Anti-virus software maker McAfee warned that a flaw in one of its products could make customers’ PCs vulnerable to attacks in which hackers used their computers to distribute spam.

The company, which is a unit of chipmaker Intel, disclosed the flaw on Wednesday in the US in a message to customers on its website.

McAfee spokesman Ian Bain said at least one customer had fallen victim to such an attack, which leveraged a flaw in a service offering known as McAfee SaaS for Total Protection.

The web-based service protects customers from viruses hidden in emails and websites. Bain said the flaw was in a piece of software that McAfee customers install on their PCs to enable them to use the service.

While the flaw could enable hackers to send spam from machines of McAfee SaaS for Total Protection customers, it does not grant them access to data on an affected PC, Bain said.

He said that the company’s engineers were working to fix the bug and expected to have it fixed on Thursday.

In April 2010, a glitch included in a regular release of McAfee’s anti-virus software mistakenly identified part of Microsoft’s popular Windows XP operating system as a virus, triggering personal computer outages at many of its customers, including more than 100 large corporations.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The US Supreme Court has upheld a federal law giving copyright protection to millions of foreign-produced books, movies and musical pieces and may undermine Google’s effort to create an online library.

The 6-2 ruling backs a law that took works by Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and J.R.R. Tolkien out of the public domain, barring use without permission of the copyright owner. The decision is a victory for the film and music industries and a setback for Google, which had said it would lose access to many of the 15 million books it wants to make available online.

The court rejected arguments from orchestra conductors, educators, performers, film archivists and movie distributors who argued that the 1994 law violates the constitutional provision that lets Congress set up a copyright system, as well as the constitution’s free-speech guarantee.

”We have no warrant to reject the rational judgment Congress made,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.

The statute aimed to harmonise US copyright law with rules in other countries. The measure applied to works that had been excluded from the American copyright system for various reasons, in some cases because the US didn’t have copyright relations with the author’s home country and in other cases because the US hadn’t yet recognised copyrights on sound recordings.

The law gave rights-holders the copyright protection they otherwise would have had. Affected works include Tolkien’s The Hobbit, hundreds of Picasso paintings, several Hitchcock films and the music of Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and other Russian composers.

Congress approved the law to meet obligations stemming from the Uruguay Round of international trade talks. The motion-picture and music industries pushed for the provision to secure reciprocal protection for American works abroad.

Justice Ginsburg said that was a legitimate goal under the constitution’s copyright clause, which she said let Congress focus on encouraging the distribution of existing works and creation of new ones.

”Congress determined that US interests were best served by our full participation in the dominant system of international copyright protection,” she wrote. The Obama administration defended the law.

While most popular travel search engines can display the hotel’s location on a map, Google has gone one step further with its “Hotel Finder” filter experiment.

The more flexible travel-search options mean travellers can search directly for a point of interest such as a tourist attraction. Google then populates hotel results based on a 20-minute default distance from a point of interest.

With the ability to filter hotels by travel time, price, ratings and reviews as well as hotel class, the search method has been called “unique and useful” by reviewers such as searchengineland.com.

The transit time search is only available in cities where Google has partnered with local transit agencies to get their data in Google Maps. Where no transit data is available, it will display walking time.

Meanwhile Wego has tailor-made its sites in Australia and New Zealand to provide localised search results.

The “popularity” tool shows users search results most preferred by others and unique to their own country.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) issued a watch for a geomagnetic storm expected to reach our planet tomorrow after a satellite witnessed an ultraviolet flash from Sunday night’s massive solar eruption.

The storm poses no risk to Earth-dwellers, Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre told FOXNews.com.

But as a rare precaution, polar flights on Earth are expected to be re-routed, Kathy Sullivan, deputy administrator of NOAA, said today at a Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, according to Space.com.

Eruptions on the sun shoot tremendous streams of charged particles away from the star – in this case directly towards us.

“There is little doubt that the cloud is heading in the general direction of Earth,” Spaceweather.com announced in an alert. “The blast from the immense solar radiation storm let loose with a so called coronal mass ejection (CME) that will hit the atmosphere Tuesday morning, something NASA and NOAA monitor for as it could cause problems for astronauts, communications satellites, and even rocket launches.”

