Postal Cuts to Slow Mail Delivery

Facing bankruptcy, the U.S. Postal Service is pushing ahead with unprecedented cuts to first-class mail next spring that will slow delivery and, for the first time in 40 years, eliminate the chance for stamped letters to arrive the next day.

The estimated $3 billion in reductions, to be announced in broader detail on Monday, are part of a wide-ranging effort by the cash-strapped Postal Service to quickly trim costs, seeing no immediate help from Congress.

The changes would provide short-term relief, but ultimately could prove counterproductive, pushing more of America's business onto the Internet. They could slow everything from check payments to Netflix's DVDs-by-mail, add costs to mail-order prescription drugs, and threaten the existence of newspapers and time-sensitive magazines delivered by postal carrier to far-flung suburban and rural communities.

That birthday card mailed first-class to Mom also could arrive a day or two late, if people don't plan ahead.

"It's a potentially major change, but I don't think consumers are focused on it and it won't register until the service goes away," said Jim Corridore, analyst with S&P Capital IQ, who tracks the shipping industry. "Over time, to the extent the customer service experience gets worse, it will only increase the shift away from mail to alternatives. There's almost nothing you can't do online that you can do by mail."

The cuts, now being finalized, would close roughly 250 of the nearly 500 mail processing centers across the country as early as next March. Because the consolidations typically would lengthen the distance mail travels from post office to processing center, the agency also would lower delivery standards for first-class mail that have been in place since 1971.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/postal-cuts-to-slow-delivery-of-first-class-mail/article_17a16f10-1650-5a75-918e-1453b9135e2f.html#ixzz1fclJ9IYA

Online crime at second highest in decade

CUNA - FAIRMONT, W.Va. (3/4/11)--Just how pervasive has Internet crime become? In 2010, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 303,809 complaints--the second-highest total in IC3's 10-year history and an average of 25,317 complaints per month.

IC3, a repository for victim complaints, is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). It has received more than two million Internet crime complaints since it was established in 2000.
The three most common complaints:

• Nondelivery of payment or merchandise (14.4% of complaints);
• Scams using the FBI's name (13.2%); and
• Identity theft (9.8%).
  

Others included: computer crimes, 9.1%; miscellaneous fraud, 8.6%; advance fee fraud, 7.6%; spam, 6.9%; auction fraud, 5.9%; credit card fraud, 5.3%; and overpayment fraud, 5.3%.

Of those with dollar losses reported, 21.1% related to non-delivery of payment or merchandise; 16.6% were identity theft, 10.1% were auction fraud, and 9.3% were credit card fraud.

Wi-Fi key-cracking kits sold in China mean free Internet

Dodgy salesmen in China are making money from long-known weaknesses in a Wi-Fi encryption standard, by selling network key-cracking kits for the average user.

Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China's bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year.

With one of the "network-scrounging cards," or "ceng wang ka" in Chinese, a user with little technical knowledge can easily steal passwords to get online via Wi-Fi networks owned by other people.

Chinese Internet censorship: An inside lookLenovo looks for strong finish at Beijing OlympicsSpammers leverage interest in OlympicsU.S. Congressmen accuse China of hacking their computers

View more related contentGet Daily News by EmailThe kits are also cheap. A merchant in a Beijing bazaar sold one for 165 yuan ($24), a price that included setup help from a man at the other end of the sprawling, multistory building.

The main piece of the kits, an adapter with a six-inch antenna that plugs into a USB port, comes with a CD-ROM to install its driver and a separate live CD-ROM that boots up an operating system called BackTrack. In BackTrack, the user can run applications that try to obtain keys for two protocols used to secure Wi-Fi networks, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). After a successful attack by the applications, called Spoonwep and Spoonwpa, a user can restart Windows and use the revealed key to access its Wi-Fi network.

(Read the entire article at: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/050510-wi-fi-key-cracking-kits-sold-in.html)

Internet Flaws Could Bring Down Service in 30 Minutes

In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the administration of President George W. Bush concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest."

Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation. The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run normally.

The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called "hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on destruction. Instead the outages are a problem borne out of the open nature of the Internet, a quality that also has stimulated the Net's dazzling growth.

"It's ugly when you look under the cover," says Earl Zmijewski, a general manager at Renesys Corp., which tracks the performance of data routes. "It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working."

When you send an e-mail, view a Web page or do anything else online, the information you read and transmit is handed from one carrier of Internet data to another, sometimes in a long chain. When you log into Facebook, your data might be handed from your Internet service provider to a company such as Level 3 Communications Inc., which operates a global network of fiber-optic lines that carry Internet data across long distances. It, in turn, might pass the data to a carrier that's connected to Facebook's servers.

The crux of the problem is that each carrier along the way figures out how to route the data based only on what the surrounding carriers in the chain say, rather than by looking at the whole path. It's as if a driver had to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh without a map, navigating solely by traffic signs he encountered along the way — but the signs weren't put up by a central authority. If a sign pointed in the wrong direction, that driver would get lost.

