Phoenix school first to install face scannersBig Brother is right around the corner. When is your office going to provide face recognition to look for sex offenders and missing employees.
Source: The Arizona Republic A north-central Phoenix school is the first in the nation to install cameras designed to detect the faces of sex offenders or missing children and instantly alert police.
Phoenix school first to install face scanners
What a swindle from the AirlinesI was watching the news this morning and they were explaining about a new site called heromiles.com which is helping the troops get home for the holidays from your extra frequent flier miles.
Frequent flyer miles usually don't matter to airline companies because you will always be flying on a plane that is filled with other paying individules. This is just taking your $300 value from you and making the trip anyway. In my personal opinion, I would send a car package instead of your extra miles. Do something that won't benefit airline companies but will benefit the morale of the soldiers down there. They shouldn't be in Iraq right now, we aren't down there to make the country better, we are there to make our country's leaders more powerful and richer.
Operation Hero Miles - Official Website
Canada has never been about freedom so why should this suprise you?Canadian music lovers will be paying more for new MP3 players arriving in stores before Christmas -- and after -- because of a controversial decision yesterday on copyright compensation.
The new levy will range from $2 to $25, depending on how much memory the various digital audio recorders have, though it isn't clear yet how much of that will be passed on to consumers.
But the Copyright Board of Canada, an Ottawa-based federal tribunal, gave consumers a break by freezing existing levies on blank CDs, analog audiocassettes, MiniDiscs and other media.
It also turned down applications for a new, 65-cent levy on recordable and rewritable DVDs, and for a sliding-scale tariff on electronic memory cards that could be used in MP3 players.
Money raised from the various levies is distributed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective, a non-profit agency created in 1998 to compensate composers, performers, publishers and record companies for revenue "lost" by the electronic downloading of digital music files.
The CPCC was happy with the MP3 move, but decried the tribunal's other decisions as "disappointing" and "perplexing" -- not least because it had asked for a 22-cent increase, to 51cents, in the levy on audiocassettes and a 38-cent increase, to 59 cents, on a single recordable CD.
Retailers and manufacturers opposed to levies hailed the Copyright Board's ruling as encouraging and wise, and an indication that the federal tribunal realizes that "the times they are a-changing in the digital universe."
MP3 players already for sale in retail outlets such as Future Shop, Wal-Mart and Radio Shack won't be hit by the new, hidden levy, which manufacturers and hardware importers will apply to the non-removable memory functions contained in all digital audio recorders.
Now the popular, portable 20-gigabyte Apple iPod, capable of holding about 5,000 songs, sells for about $580 at Future Shop outlets, exclusive of sales tax and GST (and, of course, copyright levy). Under the new setup, individual digital recorders with 10 gigabytes or more of internal memory will face a levy of $25; those above one gigabyte but less than 10 will be levied $15, and those with memory up to one gigabyte, $2. However, after the transition from manufacturer to the store floor, the consumer may not end up paying the full levy.
Since 2000, the CPCC has collected more than $72-million in approved but hidden levies applied to analog audiocassettes, blank CDs and the like. By early next year the CPCC expects it will have disbursed close to $25-million of this to copyright holders.
The CPCC argues the levies offer musicians and composers fair and modest reimbursement for the unprecedented and heretofore largely uncompensated downloading of music files via the Internet.
Opponents of the levies, most notably the Canadian Storage Media Alliance and the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access, which includes major retailers and manufacturers such as Costco, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, London Drugs and others, have hotly argued that the tariffs are too broad, inefficient and "a cross-subsidy of the music industry" by consumers using recordable media for non-musical purposes.
The tariff increases that the copying collective requested would have made Canadian retailers and manufacturers uncompetitive relative to the U.S., they said.
Opponents of tariffs were cheered by another Copyright Board ruling yesterday, which said the CPCC had no authority to exempt some groups from paying levies on blank digital media. The "zero-rating program" had been introduced by the CPCC as a way of freeing religious groups, the courts and police, universities and colleges, among others, from paying the levies.
The ruling that the exemptions are illegal "opens the door to questioning the legality of the levies themselves," said Diane Brisebois, president and CEO of the anti-tariff Retail Council of Canada.
The Globe and Mail: "Move will increase price of MP3 players"
Internet Explorer URL Spoofing Vulnerability This is HUGE. You can test it yourself at
http://www.secunia.com/internet_explorer_address_bar_spoofing_test, Just imagine the Paypal hacks that could occur.
Secunia Advisory: SA10395
Release Date: 2003-12-09
Last Update: 2003-12-11
Critical: Moderately critical
Impact: ID Spoofing
Where: From remote
Software: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
Description:
A vulnerability has been identified in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to display a fake URL in the address and status bars.
The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error, which can be exploited by including the "%01" and "%00" URL encoded representations after the username and right before the "@" character in an URL.
Successful exploitation allows a malicious person to display an arbitrary FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) in the address and status bars, which is different from the actual location of the page.
This can be exploited to trick users into divulging sensitive information or download and execute malware on their systems, because they trust the faked domain in the two bars.
Example displaying only "http://www.trusted_site.com" in the two bars when the real domain is "malicious_site.com":
http://www.trusted_site.com%01%00@malicious_site.com/malicious.html
A test is available at:
http://www.secunia.com/internet_explorer_address_bar_spoofing_test/
The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 6.0. However, prior versions may also be affected.
Solution:
Filter malicious characters and character sequences in a proxy server or firewall with URL filtering capabilities.
Don't follow links from untrusted sources.
Reported by / credits:
Originally discovered by:
Zap The Dingbat
Status bar variant reported by:
Chris Hall
Changelog:
2003-12-11: Linked to test. Added information regarding variant, which makes it possible to spoof URL in the status bar as well.
Sun making a last ditch effort again?You can get all Sparc and Intel platforms of Solaris 9 for free. If you go to the hyperlinked page you will see that Sun is offering:
Solaris 9 Operating System, SPARC Platform Edition - FREE
Solaris 9 Operating System, x86 Platform Edition - FREE
You have to register to continue on the site but it's free.
Free Solaris Binary License Program
Security Alert: Powerful Flaw Found in IE Hole could allow scammers to hide the true address of Web pages.
A newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser could be a powerful new tool for scammers, allowing them to convincingly mask the real origin of Web pages used to trick targets into revealing sensitive information."
PCWorld.com - Powerful Flaw Found in IE:
Manhattan Borough President Wants Toy Guns Off Store ShelvesI guess people are just too stupid to know what a gun is anymoreAfter a student pointed one at a security guard at a Manhattan school, the borough president is calling for crackdown on stores that sell realistic toy guns.
A student at the Frederick Douglas Academy bought a toy gun for $1.99 at a store in Washington Heights, and he took off the orange tip so the gun looked like the real thing, school officials said. Nobody got hurt when he pointed it at a school security guard two weeks ago, but school officials are concerned that these types of toys are still available, worrying they could provoke police to shoot.
Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields sponsored a 1999 law that bans realistic-looking toy guns from stores, and now she wants it more strictly enforced.
'In the past I have asked the police commissioner and the Department of Consumer affairs to enforce the law and to remove these toy guns from the shelves,"
NY1 News
