The Federal Trade Commission today had a US District Court issue a temporary restraining order halting the sale of RemoteSpy keylogger spyware.

According to the FTC's complaint, RemoteSpy spyware was sold to clients who would then secretly monitor unsuspecting consumers' computers. According to the FTC, the defendants provided RemoteSpy clients with detailed instructions explaining how to disguise the spyware as an innocuous file, such as a photo, attached to an email.

If this is true, it's one of the least consumer-friendly things we've ever heard Apple (AAPL) get behind.

According to Wired, Apple has quietly added anti-piracy technology to its new MacBook laptops. If you hook your laptop up to your digital TV, projector, external monitor, etc. -- which we do on a near-daily basis -- to watch movies, it will block you from playing movies you've paid for from iTunes unless you have a "High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection" compatible display.

The content industry has lobbied to force internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect users they suspect of engaging in copyright-infringing file-sharing after two warnings.

Digital rights activists have questioned the accuracy of the evidence gathered by industry against individuals and have said that the effects on a whole household of one user's actions are disproportionate.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Google's increasing dominance of internet search and advertising is the rising fear, justified or not, that Google's broadening reach is giving it unchecked power.

This scrutiny goes deeper than the skeptical eye that lawmakers and the US Justice Department have given to Google's proposed ad partnership with Yahoo. Many objections to that deal are financial, and surround whether Google and Yahoo could unfairly drive up online ad prices.

The truth is out there ... and so is your data. And just because there are no virtual black helicopters following you doesn't mean somebody somewhere doesn't have a bead on who you are and what you are doing.

If you think you're making a private call, or sending a discreet message, think again. Under an anti-terrorism law passed in late 2001 in the wake of the atrocities of September 11, details of every website visited and the transmission of every email sent and every phone call made in the UK can be retained and made available to authorities. This may give individuals privacy concerns but for telcos and internet service providers faced with the consequent storage and retrieval requirements, it is cause for financial concern.

Why did this woman, a reverend and a nurse, give over $400,000 to Nigerian email scammers? It started with just $100. The emails told her a long-lost relative with the same last name had $20.5 million caught up in the banks of Nigeria. Janella Spears just had to help with a few processing fees...

As she sent the money, more and more obstacles would arise, each needing more money to solve. Driven by blind greed, she sent over $400,000 to the scammers, draining her and her husband's savings, retirement fund, mortgaged the house and put a lien on the car.

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

Search giant Google is known for its "do no evil" approach. It goes to great lengths to protect the environment and it blocks sites on lists of known malware sites from being searched.

However, security researchers made an alarming discovery of a major slip-up for Google. The site had allowed a known malware site to buy text ads and was placing these ads on its partner pages through its Google AdWords service. The link was listed as “Antivirus XP 2008,” which led to the URL “antivirus-world-2009.com.” (Don't go there)

Search giant Google is known for its "do no evil" approach. It goes to great lengths to protect the environment and it blocks sites on lists of known malware sites from being searched.

However, security researchers made an alarming discovery of a major slip-up for Google. The site had allowed a known malware site to buy text ads and was placing these ads on its partner pages through its Google AdWords service. The link was listed as “Antivirus XP 2008,” which led to the URL “antivirus-world-2009.com.” (Don't go there)

Anyone who used Windows Vista in the early days of its launch will likely have not so fond recollections of driver issues that often led to frequent crashes and lockups. Video cards from NVIDIA were especially difficult to get working on Vista early on thanks to drivers that didn’t work well.

The U.S. military, with help from Seattle startup Delve Networks, has launched a video-sharing Web site for troops, their families and supporters, a year and a half after restricting access to YouTube and other video sites.

TroopTube, as the new site is called, lets people register as members of one of the branches of the armed forces, family, civilian Defense Department employees or supporters. Members can upload personal videos from anywhere with an Internet connection, but a Pentagon employee screens each for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.

The websites will be blocked as part of a government-sponsored trial of its filter technology that will start before Christmas and last six weeks.

The government has already identified 1300 websites that it wants to black list as part of the clean feeds scheme.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the sites mostly contained child pornography and other unwatned content, including images and videos.

