The creator of Nmap has said on his Web site, insecure.org, that the FBI keeps trying to take data from his Web server. The creator of the famous hacking tool Nmap is being hounded by the FBI for copies of Web server log data from his Web site Insecure.org. Fyodor, as he is known, is a well known figure in the security world, specifically for his work with Nmap. In his blog, Fyodor said that the authorities were asking him...

The SCO website appears to have been hacked over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. SCO's Web site was largely out of commission until Monday morning, a representative of the Lindon, Utah-based Unix and Linux seller said Monday. Performance measurement statistics from Netcraft indicated that the site had been down since Friday night. Company's website was also defaced.

Nullsoft has issued a fix for a newly discovered security vulnerability affecting Winamp 3.0, 5.0 and 5.0 Pro or newer. The vulnerability takes advantage of the Winamp Skin installer mechanism coupled with a security hole within the Internet Explorer browser. To be vulnerable, a user must navigate to a specifically crafted web page which automatically installs a malicious Winamp Skin. This skin launches an embedded Internet Explorer browser within the Skin using a feature of the Winamp Modern Skin Engine.

The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal. In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room...

Peer-to-peer program Kazaa is the number one spyware threat on the Internet, according to Computer Associates. According to the company's Pest Patrol research, Kazaa created a greater threat than other programs in its top five spyware list because of its widespread popularity. Kazaa claims that its sofware has been downloaded 214 million times. CA gave Kazaa a high 'clot factor', its measure of how much a program slows a machine by adding uncessary registry entries and directories.

Opera says the next version of its browser will improve Web page rendering to make it easier to view and print online content. The next version of the Opera browser, due at the end of the year, will improve the browsing experience, Opera Software said on Tuesday. Opera 7.60 will include new rendering technology that will cut out the need for horizontally scrolling across Web pages, regardless of screen size. The same technology also means that online content can be...

As Firefox marks its 5 millionth download and moves to retail stores, OneStat.com, an Amsterdam, Netherlands-based provider of Web traffic measurement services, said that according to numbers gleaned from 2 million Web surfers around the world, the Mozilla Foundation's new Firefox releases appear to be cutting into Microsoft's still commanding lead in the browser market. "It seems that people are switching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox browser," Niels Brinkman, OneStat.com co-founder, said in a statement. IE's market...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has made an appeal to the EU Council to oppose the adoption of the Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions, known as the software patent directive. In a statement published on an anti-patent Web site (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com), Linus Torvalds, MySQL co-founder Michael Widenius and PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, said that software patents must not be legalised. "In the interest of Europe, such a deceptive, dangerous and democratically illegitimate proposal must not become the Common Position of...

Once chided for jumping the gun with its Mozilla-based browser, Netscape is gunning to surpass the original with its next release. Netscape on Wednesday confirmed an earlier report that it planned to release a new browser based on the Mozilla code. The America Online unit this week issued an invitation for people to sign up to test a limited prototype of the update, to be released Nov. 30. In its invitation to testers, Netscape didn't resist the urge to take...

Has anybody had a good experience with Symantec's Norton Antivirus? Whenever I have written about Symantec's flagship consumer antivirus application, the response from readers is always the same. Hordes of Symantec's customers write in complaining that Norton AntiVirus (NAV) sucks up their system resources, doesn't clean their computer thoroughly and when they finally decide to ditch the program altogether, they first need to download a special un-installation tool from Symantec's Web site.