News about what is happening in technology today!

WASHINGTON DC — Websites get looked at by two different kinds of visitors: the human ones who peer around, look at the graphics, think about the links and click slowly; and the spiders, those automated scanners that come in from search engines like Google, or, more ominously, from malicious attackers, competing businesses and spammers looking for e-mail addresses.

Fortunately, it has always been pretty easy to tell the difference between the two in server logs, and block unwanted or anti-social crawlers. But research presented at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Friday may change that.

Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. “Basically this nullifies any traditional form of forensics,” says Hoffman.

The program comes from different internet addresses, simulates different browsers and throttles itself to human-like speeds.

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WASHINGTON DC — To many privacy geeks, it’s the holy grail — a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks.

That was the guiding principle for the members of kaos.theory security research.

when they set out to put a secure crypto-heavy operating systems on a bootable CD: a disk that would offer the masses the same level of privacy available to security professionals, but with an easy user interface.

“If Granny’s into trannies, and doesn’t want her grandkids to know, she should be able to download without fear,” says Taylor Banks, project leader.

It’s a difficult problem, entailing a great deal of attention to both security details and usability issues. The group finally unveiled their finished product at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Saturday, with mixed results.

Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a “live CD” — meaning it’s a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.

Tom Lynema assembles an Ubuntu-based Linux home media center. ‘Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC).’

IBM announced Thursday that it had received notice of a formal, nonpublic investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning the company’s disclosures relating to Q1 2005 earnings and expensing of equity compensation. According to the article, there has been a non-formal investigation going on since June 2005. Both articles indicate that it doesn’t mean IBM has broken any laws, so we’ll see what comes of it.

Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM’s new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered.” From the article: “Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years.