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Google would not comment on whether Intel was one of the roughly 20 unnamed companies that the world’s No. 1 Internet search engine said had been similarly targeted in attacks that originated in China.

The attack was just one of what the world’s largest chipmakers said were regular attempts on its computer systems, Intel said in a filing under a heading about potential theft or misuse of the company’s intellectual property.

“The only connection is timing,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, declining to elaborate. The company first publicized the attack and pointed out the similarity in timing to the move on Google in an annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now that Google has publicly admitted to being successfully attacked without much damage to their reputation, analysts said other companies are rethinking their typically tight-lipped approach to security breaches.

Recent changes to disclosure laws and increased awareness of cyber-security may also have prompted Intel to come clean, analysts say.

But Intel did not say who was behind the attacks, from where in the world they originated, or what information, if any, had been taken.

Full Story ~ Reuters

It would seem to be prudent for the giants of industry to talk to each other or perhaps to a government agency when attacked in a sophisticated way.

Chinese military and education officials have dismissed reports linking them with a cyber attack on the Internet search engine Google. In an interview with China Daily, they said that a recent accusation printed in the New York Times was false.

In its report on Thursday, the New York Times linked two Chinese higher education institutions to cyber attacks on Google.

The world’s biggest search engine announced last month that it had been the target of a highly sophisticated attack in December. It said the hacking had come from a source within China.

The report claimed the two education facilities have close ties with the Chinese military and also Google’s competitor in China, Baidu.

Pan Zheng, an expert from the National Defense University, told China Daily that the attacks on Google had nothing to do with the Chinese government, nor the military. He went on to say that a hacking location inside China doesn’t necessarily mean the attacks were launched by the government or the military.

Major General Luo Yuan from the Academy of Military Science said that web hacking is against Chinese law. He stated that the Chinese military would not go against the rules. He claimed that it was irresponsible to blame the military when there was such a lack of evidence.

One of the accused schools is the Shandong-based Lanxiang Vocational School. School officials say they have been getting phone calls all day asking about the cyber attack. They say that the school provides lessons in I.T. and computing, and has no ties with the Chinese military.

A professor from Shanghai-based Jiaotong University, the other named Chinese institution, said he is not surprised by allegations that students hacked into websites. However he said that such acts were not malicious in motive, and that the students may simply have been testing out their Internet abilities. The professor added that the IP address of the university was often hijacked.

Source ~ CCTV.com

BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) — The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and some other newspapers have published articles indicating that cyber attacks targeting Google and several other U.S. companies were from China. Such allegations are arbitrary and biased.

These articles take as evidence that hackers’ IP addresses could be traced back to two schools in China. However, it is common sense that hackers can attack by hijacking computers from anywhere in the world. This fact also explains why hackers are hard to be tracked down.

Computers in China are easy to be hijacked by hackers as internet security technology and services are still underdeveloped in China. The majority of Chinese internet users also lack security awareness and adequate protection measures.

The hackers’ IP addresses could by no means vindicate the newspapers’ allegations that the attacks were carried out by Chinese citizens or from within China.

Certain newspapers went even further by indicating that the Chinese government and the military might have supported those cyber attacks.

Full Story ~ xinhuanet

For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

I still need to use some Google services–I have clients who share a couple of documents via Google Docs, I need to access one private blog on Blogger, and I will continue to use Google search (though I plan on exploring alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo). But for the most part, I’m dropping Google wherever I can.

It was a combination of recent incidents that drove me to this point. One was the introduction of Google Buzz, which, in some cases, disclosed contact information that users thought was private. When Google launched Buzz, its “social networking tool,” the company didn’t let users opt into the program, but automatically applied it to all of the millions of users of the company’s free Gmail. Google quickly backtracked, but it is not clear whether the “turn off Buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail pages truly purges the links that Google created.

Full Story ~ PC World

As the online search giant Google has completed its acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies the company was recommended by the Free Software Foundation to release On2’s latest codec under an irrevocable free license and use it to replace Adobe Flash on YouTube.

“With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec: VP8,” reads a open letter to Google, posted to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blogs.

“Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).”

Full Story ~ Ecommerce Journal

The New York Times is reporting that the recent online attacks on Google and on other American corporations have been traced to two computers at schools in China.

The two schools in question are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to anonymous sources of the newspaper.

Jiaotong touts one of China’s top computer science programs. Lanxiang is a vocational school that was founded by the military and trains computer scientists for the military.

Google first announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies were the targets of computer hijacking which were believed to be from China. The attacks, which were intended to steal trade secrets and computer codes and also the e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun in April — months earlier than originally thought.

Only until recently, the investigation had led the National Security Agency to Taiwan.

Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said that they were unaware that American officials traced the hacking to the schools.

According to an interview with a professor of Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering in the Times article, it is common for students to hack into foreign Web sites.

Full Story ~ Fox News

Google released Buzz last week as a better way to manage the growing deluge of social networking information, but privacy concerns have caused quite a fallout. First, numerous complaints online caused Google to quickly change some features. Then came a complaint to the FTC from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Now Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed this week in federal court in California, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a resident of Florida, though the suit seeks to include all 31.2 million Gmail users as potential plaintiffs. Buzz was rolled out to most, if not all, Gmail users last week. In at least some cases the feature was automatically activated, and generated publicly accessible lists of followers gleaned from users’ Gmail accounts and Gtalk conversations. There is real concern that sensitive information related to some contacts could have been exposed.

Google made numerous changes last weekend in an attempt to make it easier to opt out of the service and make contact lists private. It also dropped the automatic following features, replacing it with a list of suggested contacts. Buzz won’t automatically connect and use public data from Picasa and Google Reader without a user explicitly activating the connecting, either.

Full Story ~ ars technica

Google Inc. has acquired Aardvark, a San Francisco start-up whose service melds Internet search and social networking.

Aardvark co-founder and top strategy manager Max Ventilla told Reuters his company had signed a deal to be acquired by Google “recently,” but would not comment on the price.

A report on the technology blog TechCrunch said the deal was for $50 million, citing a source briefed on the transaction.

A source familiar with the situation told Reuters the deal was expected to close within the next week.

The purchase represents the latest sign of Google’s interest in the fast-growing social networking market, ruled by companies like Facebook and Twitter. On Tuesday, Google introduced a new product called Google Buzz that integrates Twitter-like social networking features directly into its Gmail Web-based email service.

Aardvark, which counts two ex-Google employees among its founders, has pioneered a new type of Internet search dubbed “social search.” Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark’s service taps a person’s network of social contacts.

Full Story ~ Reuters

Google on Wednesday introduced a plan to offer ultra-high-speed Internet access to consumers in a test intended to showcase the potential new uses of broadband networks once such speeds become commonplace.

The test could also help advance Google’s policy goals of open, unfettered Internet access, challenging the business model of established telecommunications companies.

In a post on its corporate blog, the company said it planned to build and test a high-speed fiber optic broadband network capable of allowing people to surf the Web at a gigabit a second, or about 100 times the speed of many broadband connections. The trial could be offered in several communities and extend to as many as 500,000 people.

In an interview, Richard S. Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counsel, said Google did not see the test as a new business venture as an Internet service provider, but rather as an effort to push the industry into offering faster Internet access at lower cost.

“We are not getting into the I.S.P. or broadband business,” said Mr. Whitt, using the industry shorthand for Internet service provider. “This is a business model nudge and an innovation nudge.”

Mr. Whitt said that if the project was successful, Google would benefit because more people would use the Internet, and in turn, the company’s own services.

Full Story ~ The New York Times