MIT to open up some courses to global audience

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MIT to open up some courses to global audience — free, online

The program, called MITx, will represent the next evolution in online offerings, extending the university’s already well-established OpenCourseWare, which provides materials on about 2,100 courses that has been accessed by more than 100 million people. OpenCourseWare will continue, but MITx will be more interactive and provide a greater virtual classroom experience, providing access to online laboratories, student-to-student discussions, and greater interactivity. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

 

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Zeus returns: FBI warns of ‘Gameover’ ID-theft malware

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The FBI said the phishing lures typically includes a link in the e-mail that goes to a phony website. ”Once you’re there, you inadvertently download the Gameover malware, which promptly infects your computer and steals your banking information,” it warned.

via Zeus returns: FBI warns of ‘Gameover’ ID-theft malware | ZDNet.

Hmmm.  You must have to do something to “inadvertently” download the malware.  I’d like to see this website and how they do it but no link or no example.  This story sounds fishy.

Knock Knock Knockin’ on Bridges’ Doors

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In October 2011, ticket #4185 was filed in the Tor bug tracker by a user in China who found that their connections to US-based Tor bridge relays were being regularly cut off after a very short period of time. At the time we performed some basic experimentation and discovered that Chinese IPs (presumably at the behest of the Great Firewall of China, or GFW) would reach out to the US-based bridge and connect to it shortly after the Tor user in China connected, and, if successful, shortly thereafter the connection would be blocked by the GFW. There wasn’t time for a detailed investigation and analysis at the time, but that kernel eventually grew into the investigation detailed below. We were, however, able to determine that limiting connections to the bridge relay to only the single IP expected to be its client would, in fact, block the probes and allow the connection to remain open for an extended period (>48 hours in our testing).

via Knock Knock Knockin’ on Bridges’ Doors | The Tor Blog.

How the Great Firewall of China Blocks Tor

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Wilde was able to find that the method the firewall was using to identify which sessions to go after had something to do with the list of SSL ciphers contained in the SSL packet the client sends at the beginning of a session. By changing that list, he was able to evade the blocking of the Chinese firewall. More long-term solutions are in the works, as well, including password protection for bridge relays and the establishment of another layer on top of the session that simply looks like binary data.

via How the Great Firewall of China Blocks Tor | threatpost.

Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead

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Balancing chaos and order has always been a challenge; you want to curtail botnets and spam and phishing and other Internet ills without destroying the productive chaos that allowed a million websites and online businesses to launch without permission from any gatekeeper. Early Internet theorists, caught up in this chaos and still somewhat insulated from criminal gang activity behind so much spam and fraud and hacking online today, worried about breaking the Internet’s best qualities. Today, with 15 years of online bad behavior to look back on, governments have increasingly ignored Dalzell—but they sometimes risk imposing so much “order” on the ‘Net that creativity, commerce, and free speech is affected.

via Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead.

AcerCloud Is Acer’s Answer To The Media Cloud

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AcerCloud Is Acer’s Answer To The Media Cloud | TechCrunch.

AcerCloud makes it easy to take photos on a smartphone while on the go, and then view them on a main PC at home or in the office, without the delay and complication of manually transferring files. It also allows users to purchase a movie from an all-in-one PC, and then watch it on a tablet or smartphone on a train or airplane. As long as the main PC is in sleep (standby/hibernation) mode, Acer Always Connect technology can wake it up through Wi-Fi® so media can be retrieved via a mobile device. AcerCloud, meanwhile, intelligently uses local and cloud storage together so all data is always available. Other features of AcerCloud include:

TCP may keep its offered receive window closed indefinitely RFC 1122

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Part of the Transmission Control Protocol TCP specification RFC 1122 allows a receiver to advertise a zero byte window, instructing the sender to maintain the connection but not send additional TCP payload data. The sender should then probe the receiver to check if the receiver is ready to accept data. Narrow interpretation of this part of the specification can create a denial-of-service vulnerability. By advertising a zero receive window and acknowledging probes, a malicious receiver can cause a sender to consume resources TCP state, buffers, and application memory, preventing the targeted service or system from handling legitimate connections.

via US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#723308 – TCP may keep its offered receive window closed indefinitely RFC 1122.