Eeyore's News and view

And what do you think they can do to you and will do to you in the future when they are done testing this?
Children tracked by sat nav to stop bad behaviour
The project is being trialled across the six North Wales counties to tackle anti-social behaviour on school buses.
Pupils will use a picture swipe card to clock on and off the bus allowing parents to keep a closer check on their child via a website.
It will help deal with a number of issues including truancy, drivers reporting and identifying ill-behaved children and monitoring a child's whereabouts in the event of them going missing or a bus breakdown.
The scheme include 'Bus Angels' aged 14 and above, who covertly report incidents of bad behaviour,
Peter Daniels, transport manager at Denbighshire County Council said: "The main aims are to support schools, drivers, parents and pupils on school buses to improve behaviour and enable them to understand the consequences of some of the things they do.
"I have to say in north east Wales we don't really see trouble and misbehaviour, but in the afternoon some of the pupils can be jolly and minor anti-social behaviour can occur, or from time to time something more serious.
"It's very much like the scheme in London where an Oystercard user boards a bus and taps in and then taps out when he or she gets off.
"Using GPS tracking, parents will know exactly where their pupils are on the bus."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5205662/Children-tracked-by-sat-nav-to-stop-bad-behaviour.html

Cybergangs use cheap labor to break codes on social sites
SEATTLE — It's become the new front in cybercrime: scams and identity-theft programs that attack e-mail accounts and users of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
To carry out many of these automated attacks, cybercriminals first must overcome "captchas," the distorted letters and characters that users of an e-mail or social-networking account are required to type to complete certain online forms. For years, captchas have helped to stop or bog down automated programs aimed at creating, among other things, e-mail accounts that promote scams such as fake computer virus protection and bogus accounts on social websites that can be used to collect personal information on legitimate users.
Now, security specialists say, a growing number of captcha-breaking groups are using real people to type in captcha responses for cybergangs around the world. This is allowing the gangs to create fake e-mail and social-network accounts by the tens of thousands — and use them as the starting point for a variety of cyberscams spread by e-mail and instant messages.
MySpace and Facebook say that, so far, they have kept such attacks largely in check. But security researchers say that as long as captchas are a key security feature on networking websites, cyberattacks on such sites are likely to intensify.
"We shouldn't have any illusions about captchas," says Sergei Shevchenko, a virus hunter at Internet security firm PC Tools. "If the professionals want to break in, they'll do it."
For social-networking sites that have exploded in popularity during the past two years — Facebook now claims more than 200 million members — the stakes are enormous.
The social networks, scrambling to build audiences and ad revenue, want to avoid e-mail's fate: Today, 90% of all e-mail traffic is spam, and companies across the nation pour vast resources into keeping legitimate e-mail viable by filtering away spam.
Meanwhile, cybergangs recognize the opportunity to get fresh mileage from tried-and-true scams. They are repurposing ruses perfected in e-mail spamming to try to fool members of social networks into accepting — or even spreading — ads for fake products, data-stealing programs and other harmful computer bugs.
"Social-networking sites are a viral marketer's dream," says Paul Wood, analyst at Message Labs-Symantec, an Internet security firm. "The potential to tap into a huge community of like-minded individuals is enormous."
A penny at a time
Captchas first appeared in 2001. They are based on the idea that humans — and not automated programs used by cybercriminals — can distinguish a word or group of characters shown as a warped graphical representation and then type them on an online form to gain access to a protected Web page.
Social networks typically require captchas for creating accounts and sending private messages that include Web links.
Captchas represent the first line of deterrence against automated programs, called bots, which typically are assembled in large groups known as botnets.
Bots are the little engines that propel online criminal activities. Bots, for example, are efficient at creating bogus Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL messaging accounts, as well as memberships on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These bogus accounts can serve as launching points to spread spam, steal data, pitch fake antivirus subscriptions — and scoop more PCs into the botnet.
Captcha designers have made their work increasingly distorted and camouflaged to defeat improved character-recognition programs carried by bots. Today, most major websites use advanced captchas that bots can't resolve.
Enter captcha-breaking groups, bearing a new weapon that combines cheap labor with the Internet's capacity for quick, anonymous global transactions.
