Pr0n baron challenges Google and Yahoo! to build better child locks
112164
'This is not about First Amendment rights, it is about protecting children' The world's largest porn studio says that Google and Yahoo! should "erect stronger barriers" to keep porn away from the world's children.â¦
619634
By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 10--You go to Google and get your search results -- then what?   How do you know whether the sites Google returns can be trusted? You can't. It's you against the world.
355088
Letters Lock up the leakers and throw away the key!
86299
Plus: Is Microsoft search engine crawling Google? [News.com Extra]
172241
John Markoff in the New York Times reports that a computer science professor and two of his students have discovered a &quot;composition flaw&quot; in Google&#39;s desktop search application.
83261
The core business of Internet search engines is being threatened by the evolution of new generation of content providers. The search engines like Google or Yahoo make money by indexing the web sites all over
73152
Internet portal Yahoo has launched a personalization feature in its search engine in an effort to counter Google&#39;s ever-rising popularity.
21973
A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
399121
Rethinking privacy in an immodest age.
432256
Data protection officials from 27 European countries have warned Google it is storing data on people&#39;s searches for too long-- but Europe&#39;s top privacy guardian, the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, believes Google&#39;s efforts to respect the privacy of European citizens in its Internet search software &quot;is not just window dressing.&quot;
468567
InfoWorld - Data protection officials from 27 European countries have warned Google it is storing data on people&#39;s searches for too long -- but Europe&#39;s top privacy guardian, the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, believes Google&#39;s efforts to respect the privacy of European citizens in its Internet search software &quot;is not just window dressing.&quot;
527702
Plus: Google apps for your site, and HP's pretexting debacle.
140304
The launch of Microsoft&#39;s test version throws down a gauntlet to Google. With Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves gearing up, too, a battle is brewing.
211846
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
657731
Google is working to fix a bug in the Google Toolbar that could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software on a system, a security researcher warned Tuesday.The flaw lies in the mechanism Google Toolbar uses to add new buttons on the browser. Because the toolbar does not perform adequate checks when new buttons are being installed, a hacker could make his button appear as though it was being downloaded from a legitimate site when in fact it came from somewhere else. By spoofing the origin of the toolbar button, an attacker could download malicious files or launch a phishing attack against the victim, wrote security researcher Aviv Raff in a blog post on the issue.Raff has posted proof of concept code, showing how such an attack would work with the Internet Explorer browser. A Google spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that the company is working to fix the problem.The attack requires many steps. First, the victim would have to be tricked into clicking on a Web link that would then pop up a window asking the user if he wants to install a custom button on his toolbar. Because of the flaw, this alert could look like it was downloading the button from a legitimate site, such as Google.com, even if it were not. Once the button was installed on the toolbar, the victim would then have to click on it and, finally, agree to download and run an executable file for the malicious software to be installed.Because the user would have to go through so many steps in order to fall victim to the attack, the bug isn&#39;t a critical one, said Marc Maiffret, an independent security researcher. &quot;While it is interesting, it&#39;s probably a low threat compared to other flaws out there,&quot; he said.Still, it was sloppy work on Google&#39;s part to miss such a simple attack, he said. &quot;They should definitely assess how it slipped through the cracks,&quot; he said.This is not the first obvious Google flaw that Raff has found. Last month, he showed how a simple Web programming error on the Google.com Web site could allow attackers to launch what&#39;s known as a cross-site scripting attack.Because Google&#39;s programmers didn&#39;t properly check the HTML generated by the Google search engine, Raff was able to create a specially crafted Google link that, when clicked by the victim, would trick the browser into running unauthorized scripting code. This type of link could be used to steal the victim&#39;s Google account or conduct phishing attacks, Raff saidThis error was fixed by Google just hours after Raff notified the company of the problem, but a demo of the flaw being exploited can be seen online.
3394
The security guru for the One Laptop Per Child program unveils his plan to make the rugged machines uniquely resistant to spyware and hack-attacks. Ryan Singel reports from the RSA Conference.
480800
Aaron Wall at SEObook has put together a thought provoking post on current linking techniques, structure, and how Google reliance on trusted sources &#038; domains is in jeopardy as those resouces become more and more abused. Finding the Most Powerful Links Anything that has been greatly trusted has been abused. The difference between the current abuse and [...]