Stolen MacBook camera helps catch thieves

The device integration that laptops offer us today is pretty amazing, and even more so when these can be easily configured to act as remote security systems. A woman who had her MacBook stolen was able to use the very machine itself to catch the thieves thanks to a remote control software she had installed and the laptop’s integrated webcam.

After the laptop was stolen, the thieves used it to get online – as a result, the victim was able to login to the laptop remotely and use the embedded webcam to take pictures of the thieves. After submitting the photo to the police, the two thieves were arrested and a plethora of electronics equipment was recovered from their apartment. While I am sure that no retail outlet wants to sell a laptop on the basis that it will help you catch crooks, this is a very humorous and interesting use of a simple piece of hardware found in many laptops today.

Security flaw turns Gmail into spamming machine

According to a recent report by the Information Security Research Team, a flaw in Google’s email service makes it vulnerable to becoming a massive spam machine. The team claims to have successfully created a proof of concept exploiting the “trust hierarchy” that exists between mail service providers, allowing them to send 4000+ messages in a short period of time from a single account.

The study explains that IP addresses of spam offenders are often blacklisted, while those of known good sources – such as Gmail – are immune to most spam filtering. The vulnerability enables a malicious user to bypass these blacklist / white-list based email filters and freely forge all fields in an email message by having Google’s SMTP servers tricked into functioning as open SMTP relays. There has been no official comment by Google on this matter yet, but hopefully the problem will be resolved in short order.

Nvidia denies Via acquisition rumors

It had been suspected that Nvidia could be seeking to acquire Via, which later was toned down a bit to “just cooperating” in order to beef up their market share compared to behemoth Intel. What exactly they had in plan was unknown, but now Nvidia has come out to set the record straight regarding a buyout.

According to Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, his company will not be purchasing Via, and insisted that neither company is in financial peril. The reasoning behind his outright denial was laid forth as well, with him saying that Nvidia’s focus will remain on one thing. He added they have no interest in “general-purpose” processor manufacturing. Considering that not long ago this same CEO claimed that Intel’s technology was a joke and that they had huge plans in store, the rumors were not surprising.