Spawned in the online underground, these groups are difficult to pin down, security specialists say. But based on recruitment ads, discussions on hackers' forums and the rising volume of bogus accounts being created, there appear to be dozens of captcha-breaking gangs employing hundreds of people in several countries, tech security researchers say.
Human captcha-solvers work piecemeal. They have shown up in Internet cafes or in sweatshops filled with Internet-connected PCs in China, India, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, working long shifts deciphering streams of characters forwarded by an unseen coordinator, researchers say.
"At least one major operation is being run out of Pakistan," says Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies at messaging security firm Cloudmark. "I suspect similar operations are being run anywhere that has bandwidth and cheap labor."
Cybergangs typically pay captcha-solvers a half-cent to a penny for every captcha they complete, according to online recruitment ads on hackers' forums that reflect how captcha-solving has become a growing underground business.
"You can pay a business for captcha-breaking services, and they'll make it happen," says Patrick Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco. "You can have the captchas solved in the Internet cloud as you create each new account."
Networks fight back
Without the emergence of for-hire captcha-breakers, a particularly destructive worm that plagued the Internet in May — known as Koobface — would not have been possible. A worm is a program designed to self-replicate across the Internet.
Koobface — a cockeyed spelling of Facebook — targeted MySpace and Facebook. It initiated messages that duped victims into clicking on a Web link to view a funny YouTube video.
Clicking on the link led to instructions to download a Flash Player update required to view the video. Clicking on the video player update downloaded a copy of the worm, which instantly searched out the victim's friend lists on Facebook and MySpace and sent copies of itself to everyone on the list. So, subsequent victims received a message that actually arrived from the account of a trusted friend.
"This certainly represented the sullying of what began as a clear, worry-free place to interact with peers," says Joel Smith, chief technology officer at messaging security firm AppRiver.
MySpace and Facebook scrambled to warn users about Koobface, block suspicious Web links and take other defensive measures.
"We've been working for months to limit the distribution of Koobface over Facebook," says Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. "We take the security of our users very seriously and have invested significant resources in protecting them."
MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam says improved security has reduced spam that reaches the network's members by 73% since Koobface first appeared. MySpace beefed up its message-filtering systems and developed a tool to warn members about suspicious links.
"We have put in a lot of features to cleanse things like Koobface," Nigam says.
Researchers don't know who created or controls Koobface, which continues to morph on the Web. In mid-March, Microsoft added Koobface detection to its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), which automatically checks PCs running non-pirated copies of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 for more than 100 viruses.
In the ensuing two weeks, MSRT removed Koobface nearly 200,000 times from 133,677 PCs.
"Koobface is constantly changing to avoid detection, with over 20,000 variations to date," Jeff Williams, Microsoft Malware Protection Center program manager, said in a blog post. "We're also working to detect new variants of the Koobface virus as they're discovered, so we can provide ongoing protection from this threat."
A 'shark' in 'warm waters'
Early versions of Koobface focused on spreading the worm far and wide.
Besides copying itself to everyone on victims' friend lists, the worm stole cookies — small pieces of text, stored in the users' Web browsers. But it stole only those cookies that contained user IDs and passwords for members of social-networking sites Friendster, BlackPlanet, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal and MyYearbook. That gave the attackers starting points to launch the worm in the more popular social networks, says Kurt Baumgartner, chief threat officer at PC Tools.
As Koobface steadily added capabilities, Baumgartner observed it begin to incorporate malicious programs widely used by other criminal groups:
•Adware for a $50 fake antivirus program, called Security Protect 2009, that's now also being spread by the Conficker worm.
•Coding that turns an infected PC into a spam-spreading bot, the same coding used by the huge Waledac e-mail virus.
•A program called ZeuS that steals user IDs and passwords from a customizable list of banks.
"Koobface is like a shark that has found itself in warm waters with plenty of prey," Baumgartner says.
Monitoring Koobface with Baumgartner has been colleague Shevchenko, a Russian expatriate. Shevchenko made some startling discoveries about captcha breakers. Monitoring Russian-language forums, he found an ad headlined "Kolotibablo," which means "make easy money."
