WASHINGTON - A federal grand jury has indicted the son of a Democratic Tennessee state lawmaker in connection with the hacking of the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

David Kernell, 20, of Knoxville, Tenn., the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge C. Clifford Shirley, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

David Kernell was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Knoxville for intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of Palin, Alaska’s governor, the Justice Department said.

Kernell, an economics major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release.

His father, a Memphis Democrat, is chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee. Mike Kernell has said he had nothing to do with the hacking incident.

The indictment against David Kernell alleged that on Sept. 16 he reset the password to Palin’s personal e-mail account to gain access to it. Authorities say Kernell then read the contents of the account and made screenshots of the e-mail directory, e-mail content and other personal information, later posting some of the information to a public Web site.

The Justice Department said the case was being prosecuted by section chief Michael DuBose and trial attorney Mark Krotoski of the criminal division’s computer crime and intellectual property section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Weddle of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The FBI’s Anchorage and Knoxville field offices investigated the case.

Source: Yahoo! News

Employees’ bad habits, such as using company computers for personal business and allowing others to use company-owned technology unsupervised, cause a glaring gap in security that goes unnoticed by many IT managers, according to a study conducted by Cisco Systems.

While enterprises may be on top of their security practices for the most part, data leakage as a result of end user misuse and abuse is something that might very well be flying under the radar.

According to a newly released global study by Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), “The Challenge of Data Leakage for Business and Employees Around the World,” employees are taking numerous risks that could lead to the loss of corporate information.

Personal and Local Matters

The use of corporate technology resources for personal activities is becoming increasingly prevalent as the line between people’s personal and work lives continues to blur. The study indicates that nearly eight in 10 end users use their company-issued computer to send and receive e-mails through a personal e-mail account on a regular basis. In addition, roughly half use their work computer for personal research and online banking.

The most interesting numbers coming out of the survey of 1,009 end users and 1,011 IT decision makers in 10 countries is the disparity in data security practices from country to country. In China, Brazil and India, for example, a significantly larger proportion of end users has altered the security settings on their company-issued laptop (42 percent, 26 percent and 20 percent, respectively). By way of comparison, the U.S. sits at a mere 2 percent.

This discrepancy could be attributed to the fact that these countries have been experiencing a significant ramp up in the knowledge worker industry over the past five years, notes Marie Hattar, vice president of network and security solutions for Cisco in San Jose, Calif. “There is more outsourcing of services and as a result, more Internet use. Given that this is fairly recent, they weren’t there nine years ago when the rest of us were hit by Blaster, Nimda or Code Red viruses.”

Open Doors and Open Minds

Physical access to networks and premises is another issue that deserves attention. About four in 10 IT decision makers have had to deal with an employee gaining access to an unauthorized physical or network area. The same holds true for vendors or partners visiting sites.

Users are also more cavalier with their IT resources. More than four in 10 end users have allowed someone else to use their company-issued computer without supervision.

The risk can even extend to conversations between co-workers and family members. More than four in 10 end users have shared sensitive information about their job with others.

“Companies tend to think that data loss is all about network security,” Hattar says. “When you think of data loss, you have to look at it as anywhere someone can potentially take information away. If you want to develop a holistic strategy, you have to include the physical security [of server rooms and computer use] and personal behavior.”

Bad Habits to Break

For the most part, user habits that can lead to data loss are done without a second thought. Approximately two-thirds of respondents have done one or more activities that threaten corporate security on some level. At the top of the list is stepping away from a computer without logging off or shutting it down and/or leaving a computer turned on overnight.

Other potentially risky activities on the list include carrying corporate data on portable storage devices outside the office; storing computer login/password information on your computer at work; sharing computer login/password information with fellow workers; and throwing away corporate paperwork without shredding it.

The risks are also increasing as we deal with a rapidly growing mobile workforce:

• Only half of remote workers continually monitor their surroundings to make sure no one is looking at their work
• More than half do not take any special precautions to ensure security and privacy while working in a public setting
• Almost half transfer work documents to and from their home computer

The Learning Curve

Dealing with data loss is only going to be more challenging in today’s networked world, Hattar says. “All of a sudden there are a lot more collaboration tools and thousands of entry points to corporate assets. The explosion in social networking is only adding to this, as employees become much more open and less private about anything. That’s why they need to be brought up to speed on good security practices.”

