Tech News
More than 75,000 requests were made by police forces around the world for data on Microsoft users in 2012. The figures were revealed in Microsoft\'s first transparency report which detailed how often police forces sought data to aid investigations. US police forces topped the list of agencies keen to know who created specific images or other content. In most cases, Microsoft only handed over basic information such as login names and IP addresses. The transparency report from Microsoft follows similar efforts by Google, Twitter and others to let users know who is seeking data about what people do online. The requests covered more than 137,000 accounts on Microsoft\'s many services including Hotmail, Outlook.com, Xbox Live, Skype and others. It was hard to estimate how many individual users that involved, said Brad Smith, Microsoft\'s general counsel, in a blogpost, because many people ran lots of separate accounts.
We launched Google Public DNS three years ago to help make the Internet faster and more secure. Today, we are taking a major step towards this security goal: we now fully support DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on our Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, we accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but did not perform validation. With this new security feature, we can better protect people from DNS-based attacks and make DNS more secure overall by identifying and rejecting invalid responses from DNSSEC-protected domains.
Unverified reports in Russian media claim that conversations over Skype can be eavesdropped by intelligence agencies which can also determine the location of users. First reported in the Russian-language Vedomosti newspaper last week, the Federal Security Service (FSB) has had the ability to intercept Skype calls for "a couple of years" and often do so without a court warrant. As a result, some Russian companies are banning staff from using Skype out of concern that their communications are secretly listened to. Since Skype voice and video calls as well as instant messages are routed directly between users in a peer-to-peer fashion without a central server, and encoded locally according to the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard developed by the United States government, it\'s been assumed that eavesdropping on communications would be impossible in practice. However, Vedomosti quotes the executive director of payments provider Peak Systems, Maxim Emm, saying that after Microsoft\'s purchase of Skype, it is now possible to eavesdrop on users easiliy.
As computer security guru Bruce Schneier likes to say, \"Security is a process, not a product.\" He was proven right again when Google announced that, while its Linux-based Chrome OS hadn\'t been cracked in its Pwnium Chrome OS contest, one hacker was successful in creating an an unreliable exploit. While not cracked open, a hacker was able to pry a bit at Chrome OS in Google\'s recent Pwnium competition. Specifically, the hacker known as Pinkie Pie, who cracked the Chrome Web browser on Windows last year in Google\'s security contest, \"submitted a plausible bug chain involving video parsing, a Linux kernel bug and a config file error. The submission included an unreliable exploit demonstrating one of the bugs.\" Google also thanked him \"for honoring the spirit of the competition by disclosing a partial exploit at the deadline, rather than holding on to bugs in lieu of an end-to-end exploit. This means that we can find fixes sooner, target new hardening measures and keep users safe.\"
About 50% of all junk mail on the net emerges from just 20 internet service providers (ISPs), a study has found. The survey of more than 42,000 ISPs tried to map the net\'s "bad neighbourhoods" to help pinpoint sources of malicious mail. The survey by a researcher in Holland found that, in many cases, ISPs specialise in particular threats such as spam and phishing. Methods to thwart attacks and predict targets also emerged from the study.
Google is to shut down its Reader service in July, as usage has declined. A petition to save the service, which aggregates news content from web feeds, had 25,000 signatures in a few hours. Experts say shutting Reader is part of Google\'s plan to migrate more people to its social media service, Google+. Google said in its official blog: "There are two simple reasons for this - usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we are pouring all of our energy into fewer products." It added users and developers who wanted to use alternatives could export their data, including their subscriptions over the next four months, using its Google Takeout service.