In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”

Read the full article at washingtonpost.com

Read the report by Privacy International

“After a week of extensive testing, the CRN Test Center found that users of Windows Vista and Windows XP are equally at risk to viruses and exploits and that overall Vista brings only marginal security advantages over XP.”

Read the full article at CRN Test Center

“…songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.”

Read the full article at ars technica

Ever find yourself with too many passwords to remember and no idea where to keep them so that only you can find the password list? Creating a password.txt file in your root directory is out of the question, as is a password-protected OpenOffice.org file. A piece of paper hidden somewhere is not a good idea, because after you forget where did you put it, someone else will find it and abuse it. Instead of these approaches, consider using steganography, a method for hiding sensitive information inside some other object, typically a JPEG picture or a sound file.

Read the full article at Linux.com

“If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves,” he writes in the paper. “Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.”

Read the full article at ars technica

“The Trustees heard that 90 percent of the respondents didn’t want DRM and especially didn’t want Microsoft DRM. But rather than giving the BBC orders to deliver its free-to-air video in free-to-net formats, they gave it permission to sell out the license-fee payers who are required by law to support the BBC.”

Read the full story at boingboing

“What do you do if you forget the password to your OpenOffice.org files? The simplest solution is to download OOo Password Cracker, a macro for opening protected documents in any OpenOffice.org application. Using a brute force dictionary attack, OOo Password Cracker provides a slow but reliable method of document recovery. However, the macro requires some preparation if you want to use it effectively.”

Read the full article at Linux.com

“Just after vbootkit takes control, it hijacks the interrupt 13, then searches for Signature for Vista OS. After detecting Vista, it starts patching Vista, meanwhile hiding itself (in smaller chunks at different memory locations). The patches includes bypassing several protections such as checksum, digital signature verification etc, and takes steps to keep itself in control, while boot process continues to phase 2.

Phase 2 includes patching vista kernel, so as vbootkit maintains control over the system till the system reboots. Several protection schemes of Vista were analyzed such as the famous PE header checksum (every Windows EXE contains it), the Digital Signature of files.”

Read the full article at The Register

Developers have discovered that the name given to a Vista executable affects whether or not it will require admin rights to run.

Read the full article at The Register

“Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, a senior Microsoft official is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system.”

Read the full article at Zero Day