Social engineering is creating one of the biggest gaps in network security, so the need to look at behavior as well as technology is critical, said Michael Hall, chief information security officer for Drivesavers in Novato, Calif., a data recovery firm.

“IT departments are very proficient at defining their network architecture. One telling thing that this study shows, however, is the lack of communication with end users. You can hedge your bets by putting restrictions on laptops and manipulating hardware to stop some [bad habits] but you can’t control what people say to other people. The only thing you can do is educate them, and have security training policies and procedures in place to create constant awareness.”

There, he said it. Microsoft is interested in making money. That’s what CEO Steve Ballmer said in reference to Microsoft’s motivation in the mobile space. Google and Nokia, on the other hand? Who knows what their goal is with all their not charging people for mobile operating systems, Ballmer said.

Microsoft plans to continue charging licensing fees from handset makers for using its mobile operating system and not follow the free offerings of Google and Nokia, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.

The pressure on Microsoft’s high licensing fees has increased over 2008 with Google rolling out free Android technology and Nokia offering to buy out others from Symbian and also make its software royalty-free.

“We do,” Ballmer told Reuters, when asked whether his firm would stick with licensing fees. “We are doing well, we believe in the value of what we are doing.”

Who Benefits?

“It’s interesting to ask why would Google or Nokia, Google in particular, why would they invest a lot of money and try to do a really good job if they make no money. I think most operators and telecom companies are skeptical about Google,” he said.

Google tries to promote Web surfing on phones and the use of their services such as e-mail and search so they make advertising revenue.

“In the case of Nokia — are they really open sourcing, or are they really making Symbian their own operating system? We have to wait and see,” Ballmer said in an interview.

Motivated by Money

Microsoft’s market share in smartphone operating systems has stayed at about 10 percent for several years, despite the U.S. technology giant’s efforts to win more.

Microsoft charges US$8 to $15 per phone, according to Strategy Analytics.

“Handset makers are skeptical of Nokia, operators are skeptical of Google, I think by actually charging money people know exactly what our motivations are,” Ballmer said.

Not Into Hardware

He said there was no reason to expect Microsoft to enter the mobile phone making business, like some analysts foresee.

“I do not anticipate us building a phone. Sorry, we are not going build one,” Ballmer said.

Source: Tech News World

Firm urges two IT budgets: one based on execs’ guidelines, another for growth should the economy improve

IT spending is faring better than the overall economy, and the sector “will avoid a recession in 2008,” according to Gartner Inc. But in a report sent to clients this week, the analyst firm said it believes IT budgets will show “very low year-over-year growth rates until business growth significantly improves.”

Gartner and Forrester Research Inc. do not see tech spending traveling into negative territory, but the word “slow” and “slowdown” is used often enough in their reports to get the message across about what’s ahead. Forrester released its forecast last week.

Gartner is nonetheless advising clients to hedge a little and not assume that the economy won’t improve next year. It’s recommending that IT managers prepare two budgets: one “based on guidelines and directions of senior executives,” and another “growth budget for 2009 in the event that healthier economic growth rates begin to return next year.”

Gartner said that overall U.S. economic growth and IT growth are moving at two different speeds and that the tech industry may be “even more resilient than we had originally imagined.”

In the Gartner report, analysts Ken McGee and Mark McDonald cite government data, results of a survey of about 1,000 CIOs, and recent quarterly reports from top vendors to reaffirm an assessment made earlier this year that IT spending won’t turn negative. Tech stocks have taken a beating on Wall Street but have recovered some this week.

Gartner noted in the report that after the last recession, U.S. IT budgets grew slowly. But it said that “executives should not blindly follow history and automatically cut IT costs in 2009 until they are certain that IT’s current counter economic-trend performance isn’t being contributed to, in part, by their competitors.”

