Personalized Security Protects Laptops

Company also notifies parents when kids go astray online

(NEWSER) - A company that polices children's Internet chatter is also selling it to companies that want marketing data on the quick, CNET reports. Sentry Parental Control Software, which monitors kids online—and triggers a phone call to parents when kids go astray—is amassing their chatter about products and selling it. But "we never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it," says Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene. More»

Malware experts race against time to limit the program's damage

(NEWSER) - Malware experts are racing to find the authors of the Conficker C worm and limit the damage it seems poised to do beginning April Fool’s Day, CNN reports. Conficker C, the bug’s third iteration since late 2008, has infected between 5 and 10 million computers but so far has not taken action; a piece of the code indicates the worm will activate April 1. More»

(NEWSER) - Almost half of American women would be willing to go without sex for 2 weeks in order to keep their Internet access, a new survey says. Of 2,119 adults surveyed last month, only 30% of men agreed, but that number rose to 39% in the younger 18-to-34 range. The survey was commissioned by Intel to demonstrate the importance of computers in modern life. More»

Next president must find right balance of regulation for internet safegaurds

(NEWSER) - Noting that both candidates have plans to ensure our collective cyber security, Bruce Schneier, in Wired, lays out some essential policy advice for the next president:

• Use the government’s enormous purchasing power to make security software producers do better. Make security requirements for government software high, and those improvements will be included in the security products offered to the public.

Small but significant number of cases vulnerable

(NEWSER) - Oops. Now that millions of people have downloaded encrypted information like credit card and bank account numbers onto the Internet, a team of mathematicians and cryptographers have located a crucial flaw in online encryption. The flaw concerns the way the system generates random numbers to create a code critical to protecting digital information. In the system, randomly-generated prime numbers are used to create a public "key," which is used in a formula to encrypt information. The original, randomly generated numbers are kept secret. But in a small but significant number of cases, the random-number key generation system failed to work properly. The researchers found in certain cases that numbers were not truly random, making it possible to determine the secret keys used to generate the public key. The problem can only be fixed by software and Internet operations, not consumers. More»