Thursday Throwdown

All the week's news in one convenient package - cuz I've been too lazy to do the news all week. It's Towel Day. Douglas Adams passed away on this day three years ago.

1. eEye is at it again. April 19 the firm discovered four serious flaws that occur in almost all Symantec security products. Symantec is offering a comprehensive patch and strongly encouraging its customers to update immediately (in most cases running Live Update is sufficient). It typically takes less than a day for worm authors to capitalize on such holes once publicized. The holes, which occur in the symdns driver, allow ring 0 access to code, even when all firewall ports are filtered and all intrusion rules are set (thanks to a separate bug there).
2. Google'sAdSense will offer banner ads for those that want them. I'm sticking with the plain old text version. Still no graphics on the main Google site, however. The company has also launched the second beta of its Google Groups site.
3. There have been five more Sasser arrests this week, but the German police say it's not a gang, just a loosely knit collection of teens and 20-somethings who share code with each other. Meanwhile they're calling the original suspect, 18-year-old Sven J., a "bottom-feeding hacker" who is responsible for all 28 strains of Sasser and Netsky. In his confession Sven said he originally intended to create an anti-virus worm but something went wrong.
4. The US House of Representatives is considering modifications to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) but the movie industry is crying foul. Republican Representative John Doolittle waved his iPod around and said he didn't understand when he sponsored the DMCA that it would limit what he could do with his music. "We went way overboard," he said. "It needs to be corrected."
5. The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill Wednesday that would outlaw "upskirt" pictures. The Video Voyeurism Prevention Act would prohibit taking covert pictures in any place where people had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Senate passed the bill last year.
6. A Salinas, California High School has banned camera phones from classes after catching a student using one to cheat on a math exam. Last year, six University of Maryland students admitted to cheating on an accounting exam by using SMS messaging to get the answers from their friends.
7. Wi-Fi is susceptible to a denial-of-service attack according to AUSCERT at the University of Queensland in Australia. A vulnerability in the 802.11 spec could allow someone with a PDA to disrupt an entire wireless network. No patch is possible because the problem lies in the fundamental spec for 802.11.
8. Spammer OptInRealBig won a temporary injunction Monday against SpamCop, prohibiting the spam fighting site from reporting spammers to ISPs. The judgement was issued ex parte because SpamCop had not yet files a response. Once the court heard from SpamCop's parent IronPort it rescinded the order.
9. Intel released the 90 nanometer version of the Pentium M this week, code named Dothan, a year late. The small die should further improve the M's already excellent power usage. Its 2 meg L2 cache should speed it up condsiderably. Reviews available at Tom's Hardware and elsewhere.

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.