It could also affect navigation and the power grid.

The solar flare that spat out on Sunday at 10.59pm local time was rated an M9-class eruption – nearly an X-class flare, the most powerful type of solar storm.

NOAA measures geomagnetic storms on a five-point scale from 1 to 5. G1 storms are minor, leading to weak power grid fluctuations and having only minor impact on satellites. G5 storms are extreme, leading to widespread voltage control problems, damage to transformers, radio outages and satellite problems.

Geomagnetic storms tomorrow may be as strong as G3, causing intermittent navigation issues and problems with low-Earth satellites.

Their work tries to answer a question that has inspired fiction writers and scientists for ages.

“We are almost discovering what was science fiction 30 years ago,” Quarles said.

Using data from the Kepler mission space telescope and computer modeling, the UTA team is trying to map for scientists where conditions exist to support life within the Kepler-16 system. That system made headlines last fall when NASA announced the existence of a “world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars.”

Kepler-16b has been likened to Tatooine — think of the place Luke Skywalker was attacked by Tusken Raiders or Sand People — but it is uninhabitable, according to NASA.

The UTA team was inspired by the discovery, said Musielak, describing how Quarles brought him an article about it. They were moved to make calculations using the tools available, Musielak said, and the results indicated that an Earth-like planet could exist in a “habitable zone” as an exomoon of Kepler-16b.

The team also concluded that an “extendable habitable zone” exists outside Kepler-16b’s orbit, according to UTA.

Cuntz said that life form could be along the lines of a plant or bacteria. The planet’s critical feature to sustain life would be liquid water, he said.

Quarles said it would be akin to life that could exist on Mars — more dependent on carbon dioxide than oxygen.

Musielak said that finding a moon in that system would be historic.

“It would be one of the greatest discoveries,” he said. “This would be the first moon discovered outside of our solar system, and it would be habitable.”

These findings were presented last week to the American Astronomical Society in Austin.

The team is encouraged by all the attention their work is getting — imagine people talking astrophysics on the streets. The science fiction references help people understand the information. The attention is also prompting people to ask more questions, which scientists thrive on, he said.

Musielak said people typically respond, “Ah, really. Hmmm, that’s very, very interesting.”

Quarles said that while scientists make these discoveries with satellites and modeling, they still can’t be verified in person. Still, the team says this type of scientific discussion can lead to more space exploration.

“You never know what people will do,” Musielak said. “Sometimes, it’s very hard to make predictions. Things are changing almost every year from the technology point of view.”

So while people don’t have the tools to travel to the Kepler-16 system today, scientists don’t rule out the possibility that someday humans will find a way to travel there.

“According to information from mission control of the space forces, the fragments of Phobos-Grunt should have fallen into the Pacific Ocean at 5.45pm GMT “, space forces spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin said.

There was no immediate comment from Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, which throughout the day, as the probe approached Earth, had given wildly different predictions about where it could land.

Zolotukhin said that the space forces had closely followed the probe’s course. “This has allowed us to ascertain the place and time of the fall of the craft with a great degree of accuracy”.

According to the ITAR-TASS news agency, the probe should have splashed down 1250 kilometres west of the island of Wellington off the coast of Chile.

A landing in the ocean would be a huge relief for Russia after earlier reports suggested it could crash into the territory of South America, possibly Argentina.

The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft should have been on an expedition to Mars’ largest moon but instead became stuck in an Earth orbit that has become lower and lower as it became increasingly tugged by the Earth’s gravity and slowed by the upper atmosphere.

Related articles

• Russian probe Phobos-Grunt to crash-land to Earth but where? (theinformativereport.com)

The solution is “nano-coating” – a protective layer 1000 times thinner than a human hair that lets the smartphone keep functioning even when it goes for an accidental dip.

The coating, developed by the good people at Liquipel, manages to get into every nook and cranny of the hardware so that it is completely protected when submerged in liquids.

However the company does not encourage users to take their phones swimming,

“NO!” it advises on the website. “Just because your device has been further protected does not mean it can be used in this way.

