CES gadget round up

Forget the Xbox and all the other top computer news at the Computer Entertainment Show in Las Vegas; the smaller, more esoteric, gadgets deserve a mention, too. On show, there was a Dr Fresh Pet Hair brush from King Tai Holdings of Hong Kong that uses negatively charged ions to refresh your hair. Meanwhile, Joas Electronics of Korea has rebranded its R785 shaver and disguised it as a packet of fags. ...more

More details emerge of Haxdoor hacking victims

More users may have fallen victim to the same cyber attack that exposed the credit card and other details of UK computer users. The Metropolitan Police force said yesterday that it had been working with US authorities to recover details of UK victims from a compromised computer found to contain confidential and personal information resulting from an Internet-borne attack. F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hypp?nen, said that F-Secure had 'assisted Metropolitan Police on the case', and that the stolen information was the ill-gotten gains of a variant of the Haxdoor Trojan. ...more

OS X sports FTP flaw

Security firm Secunia has reported a vulnerability in Mac OS X's FTP support that could potentially be exploited to compromise a system. The flaw is caused by to a boundary error in ftpd when handling commands with globbing characters (such as *) and can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code. ...more

A breakthrough for encryption and authentication

IBM has developed a new algorithm that can simultaneously encrypt and authenticate information, which could be an important breakthrough for securing online transactions. Charanjit Jutla, who works at IBM Research, invented the algorithm and hopes that its capabilities will be available for all types of systems - from servers to mobile devices. Because previous approaches required performing encryption and authentication in separate steps, the new technique can accomplish the same tasks in about half the time. ...more

MTV gets the Urge

Music channel MTV is to launch its own music downloads site tomorrow called Urge. The service is the company's long awaited move into online music retailing and is underpinned by Microsoft technology. The service, which was announced in December 2005 will start with a library of some two million tunes available in copy-protected WMA format. ...more