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United States government employees are being told to avoid placing too much personal information on social media sites or other public pages. Phishers recently used that sort of data to target public workers in the energy sector. A phishing campaign ... involves using fake forms and websites to lure victims into providing sensitive personal information, from names and addresses to credit card data. Conference List Used for Email Attacks According to reports, phishers used a public list of conference attendees to attack public energy sector workers. The conference list provided the phishers with ... (view more)

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now says it will help bring broadband Internet service to 400,000 Americans who currently don't have access to high-speed Internet. The program to subsidize networks in rural areas will cost $115 ... million in public funds. The aim of the Connect America Fund is to subsidize the installation of high-speed Internet cables in remote places where doing so is not profitable for private firms. The money will come from the Universal Service Fund. In the past, this fund was spent on subsidies to make sure every American home had telephone service, but ... (view more)

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's personal email account has reportedly been hacked. According to some observers, security weaknesses in Microsoft's Hotmail email service allowed the hack to occur. In reality, however, slip-ups by both ... Romney and Microsoft facilitated the hack. The incident occurred after the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) obtained and printed several emails sent to and from Romney during his time as governor of Massachusetts. The newspaper did not hack the account to obtain the emails, but rather made a legal request for Romney's office to hand them over. The WSJ ... (view more)

For years, analysts have expected Facebook to become publicly traded. Now, the company confirms it will be offering at least $5 billion worth of shares, making the entire company worth as much as $100 billion. It's not yet known when those shares ... will be made available, but Facebook has formally registered the move with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The $5 billion is a preliminary figure put forward to determine the registration fee the company must pay. The actual public offering may vary, depending on whether Facebook's financial advisors believe that setting a higher initial ... (view more)

It's likely to be months, if not more than a year, before Windows 8 goes on sale to the general public. But according to Microsoft, a preview copy of the system has already had more than 500,000 downloads. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been making ... several public appearances this week to coincide with the formal public unveiling of the new system at BUILD, Microsoft's conference for hardware and software developers. Ballmer said that although there's a lot of work to do, the core of the system is finished. He said one of the main goals was to make sure that Microsoft's other services -- such ... (view more)

When software is developed, it goes through a number of stages before it is officially released to the public. This document briefly explains this process. Software Release Development Life Cycles Pre-Alpha (Development) Pre-alpha refers to all ... activities performed during the software project prior to testing. These activities can include requirements analysis, software design, software development and unit testing. Pre-alpha software is rarely ever released to the public. Alpha (Developer Testing) The alpha phase of the release life cycle is the first phase to begin Software testing. In this ... (view more)

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding 'closed-door meetings' with industry insiders to broker a deal on Net Neutrality -- controlling the Internet over the people that use it. ... Included in the meeting were a small group of industry lobbyists from AT ... (view more)

A new site aims to demonstrate Facebook's lax security and privacy by exposing some of the more embarrassing messages which users have posted. However, Facebook users appear to have undermined the site by posting intentionally bogus messages. The ... new site is known as Openbook and is intended to highlight changes made last month which made the search facility on Facebook much more public, even to non-users. It's even possible for status updates and other user info to appear on public search engines. This was particularly problematic as there have been several changes to Facebook's privacy ... (view more)

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a far-reaching proposal that the U.S. government has insisted was too sensitive to be exposed to the public. Now that the 44-page document (PDF) has been leaked, it's easy to see why the U.S. wanted ... to keep it a secret. (Source: die-linke.de ) ACTA, in its present form, is heralded by the Film and Music industries and their fight against piracy. However, if upheld, citizens will pay a heavy price for their privacy. Gov't Can Search, Seize and Destroy Electronics Former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama both favor ACTA ... (view more)

Google Public DNS Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider. If you decide to try Google Public DNS, your client programs will perform all DNS ... lookups using Google Public DNS. http://www.code.google.com SpeedFan SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access harddrive S.M.A.R.T. information and show hard disk temperatures. http://www.almico.org Today's fresh software picks were provided courtesy of ... (view more)