PCIN.net Update

From BusinessWeek:

The family of Joan Miro had a bone to pick with Google. The search giant used some of his images in its Web-site logo on Apr. 20 — until Miro’s family very publicly complained Google was violating the Spanish artist’s copyrights.
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The logo came down and the flap is already dying down. But other Google combatants won’t be so easily mollified. Yahoo! and Microsoft have long endeavored to erode Google’s lead in Web search. But now Google faces a new wave of restive rivals, curious government officials, and angry human-rights advocates.

From TechWeb:

Digital photographers could soon lose their ability to anonymously shoot sensitive or illegal subject matter, thanks to new research that can link digital images to the camera with which they were taken.

The research, conducted at Binghamton University in New York, analyzes the slight variations created by the image sensor in each camera to uniquely identify pictures.

The technology is being presented as potentially useful in nailing child pornographers. “The defense in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this person’s camera,” Jessica Fridrich, the Binghamton University engineering professor who oversaw the research, said in a statement. “But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the person’s cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case.”

From TechRepublic:

Tech companies are getting religion.

Companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Avid and Hitachi are helping churches spread the gospel as part of an effort to cash in on an exploding market known as “house of worship technology.”

In recent years, members of the clergy have begun competing with MTV, video games and the Internet by jazzing up sermons with image magnification systems and large-screen video displays, a la Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs at a product launch. The trend has evolved, and churches now are Webcasting to distant parishioners with sophisticated multicamera operations and pumping up the volume inside worship areas with state-of-the-art sound systems.

From Reuters:

Security breaches from computer viruses, spyware, hacker attacks and theft of equipment are costing British business an estimated 10 billion pounds ($18 billion) a year, according to a survey on Tuesday.

The loss is 50 percent higher than the level calculated two years ago, said the study by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Department of Trade and Industry.

The rise comes despite companies increasing their spending on information security controls to an average 4-5 percent of their IT budget from 3 percent in 2004.

From the Globe and Mail:

After labouring under the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s major sources of spam, Canada has finally fallen off the list of the “Dirty Dozen” nations sending spam.

The new list, released Thursday by SophosLabs, a security company based in Lynnfield, Mass., shows that for the first quarter of this year, Canada had cut its spam output by more than half, accounting for only 1.25 per cent of the worldwide spam output. For the last quarter in 2005, Canada accounted for 3 per cent of the total output and ranked fifth on the list of offending countries.

The list counts those countries where computers send spam, not those countries where the spam originated. Much spam is relayed, via compromised computers in homes and businesses around the world, which have been remotely instructed to send the messages.