Google Stops Santy&#39;s Claws - For Now
116333
Google acted quickly to block Santy.A, a worm that targeted the company&#39;s popular Internet search engine. Antivirus experts say this threat has passed, but predict that it may be just
333473
Google&#39;s browser toolbar is back in court on patent infringement charges, after a U.S. court of appeals overturned part of a lower court decision. Google&#39;s AdSense contextual advertising service, though, is in the clear.Hyperphrase Technologies filed suit against Google in April 2006, alleging that Google&#39;s AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin rejected the allegations in a summary judgement in Google&#39;s favor, and Hyperphrase appealed.On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the parts of the summary judgement relating to AdSense, and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the part of the ruling dealing with AutoLink&#39;s alleged infringement of two of the patents. It remanded the case to the district court to be reexamined.AutoLink parses Web pages for text fragments in certain formats, and transforms them into links to Web pages it deems appropriate. For instance, it will link publication International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to a corresponding listing on Amazon.com&#39;s bookstore, or link package tracking numbers to pages showing delivery status. It will similarly process U.S. street addresses and U.S. vehicle identification numbers.In its ruling , the court of appeals found that the district court had considered an inappropriate interpretation for &quot;data reference,&quot; one of the terms used in the patent claims to describe the way a link is made between a fragment of text and an element in a database. The court of appeals remanded the case to the district court to determine whether AutoLink infringed the patents under the new interpretation it suggested.Some have likened AutoLink, introduced in early 2005, to an earlier initiative from Microsoft called Smart Tags, which sought to add links determined by Microsoft to certain keywords appearing on Web pages viewed through its Internet Explorer browser. The feature, included in beta versions of the browser bundled with Windows XP, was roundly rejected by users for the control it gave Microsoft over the appearance of Web pages, prompting the company to&#160;remove the feature&#160;from production versions in June 2001. However, it left the function in its Office XP productivity software suite, released in May 2001, where it became the subject of another patent lawsuit brought by Hyperphrase. Microsoft won a summary judgement in that case in 2003.In Wednesday&#39;s ruling on the Google-Hyperphrase case, the court of appeals upheld the judgement of the district court regarding AdSense. The way AdSense infers the topic of a Web page to associate it with keywords that may not appear on the page, and link those keywords to advertisements, did not constitute use of a &quot;data reference&quot; in the sense of the Hyperphrase patents at issue, the district court had found, and the court of appeals agreed.A Google representative reached in London would not immediately comment on the court of appeals ruling.The company&#39;s latest quarterly financial report warns that is subject to intellectual property rights claims, and may face more in the future. Such cases are costly to defend and could require it to pay damages or prevent it from using certain technologiesOne such case, brought by Northeastern University in Boston and by Jarg, a company in Massachusetts that develops distributed search technologies,&#160;charges Google with infringing a patent&#160;for a method of breaking database queries into fragments and distributing them to multiple computers to get search results faster. Google has until Jan. 11 to file a response in that case.&#160;
505110
Last week a new worm started spreading on the Internet. It&#39;s named Santy, and it attempts to deface websites using specific versions of the popular phpBB bulletin board software.
613642
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia once said, &#8220;Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.&#8221; And while he&#8217;s dabbling with the concept of an open-source search engine, Dr. Riza C Berkan of Hakia.com believes the fix is in the semantics.  The CEO and founder of the &#8220;meanings&#8221; [...]
183325
Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
420317
A favored online tactic to mock the president â altering the Google search engine so the words âmiserable failureâ lead to President Bushâs home page â has been neutralized.
698736
Google said it was blocking searches generated by a new worm, Santy.A, which were being used to find and infect vulnerable computers on the Internet.
395515
The Santy worm, which originally flared up a week ago as bulletin board Web sites found their pages erased and defaced by the worm&#39;s own text, has begun to spread using both Google and other search engines.
407014
Santy Virus Used Google To Hack phpBB Forums  There is a new internet worm is defacing web bulletin boards across the world, and its using Google as its. The Perl/Santy-A worm (also known as Santy) exploits a vulnerability in a piece of software often used to provide discussion forums and bulletin ...
66012
A new, more dangerous variant of the Santy.e virus appeared over the holiday weekend. The malware uses search engines to locate vulnerable Web sites, which it defaces.
348448
Google has responded to calls from antivirus firms to stop the spread of an Internet worm that was using the search engine&#39;s technology to spread among online bulletin boards.
389610
You know, it has not ceased to amuse me watching the various search engines fall over themselves and each other, in their march towards offering &#39;local search.
222349
More than 50 people obey Yesterday, Michael VandeMar tried to go eighteen hours without visiting the big five search engines. Taking up a challenge from search engine guru Charles Knight, heâd resolved to avoid Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com, and AOL from 6am to midnight. By 9:53, heâd given up. âBah!â he wrote to Knightâs Alt Search Engines blog. âI blew it.ââ¦
52789
The flaw exploited by the most recent versions of the worm such as Santy.C or Santy.E is more general than the original, and can occur anywhere a site designer has left the door open for the inclusion of arbitrary files into PHP scripts, reports IDG News
90728
A new variant of the Santy worm, which attacks Web pages usuing the PHP bulletin board software, appeared this week. Earlier variants used Google to find vulnerable Web pages; the new
37983
Moving beyond Google, variants of the Santy worm are now spreading on the Internet riding on other search engines such as AOL and Yahoo to identify exploitable Webpages.
19728
Do-gooder worm attempts to fix holes exploited by the earlier Santy infection--but could end up a pain.