Apple adds special 20-inch iMac for educational institutions

During these difficult economic times, schools are feeling the budget pinch as much as any other group. So Apple's decision to begin selling a 2.0GHz 20-inch iMac to educational institutions (PDF link) for $899 couldn't come at a better time. The 20-inch model replaces the 17-inch polycarbonate iMac for education, which Apple was found to be still selling only a few weeks ago.

The iMac includes the same 1,066MHz system bus as the current consumer models, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a 160GB SATA hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, a slot-loading SuperDrive, and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processing.

The model is only available to educational institutions, not for individual students or faculty. For everyone else, the entry-level iMac is a 2.66GHz 20-inch model with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive—it runs $1,149 for students, or $1,199 for the general public.

The new education model will be available in four weeks.

source: tech.yahoo.com

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Password Stealers Sit on Popular Download Sites

You might already know that it's easy for the bad guys to buy malware kits and ready-made digital nasties on black market Web sites. But some tools are even easier to pick up, such as a blatant IM password stealer available on a major download site.

A simple search can turn up a keylogger program available for download on numerous sites, including PCWorld.com, with the idea that the tools are offered for personal use to catch someone messing around on your own PC, or perhaps for concerned parents. That may be a thin veneer, but Christopher Boyd posted on the SpywareGuide Greynets Blog the he came across a tool availble as a free download at the oft-visited download.com that exists solely to steal passwords for IM accounts.

The app presents a fake IM app and captures usernames and passwords that are typed into the window, according to Boyd. It's a bit of a stretch to think of how such a tool might be meant for personal use to catch snoops on your own computer, especially with a description like "This is perfect if a visitor is coming round who wants to access their IM account."

Boyd's coverage caught my eye as support for the smart-surfer advice to always assume that any login entered on any public computer is compromised and should have its password changed as soon as you're back at a trusted PC. This tool alone had been downloaded 18,214 times when I checked its listing.

source:tech.yahoo.com

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Sony PS3 Outsells Nintendo Wii in Japan

Sony Corp's PlayStation3 outsold Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii in March for the first time in 16 months in Japan thanks to the hot new PS3 titles from Sega Sammy and Capcom, a game magazine publisher said.

Video game sales are closely watched for hints on how soon Sony can turn around its struggling game operations and how much growth momentum Nintendo has left.

Domestic sales of the PS3 came to 146,948 units in the five weeks through March 29, compared with 99,335 units of the Wii and 43,172 units of Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360, Enterbrain said on Monday.

The latest versions of popular action adventure series from Sega Sammy Holdings Inc and Capcom Co Ltd—"Ryu Ga Gotoku 3" and "Resident Evil 5," respectively—came in first and second in game software sales in the period, helping drive PS3 demand.

Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Etsuko Tamura said that despite its strong showing in March, the PS3 is unlikely to threaten the Wii's global dominance as more software makers are focusing development resources on the Wii, a console with the largest user base among the current generation of hardware.

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New Malware Specifically Targets Firefox

The malware resembles DNSChanger, a common DNS hijacking threat, but operates differently. Instead of hacking the registry to change DNS, the new variant throws a DLL into the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components directory and therefore runs inside the browser.

This is not a vulnerability in Firefox in any sense; in order for this to happen the user has to run a malicious program as Administrator or some other privileged account. But it does show that some malware authors see enough potential in Firefox to write special malware for it. The use of a DLL does make the malware specific to Windows, although it may be possible to write versions for other platforms as well.

Like DNSChanger it intercepts certain operations, like search requests, and redirects them through a Ukrainian host previously used by DNSChanger.

A second piece of Firefox adware came bundled with the installer for a 3rd party Firefox plugin called PlayMP3z. The terms of service agreement that everyone just clicks through explicitly permits the software. It's called Foxicle and it generates popup and popunder ads. Once again this isn't Firefox's fault; you chose to install it, you got what you asked for.

Success for the early entries in the Firefox malware market could set a signal for other IE-only players that it's time to go cross-platform.

Source: Yahoo! News

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IBM, Mayo Form Open-source Health IT Consortium

Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic have launched a new open-source consortium focused on natural language processing (NLP), in an effort to help doctors share diagnosis and treatment information.

