Movie Industry Admits Error in MPAA Statistics

This week's National Journal's Tech Daily news reports that: Movie Industry Admits Error On Downloading Study Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie-downloading on college students in a study. But AP reports that now the industry says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus. The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation that would force them to do so. But now the MPAA has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

Windows Annoyances, Practical Solutions and Humor

Windows XP has been a considerable improvement over its older
Microsoft sister versions, but it is still plagued with quirks that
make its users pull out heir hair. Windows XP was meant to be
flexible and highly customizable, but the typical default options are
not what most users would want. This and other annoyances are
comprehensively addressed by Windows Annoyances For Geeks and its
companion web site, annoyances.org

One of the best parts of the book is 100-plus pages meticulously addressing the problems with
Service Pack 2, which was meant to get Windows XP working smoothly. The
Service Pack 2 succeeds in doing so, but it changes innumerable
settings so that, for example, some of the network-dependent
applications may afterwards refuse to work. Karp explains that the SP2,
having done its job, has also tightened the settings in Windows' own
firewall. He also provides tips and tweaks for getting the applications
back on-line again. The book is very structured and logical, and its
worth is in the actual applying of its simple, easy-to-follow advice.

www.Annoyances.org is similar to the books' logic, and is a relief for
anyone who is fed up with the insanely irritating Paperclip, which is
an animated assistant in MS Word, as well as with countless other bugs
and idiot messages in Windows applications.The site has a
wealth of resources, such as practical, working solutions, to bugs and
even little-known malfunctions which have been well-documented and are
available for all Microsoft products going back to Windows 95.
(From own article)

Google Desktop Exploitability

(As I published on Shvoong): It was a matter of time before someone
realized that Google Desktop has provided an opening into a PC through
which a hacker can get an easy entry. Mattan Gillon, an Israeli hacker,
performed an act of public service by exposing the flaw on his blog.

Exploiting a bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer's processing Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). The CSS format is commonly used to give a Web
site page a consistent look and navigation properties, and attackers can
target the process by which IE
parses CSS while running Google Desktop. Gillon explains how browsers
usually turn off domain crossing. A specific web
page can direct a browser to another domain, though it may not retrieve
the contents of the page nor run any of its objects. This restriction
feature serves to preclude a site owner using JavaScript from spying on
a user. Additionally, if a user is already logged
on to a web service such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail, a malicious web
page could be used to run a malicious operation in the user account.
This operation can be an opening of an email and the subsequent sending
it to a third party. In IE, these security features are easily broken
when the browser encounters a CSS import.

Mattan Gillon called this attack CSSXSS, or Cascading Style Sheets Cross-Site
Scripting. Using the IE browser's weakness of being fooled by curly
brackets strategically placed in a decoy site's code, and getting hold
of Google Desktop's key found in the application code, a hacker can
easily gain an entry into the target PC already running the Google
Desktop service.For this IE weakness to be
exploited, web surfers must first be tricked into visiting a malicious
Web site. They can protect themselves, however, if they turn off Active
Scripting in the IE's Internet Options menu, Gillon says.