China Denies Hack Attack

China has denied involvement in hacking US environment monitoring satellites.

Last week the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a draft report about several incidents where US satellites were interfered with in 2007 and 2008.

The Commission did not say that the attacks were traced back to China, but it did cite China’s military as a prime suspect, due to the similarity of the techniques used with “authoritative Chinese military writings” on disabling satellite control.

The hackers gained access to the satellites on at least four occasions through a ground station in Norway. The unauthorised access lasted for between two and 12 minutes. While the attacks did no real damage, they did demonstrate that it is possible to hijack satellites, which is a worrying realisation when military satellites are taken into consideration.

China has a bad reputation throughout the world for alleged cyber attacks, often being the first to blame when a major attack has been discovered. The US has not been the only target either, with alleged attacks against Canada and France having been reported earlier this year.

“[The US] has always been viewing China with colored lenses. This report is untrue and has ulterior motives. It’s not worth a comment,” said Hong Lei, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, according to Reuters.

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Websites ‘Leaking’ User Info To Other Firms

Many top websites share their visitors’ names, usernames or other personal information with their partners without alerting users and, in some cases, without knowing they’re doing it, according to a new study from Stanford University.

Many websites “leak” usernames to third-party advertising networks by including usernames in URLs that the ad networks can see in referrer headers, said the study, released Tuesday by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. While there’s a debate in legal circles whether usernames are personal information, there’s a growing consensus among computer scientists that Web-based companies can use usernames to identify their owners, said Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who led the study.

“The vast majority of usernames are unique,” he said. “Given the prevalence of social networking, often times, once you have a username for a social network, you then also have a person’s real name, possibly a photo, possibly more.”

Other websites share first names, email addresses and other information with advertising or other partners, Mayer said at a privacy conference in Washington. Those identifiers “get associated not just with what you’re doing right now, but get associated with what you’ve done in the past, and what Web browsing activity you may have in the future,” he said.

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Defense Dept. IT Is ‘Stone Age’

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a stinging critique of the Defense Department’s IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement.

Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference in Washington,DC, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.

“Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.

Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.

The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.

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Data Center Emissions Concerns Citizens

Some residents of Quincy, Washington, the location of massive data centers operated by Microsoft, Yahoo and others, are growing concerned about pollution from backup diesel generators at the data centers, and on Wednesday they’ll have the chance to discuss the issue.

The Washington State Department of Ecology is conducting a public meeting on Wednesday evening in Quincy for residents to voice their concerns over on an application from Dell for permission to use 28 generators powered by diesel engines.

Quincy, a town of around 6,000 people, will have 141 back-up generators once those belonging to Dell, and others that have been permitted or are in line for permission, are put in place. While the generators are designed to be used only in the rare case of an electricity outage, the data center operators turn them on regularly for testing.

On average, the companies are permitted to turn on each generator for 103 hours per year. If they use that maximum running time, data center generators in Quincy would run for the equivalent of 40 hours per day on average.

The Department of Ecology says diesel emissions, when breathed in, have been known to create or worsen a variety of health problems, including heart disease, asthma and
lung cancer.

Some residents, including former mayor Patty Martin, wonder about the health impact of the diesel emissions on the community. She thinks the generators should use the same types of devices to reduce emissions that are required by other Washington cities such as Olympia and Moses Lake.

Such devices aren’t necessary in Quincy, said Karen Wood, section supervisor for air quality in Eastern Washington for the Department of Ecology. Because Olympia is a much bigger city it already has high diesel emissions from other sources, so a new data center there was required to reduce its emissions, she said.

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EBS Coming To Your Smartphone

In the event of local and/or nationwide disasters, wireless carriers will soon begin alerting the public by sending emergency SMS text messages to mobile phones.

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have all agreed to a participate in this new Emergency Broadcast System alert method. It  will initially be rolled  out in New York and Washington, D.C., later this year, and nationwide next year, in April at the earliest.

The emergency text messages will cover public safety threats, Amber Alerts for missing children, and messages from the president, the New York Times reports. Messages will be free for customers, who can opt out of them all except the presidential messages.

We don’t expect the alerts to be frequent,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the Times. “They will be reserved for when they are truly needed, for tornadoes or for disasters like 9/11.”

Genachowski said the emergency texts will look different from ordinary messages, making them more difficult for hackers to infiltrate or fake. They’ll probably appear directly on the screen, along with a special vibration or other signal. No word on how closely they’ll resemble the tone and color bars of the current Emergency Broadcast System for televisions, or whether users can expect “this is a test” messages on a regular basis.

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AT&T’s iPhone 4 Beats Verizon’s

In the phone wars between the two big carriers, it looks like AT&T wins this round. The iPhone 4 on AT&T’s network downloaded data twice as fast, on average, as the iPhone on Verizon Wireless, according to thousands of recent field tests in five U.S. cities performed by Metrico Wireless, an independent mobile device performance evaluation firm.

Metrico’s tests looked at several other variables, however, and found the average Web page load time was nearly the same on iPhone 4 on both networks, a Metrico official said.

Also, when the iPhone 4 was in a moving vehicle, the AT&T model successfully finished about 10% more download session than Verizon’s. But when the iPhones were stationary, the Verizon iPhone had a 10% better success rate in uploading data than the AT&T iPhone, Metrico said.

Metrico did not reveal actual time measurements for any of its results, including the data downloads and uploads or Web page loading times, prior to publication of its full study.

Some of Metrico’s findings are at odds with several smaller spot reports conducted last month that found Verizon’s iPhone performed better on several criteria. But a Metrico official noted that those quick studies were based on only a handful of test samples, often in a single city, including San Francisco, where AT&T’s coverage for the iPhone has been consistently criticized.

AT&T admitted more than a year ago that it had network problems in downtown San Francisco and Manhattan and had begun infrastructure updates.  Read More….

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