Trawling The Net

Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. Chenette's software, called FireShark, creates a map of interconnected websites and highlights potentially malicious content. Every day, the software maps the connections between nearly a million websites and the servers that provide content to those sites. "When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content," Chenette says. While some of the content hubs that connect different communities could be legitimate--such as the servers that provide ads to many different sites--other sources of content could indicate that an attacker is serving up malicious code, he says. According to a study published by Websense, online attackers' use of legitimate sites to spread malicious software has increased 225 percent over the past year.

The ads for Asics athletic gear that hung horizontally across several storefronts near the Kodak Theater where the Oscars will be held Sunday were all removed by Saturday. Three of the four people charged have posted $100,000 bail each. City law bans the installation of supergraphics, vinyl images draped over buildings. Last week in the most severe step taken in the ongoing battle over the banners, Los Angeles businessman Kayvan Setareh was jailed on $1 million bail for hanging an enormous movie ad on a Hollywood Boulevard building he owns near the Kodak Theatre.

"I am beyond happy because I had to prove that (last year's victory) was not chance, so now I am totally at peace. I love to compete against myself and getting better and better," said Ronnie White, of Fort Worth, Texas. Fifty mental athletes competed all day in the 13th annual championship in lower Manhattan that included events such as memorizing the names of 99 people and their pictures, a 50-line poem in free verse and over 100 single numbers in the right order. In the category of speed numbers, computer science student Nelson Dellis, 26, won and topped White's previous record by remembering in five minutes 178 different numbers in their right order. White, who is able to memorize a deck of cards in 1.5 minutes, will go on to represent the United States at the World Memory Championships in Guangzhou, China in November. Mostly won by Britons, last year's world championship was clinched by Briton Ben Pridmore, who memorized a randomly shuffled deck of 52 cards in 24 seconds. Despite their astounding feats, most competitors profess nothing unusual about their prodigious memories, claiming that all it takes is regular mental exercise.

To become official, "hella" would have to jump through quite a few bureaucratic hoops. It would have to pass through the Consultative Committee for Units (CCU), one of 10 advisory committees of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM). If the CCU recommends it the CIPM, that board must then decide whether to advance the cause to the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), the official authority that can make changes to the SI system. That international organization, based in France, includes members from 81 countries. "I think that for a number of reasons it's a long shot," said Ben Stein, a spokesperson for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the U.S. organization that handles measurements. "The types of things they would consider are is it needed, does it add or reduce confusion, are the names consistent with other names associated with the prefixes?" Sendek argues that the name would honor the scientific contributions of Northern Californians, who have famously popularized the phrase "hella" to mean "a whole lot."

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?

LinkTV, a non-profit satellite TV channel that specializes in news and documentaries about global change and the developing world, is launching a site called ViewChange.org, which it says will be a one-stop portal portal “to help raise awareness of global development issues.”