Remember those episodes of ‘Masters of the Universe’ where the floppy-haired hero, He-Man had to team up with arch-nemesis Skeletor in order to defeat a greater evil that threatened the planet of Eternia? Nope… well anyway, even ignoring the ‘80s nostalgia the basic message is that sometimes the pressure to kill off a bigger rival leads to enemies joining forces; something that’s happening now in China, as two OS developers join up to hunt down Microsoft.

He-Man Fact: he has nothing to do with operating systems. Chinese or otherwise.

Aiming to build a domestic OS brand that could challenge Microsoft’s dominant Windows platform, China Standard Software and the National University of Defense Technology have signed a strategic partnership to launch an operating system brand known as ‘NeoKylin’. It will be used for national defense and all sectors of the country’s economy. Continue Reading

The thorny subject of how to tackle cybercrime across Europe has reared its head again with the director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, weighing on in the topic of digital ne’er-do-wells. He’s recommended a course of action that would get regular web users to get directly involved in tracking down cybercrime gangs.

Europol ain't gonna take no more... well they won't after the proper legislation gets through.

A ground breaking experiment in “crowd sourcing”, as Wainwright terms it, will soon be necessary as the extent of the continent’s cybercrime problem is often underestimated in the EU. Continue Reading

Computer programmer, free software advocate and noted beard fan, GNU founder Richard Stallman has claimed that the Google Chrome OS is a bit of a threat to your legal rights.

Richard Stallman.

The Free Software Foundation founder believes that rather than “cloud computing”, Chrome OS encourages “careless computing”, and highlights the fact that the rules over what information police can or can’t seize without a search warrant change depending on where your data is stored. Continue Reading

Microsoft is readying one last big ‘Patch Tuesday’ before Christmas, with flaws in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SharePoint and Exchange all getting a fix.

Record breaking year for Microsoft patches.

The company said in a security patch advance notification that all but one of the 17 updates are rated ‘important’ or ‘critical’. This has been the busiest year ever for Microsoft’s flaw fixing team, which has issued a total of 106 software bulletins since January. Continue Reading

In a move that will no doubt appease StarCraft II devotees, the creators of the series – Blizzard – has announced that it’s suspended or banned several players for cheating or using hack programs to play the game.

Blizzard takes StarCraft II cheats down to Chinatown.

“We recently issued a new round of account suspensions and bans to StarCraft II players who were in violation of the Battle.net Terms of Use for cheating and/or using hack programs while playing,” wrote Blizzard on the StarCraft II website. Continue Reading

It seems that any security firm worth their salt these days spends half their time on Facebook discovering faults. It certainly seems that way from the press releases we get in most days. Anyway, today it’s BitDefender’s turn and its researchers claim that one fifth of Facebook users are exposed to malware contained in their news feeds on a daily basis.

BitDefender said it had detected infections contained in the news feeds of around 20% of Facebook users, though Facebook said it already had steps in place to identify and remove malware-containing links. “Once we detect a phony message, we delete all instances of that message across the site,” the site said in a statement.

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Awkwardly named but very dangerous, the Stuxnet virus is causing a few headlines today with the news that the malware is being traded on the black market and “could have fallen in to the hands of cyber criminals”.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into Iran’s nuclear power stations…

To be fair, we would have thought that a dangerous piece of software available on the black market would only fall ‘into the wrong hands’. Though maybe there are some charity workers and war heroes operating on the black market as well. Who knows. Anyway… on to the story. Continue Reading

This might get a few Android acolytes all paranoid – a JavaScript vulnerability in the mobile OS has been found which allows some less-than-virtuous websites to retrieve data from a smartphone’s SD card.

Spot of bother for Android users ahoy.

The discovery comes courtesy of security expert Thomas Cannon who, instead of playing five-a-side, shooting ducks or collecting antiques in his spare time, used his downtime to investigate his hunch that there may be a significant fault in Android’s armoury. The vulnerability, he said, is present because of a “combination of factors”, and in a recent blog post he listed those factors as follows: Continue Reading

The help of governments across Europe is becoming all too familiar round these parts. However, sidestepping financial bombshells for the moment, the news we’re concentrating on today is the recommendation for the continent’s collected government front benches to back plans for a “vaccination scheme” to clean up the huge numbers of PCs hijacked by cyber criminals.

Vaccines – never fun but must be done. (Note: That rhymes and you know it rhymes!)

The research document which is the source of this suggestion reported that in Europe about 5-10% of PCs on broadband net links were hijacked and became part of a botnet in 2009. Professor Michel Van Eeten from the Delft University of Technology led the OECD-backed research. Continue Reading

Big budget, all-action summer movies where the world ends tend to have one unifying theme. No, not the enduring fortitude of the human race in grave circumstances. Nope, instead it’s that when the world is in peril, when no one else can help… every other nation on the planet kicks back and hopes America will sort out those nasty aliens/monsters/dangerous weather cycles etc.

‘The Prez sez your internet is being turned off whether you like it or not.’

With all this brainwashing going on for generations, it’s no wonder that most Americans think that their President should have the right to switch off the most of the world’s internet if he deems it necessary. They want an internet kill switch in the Oval Office, and they want it now according to research conducted by information technology company Unisys. Continue Reading