The job description as translated by Shevchenko: "Your new job is printing English text that you see in the pictures. (Images of captchas were shown.) All you need is to know English alphabet and know where the keys are located on a keyboard. For every correctly entered word you will receive up to 1 cent, depending on the level that you have achieved. Your only limit is your typing speed. Every minute, you'll be able to correctly type the text from 10 pictures on average. Thus, with an average price of 0.5 cent per one correctly typed text from a picture, your salary will be 3 US dollars per hour."
Shevchenko conducted an experiment. First, he reverse-engineered Koobface to discover where the worm sent captchas to be resolved. Next, he generated and saved 100 captchas issued by Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. And finally he built a tool that could submit the 100 captchas to Koobface's resolvers.
Shevchenko's findings, widely cited in tech security circles, astounded many of his peers, a band of about 200 or so elite virus hunters around the world. Two-thirds of the captchas came back resolved in less than 30 seconds. The unresolved words or characters were more highly distorted and thus more difficult to solve.
Some rejects came back with letters typed from one side of the keyboard, such as "asdfg," indicating a human resolver was typing gibberish to quickly get to an easier puzzle. Shevchenko resubmitted the rejects, and eventually all 100 sample captchas were successfully resolved.
"I was just amazed with the effectiveness of the system," Shevchenko says.
As a parting shot, Shevchenko submitted a captcha of his own composition to let the captcha-solvers know someone was on to them: "Don't be a monkey respect yourself."
The message came back solved in 23 seconds.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2009-04-22-captcha-code-breakers_N.htm

What a bunch of nonsense.
Air pollution helps plants blunt climate change: study
Cleaning up skies choked with smog and soot would sharply curtail the capacity of plants to absorb carbon dioxide and blunt global warming, according to a study released on Wednesday.
Plant life -- especially tropical forests -- soak up a quarter of all the CO2 humans spew into the atmosphere, and thus plays a critical role in keeping climate change in check.
Through photosynthesis, vegetation transforms sunlight, CO2 and water into sugar nutrients.
Common sense would suggest that air pollution in the form of microscopic particles that obstruct the Sun's rays -- a phenomenon called "global dimming" -- would hamper this process, but the new study shows the opposite is true.
"Surprisingly, the effects of atmospheric pollution seem to have enhanced global plant productivity by as much as a quarter from 1960 to 1999," said Linda Mercado, a researcher at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Britain, and the study's lead author.
"This resulted in a net ten percent increase in the amount of carbon stored by the land," she said in a statement.
Global dimming was especially strong from the 1950s up through the 1980s, corresponding to the period of enhanced plant growth, notes the study, published in the British journal Nature.
Research published last month found that dimming has since continued almost everywhere in the world except Europe.
The explanation for this botanical paradox lies in the way particle pollution reflects light.
Even if plants receive less direct sunshine, the presence of clouds and pollution scatter the light that does filter through such that fewer leaves -- which is where photosynthesis occurs -- wind up in total shade.
"Although many people believe that well-watered plants grow best on a bright sunny day, the reverse is true. Plants often thrive in hazy conditions," said colleague and co-author Stephen Sitch.
This process of diffuse radiation is well known. But the new study is the first to use a global model to calculate its impact on the ability of plants to absorb CO2.
The findings underline a cruel dilemma: to the extent we succeed in reducing aerosol pollution in coming decades, we will need to slash global carbon dioxide emissions even more than we would have otherwise.
"Aerosols offset approximately 50 percent of the greenhouse gas warming," Knut Alfsen, research director at the Centre for International Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, said by phone.
Without this particle pollution, he said, average global surface temperatures would have increased by 1.0 to 1.1 Celsius (1.8 to 2.0 Fahrenheit) since the start of industrialisation, rather than 0.7 C (1.25 F).
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that average global temperatures will rise before 2100 by 1.1 to 6.4 C (2.0 F to 11.5 F), depending on efforts to curb the gases that drive global warming.
Any increase above 2.0 C, the panel said, would unleash a maelstrom of human misery, including drought, famine, disease and forced migration.
