10.99 payment, or it will delete one file every 30 minutes, security experts at SophosLabs said in a statement published Friday. "This Trojan horse is designed to take your data hostage and tries to scare users into paying up quickly by threatening to wipe files one-by-one," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in the statement. The Trojan asks for payment via the Western Union money transfer service and promises delivery of a special disarming code after the ransom is paid, Sophos said. This is the second example of malicious software that seeks to extort money in as many months. In March, a Trojan horse that encrypts victims' files and demands a $300 payment to have them decrypted and unlocked made the rounds. A similar attack was spotted in May of last year.

The initial reviews were very favorable. Mac lovers--arguably the eclectic hippies of the computer revolution--finally have a chance to run programs previously unavailable, including proprietary business applications. But users are now also able to bring all their favorite programs to the new MacTel platform. So it's time to be on the lookout for security stowaways--the viruses, worms and spyware that are coming along for the ride. The Windows platform (along with Internet Explorer) is clearly the most targeted and exploited operating system on the planet--and it's now crashing the relatively virus-free Mac party. Even Apple takes its own jab at Windows security with this warning from its Web site: "Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes." Here's the rub--Apple users run virtually no security software on their machines. Until recently, the platform was virtually virus-free, remaining unaffected by most major viruses. Reacting to the new virus infection potential, some industry watchdogs dismissed the threat. If you get a virus on your new Apple running Windows, their answer is to reboot on the Mac side.