Legal Commentary

News From All Over

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In - Security Fix

Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports:

- A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.

According to wire reports, the remote facility temporarily moved to Defense Condition (Defcon) 3 in the pre-dawn hours, but quickly backed down from that posture. An airman at the installation who asked not to be identified blamed the mishap on “way too much caffeine” consumed by occupants inside the secluded underground control room.

Innovation in England:

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication

Gmail Autopilot is Google’s latest step in its plan towards world email domination. Basically, it pulls sample text from emails you’ve sent before and offers you a draft reply to email piling up in your inbox. They suggest you can even send them out without reading them, but won’t allow endless loops:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.

Qualcomm is spreading out from its tech roots into bio-engineering

It appears, however, that Qualcomm may face competition from Amazon.com, which unveiled plans for a much more practical version of a similar service

Full post as published by Discourse.net on April 01, 2009 (boomark / email).