The Morningwood News

The Denver Post
By Kimberly S. Johnson

There are an increasing number of software tools available to keep personal online activities safe from hackers and spyware programs.

But even if a user has firewalls, up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware programs installed on a PC, there are other ways for your personal information to make it into the wrong hands.

“Applications leave traces of information behind. That information can be telling of certain things,” said Mike Irwin, chief operating officer for Webroot Software Inc. in Boulder. “For people that know where to look, it provides a distinct visibility into specific aspects of computer usage by the user.”

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Yahoo 7 News
AAP

A 16-year-old schoolboy has cracked the federal government’s $84-million internet porn filter.

Tom Wood, a Year 10 student, told News Ltd newspapers it took him about 30 minutes to break through the government’s new filter, released on Tuesday.

Tom, who attends a Melbourne private school, can deactivate the filter after several clicks.

His method ensures the software’s toolbar icon is not deleted.

He can leave his parents believing the filter is still working.

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By Troy Wolverton
Mercury News

You might think that the face of one of the hottest areas in gaming right now is a young male in his 20s who owns the latest supercharged gaming system from Microsoft or Sony - or both.

But you’d be wrong.

Instead, the epitome of the new-era gamer is a woman in her late 30s or early 40s who plays on an average PC.

Yes, the video game industry seems to have been turned on its head.

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Yahoo News
InfoWorld
By Robert McMillan

 San Francisco (IDGNS) - Internet service providers in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire.

TeliaSonera AB, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. “Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,” said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.

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Chicago Tribune
By Associated Press

SAN DIEGO - The Navy has removed a video from YouTube shot aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan because it shows sailors using safety equipment inappropriately, a Navy spokesman said.

The video, titled “Women of CVN76: ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much,’” was shot by an airman and not sanctioned by the ship’s commanders or the Navy. It includes fleeting shots of the door to the ship’s nuclear power plant and of a sailor dancing while wearing a full-body radiation suit.

Both could alarm Navy nuclear-propulsion officials, who are sensitive about security. Under Pentagon rules, images of any part of a ship’s nuclear plant cannot be shown to foreign nationals.

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The Columbus Dispatch
By Penny Moore
WBNS-10TV

A lieutenant with the Clinton Township Division of Fire resigned yesterday after his superiors viewed a video that showed him and several other firefighters persuading a woman to bare her breasts in the firehouse.

Douglas E. Brown, a 22-year veteran of the division, submitted his resignation to the Clinton Township Board of Trustees last night. It was effective immediately.

Earlier, when contacted by WBNS-TV (Channel 10), Brown had denied knowing anything about the incident, even though he is clearly visible in the video. Last night, however, after the station aired parts of the video, Brown acknowledged his participation.

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InfoWorld
By Mike Elgan
Computerworld

Come on, come all for the freakiest iPhone oddities from around the globe

The old carnival freak show is dead and gone (or has at least moved to reality television and daytime talk shows). But in our hearts, we still long to gawk at the strange and the bizarre.

That’s why iPhone culture is so entertaining. The hype around Apple’s first cell phone — sometimes generating enthusiasm bordering on insanity — has produced some of the wackiest, nuttiest, and, yes, freakiest news stories ever witnessed in the history of technology.

So prepare to be amazed, ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and take a front-row seat for Steve Jobs’ unintended sideshow attractions.

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Wired
By Noah Shachtman

For years, the military has been warning that soldiers’ blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material that’s far more potentially harmful than blogs do.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

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International Herald Tribune
By Toby Sterling
Associated Press

EINDHOVEN, the Netherlands: It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-size plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near the German city of Hannover.

An engineering marvel at the time but instantly recognizable today, the compact disc turns 25 years old on Friday. But in an age of iPods and MP3 players, the CD’s future is increasingly in doubt.

Those first CDs contained the Alpine symphony by Strauss and would sound equally sharp if played today, according to Royal Philips Electronics, which jointly developed the CD with Sony.

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Newsvine.com
By Claus Jacobsen

Facts are not what they used to be. It is supposed to be the largest open source encyclopaedia, free for all to use and edit for the general enlightenment of people all over the world, but Wikipedia is very easily abused by groups and organizations that want to control freedom of information.

The Wikipedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia, uses Wikipedia Scanner, a piece of software that allows the people behind the open source project to tie millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

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AlterNet
Matt Stoller

There’s a new tool out there that lets you search the destination IP addresses for people editing wikipedia entries. Arthur Bergman found that folks at Fox News’s IP address were editing Al Franken’s entry. Apparently, Fox News propagandists deleted Franken’s statement that Fox News’s legal case against Franken was “”literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.” The Fox News users also added a ‘liberal’ adjective when characterizing the NPR show ‘Fresh Air’.

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Conra Costa Times
By David Morrill

Gripe all you want about “Madden NFL 08″ being the only video game released this year with the current NFL roster.

It doesn’t matter.

As certain as the sun rising from the east and setting in the west is the fact that when Madden ‘08 hits the store shelves today, it will instantly rise to become one of the year’s top sellers.

This year’s version will be available on 10 different gaming systems and will range in price from about $30 to $60.

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