Finjan recently reported (MPOM report) on a Crimeserver hosting 1.4G of unprotected stolen data, including passwords, medical data, emails etc. A few days ago they found yet another.

To demonstrate how easy it is to access the data and how vulnerable the data are once stored on an unprotected Crimeserver, the following examples should raise some eyebrows.

As Finjan disclosed in their Q3/2006 Trend report, malicious code is hosted on caching servers of leading Search Engine Providers. This time they reported in their recent MPOM that stolen end-user data is also stored on these caching servers. Yes, your passwords, Social Security numbers, Online banking information… no data is safe, as the image below illustrates.

So if you are looking for some stolen login credentials… Google it!

Finjan claims they share their experience and findings to increase public awareness of  the growing cybercrime problem.

Finally, please don’t blame Google - they just indexed the unprotected Log files found on the Crimeserver as they do with any other public file their crawlers find on the Web.  Scary isn’t it?

In an effort to enable more credible global climate change predictions, researchers from UC Berkeley believe that the way to go is a new kind of cloud supercomputer that includes 20 million processors delivering a peak performance of 200 PFlops to simulate 1-km scale climate models.

We are just about ready to transition from the Gigaflop into the Petaflop era and the new proposal from UC Berkeley and Tensilica could, at least on paper, put supercomputer development into warp speed. In a dramatic departure from current supercomputer architectures and upcoming hybrid systems, this proposed system would rely on embedded processors with minimal power consumption.

The researchers believe that 20 million Tensilica RISC processors would deliver at least 10 PFlops of sustained performance, while topping out at about 200 PFlops. The power consumption of such a system is estimated at about 4 Mega Watts and the construction and typical operation cost at about $75 million. A 200 PFlops system that is built on today’s common architecture could cost up to $1 billion and consume 200 Mega Watts – which is the equivalent of what a city with 100,000 people consumes.

In comparison, the currently fastest supercomputer tops out at 596 TFlops.

So, what would a 200 PFlop system be able to accomplish? Read the full story at TG Daily.

DExposE2 is a task switching application similar to the one found on Mac’s OS X. Setup is straight forward, and after tweaking the settings just a little bit (to your likings) it’s ready to go. By default you’ll get all your open applications side by side on the desktop (press F9, F10 or F11) and to select simply click on whatever you wish to work on/with.

Nice fading transitions and help titles when hovering makes this a killer add-on for XP or Vista (Mac user’s obviously doesn’t need this one…).

Here’s how it looks on my Win XP SP2 office PC:

Grab the code from Lora Devrexter’s homepage and try it for yourself. Download link on the right-side menu, or download it here.

The moment has arrived! Mozilla are welcoming all testers to help with Firefox 3 RC1 Testday (Part 1). This will be the biggest testday of the year, and they need your help.

What: Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 Testday (Part 1)
When: Friday, May 16, 2008 from 7am - 5pm PDT
Where: IRC on irc.mozilla.org, channel #testday

How you can help

1. Install the RC1 build candidate at: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.0rc1-candidates/…
2. Review this list of things to test.
3. Provide your feedback and any testing updates by leaving a comment on this event post! Or join on irc.mozilla.org, channel #testday for immediate discussion.

As announced on Weblog Tools Collection and on the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog itself I just thought I’d help spread the word about the upcoming WordPress 2.5 Plugin Competition. And besides the fame and glory there’s already some cash and goodies in the pot for the winner(s).

You can read all about what, where and how on the above mentioned pages. In short “all” you need to do is write a plugin that is:

1. Original (new) and useful
2. Well documented
3. Supported

I’d love to participate, but workload has been somewhat keeping me busy 9 days a week lately. If you’re joining please leave a comment so we can follow your work from here - and not to forget, Good Luck!!