132655864
submission
hankwang writes:
The New York Times has an article on how the transmission of Covid-19 by seemingly healthy individuals was discovered in Germany on January 27, but the report was discredited because of a quibble over whether it was really asymptomatic or rather presymptomatic or oligosymptomatic transmission. Oligosymptomatic means that the symptoms are so mild that they are not recognized as symptoms.
From the article: European health officials say they were reluctant to acknowledge silent spreading because the evidence was trickling in and the consequences of a false alarm would have been severe. "These reports are seen everywhere, all over the world," said Dr. Josep Jansa, a senior European Union health official. "Whatever we put out, there’s no way back."
It took until the end of March before asymptomatic transmission was publicly acknowledged as playing a significant role. But even in mid-June, WHO placed ads on Google search results titled “People With No Symptoms — Rarely Spread Coronavirus.”
40767609
submission
hankwang writes:
The European commission fined a number manufacturers for pricing fixing of cathode ray tubes in the period between 1996 and 2005. The total fine was EUR 1.47 billion (USD 1.92 billion), for Philips, LG Electronics, Samsung SDI, and three other firms. According to the European Commission: "For almost 10 years, the cartelists carried out the most harmful anti-competitive practices including price fixing, market sharing, customer allocation, capacity and output coordination and exchanges of commercial sensitive information. The cartelists also monitored the implementation, including auditing compliance with the capacity restrictions by plant visits in the case of the computer monitor tubes cartel. "
Other news sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/lg-said-to-face-eu-fines-with-philips-panasonic-for-cartel.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/05/us-eu-cartel-crt-idUSBRE8B40EK20121205
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57557212-92/philips-lg-samsung-others-hit-with-eu-antitrust-fine/
27844344
submission
hankwang writes:
The Internet Storm Center reported that one million web pages have been attacked by a the Lilupophilupop SQL injection and contain a malicious javascript link. Affected sites can be found using a a Google search query. See also the technical details of the SQL injection. The attack is directed to sites running ASP or ColdFusion with an MSSQL back end. The payload of the javascript leads, via redirects and obfuscated javascript, to a fake download page for Adobe Flash and antivirus software.
16980002
submission
hankwang writes:
The Dutch telecommunications authority OPTA has announced that Dutch hotels must register as internet providers (Original version in Dutch) because that is what they formally are according to Dutch laws. It is well possible that once hotels are officially internet providers, they will also have to abide the European regulations on data retention and make efforts to link email headers and other data traffic to individual hotel guests. Could this also happen in other European countries? This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels.
14604046
submission
hankwang writes:
The Belgian authorities uncovered an international network of online banking fraud, which has been going on since 2007. (Story in Dutch and Google translation). The fraud targeted customers of several major banks, which used supposedly secure two-factor systems that required the customer to generate authorization codes from transaction information (random code and amount or recipient's account number) that is manually keyed into a cryptographic device (Flash demo from one of the banks, Manufacturer's website). Trojan horses that were planted onto the victim's computer would generate a fake error message and requested to re-enter authorization codes. This way, amounts up to €4,000 were transferred to foreign bank accounts.
The worrying part is that many cases were never reported to the police, with the bank preferring to refund the money to the victim rather than risking their reputation. The extent of this type of fraud is unclear.
13844956
submission
hankwang writes:
Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor 2 compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains.
297685
submission
hankwang writes:
Security researcher Petko Petkov, who is known for his recent discovery of a vulnerability with Quicktime in Firefox, claims to have discovered an exploit that allows arbitrary code execution when a maliciously crafted PDF document is opened in any version of Adobe Reader. Petkov did not disclose any technical details other than a video, but claims on his blog that Adobe has acknowledged the vulnerability. If this exploit goes wild, it could cause some serious problems, as PDFs are usually automatically opened from web browsers and widely used and trusted by corporate users. See also Petkov's original blog post [Coral cache].
43794
submission
hankwang writes:
Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 and €280 onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages.