In a Sept. 24 report, Forrester said technology purchases were stronger in the first half of 2008 than its projections, but that it was cautious nonetheless. “The U.S. recession and the resulting tech market slowdown have only been delayed, not cancelled,” the report said.

Forrester projects a slowdown in tech purchases in the remainder of this year and that the trend will carry into the first half of 2009. But it has now raised its forecast in 2008 growth in the purchases of IT goods and services by business and government to 5.4%, compared with its May forecast of 3.4%. But it has lowered its projected growth rate of 10% for next year to 6.1%. Forrester noted that software and outsourcing are two strong areas.

The Forrester report’s author, analyst Andrew Bartels, said with regard to financial firms, he expects 10% cuts at most in IT where firms have been acquired or merged. In the case of the bankrupt firms whose assets where purchased, the IT reductions could be as much as 20% to 30%, he said.

Source: Computer World

Oracle is adding to its retail software lineup by acquiring Advanced Visual Technology, a maker of 3D space planning software for retailers.

AVT, based in Hertfordshire, England, sells a product called Retail Focus, which lets retailers plan store floors and shelf space. An add-on product, called Retail Focus Merchandiser, gives retail planners a three-dimensional view of retail space that they can “walk” through virtually.

No terms were disclosed. Oracle said the transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2008.

Oracle plans to add AVT’s employees and management to its Retail Global business unit. AVT’s products will be combined with Oracle Retail’s application suite. The company said it expects the combination will help retailers to increase their profits through better space allocation and monitoring of sales.

Source: CNET

Breaking with its preferred business model, Apple has released an unlocked version of the iPhone 3G in Hong Kong, allowing users to pick their preferred carrier.

The phones will go on sale in Hong Kong at prices of $695 for the 8GB model and $798 for the 16GB version. If those numbers look strikingly high, it’s only because Apple’s business plan has been to pair the iPhone 3G with a carrier in a given market–for instance, AT&T Mobility in the United States–which subsidizes the cost of the phone because customers are required to sign a service contract and pay for data plans.

Previously, the iPhone was only available in Hong Kong paired with a two-year service contract from Hutchinson, and included a $188 monthly fee.  Now customers will be able to put their old SIM card into the iPhone and activate it in iTunes. It’s not clear whether this gamble will pay off, though it could put more pressure on Apple to unlock the phones in other markets.   

Source: FierceWireless

Microsoft on Monday announced its latest software release, Windows HPC Server, at the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street Conference in New York. The application, aimed at industries like financial services, marks Microsoft’s latest entry into the high-performance computing (HPC) market.

The announcement comes in the wake of news last week that supercomputer manufacturer Cray and Microsoft have teamed to offer a deskside-sized supercomputer for less than US$60,000. Those machines will come preloaded with Windows HPC Server 2008.

HPCs on Deck

HPC Server 2008 picks up for Microsoft where Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) left off. CCS was the first HPC cluster technology offering from the company, designed to enable businesses to deploy multiple computers in a high-performance compute cluster in order to achieve supercomputing speeds.

Based on Windows Server 2008, HPC offers administrators simplified deployment and improved productivity of systems administration and cluster interoperability. The software will also speed application development through its integration with Visual Studio 2008.

It also supports standard interfaces, including OpenMP, multiprocessor interconnect (MPI) and Web services, along with third-party numerical library providers, performance  optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits.

How Super, Really?

The term “supercomputer” has lost a great deal of its power lately since most “high-performance computing” is done with clusters of small computers that can be indistinguishable from those running non-HPC workloads, explained Gordon Haff, an Illuminata analyst.

“Microsoft and Windows have limited presence in ‘classic’ HPC — large pools of systems in academia or national research labs,” he told TechNewsWorld.

That said, however, more and more HPC workloads are being run in regular companies that design and build products, Haff continued.

“These are mostly smaller installations than you find at a Los Alamos [National Laboratory], but they’re still huge computing resources by historic standards,” he noted.

As Microsoft owns some 90 percent of the traditional desktop computing environment and offers users as well as developers a high level of familiarity, its push into the HPC market should start with those facilities, he said.

“Whether for reasons of familiarity, developer tools, or software compatibility, these sorts of sites are often more amenable to Windows than is the case elsewhere,” Haff concluded.

