Online crime groups reportedly are using Internet Explorer as an attack vector against a Windows Shell vulnerability. Several third-party patches have already surfaced for the flaw, and Microsoft plans to issue a patch October 10 in addition to prepatch workarounds already provided. Attackers use IE to trigger an integer overflow error.
According to Exploit Prevention Labs […]

A recent House/Senate conference report on the fiscal 2007 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill indicates that the DHS will receive less money for its IT programs in 2007 while facing closer oversight of its management of the programs. Language picked up from an earlier House report on IT oversight requires DHS’s CIO to approve […]

Songwriters and record companies in Britain reached an agreement over royalties for online music sales just as a copyright tribunal that would have decided the issue went into session. In the dispute, record companies were represented by the British Phonographic Industry, and Adam Singer represented songwriters. Singer heads the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society Ltd and the […]

A federal judge in California ruled against StreamCast Networks, developer of the Morpheus P2P application, saying that evidence of the company’s “objective of promoting infringement is overwhelming.”
Previous high-profile rulings have been handed down against Grokster and Kazaa, both of which have stopped distributing file-sharing software. Morpheus was the remaining hurdle in the recording industry’s legal […]

In an arrangement with Google, the University of California, Berkeley, will make available online considerable amounts of videotaped course content, including lectures, speeches, special events, and, in some cases, entire courses. UC Berkeley is the only institution with its own page on the Google Video Web site, and the course materials are available for public […]

The Complutense University of Madrid has joined Google’s controversial Book Search project, making it the first institution from a non-English-speaking country to take part. The university maintains the second-largest library in Spain, with 3 million volumes; only the National Library is larger. In addition to books in Spanish, the library also houses texts in French, […]

Responding to the large-scale exodus of students from computer science programs nationwide, the Georgia Institute of Technology is undertaking a fundamental redesign of the curriculum for computer science majors.
The new approach replaces the core curriculum with courses that follow “threads” and “roles.” Students choose two of eight threads of instruction and tailor their schedules around […]

Working under the auspices of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, the National Library of New Zealand and the British Library have developed a Web curator tool to archive online content. Because Web pages change constantly, efforts to preserve important online material present complex challenges for gathering and preserving that content. The new tool automates the […]

The British Library has called for a wide-scale revision of existing copyright law, which, it said, inadequately addresses digital content, putting too much control into the hands of content producers and owners. Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, took aim at digital rights management (DRM) technology in particular, saying that it allows content […]

According to new data from security firm Symantec, online criminals are increasingly turning to Web applications–rather than e-mail–and are motivated more by money than by bragging rights. In the early days of the Internet, many hackers engaged in such activities purely for the challenge or for the notoriety of successfully bypassing security measures. Today’s hackers, […]