SitePoint Flash Scripts
SitePoint's Flash Script resource hass just been updated -- all recent additions are marked "New!"

Here, you'll find an ever-increasing number of quick, simple Flash scripts that you can easily apply to your latest project. No matter what you're after, it's here! The scripts are categorised as:


Graphic Effects (below)
Build Your Own... With Flash
Use Flash To...

Compatibility: Please note that all scripts presented here are compatible with Flash 5, unless otherwise stated.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article.php/1125

DefCon, Black Hat: Action required
More serious vulnerabilities have been discovered in the past month, highlighting the fact that security hasn't improved despite strong talk from government and industry. Security experts are gathering for two conferences in Las Vegas hoping their solutions won't fall on deaf ears.

http://zdnet.com.com/2251-1110-5058151.html

Simple and affordable steps can improve SMB security postures
Many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) don't believe that a hacker would target their enterprise. Although it's true that many attacks are planned to vandalize highly visible Web sites, any enterprise that has inadequate security should be concerned. The recent emergence of the SQL Slammer worm demonstrates the challenges SMBs face from a mass attack that hits any vulnerable IP address. In attacks such as Nimda, Code Red, and Slammer, hackers are going after systems at random, so being an SMB doesn't make you any less attractive as a target.

Also making SMBs prime targets are the following factors: 90 percent of SMBs are running Windows on their servers, 80 percent are using Outlook and Exchange for e-mail, and 70 percent are using SQL databases. Microsoft software is a major target for hackers because it has large numbers of vulnerabilities, and its market share gives hackers the ability to have a massive impact. Security breaches at smaller businesses don't grab headlines the way attacks on Fortune 500 companies do, but this doesn't mean they're any less devastating.

Through 2005, 40 percent of SMBs that manage their own network security and use the Internet for more than e-mail will experience a successful Internet attack, and more than half of them won't know they were attacked (0.8 probability).…



http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914399,00.html

Hackers intent on anonymously sending data across the Internet have a new tool.
A program called NCovert uses spoofing techniques to hide the source of communications and the data that travels over the network--a potential boon to both privacy advocates and hackers, said Mark Lovelace, senior security researcher for network protection firm BindView, who unveiled the program Thursday at the Black Hat Briefings security conference here.

"I am not going to beat around the bush," Lovelace said. "If you have something to hide, you would use this--so it could help black hats (criminal hackers)."

The technique essentially creates a covert channel for communications by hiding four characters of data in the header's initial sequence number (ISN) field. The header is the part of data packets that tells network hardware and servers how to handle the information. The header also includes source and destination Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Those addresses are used to add anonymity to the communications.


Lovelace, known among the security community as "Simple Nomad," said the key to the technique is to forge the source of the IP address to look like the intended recipient of the information, while the destination IP addresses points to another third-party server on the Internet.

The hacker would then send off a data packet to the third-party server with any valid-looking information in the data fields, but the real message would be hidden in four bytes of the ISN field. The packet would contain a message indicating to the third-party server that a computer wants to start a communications session. The server would acknowledge the message, but because of the forged source address, the message would be forwarded on to the recipient.


http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5058535.html

More spam in July than during all of last year
Anybody still unconvinced about the scale of the spam epidemic should consider this fact: MessageLabs intercepted more spam in the last month than in the whole of 2002.

http://silicon.com/news/165/1/5385.html

JBook
JBook lets users retrieve, read, and bookmark electronic texts from Project Gutenberg and other sources. It transforms any computer into an electronic book reader with an entire library available on demand.

How To Use:

Download jbook-1.2.zip (108 KB)
Unzip with a compression utility.

Java Source: Available

Status: Free
http://javaboutique.internet.com/applications/JBook/jbook-1.2.zip

http://javaboutique.internet.com/applications/JBook/

Digging for Googleholes
But the oracle—recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.

Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.

The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.

I suspect this emphasis is due to the convention of linking to an online store when mentioning a product, whether it's a book, CD, or outdoor grill. In addition, a number of sites—such as DealTime—track the latest prices and availability of thousands of items at online stores, which creates even more product links in Google's database. Because PageRank assumes that pages that attract a lot of links are more relevant than pages without links, these most-linked-to product pages bubble up to the top.

Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer—and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?

At this stage in the Web's development, people who create a lot of links—most notably the blogging community—tend to be more technologically inclined than the general population, and thus more likely to link to Apple Computer than something like the Washington State Apple Growers Association. (This process is sometimes known as "googlewashing," where one group of prolific linkers can alter the online associations with a given word or phrase.) But there's another factor here, which is that categories that don't have central, well-known sites devoted to them will fare poorly when they share a keyword with other categories.…

Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books.…

http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/