“It is similar to buying a case for your device and asking to throw it at the ground.”

The company said it was common sense for people to take care of their device and that the protective coating was designed to protect against “rain, spills, baby drool and short term submersion such as the sink or toilet.”

Facebook as of this week is hosting an app that lets you deliver your last words from beyond the grave.

The third-party app called “If I die” lets users record a video or text message that will only be published in the event of your death.

Once you install the app you must select three “trustees” from your Facebook friends list to confirm you have in fact died.

When all three agree, the video or message will be released on your wall.

Digital strategist at communications agency Text 100 Karalee Evans said while app could seem a little creepy it could help stop trolling and flaming on memorial pages.

“The person that has recorded the message is controlling how their social networks find out about their passing,” Ms Evans said. “And it could be something that helps to mitigate that flaming by switching the power balance.”
She said the app could be useful for people with terminal illnesses to control how they finish their social footprint.

More than 5000 Facebook users have already liked the app on the social networking site but judging from this reaction on Twitter not everyone is convinced:

“Now I have seen it all! Morbid?” wrote user @ronbercume.

Another user @johanncarlise wrote: “If FB is the best you can do for after-death messages you probably don’t have any very exciting secrets to share anyway.”

Over the next few days, Google search users who are logged into their Google profile will be able to turn on a feature called “Search plus Your World”. The functionality skews search results in favour of content from Google+, giving added priority to photos, posts, pages and profiles from the service.

The additional personal touches mark another step toward one of Google’s most ambitious goals. The internet search leader eventually hopes to know enough about each of its users so it can tailor its results to fit the unique interests of each person looking for something.

Facebook and Twitter pose a threat to Google because they don’t allow Google’s search engine to log the avalanche of photos, links and observations tumbling through those services. That’s troublesome to Google because its search engine could become less useful if its system can’t analyse what people are signalling is important to them so those preferences can be factoring into the results.

Turning off the personal results permanently will require changing a setting in Google’s personal preferences. The personal results can also be excluded on a search-by-search basis by clicking on an icon of the globe on the results page (the personal results will be denoted by a button featuring a human’s silhouette).

If the new formula works as Google expects, the search results will include pertinent information culled from the requester’s Google+ account. For instance, a query about the San Francisco 49ers might include links and comments made about the football team by other people in one of the social circles on the user’s Plus account. A search request that includes the name of a dog owned by the user or a friend might turn up photos of the pet that have been posted on Google+ and Picasa.

While signed into Google, search results and private content will be protected with SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption by default, as web search and Gmail are.

Personal results will be marked as “public”, “limited” or “only you”, and it will be easy to toggle between web only results or the combined results by clicking on icons of a human (for personal) or a globe (for, well, global results) near the top of the search page.

“This is going to open up a whole new avenue in search,” said Ben Gomes, a Google fellow.

Google isn’t the first to do this. Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been mining some of the preferences and other information shared on Facebook since May. But Google’s emphasis on more personal results figures to attract more attention because its search engine is so dominant. It handles about two thirds of the internet search requests made in the US while Bing processes less than one third, including the activity that it comes through a partnership with Yahoo.

Facebook, though, has greater insights into personal tastes. That’s because its nearly eight-year-old social network boasts more than 800 million users who share more than 1.5 billion photos alone each week. In October, Google said that Google+ had more than 40 million users. Google hasn’t updated the information since then, although some external studies have estimated Plus began the new year with 60 million to 70 million users.

Some of Google’s changes may help prod more people into joining Google+. As part of this expansion, the profile pictures of Plus account-holders will appear in the drop-down suggestions on Google’s search box. In another twist, searches on general topics such as “music” and “sports”, will generate suggestions on people, companies and places that have Plus accounts.

While Google is hoping the addition of more personal results will make its search engine even more useful, the changes also could spook some people as they realise how much information is being compiled about them. Google tried to minimise privacy concerns by recently switching to technology that encrypts all its search results to protect the information from slipping out.

Previous privacy missteps by both Google and Facebook resulted in both companies entering into settlements with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC agreements require Google and Facebook to submit to external audits of their privacy practices every other year.