CIA agents find themselves Googled

The Chicago Tribune [reg required] says that Internet searches have revealed private and personal details of thousands of CIA operatives. The paper conceded to the CIA's request not to publish either its findings or the methods it used. But it says the searches it conducted through free and paid-for online databases turned up a 'virtual directory' of 2,653 CIA staff, 50 internal agency phone numbers and the sites of two dozen secret facilities across the US. ...more

Gartner warns against over-hyped IT fears

Analysts at Gartner have identified five IT risks they believe are being wildly overblown in the industry, and urge companies not to hold back IT expansion plans. Most of the points centre around burgeoning new industries. Internet telephony is picked out as being tainted with the notion that it is simply unsafe. ...more

Apple's OS X stung with five critical bugs

Five highly critical security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Mac OS X. The flaws could potentially be exploited to cause a denial of service (DoS) and compromise a user's system. Tom Ferris discovered the vulnerabilities, detailed as follows in Secunia Advisory 19686: an error in the "BOMStackPop()" function in the BOMArchiveHelper when decompressing malformed ZIP archives; errors in the "KWQListIteratorImpl()", "drawText()", and "objc_msgSend_rtp()" functions in Safari when processing malformed HTML tags; an error in the "ReadBMP()" function when processing malformed BMP images which can be exploited via, for example, Safari or the Preview application; an error in the "CFAllocatorAllocate()" function when processing malformed GIF images which can be exploited via, for example, Safari when a user visits a malicious website; and errors in the " _cg_TIFFSetField ()" and "PredictorVSetField()" functions when processing malformed TIFF images which can be exploited via, for example, the Preview, Finder, QuickTime, or Safari applications. ...more

Hidden charges are a philfy practice

First there was phishing, then wilfing and now a new term has entered the Internet lexicon: philfing. Standing for 'purposely hiding what I'm looking for' the word describes the practice of websites that hide extra charges for delivery, credit cards, baggage and insurance. Ninety-three per cent of UK online shoppers have been 'annoyed' by hidden charges and almost two-thirds said they had decided no to buy as a result, according to a survey of more than 2,400 Net users by MoreComputers. ...more

Speculation on Intel's 64-bit computing strategy resurfaces

Rumours continue to grow that Intel will announce a shift in its 64-bit computing strategy. Last month, the issue of Intel changing its 64-bit position surfaced when president and COO Paul Otellini was discussing the company's recent financial results - Intel hears the 64bit call. Now the Financial Times is anticipating that Intel will abandon its current position and adopt the AMD strategy of x86-based, 64-bit processing for desktop machines. ...more