Source: TechNewsWorld

Scientists expect startup glitches in the massive, complex machines they use to smash atoms.

But the unique qualities of the world’s largest particle collider mean that the meltdown of a small electrical connection could delay its groundbreaking research until next year, scientists said Sunday.

Because the Large Hadron Collider operates at near absolute zero — colder than outer space — the damaged area must be warmed to a temperature where humans can work. That takes about a month. Then it has to be re-chilled for another month.

As a result, the equipment may not be running again before the planned shutdown of the equipment for the winter to reduce electricity costs. That means Friday’s meltdown could end up putting off high-energy collisions of particles — the machine’s ultimate objective — until 2009.

“Hopefully we’ll come online and go quickly to full energy a few months into 2009 so in the long term, this may not end up being such a large delay in the physics program,” Seth Zenz, a graduate student from the University of California, wrote on the site of the U.S. physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

“It’s obviously a short-term disappointment, though, and a lost opportunity,” he wrote.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the repair operation will last until close to the usual winter shutdown time at the end of November. There has been some discussion that the new equipment could operate through the winter, but no decision has been made, he said.

The melting of the wire connecting two magnets Friday would have taken only a couple of days to repair on smaller, room-temperature accelerators that have been in use for decades, Gillies said.

Gillies said particle accelerators using superconducting equipment at Fermilab outside Chicago and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state had similar problems starting up, but have been operating smoothly since then.

“Once they settled in they seem to be pretty stable,” Gillies said.

At the Sept. 10 launch of the collider, beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms were fired first at the speed of light in a clockwise direction though a fire-hose-sized tube in the tunnel. Then proton beams were fired in the counterclockwise tube.

Jos Engelen, CERN’s chief scientific officer and deputy director-general, said the startup showed that the LHC can handle complex operations.

“We have encountered a weakness in one particular connection during very final hardware commissioning,” Engelen told The Associated Press by e-mail. “It is tough, but it can happen. We will make the repair and resume the very successful operation of the accelerator.”

A transformer failed outside the cold zone about 36 hours after the collider’s launch. That was repaired and the machine was ready again a week after it was shut down.

But the goal of the LHC — shattering protons to reveal more about how the tiniest particles were first created — was still weeks away because the equipment has to be gradually brought to the higher energies possible at full power.

“This was the last circuit of the LHC to be tested at high current before operations,” Gillies said. “There are an awful lot of these connections between wires in the machine. They all have to be very well done so that they don’t stop superconducting, and what appears to have happened is that this connection stopped being superconducting.”

Superconductivity — the ability to conduct electricity without any resistance in some metals at low temperatures_ allows for much greater efficiency in operating the electromagnets that guide the proton beams.

Without the superconducting, resistance builds up in the wires, causing them to overheat, he explained.

“That’s what we think happened,” Gillies said. “This piece of wire heated up, melted, and that led to a mechanical failure.”

Gillies said experts have already gone down into the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border to inspect the damage.

“By Monday I suspect we’ll know more,” he said.

Gillies said there is plenty for scientists at CERN to do between now and the startup of experiments, including studying cosmic rays that pass through collider’s massive detectors.

Source: Associated Press

Apple is recalling the USB power adapters sold with the iPhone 3G in North America and Japan amid concerns they are prone to breaking.

The company announced the Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program Friday, which applies to iPhone 3G owners who bought the device in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan, and selected countries in South America. Apple included a USB power block, shown at right, inside the box for the iPhone 3G in these countries, and the company has received reports that the prongs on that power block can break off and remain inside your wall socket, which is not good. The power adapters sold with the original iPhone as well as the ones sold in other countries are not included in this recall.

No injuries have been reported, but Apple is warning users of those power adapters to stop using them immediately until they obtain a redesigned adapter. Check the bottom of your adapter: if there’s a green dot, you’ve got the redesigned one and don’t need to do anything. If there’s no dot, it’s time to replace that unit.

You can get a replacement unit at your local Apple store starting October 10, or you can order one from Apple’s Web site here.

Source: CNET