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Buzz Out Loud 820: Stupid cloud

Richard Stallman says anyone who puts their data in the cloud is stupid. Cooley thinks he's right about some things, but finds other parts of his statement stupid. Find out which is which. We also get into a discussion of why exactly the House of Representatives' Web site went down. Cooley doesn't buy any of it. Actually Brian's pretty cranky today. You'll enjoy it. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 820

Stallman rejects cloud computing http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080930-why-stallman-is-wrong-when-he-calls-cloud-computing-stupid.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman… Read more

House Web site overwhelmed by e-mails

This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT with a graphic and more details.

The Web site for the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed this week by a deluge of visitors trying to e-mail their congressmen and download the financial bailout bill the House rejected Monday.

The site on Monday saw three to four times its normal traffic, according to Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House chief administrative officer. The traffic has slowed down the site and made it inaccessible to some, a problem that continued into Tuesday morning.

"It's extraordinary--the highest level of … Read more

Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail program exposes passwords

Passwords used to access Yahoo mail through the Zimbra client are sent over the Internet in clear text, a Canadian programmer says.

Holden Karau stumbled upon this problem while participating in the Yahoo University Hack Day at the University of Waterloo last week.

"The Yahoo imap server's used by the Yahoo Desktop don't support SSL and the password was being transmitted in plain text," Karau wrote in a blog post on Friday.

"What does this mean for you? If you use Zimbra to access your Yahoo mail, you almost certainly need to change your password … Read more

Zimbra's ubiquity play with ISPs

Zimbra just closed a deal with XMission, Utah's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, XMission will be moving customers who host e-mail with XMission to Zimbra.

It's not necessarily a huge deal, not like Comcast's decision to use Zimbra was. Even so, I like the deal because it demonstrates Zimbra's continued focus on ubiquity.

Zimbra's per-user pricing with ISPs isn't high. But that's the point. Zimbra has always focused on making it affordable for ISPs to seriously upgrade their e-mail offerings with its Web-based Microsoft Exchange replacement. Adoption first, and … Read more

No indictment in Palin hacking case

A grand jury in Chattanooga, Tenn., investigating who hacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail ended its meeting on Tuesday without indicting a Tennessee lawmaker's son.

Speculation on the Internet has centered on 20-year-old David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student.

On the Internet forum 4Chan.org, where the e-mail break-in was first announced, posts attributed to someone named "Rubico" more or less described how the Yahoo account had been compromised using the password recovery feature. The e-mail address used for Rubico has been linked to Kernell.

Kernell's father, Democratic Tennessee state representative … Read more

E-mail, photo programs stripped from Windows 7

Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 won't include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista, CNET News.com has learned.

The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others.

Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions … Read more

Another useful tool banned from the iPhone App Store

Apple is doing a good job of driving developers to circumvent the official App Store and users to jailbreak their iPhones. The company has rejected another useful application, Angelo DiNardi's MailWrangler, because it "duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail."

In a post to his blog, DiNardi says his application, which allows users to add and access multiple Gmail accounts, "simply directly loading and showing Gmail inside of an application," adding "How you can confuse Gmail with Mail.app I'm not sure."

MailWrangler also lets users see threaded views and … Read more

Is Palin's hacker a Tennessee college student?

There are mixed reports on Friday whether or not the son of a Tennessee state representative has been contacted by the FBI or Secret Service in connection with Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo Mail account.

The father, Democratic Rep. Mike Kernell has told Knoxville News Sentinel and The Tennessean that despite a lot of online chatter, no formal contact has been made.

The person who gained access to Palin's e-mail account did so by guessing details of her life, then changed the e-mail password to "popcorn."

Using the online nickname Rubico, someone posted details of the hack … Read more

Social engineering cracked Palin's e-mail account

Details describing how someone hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account emerged on Thursday, and it appears to have been done with little more than social engineering, the process of acquiring personal information through social manipulation.

Meanwhile, the Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that a 20-year-old University of Tennessee student has been contacted in connection to the federal investigation of the break-in. Further details are not known.

Since Tuesday, anonymous posters using a forum on the 4Chan.org Web site have been circulating password-protected zip files containing the contents of the now-deleted e-mail account once belonging to the Republican … Read more