If any pre-beta software ever called for a close look and benchmark testing, Windows 7 was it. I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. I started by examining Windows 7's innards--the kernel and other low-level structures--then slowly worked my way out to subsystem behavior and application runtime characteristics. Because one of the focal points of Microsoft's keynote presentation was improved performance, I looked for signs that Windows 7 would be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Windows Vista.

BRITISH GOVERNMENT plans to install black boxes at ISPs around the country, in order to log every email and web site visit its citizens make, are taking shape.

Shady Home Office officials have had talks with representatives from British based ISPs including BT, AOL Europe, O2 and BSkyB and told them of possible plans to implement the "black box" technology for storing all raw data being transmitted over the Web. It would all be funnelled into a giant central database controlled by the Government.

Transferring jpegs between jump drive or Nikon d40 or backup drive and Dell Inspiron 531s, via UBS, corruption in up to 50% of files. This is the worst!

Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish users of the popular anti-virus software AVG have discovered a nasty surprise. AVG has mistakenly identified a core Windows system file, user32.dll, as a Trojan, and summarily deletes it, b0rking Windows. AVG has announced they're working on a fix.

A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.

The study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) infiltrated the Storm network, which uses hijacked home PCs to relay much of the junk email you spend your days wading through while wondering 'who the hell responds to this stuff?'

Well. Now you know. One gullible idiot in 12,500,000 recipients. Or thereabouts.

A web programmer is the latest victim in a string of recent Google account shut-downs the company has been slow to remedy.

Axod, creator of the Ajax-powered chat webapp Mibbit, which we’ve written about previously, was apparently the victim of a malicious hacker last Thursday. While that sort of random attack could happen to anyone, it’s Google’s response that has Axod steamed.

“A company really shows its true colors when things go wrong, or when users need help,” he writes. “Google has shown that it simply doesn’t care.”

Some details from the Mibbit blog:

A web programmer is the latest victim in a string of recent Google account shut-downs the company has been slow to remedy.

Axod, creator of the Ajax-powered chat webapp Mibbit, which we’ve written about previously, was apparently the victim of a malicious hacker last Thursday. While that sort of random attack could happen to anyone, it’s Google’s response that has Axod steamed.

“A company really shows its true colors when things go wrong, or when users need help,” he writes. “Google has shown that it simply doesn’t care.”

Some details from the Mibbit blog:

We read, all too often, of various government and other (dis)organizations losing huge files with personal information in them. Would it not be nice if the people involved did not have to carry these files around with them?

Thanks for the memory

A mathematical trick may allow people to scatter their computer files across the world's hard disks ...

We read, all too often, of various government (and related) organizations losing huge files with plenty of VERY personal information in them.

Would it not be nice if the people involved did not have to carry these files around with them?

"Thanks for the memory

Sep 10th 2008
From Economist.com

A mathematical trick may allow people to scatter their computer files across the world's hard disks ...

...

Unlike many trojans, it doesn't rely on tricking the end user into clicking on a link or file to get installed. Rather, it spreads silently via websites that prey on unpatched vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system or in third-party applications, such as Adobe Flash and Apple's QuickTime media player.

"This particular trojan can get installed without even awareness of the end-user that they have agreed to anything or that anything has been installed," Sean Brady, manager of identity protection at RSA, said in an interview.

The details of about 500,000 online bank accounts and credit and debit cards have been stolen by a virus described as "one of the most advanced pieces of crimeware ever created".

The Sinowal trojan has been tracked by RSA, which helps to secure networks in Fortune 500 companies.

RSA said the trojan virus has infected computers all over the planet.

"The effect has been really global with over 2000 domains compromised," said Sean Brady of RSA's security division.

Four of the five computers that check voter registrations crashed Thursday night at the Adamsville Recreation Center in Atlanta, leaving more than a thousand people waiting long after the official closing time of 7 p.m. Hundreds were still in line at 11 p.m. as Atlantans watched them on the city’s late news broadcasts.

“This may be one of many places that this will happen,” said Lisa Borders, president of the Atlanta City Council. “The system is not adequate to accommodate the numbers of people that are going to be voting.”