According to a statement issued yesterday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google Desktop ain’t what it seems. A new feature of the application now records the contents of your hard drive, storing actual copies of your files — including Word documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Concern about the new “Search Across Computers” feature arises out of the possibility that making such files available to Google opens users up to severe invasion of privacy, not only from hackers, but from government surveillance as well.

via wired news???

The preview of Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware wrongly fingered two Symantec enterprise anti-virus products as password-stealing programs last week. If users followed Microsoft’s recommendation and removed the offending Registry key, the Symantec software turned into so much digital junk. Read more

The worm set to overwrite important Microsoft and Adobe documents come Friday has struck India five times harder than the U.S., and Peru three times harder, a security company claimed.According to Chicago-based LURHQ, the worm — dubbed Kama Sutra, Blackworm, Blackmal, MyWife, Nyxem, and nearly two dozen other names — India has the infamous honor of topping the list, with nearly 80,000 infected PCs. Peru, which came in second, sports almost 55,000 compromised computers.In comparison, the United States has about 15,000 machines contaminated with the worm.

“Viruses don’t always spread uniformly,” LURHQ said in its report. “There are many factors at play which are hard to quantitize, such as the initial seeding, social engineering, AV deployment, and random chance. And, as with all statistics, take [these] with a grain of salt.”

LURHQ tagged the total number of Blackworm-infected computers at around 300,000 — a number bandied about last week — even though a Web-based infection counter claims a number in the millions. LURHQ, however, was able to strip out bogus “clicks” on that counter to arrive at is estimate.

“An attempt was made by an unknown party to artificially inflate the counter using a set of 279 distributed (presumably compromised) computers,” said LURHQ.

The report can be viewed here.

via:techweb