News about what is happening in technology today!

Qrisma’s 1-inch Portable Hard Disk Drive is built to take a beating. Just 2.5 inches tall, this 4GB drive is protected by special anti-vibration and heat dispersion characteristics that keep your data cool and collected even if things get all hot and jittery. Looks like the company was trying to compensate for the fact that there’s a tiny hard drive inside (with delicate moving parts) rather than the less-fragile flash memory. So it’s a good thing that this drive’s rubberized surface makes it easy to grip. A nice design touch is its USB 2.0 plug that swivels out to a 90-degree angle so it can fit into tight spaces between heavily-populated USB ports. The company hasn’t announced when this little drive will be available, but at $100, it’s not too expensive for a road-hardened 4-gigabyte disk.

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After being hit by a denial of service attack that downed the Million Dollar Homepage site, British student Alex Tew now faces a lawsuit from one of the advertisers on the site.

The winner of the last 1,000 pixels, which sold for US$38,100 on eBay, is threatening to sue because the Web site was offline for six days until Wednesday, the Financial Times reported in its online edition on Thursday.

Eliger Kliger, owner of milliondollarweightloss.com, an online retailer of dieting products, won the auction for the advertising space last week, just before the Million Dollar Homepage succumbed to a denial of service attack.

No legal action has yet been taken, but an attorney for milliondollarweightloss.com told the Financial Times he was preparing to sue over breach of contract and negligence. The main complaint is that the advertisement did not go up immediately after the auction.

The Million Dollar Homepage was launched by Tew, who successfully raised $1 million by selling ad space for $1 per pixel. The site was battling back a DoS onslaught that began last week after an extortion attempt by a cybercriminal.

At an afternoon hearing convened here by the Senate Commerce Committee, Chairman Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, lashed out at an adult entertainment industry representative, saying that the industry needs to take swift moves to devise a rating system and to clearly mark all its material as “adult only.”

“I think any adult producer would agree,” said Paul Cambria, counsel to the Adult Freedom Foundation, which represents companies offering “lawful adult-oriented entertainment.” It would just be a matter of organizing the industry, he added.

“My advice is you tell your clients they better do it soon, because we’ll mandate it if they don’t,” Stevens said.

Though it wasn’t mentioned at the hearing, Web browsers have long supported the Internet standard called PICS, or Platform for Internet Content Selection. Internet Explorer, for instance, permits parents to disable access to Web sites rated as violent or sexually explicit.

Many adult Web sites have voluntarily labeled themselves as sexually explicit. Playboy.com and Penthouse.com, for instance, rate themselves using a variant of PICS created by the nonprofit Internet Content Rating Association.

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Mark Russinovich, an independent Windows security expert, has analyzed the Windows Meta File vulnerability and suggestions that it might be an intentional back door.

“Steve Gibson (of SpinRite fame) proposed a theory in his weekly Thursday-night podcast last week that, if true, would be the biggest scandal to ever hit Microsoft–that the WMF vulnerability that drew so much media attention last month is actually a back door programmed intentionally by Microsoft for unknown reasons,” Russinovich wrote on his blog Wednesday.

“I finished my analysis… over the weekend. In my opinion the back door is one caused by a security flaw and not one made for subterfuge,” Russinovich wrote. “Given a choice of believing there was malicious intent or poor design behind this implementation, I?ll pick poor design… I’m convinced that this behavior, while intentional, is not a secret backdoor.”

He also provides a technical look at the WMF issue and Gibson’s claims.

Microsoft last week also discussed the problem and said it was not an intentionally created back door.

The FBI calculated the price tag by extrapolating results from a survey of 2,066 organizations. The survey, released Thursday, found that 1,324 respondents, or 64 percent, suffered a financial loss from computer security incidents over a 12-month period.

The average cost per company was more than $24,000, with the total cost reaching $32 million for those surveyed.

Often survey results can be skewed, because poll respondents are more likely to answer when they have experienced a problem. So, when extrapolating the survey results to estimate the national cost, the FBI reduced the estimated number of affected organizations from 64 percent to a more conservative 20 percent.

“This would be 2.8 million U.S. organizations experiencing at least one computer security incident,” according to the 2005 FBI Computer Crime Survey. “With each of these 2.8 million organizations incurring a $24,000 average loss, this would total $67.2 billion per year.”

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