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TOP STORIES FOR FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2005 Apple Settles with Man Accused of Leaking Code Feds Order Banks to Disclose Breaches ICANN Approves EU Top-Level Domain Blue Gene/L Speed Record Broken, by Blue Gene/L Sybase Blocks Flaw Disclosure with Threat to Sue APPLE SETTLES WITH MAN ACCUSED OF LEAKING CODE Apple Computer has settled a lawsuit against Doug Steigerwald of North Carolina for leaking the company's upcoming Macintosh operating system, called Tiger. As part of the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) program, Steigerwald, a recent graduate of North Carolina State University, had prerelease access to the operating system. The ADC program allows software developers to create products that will operate with a new operating system before it is released to the public, and participants in the program are required to sign a contract that prohibits disclosure of information about Apple products before they are launched. In a statement, Steigerwald admitted distributing prerelease copies of Tiger over the Internet in violation of the ADC contract he signed. Specifics of the settlement were not released, but a statement from Apple said, "While Apple will always protect its innovations, it is not our desire to send students to jail." The statement also expressed the company's satisfaction that Steigerwald took responsibility for his actions. CNET, 24 March 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-1047_3-5632119.html FEDS ORDER BANKS TO DISCLOSE BREACHES Four federal agencies have released regulations requiring banks and other financial institutions to notify customers when a security breach presents a risk that their personal information may be misused. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision deliberated for 18 months on how federal legislation, including the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act, should be interpreted. The resulting "guidance" stipulates that when personal information is accessed without authorization and misuse of that information has occurred or is reasonably possible, institutions must notify affected customers "as soon as possible." In all cases, even those that do not meet the standard set for notifying customers, institutions must notify their primary federal regulators of the breach. Delays in notifying customers are permissible if such notification is determined to jeopardize an investigation into the breach. PCWorld, 24 March 2005 http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120168,00.asp ICANN APPROVES EU TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved use of .eu as a country-code top-level domain for use by European Union countries. EURid officials, who will manage the registry for .eu, expect the U.S. Department of Commerce to approve the decision shortly. The introduction of .eu is not expected to affect use of already popular country codes such as .de for Germany or .uk for the United Kingdom. Internet News, 25 March 2005 http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3492776 BLUE GENE/L SPEED RECORD BROKEN, BY BLUE GENE/L The still-unfinished Blue Gene/L supercomputer, being built by IBM at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has reached a processing speed of 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), smashing the record it set last year of 70.72 teraflops. When complete, the Blue Gene/L supercomputer will have a theoretical processing capacity of 360 teraflops. Developers of the machine doubled the number of racks in the system--to 32--to achieve the new record. Each rack holds 1,024 processors; Blue Gene will eventually include 64 racks. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, will use Blue Gene to study the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons, without the need to perform dangerous underground testing. BBC, 25 March 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4379261.stm SYBASE BLOCKS FLAW DISCLOSURE WITH THREAT TO SUE California-based Sybase Inc. has threatened to sue U.K.-based Next Generation Security (NGS) Software Ltd. if that company discloses the details of eight security flaws it discovered in 2004 in Sybase database software, Adaptive Server Enterprise Version 12.5.3. NGS notified Sybase of the flaws, and Sybase released a patched and updated version of the software in February 2005. NGS policy mandates that it wait for vendors to issue patches before publicly releasing information on software flaws. The company chose not to make a public disclosure of the database holes after receiving the Sybase letter threatening to sue. According to an e-mail statement from a Sybase spokeswoman, the company was motivated to prevent the disclosure out of concern for its users' security. ComputerWorld, 25 March 2005 http://www.computerworld.com/ ***************************************************** EDUPAGE INFORMATION To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 Or, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by sending e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName To UNSUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SIGNOFF Edupage If you have subscription problems, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************** OTHER EDUCAUSE RESOURCES The EDUCAUSE Resource Center is a repository for information concerning use and management of IT in higher education. 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