Daily Report Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Daily Highlights

The Federal Railroad Administration, in part as a response to a serious November 2006 accident, has issued a safety advisory to railroad industry owners and operators urging them to ensure that specialized maintenance equipment is only operated by fully qualified individuals and is properly inspected. (See item 15)
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The Army Corps of Engineers, in an inspection program that has grown more aggressive since Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees across the Gulf Coast in August 2005, has identified 146 levees nationwide that pose an unacceptable risk of failing in a major flood. (See item 36)
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The Associated Press reports police are on the lookout for a man described as being of Middle Eastern descent who tried to gain access to the Barrett Firearms plant, which makes 50.caliber rifles that could be used to bring down commercial airliners or penetrate rail cars and storage plants holding hazardous materials. (See item 37)

Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector

29. January 29, IDG News Service — Symantec to buy asset management vendor Altiris. Symantec will acquire Altiris, a maker of asset management software for mobile devices and other hardware, for $830 million, the companies said Monday, January 29. Symantec said it will merge technology from Altiris into its endpoint security products, which deal with compliance, security, and backup issues.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNsymantecbuysalti ris_1.html

30. January 29, Agence France.Presse — Repairs to quake.hit Asia Internet cables delayed again. Hong Kong's telecom regulator says bad weather had again delayed full repairs to undersea cables damaged last year by an earthquake, which badly disrupted Internet access in parts of Asia. The Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) said most of the seven submarine cables, damaged by a powerful 7.1.magnitude temblor off Taiwan on December 26, have now been fixed but that one will take longer than estimated. Repair work will be completed at the end of February, instead of mid.February as had been anticipated earlier. "The repair work of one section of a cable will now complete by the end of next month," said OFTA Director General Au Man.ho. "Bad weather, technical problems and other reasons are causing the delay." However, he said Internet providers had diverted Web traffic and that the delay was not having a significant impact on Internet services in Hong Kong.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070129/tc_afp/asiaquakeinternet;_ylt=AkPe2aokcV9ioj2vUK3ms8IjtBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM.

31. January 29, IDG News Service
— Adobe looks to have full PDF spec become ISO standard. Adobe Systems is taking the first step towards having its entire Portable Document Format (PDF) specification recognized as a global standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The vendor announced Monday, January 29, plans to submit the full PDF 1.7 specification to enterprise content management nonprofit organization the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) with the hope that AIIM will then recommend ISO adopt it as an international standard. In part the move was driven by a growing proliferation of ISO standards around different subsets of the PDF specification, according to Sarah Rosenbaum, director of product management with Adobe. “It was becoming a bit of an alphabet soup dependent on industries or uses of the specification,” she said.
Source: http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/01/29/pdfiso/index.php

32. January 29, Reuters — China's 4G wireless launch leapfrogs 3G. China, still working on its long.delayed homegrown third.generation (3G) wireless standard, has leapfrogged itself by launching the world's first fourth.generation (4G) standard, state media said on Monday, January 29. Data.rich 3G telephony .. which allows high.speed transmission of data and images .. is not yet available in Mainland China. But a group of 10 "leading domestic institutions" called the "FuTURE Project" on Sunday rolled out 4G in Shanghai, the official China Daily reported. China aims to hold field tests for the 4G system and put it into trial commercial use up until 2010.
Source: http://news.com.com/Report+Chinas+4G+wireless+launch+leapfrogs+3G/2100.1039_3.6154100.html?tag=nefd.top

33. January 29, VNUNet — Debian warns of Mozilla bugs. Linux distributor Debian issued a security advisory over the weekend, warning of several problems in Mozilla and associated products such as Mozilla Firefox. The vulnerabilities include bugs in the layout engine which could allow a denial.of.service attack and the execution of arbitrary code. Vulnerabilities in the JavaScript engine could allow the same attacks, and a "shutdown" flaw could allow remote attackers to gain privileges and install malicious code via the watch JavaScript function.
Source: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2173641/debian.warns.mozil la.bugs

34. January 29, Reuters — Vista is ready for consumers. After more than five years of development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6 billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista finally reaches consumers this week. But the extent of success of the new operating system may depend more on large corporations, looking for different things than the multimedia bells and whistles aimed at home users and who have more discretion about when to buy the software. Computers running Vista go on sale at retailers Tuesday, January 30, two months after Microsoft made it available to corporate, or enterprise, customers. This is the first major upgrade of the Windows operating system since Microsoft first released Windows XP in October 2001.
Source: http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=YKEAUQMNHZS1GQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=197001179

35. January 28, Sophos — Malware shipped on TomTom SatNav devices. Internet reports claim that some TomTom GO 910 satellite navigation devices for car drivers have been shipped with malware pre.installed. An Internet posting by British technology journalist Davey Winder contains a statement by the makers of the dashboard.mounted SatNav units acknowledging the incident. TomTom SatNav devices are Linux.based, and cannot be infected by the malware. However, Windows users who connect to the device via their USB port could risk running the malicious code and infecting their desktop computers.
Winder's report: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1276.html
TomTom public statement:
http://www.tomtom.com/news/category.php?ID=2&NID=349&Languag e=2
Source: http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/01/tomt om.html