To stay below that threshold, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere must be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm). The current level is about 385 ppm.
"As we continue to clean up the air -- which we must do for the sake of human health -- the challenge of avoiding dangerous climate change through reductions in CO2 emissions will be even harder," said Peter Cox, a researcher at Britain's University of Exeter and a co-author of the Nature study.
A major scientific review released last week at the United Nations showed that warming is itself limiting the capacity of plants to take up CO2, and that an increase in two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would transform forests from a sink into a net source of CO2.
When plants die, the carbon they store is released into the air.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.3bb1cb136038ab4034b51162ec256bcc.281&show_article=1

Open mouth and insert foot. It is nice to see the honeymoon is seemingly over in the press and they are starting to be normal again. They are still biased left, but at least they are being attacking now.
U.S. security boss clarifies comments about border
Updated Wed. Apr. 22 2009 1:22 PM ET
CTV.ca News
The U.S. Homeland Security chief has clarified earlier remarks that suggested the 9-11 terrorists entered the U.S. through Canada.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the comments during a media interview earlier this week, much to the chagrin of Canadians on both sides of the border.
In a release Tuesday night following the interview, she called Canada a "close ally and an important partner" and said she was simply misunderstood.
"I know that the September 11th hijackers did not come through Canada to the United States," she said in the statement.
"There are other instances, however, when suspected terrorists have attempted to enter our country from Canada to the United States. Some of these are well-known to the public -- such as the Millennium Bomber -- while others are not due to security reasons."
Ottawa rushed to defend its border security on Tuesday amid the diplomatic scuffle that broke out over Napolitano's earlier remarks.
In recent years, Ottawa has invested a great deal of effort into dispelling perceptions among Americans that Canada's border is an easy entry point for terrorists planning attacks on U.S. soil.
"Unfortunately, misconceptions arise on something as fundamental as where the 9-11 terrorists came from," said Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador in Washington.
"As the 9-11 commission reported in 2004, all of the 9-11 terrorists arrived in the United States from outside North America. They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued by the United States government and no 9-11 terrorists came from Canada."
Wilson, who was the keynote speaker at the Border Trade Alliance meeting in Washington on Tuesday, said Napolitano's staff attempted to tamp down the controversy by blaming the comments on a simple misunderstanding.
"Her comment from her people is that she misunderstood," Wilson said, adding that he was planning a personal meeting with Napolitano in the near future.
The furor began when Napolitano was asked to clarify statements she had made about equal treatment for the Mexican and Canadian borders, despite the fact that a flood of illegal immigrants and a massive drug war are two serious issues on the southern border.
"Yes, Canada is not Mexico, it doesn't have a drug war going on, it didn't have 6,000 homicides that were drug-related last year," she said.
"Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country or suspected or known terrorists have entered our country across a border, it's been across the Canadian border. There are real issues there."
When asked if she was referring to the 9-11 terrorists, Napolitano added: "Not just those but others as well."
However, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan downplayed the comments and said that Napolitano is well aware that Canada was not the source of the 9-11 terrorists.
"We spoke about it back in March, and we were sharing a chuckle at the fact that the urban myth does circulate," he told CTV's Power Play.
"Ms. Napolitano understood quite clearly, then and now, that none of the September 11 terrorists came through Canada, as the 9-11 Commission found."
Still, that positive outlook wasn't shared by other Canadian officials.
On Tuesday afternoon, RCMP Commissioner William Elliot expressed frustration with the comments during an interview on CTV's Power Play.
"I was somewhat surprised and disappointed," he said, adding he hopes the misconception has been cleared up.
"I understand and am happy to hear that she has issued a statement acknowledging that that didn't happen."
But Thomas d'Aquino, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, decried Napolitano's comments on Tuesday.
"I am a longstanding friend and ally of the United States, but sometimes failures in our two-way dialogue cause me to shake my head in sadness and dismay," he said in a press release.
"The claim that some of the 9/11 terrorists entered the United States from Canada is, quite simply, a myth - an urban legend that began with a handful of erroneous media reports in the days following the terrorist strikes."
With files from The Canadian Press
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090421/USA_Border_090421/20090421?hub=TopStories