High street retailer Argos has compromised its customers' security by sending their credit-card details - including the vital security code - in unencrypted emails.
The company has been including the customer's full name, address, credit-card number and three-digit CCV security code in order confirmation emails, which are sent once a customer has placed an order on the Argos website. Although the credit-card details don't appear in the text of the email itself, they are contained - in plain text - in the HTML code of the order confirmation.
It means that anyone intercepting or gaining access to the order confirmations would have all the details necessary to steal someone's credit card.
Argos has refused to confirm how many customers have been...

EU smiles on deal
By Bill Ray 1st March 2010 15:38 GMT
The merger of T-Mobile and Orange will go through, after the UK's Office of Fair Trading withdrew its request for time to investigate the deal.
The OFT wanted to investigate on the basis that the merged entity would own an unfair proportion of radio spectrum, and that once it had merged with Orange T-Mobile would have little incentive to maintain its network sharing agreement with 3UK. Now the companies involved have undertaken to address those issues, prompting the OFT to back out the merger.
Specifically, T-Orange will be handing over 30MHz of the 120MHz the combined company holds at 1800MHz, and has signed a deal with 3UK which binds the new...

No more 'bill shock'?
By Tony Smith 1st March 2010 13:48 GMT
From today, Europe's mobile phone networks must work with customers to prevent using mobile broadband while travelling from costing the Earth.
Roaming rules put in place by the European Union's Council of Ministers and the European Parliament in June 2009 oblige O2, Orange, Three, T-Mobile, Virgin Media, Vodafone and others to offer customers of a monthly limit beyond which punters will not be charged.
The EU suggested a €50 (£45) cut-off point, but networks are free to agree any other amount with their customers.
Customers who don't make a choice by 1 July will have a €50 limit imposed upon them.
The legislation was put in place to prevent so-called 'bill shock'...

From BBC News, Technology
Microsoft tackles 17-year-old bug
A 17-year-old bug in Windows will be patched by Microsoft in its latest security update.
The February update for Windows will close the loophole that dates from the time of the DOS operating system.
First appearing in Windows NT 3.1, the vulnerability has been carried over into almost every version of Windows that has appeared since.
The monthly security update will also tackle a further 25 holes in Windows, five of which are rated as "critical".

Home hijack

The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs.
Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The Scream! forum user PsiDOC has discovered that BT has added a back door to the latest Home Hub Firmware which allow BT (and probably anybody else) full access to the Home Hub and probably a lot more.

Affected Hardware : BT Home Hub Version 2.0a
Affected Firmware : 8.1.H.J

more information here.

PsiDOC (a regular on our forums) is well versed in the home hub and has previously been modifying the firmware to allow the home hub to be used on other ISP's.

By John Leyden 4th February 2010 12:44 GMT
Microsoft has begun investigating a flaw in IE that most affects older versions of Windows, and turns vulnerable systems into a "public file server".

The vulnerability means that hackers might be able to access files with an already known filename and location, providing they can trick users into visiting a maliciously constructed website. For this approach to work, the Protected Mode feature - which runs by default in Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 - needs to be absent or disabled.

The bug is therefore much more of a potential concern for XP and Windows 2000 shops, whose users are potentially in the firing line even if they are running IE 8. The vulnerability has not...

Just a little disk drive monitor I slapped together.

http://www.hiddenvision.co.uk/drivespace

Thought it may be handy for someone else

It is a Multistart application so you can start it more than once.

Open for comments and can make required updates if asked nicely.

Researchers show exploits for IE 7 and 8
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco 19th January 2010 20:52 GMT
Microsoft will release an emergency update that patches the Internet Explorer vulnerability used to breach the security defenses of Google and other large companies.
The software maker has said that real-world attacks against the browser continue to be "very limited" and that they're effective only against version 6, which was first released in 2001. Still, researchers have determined that it's possible to exploit more recent versions using well-known techniques, causing the level of concern generated by the vulnerability to spiral since last week, when Google revealed that it 20 other companies were hit by highly...

From PC Pro
TalkTalk calls time on Tiscali brand

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/images/front_..._141841_50.jpg

Posted on 7 Jan 2010 at 10:36
Carphone Warehouse has put an end to the Tiscali brand, bringing all of its broadband customers under the TalkTalk umbrella.
Carphone Warehouse bought Tiscali's UK broadband assets for a knock-down price of £236 million back in May 2009, making it the UK's largest residential broadband provider with 4.25 million subscribers.
At the time, Carphone's chief executive Charles Dunstone announced his intention to dispense with the...

The Scream Christmas Competition, starts Tuesday 1st December

Win a Limited Edition Black Wii, a Western Digital HD Media Player box with Toshiba USB HDD (v slinky ) or an 5th Gen Ipod Nano
8GB.

Full details here: http://www.the-scream.co.uk/chrimbo_compy

Enter here: http://www.the-scream.co.uk/chrimbo_compy_entry

You can only enter if you had 5 or more posts as of this morning, so you cant register and post 5 times and enter

*sniff*

Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August.
Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. Weve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that its neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is...

By Chris Williams Posted 26th November 2009 10:36 GMT
Virgin Media will trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of illegal filesharing on its network, but plans not to tell the customers whose traffic will be examined.
The system, CView, will be provided by Detica, a BAE subsidiary that specialises in large volume data collection and processing, and whose traditional customers are the intelligence agencies and law enforcement.

The trial will cover about 40 per cent of Virgin Media's network, a spokesman said, but those involved will not be informed. "It would be counter-productive because it doesn't affect customers directly," he said.

CView will operate at the centre of Virgin Media's network on...

The Scream Christmas Competition, starts Tuesday 1st December

Win a Limited Edition Black Wii, a Western Digital HD Media Player box with Toshiba USB HDD (v slinky ) or an 5th Gen Ipod Nano
8GB.

Full details here: http://www.the-scream.co.uk/chrimbo_compy

Enter here: http://www.the-scream.co.uk/chrimbo_compy_entry

You can only enter if you had 5 or more posts as of this morning, so you cant register and post 5 times and enter

By Dan Goodin Posted 23rd November 2009 20:54 GMT
A bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is causing more than 50 million files stored online to leak potentially sensitive information that could compromise user privacy, a security researcher said.
The documents stored in Adobe's PDF format display the internal disk location where the file is stored, an oversight that can inadvertently expose real-world names and login IDs of users, the operating system being used and other information that is better kept private. The data can then be retrieved using simple web searches.

Google searches such as...