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October 20th, 2009UncategorizedCybercrime spans the entire globe, and, until now, there's been little collaboration between nations when it comes to combating international networks of hackers.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the newly formed European Electronic Crime Task Force -- a Rome-headquartered effort between the United States and the European Union. The group is backed by the muscle of the U.S. Secret Service, an Italian cybercrime police unit, and the Italian post office Poste Italiane SpA (PISA). What does a mail system have to do with fighting crime, you ask? Well, many people use PISA to deposit paychecks and pay bills, both online and in person. The Wall Street Journal reports that the post office does more business in its banking and insurance divisions than it does mailing letters and packages. -
October 19th, 2009UncategorizedVeracode Inc., provider of Application Risk Management Platform, announced expansion of its SecurityReview® cloud-based subscription service to support mobile applications. With more than 100,000 mobile applications already in the market and millions of mobile users accessing critical business data, the security risk posed by these applications is staggering. Veracode announced immediate availability for Windows Mobile with near term support for other platforms such as RIM BlackBerry, Google Android and Apple iPhone. Veracode's SecurityReview is the first solution to enable enterprises and software vendors to assess the security risk of mobile applications before they are shipped or deployed to combat the growing number of data breaches and compliance failures.
Enterprises are increasingly transacting critical data with customers and remote workers through mobile applications, yet the security of these applications goes largely untested. Source code for mobile applications is rarely available, as most software is written by third parties, and is insufficient in finding vulnerabilities such as backdoors, malicious code or flaws introduced by third party libraries and components. Veracode provides the only solution to assess binary code – the way attackers see it – enabling organizations to apply a common, holistic approach to secure both their mobile and server applications regardless of whether they are internally developed, purchased from a commercial vendor, outsourced or open source.
The Verified by Veracode Software Ratings Programme is a quality indicator for the security level of applications and software components. By expanding this Programme to cover mobile software, providers of mobile applications can now protect their brand and platform with a consistent and automated security verification Programme for mobile applications developed internally or by third parties. Organizations who have achieved "Verified by Veracode" status have made reasonable efforts to demonstrate that they have taken due care to ensure the security of their applications and their software has been assessed against industry standards for software assurance.
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October 18th, 2009Uncategorized
It's the catechism that vexes chargeless accessible antecedent software advocates and bartering competitors about the globe: Why is Microsoft Office so difficult to dislodge from its branch aloft the IT heap? Is it the absolute bundling deals? The abysmal Software Assurance entrenchment? Steve Ballmer's backroom accord with the devil?
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October 17th, 2009Uncategorized
San Diego-based Nirvanix, a provider of cloud-based storage services, announced this morning that the firm has scored a win as part of a NASA mission, to store a copy of all of the data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in its services. According to Nirvanix, its CloudNAS network attacked storage gateway is being used by NASA to store a copy of all of the data which will be acquired by the LRO. Financial impact of the deal was not disclosed. Nirvanix said that its cloud-based NAS product will be used to replicate data from a project team as Arizona State University, allowing the project managers at ASU to worry about other issues aside from offsite storage. -
October 16th, 2009Uncategorized
Irvine-based HireRight, a provider of online, employment screening services and software, announced this morning that the firm has upgraded its HireRight Enterprise offering. According to HireRight, the software now supports country-specific logic to handle employment screening in different countries, complying with regulations in those countries, in addition to expanded tracking of applicants' job history. HireRight offers a software-as-a-service offering used by companies to run employee background checks. -
October 15th, 2009UncategorizedIt should go without saying that we absolutely love the Net. The Web of Intertubes (forget the educational purposes) allows everyone to feel a little bit better about themselves, if only through pointing out other people's foibles, insecurities, and moments of weakness. And then mercilessly making fun of them.
Web users constantly post regretful comments that result in firings, arrests, and, at the least, massive embarrassment. Well, just for all you Info-Superhighway rubber-neckers, there's a site called Oversharers.com that catalogs those moments for the entire world to see, and ridicule.One such TMI moment, from "nattypoo," reveals that he "has the urge to sneeze and vomit at the same time. Body, please proceed with caution. Innocent bystanders, grab your Gallagher tarps." Predictably, the site's offerings are currently dominated by body humor (with a heavy dose of regurgitative tales) and tweets, which, with their 140-character-or-less limit, are perfect for inane and nauseating ramblings.
While Oversharers.com has some work to do before it passes AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com or TextsFromLastNight.com on our list of favorite sites that detail goofy and inappropriate behavior, it can at least rest easy knowing that, with Twitter and Facebook around, it will never run out of material. [From: Oversharers.com] -
October 14th, 2009UncategorizedA complete prototype system for measuring vehicle lateral position has been set up during the course of this master’s thesis project. In the development of the software, images acquired from a back-ward looking video camera mounted on the roof of the vehicle were used.
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October 12th, 2009Uncategorized
The need for customized electronic health records software may be pricing out some hospitals, according to a collaborative study done by a Harvard Medical School doctor and an MIT Sloan School of Management professor.
The study, which will be published in the journal Management Science, found that because privacy laws differ across states, EHR software often has to be customized to account for these differences. This is a potential barrier for many hospitals, because customization costs money.
States that had unique health privacy laws in place experienced a 20 to 30 percent reduction in EHR adoption rates, Catherine Tucker, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor and the study's coauthor said.
"What we found is that when we were talking to hospitals, a lot of the costs came because these state laws are very different and so it meant that a vendor couldn't sell a standardized solution," she told The Boston Globe. "Any time you mention customization and software, it gets costly."
However, there is one potential way to hold costs down for hospitals that can't afford commercial solutions: Using open-source software.
For instance, the EHR package built by the Veteran's Administration using taxpayer dollars is free and open source, although hospitals will need to spend money and time to customize it to fit their needs.
In addition, West Virginia senator John J. Rockefeller last month introduced Senate Bill 90, the Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009, which would help promote open source EHR and offer grants to hospitals willing to implement it.
Medsphere, a company that has helped commercialized VistA, sells its EHR software "for comparative pennies on the dollar," CNET reported. Proprietary systems comparable to what Medsphere offers typically run between $10 and $20 million dollars.
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August 3rd, 2009UncategorizedAnnoying shoulder lurkers have always been the bane of public readers, even if the reading material is as innocuous as a newspaper. So-called "shoulder surfers" can be a significant problem, though, for office workers and military personnel whose computer screens may display valuable confidential information.
Oculis Labs focuses on developing "technologies for protecting the contents of your computer monitor" from such eavesdropping spies. Founder and President Bill Anderson recently spoke with The Baltimore Sun about two of his company's current products, and how exactly they can hide your screen from nosy neighbors. -
August 2nd, 2009Uncategorized
In late Jaunary, the bookmark-sharing website ma.gnolia suffered a "catastrophic" failure that took the service offline. The data could not be recovered. Founder Larry Halff decided to shutter the service, but according to a message left on the front page of the site, Ma.gnolia will re-open as a "by-invitation community bookmarking service" by the of the summer.
