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Mobile Planet
MTA To Close 17 Subway Token Booths This Weekanother step to automated cash-less societyThe Metropolitan Transportation Authority is closing 17 more part-time subway token booths this week.
The MTA shut down 45 booths back in August, and replaced them with MetroCard vending machines. The remaining 17 booths will begin closing on Friday.
Critics of the plan say the move compromises rider safety. However, the MTA says the affected entrances will now be open 24 hours a day, even if they weren't before, and there will still be an attendant elsewhere in the stations where the booths are being discontinued.
The MTA, which is facing a budget deficit, says the closings will save more than $6 million over three years.
Google's Orkut offlinethis story is funny because Orkut is Finnish for OrgasmThe social network site, an experimental project of search giant Google, goes offline just days after thousands of Silicon Valley execs and techies are invited to join.
Google's experimental social networking site Orkut.com went offline on Monday, just after thousands of Silicon Valley executives and techies were invited to join the service.
"We've taken Orkut.com offline as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users," the Orkut team said in an e-mail message sent to members.
Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez confirmed the outage on Tuesday and said that the site should be operating again "shortly."
Orkut, which first went online last week, is the latest example of Google's dabbling in new technology. The service, which aims to connect people via their friends and colleagues, launched quietly, but it quickly generated interest from people around Silicon Valley, where Google is based. Orkut restricts membership, so that people must be invited to sign up, but it sent out thousands of invitations last week.
As an illustration of the exclusivity of Orkut, an invitation to join the network was sold off for $11 on eBay's auction site this week.
"Since Orkut is in the very early stages of development, it's likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months...And, if all goes well, you should see some significant improvements when we come back online," the Orkut team told members in the e-mail message.
Stowe Boyd, an Orkut member and a technology consultant, suggested that the service had attracted too many people at once, overloading its capacity. "They had like 3 million page hits, so it may be that they just need to revamp the physical infrastructure," Boyd said.
Many people have put forward suggestions for changes to the network, "so I'm sure they are rethinking design," he added. Orkut offers a messaging system, among other features.
Orkut is the independent project of one of Google's engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for the search giant. Buyukkokten created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees.
MyDoom Worm Spreads Rapidly, Targets SCO Web Site SEATTLE (Reuters) - MyDoom, the latest worm to infect computers over the Internet, has become the fastest-spreading attack since last summer's twin attacks by the Blaster worm and SoBig virus, computer security experts said on Tuesday.
Since appearing late Monday afternoon, the worm, also known as Novarg or Shimgapi, has spread rapidly, mostly in North America, accounting for one in nine messages globally, experts said. The volume of messages clogged networks and appeared to be concentrated in corporate environments, experts said.
Anti-virus experts said the worm was designed to attack the Web site of the SCO Group Inc.
, the small software maker suing IBM over the use of code for the Linux operating system, experts said on Tuesday.
In response, SCO, which has drawn the ire of many Linux advocates for its claims that Linux software includes copyrighted code from the Unix operating system, offered a $250,000 reward for "information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for this crime."
The new worm is activated when unsuspecting recipients of an e-mail message open a file attachment that releases a virus.
An infected personal computer could then allow attackers to gain unauthorized access and use the computer to aid in an Internet attack to bring down SCO's Web site, said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager at security company Symantec Corp.
"Certainly there's code in here to launch a denial-of-service attack against SCO on Feb. 1," Friedrichs told reporters on a conference call.
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SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, has already been targeted repeatedly with numerous denial-of-service attacks, which are used to flood a Web site with requests for information so that it overloads and shuts down.
"This one (MyDoom) is different and much more troubling, since it harms not just our company, but also damages the systems and productivity of a large number of other companies and organizations around the world," Darl McBride, SCO's chief executive, said in a statement. "We do not know the origins or reasons for this attack, although we have our suspicions. This is criminal activity and it must be stopped."
SCO claimed in lawsuit filed last March that International Business Machines Corp.'s customers and others are illegally using a version of the Linux operating system, a free operating system that software developers can modify.
The attacks from infected computers are scheduled to begin on Feb. 1 and continue to Feb. 12, Symantec said.
At risk are computers running the latest versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows programs and any e-mail program.
The worm doesn't exploit any flaws in Windows, but rather is designed to entice the recipient of an e-mail to open an attached file and run programs contained in the attachment.
The mass-mailing worm that arrives as an attachment with an .exe, .scr, .zip or .pif extension and can have a subject line of "test" or "status."
Users who receive the worm and simply ignore or delete it will be able to avoid any damage.
MyDoom also mails itself out to addresses in the victim's computer and is clogging mail servers and degrading network performance at companies, experts said.
The worm appears to have a random sender's address and subject line and sometimes contains an error message such as "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII and has been sent as a binary attachment."
Microsoft also offered two $250,000 bounties last November for information leading to the capture of those responsible for the Blaster worm and SoBig virus.