The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium, announced Thursday, will focus on technology to allow for large-scale data aggregation, allowing doctors to mine medical records in their specialties to find similar cases to study before making difficult diagnoses or before determining treatment.

Doctors will be able to review any physician notes on similar cases, but no personally identifiable patient information will be available in the database, IBM and Mayo said.

With the launch of the consortium, the two organizations have released two projects under open-source licenses, one focused on clinical notes and one on pathology reports. The consortium is using the Apache license, version 2.0.

The organizations are inviting others to help develop NLP tools. "By making it an open-source initiative, we hope to enable wide use of these NLP tools so medical advancements can happen faster and more efficiently," Dr. Christopher Chute, a Mayo Clinic bioinformatics expert and senior consultant on the project, said in a statement.

Two other health care organizations, Seattle Group Health and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, plan to participate in the consortium, and other participants are welcome, IBM and Mayo said.

As more health care providers adopt electronic health records, it will become increasingly important to be able to search those records, the organizations said. Mayo and IBM have developed a system for extracting information from more than 25 million text-based clinical notes based on IBM's open-source Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, they said.

The two organizations have also developed a system to extract cancer diseases characteristics from pathology reports, allowing for the computation of cancer stage.

"Large-scale information extraction from the clinical narrative is a vital component in advancing translational research and patient care," Guergana Savova, a medical informatics specialist and Mayo's lead on the project, said in a statement. "It 'unlocks' the clinical textual data that resides in huge repositories. Such technology would allow for large-scale data aggregation, analyses and usage -- just imagine the power of data from millions of patients."

The organizations have not yet determined what NLP projects to work on next, an IBM spokeswoman said. "The goal is to first get feedback from participating institutions on the initial project, and then expand," she said.

Source: Yahoo! Tech

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Skype Fuels FCC Fight for an Open Wireless Internet

Skype's free iPhone application is stirring up debate again. Available on Apple's App Store on March 31, the app first stirred debate after being blocked by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. Now Skype is fueling debate on network neutrality.

Skype's Voice over Internet Protocol app gives users Skype calling and instant messaging on Apple iPhones and second-generation iPod touches. The application, which saw more than one million downloads in the first two days after being made available, allows users to make calls on the iPhone over a Wi-Fi connection, but not on AT&T's 3G cellular network.

The limitation, which has been formally imposed by Apple's App Store policies, has caused groups such as the Free Press to ask the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether Apple and AT&T are breaking federal rules. The Free Press wants the FCC to clarify whether its Internet Policy Statement for an open Internet applies to wireless service providers who also offer broadband Internet access service.

Competition at Core

The Free Press complaint comes after a senior AT&T official was quoted in USA Today as saying that AT&T expects its vendors to not facilitate the services of competitors. That statement indicates it won't be developers who have control over wireless innovations, but wireless carriers through restrictive language used to control the use of applications and services on their network, according to the Free Press.

The Free Press says the mobile Internet should be as free as the Internet users access from fixed locations.

"This issue is not new -- it is simply unresolved," said Ben Scott, policy director at the Free Press. "Wise voices at the FCC have long said that the Internet Policy Statement applies to wireless. As more and more consumers begin to access the Internet wirelessly, it is critical that the FCC clarifies that online consumer protections that prohibit blocking are the same regardless of how we access the Web."

Analyst Michael Gartenberg said carriers may have to come to terms with VoIP applications such as Skype's becoming competitors, but added that in this case the developer may have made the decision.

"It seems like app functionality is determined by the app developer," Gartenberg said. "(There are) lots of reasons why Skype might not have wanted to use 3G for calls."

Consumer Rights and Choice

Scott, however, sees the situation as a step back for consumer rights. "These limitations fly in the face of the consumer rights contained in the Internet Policy Statement, and the commission should reaffirm that the Internet Policy Statement applies to wireless networks," Scott said in his letter to FCC Acting Chairman Michael Copps.

Skype is supporting Free Press' actions. As long as consumers are not harming the network, they should be entitled to use the products they pay for, Christopher Libertelli, a senior director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype, told The Wall Street Journal.

Source : Yahoo! Tech

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