Despite being pounded by the Holiday Blizzard of 2006, North American Aerospace Defense Command remains on alert for the nation and ready to track Santa Claus, according to NORAD officials. “NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center is schedule to begin operations as scheduled at 2 a.m. Christmas Eve,” said Michael Perini, Director of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command Public Affairs.

More than 800 Santa tracking volunteers will cycle through the center answering telephone calls and e-mails from children around the world wanting to get a fix on Santa Claus’ whereabouts.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command annually “tracks” the flight of Santa Claus and associated reindeer across the skies on Christmas Eve, posting sighting data and imagery of the icon on its website.

View: NoradSanta.org
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Google Translate is a translation service provided by Google to help you translate text or web pages to the language you desire. Some of the languages supported include English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, Japanese, etc.

If you want to translate a page from one language to another, here is the URL format:

http://www.google.com/translate?lan….websiteurl.com

where en|es is the language pair to translate from one language to the other (here it is English to Spanish), and www.websiteurl.com is the site you want to translate.

An interesting workaround to bypass your proxy server is to use Google Translate to translate the page you want to view from English to English, like this:

http://www.google.com/translate?lan….websiteurl.com

Here, since the origin language and the destination language are the same, Google Translate does not perform any translation and hence simply acts as a forwarder and forwards the page you want to view directly to you.

View: Full Story Via: O’Reilly Network

Even Santa isn’t safe from spyware and viruses.

With Christmas fast approaching, Santa Claus reached out for a little help from Stopbadware.org this week.

The consumer advocacy group said it was approached by an Incline Village, Nevada, man who has legally changed his name to Santa Claus, who asked them to help figure out why his Web site was being flagged by Google’s Web site filters.

It turned out that Santa’s Web site, Santaslink.net had been hacked.

View: Full Story Via: PCWorld

Computer security analysts are studying reports of a worm that may be circulating via a feature in Skype’s popular Voice over IP service.

Security vendor Websense said the worm spreads through Skype’s chat feature. Users receive a message asking them to download a file called “sp.exe.” The executable is a Trojan horse that can steal passwords. If a user runs the Trojan it triggers another set of code to spread itself.

The first infected PCs appeared in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in Korea, Websense reported on its blog today. It said it was still investigating the issue.

View: Full Story Via: PC World

F-Secure has spotted an outbreak of a Javascript exploit that uses flaws in Apple’s Quicktime to grab MySpace profile data.

It’s not easy to explain, but it’s a form of phishing: you visit what looks like a normal MySpace page, but the links have been altered to take you off-site (though that still looks like MySpace). There, a Quicktime .mov is downloaded to your system and runs a Javascript file that changes your MySpace profile.

The aim: to steal lots, and lots of MySpace login details.

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News source: Guardian Unlimited

Security vendor McAfee has predicted that the increasing popularity of video on the web will make it a future target for hackers.

The use of video formats on social-networking sites — such as YouTube — will attract malware writers, the company claims. As people become more reluctant to open email attachments from anonymous sources, hackers will target users who open media files instead.

The functionality of online video, which includes pop-up ads and URL redirects, will become “ideal tools of destruction for malware writers,” claimed McAfee in a statement. “As video-sharing networks on the web proliferate, the potential capture of a large audience will incite malware writers to exploit these channels for monetary gain.”

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News source: ZDNet

Years ago it was hackers who were doing it for the bragging rights, now it’s criminals. The motivation has changed, hacking is now profitable and there’s so much money to be made with very little risk to the actual hackers.

Interestingly enough IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is still being utilized to start attacks and for communications amongst the bad guys. There are more secure means of communications available but they are still using IRC. They are not worried about being caught they are blatantly doing these things out in the open. Though the good ones are communicating less which makes it harder to track them. Their focus has shifted to make money in which case they naturally don’t want to make a name for themselves, so there’s less bragging involved, less communication.

Over the past year or two we have seen a tremendous amount of acceleration of adaptability on the part of the hackers, the minute there’s a new security tool out there, the bad guys find a way around it. Spam is a good example, nobody has been able to stop it. Recently you see spam that comes in form of distorted or disguised images, so it’s even harder to filter it. It’s amazing how fast the bad guys are staying ahead of us.

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News source: Hack Report

One in five American parents believe their children are spending too much time on the Internet, although most say the online activities haven’t affected grades either way.

In a study to be released today by the University of Southern California, 21 percent of adult Internet users with children believe the children are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that’s less than the 49 percent who complain their children watch too much TV.

About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades haven’t gone up or down since they got Internet access.

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News source: chron.com

Criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.

The number of “spam” messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of 10 e-mails sent worldwide, according to U.S. email security company Postini.

As Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.

“E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam,” said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

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News source: CNN