Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Daily Highlights

Senators Richard Burr and Susan Collins have drawn up legislation −− called the National Agriculture and Food Defense Act −− with the goal of creating a national strategy to prepare for, detect, respond to and recover from an agro−terror attack or catastrophic food emergency. (See item 17)
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Reuters reports a U.S. delegation has arrived in Beijing on a five−day fact−finding mission concerning food and drug safety amid a series of health scares about the "made in China" label, affecting items from pet food to poisonous ingredients in exports of toys, toothpaste, and fish. (See item 18)
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Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector

27. July 31, IDG News Service — Mozilla rushes out second Firefox patch this month. Mozilla has patched a pair of nasty flaws in its Firefox browser, two weeks after security researchers first started posting code that showed how the flaws could be exploited in attacks. The 2.0.0.6 version of Firefox, released Monday, July 30, fixes a pair of related flaws in the URL protocol handler component of Firefox, which is used to launch programs when a user clicks on certain specially crafted Web links. Mozilla rates these problems critical, meaning they are a serious security risk. The 2.0.0.6 Firefox release also fixes a third security flaw, that Mozilla considers to be less−critical than the URL protocol handler bugs.
Mozilla Security Advisory 2007−26: http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007−26.ht ml
Mozilla Security Advisory 2007−27: http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007−27.ht ml
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/31/Mozilla−second−Fir efox−patch_1.html

28. July 31, Sophos — Hacker exploited unsecured wireless Internet access to send spam. Sophos has reminded computer users of securing their wireless Internet access following the sentencing of a man who sent pornographic spam while driving around Venice, CA. Nicholas Tombros has been sentenced to three years' probation and six months home detention after e−mailing out thousands of advertisements for pornographic Websites. The spam e−mails were sent from Tombros's laptop via unencrypted wireless Internet access points he found while driving his car.
Source: http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/07/tomb ros.html

29. July 30, IDG News Service — Google Analytics in data blackout since Saturday. Google Inc.'s Analytics service stopped delivering data to users on Saturday, July 28, another in a series of recent performance and availability problems affecting the popular Website traffic−monitoring service. The latest problem remains unsolved and is apparently affecting all Google Analytics accounts, according to a message posted Monday afternoon by a Google employee in the official Google Analytics blog. Users can log in to their accounts, but the data hasn't been updated since Saturday night. Last week, Google Analytics suffered what the company called a "brief processing delay." Another such delay hit the service during the July 14−15 weekend, affecting "a small percentage of users," Google said at the time. The previous weekend, a server outage prevented "many" users from creating and logging into new accounts, according to Google. A significant data outage left many users fuming in late May as well.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9028462&intsrc=hm_list