(Read more at: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/story/EEB5A07B82E2B45E8625771D0011FA3D?OpenDocument
or:  http://bit.ly/bYqCrR

Internet Scams Cost Consumers $240M

The number of reported Internet scams was down last year in comparison to past years, but the dollar amount lost was up by $40 million, to a new high of $240 million, according to a government report that used data gathered from the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Other statistics from the report indicate an increase in ploys that involved pets, check cashing, and online dating.

Furthermore, the amount lost by males was on average higher than females, and the overall amount lost increased with age.

Voice biometrics: coming to a bank near you

At a recent bankers' conference in the US, Australian speech application company VeCommerce presented delegates with a challenge: fool our voice biometric technology and win $US1000. No one did, vindicating the company's claim that the technology is robust enough to be deployed in multifactor authentication for applications such as online banking.

According to Steve Lewis, general manager business consulting for VeCommerce in Australia, while deployments of voice biometric technology have to date been fairly limited, that is set to change.

"We are a the cusp of seeing some major deployments. We are in the process of developing a system for a top tier financial services organisation in Australia which will roll out at the end of this year. That will be a very large scale deployment...Two of the others are looking at similar solutions: once one goes the others will follow."

Lewis said the banks were interested particularly in applying the technology to Internet banking.

"There is so much phishing going on that people are getting nervous about the security of their passwords. A number of banks secure now their transactions through SMS tokens - they send a one time password to your mobile phone. Our product allows the bank to generate a phone call to your mobile phone then it compares your voice to a stored profile."VeCommerce suggests that a voice profile eliminates the need for remembering identifiers such as PINs, passwords, mother's maiden name, or for having special equipment such as PIN pads or fobs.

Also, in situations where callers are required to identify themselves to a call centre operator, it avoids the caller having to provide information such as account number, date of birth, etc which could easily be stolen and used in subsequent identity fraud.

AOL Revenue Continues to Drop

AOL’s revenue and operating income continued to slide as the parent Time Warner focuses on advertising. For the fourth quarter, AOL reported operating income of $274 million on revenue of $1.25 billion. That’s down from operating income of $910 million on revenue of $1.84 billion.
AOL’s results are an interesting sidebar to the Microsoft-Yahoo saga.

The Microsoft $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo gives Time Warner an excuse to dump AOL. Perhaps Google would buy AOL. In either case, AOL is in play or it’ll become left out of the advertising consolidation. AOL simply won’t be able to compete in online advertising world dominated by Google and Microsoft.

In the meantime, AOL erosion continues. Nevertheless, it is still amazing that AOL still has 9.3 million access subscribers. Who are these people? And why are they paying for what they could get for free?

But I digress. By revenue AOL is just a hair larger than Time Warner’s publishing business. And in the fourth quarter publishing had more revenue. For 2007, AOL had revenue of $5.18 billion, down from $7.78 billion in 2006. On the bright side, operating income was up for the year to $2 billion in 2007 from $1.89 billion in 2006. The results were roughly in line with Wall Street’s expectations. For instance, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen had projected AOL advertising revenue growth of 10 percent and that’s what the online unit delivered.

Other notable nuggets:

~ Revenue at AOL was down 33 percent for 2007 and 32 percent for the fourth quarter.

~ Subscription revenue fell 52 percent due to the sale of AOL’s international access business.

~ Adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization was up 4 percent for 2007.

~ In the fourth quarter that measure of operating income was up 29 percent.

~ In the fourth quarter, AOL had 109 million average monthly domestic unique visitors and 49 billion page views.

~ AOL had 9.3 million U.S. access subscribers at the end of 2007, down 3.8 million from a year ago. Even so losing 740,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter was better than Deutsche Bank’s projection for a loss of 1 million lost subscribers. Who are these people?

Sending Large Files Over the Internet

Move Big Files Across the Internet - It's considered rude--and rightly so--to e-mail someone a file larger than a few megabytes without permission. And you may not be able to anyway, since many ISPs place a cap on message size (often 10MB or less).

So what are you to do if you need to send an 18MB, an 80MB, or even an 800MB file to someone? Online services make the task much easier and more elegant than burning a DVD and dropping it in the mail. You have lots of options, and more new services pop up every day.

MediaFire.com is my favorite, and it's one of the best on the market now. The free service requires no registration, and it allows unlimited maximum file size, unlimited downloads, and multiple simultaneous downloads. It's just about perfect!

The other services below, however, also have certain unique features that may make them more suitable for you.

Files-upload.com: Handles 300MB files through a Web-based interface without registration; files expire after 45 days. Register, and you get your own FTP subdomain (yourname.files-upload.com) that's accessible with a standard FTP client. It has a 1GB file-size limit.

GigaSize.com: Has a 1.5GB file-size limit and stores files for 90 days. A $4 monthly fee gets you a 2.5GB size limit.

Pando.com: Has a 1GB file-size limit, but offers a peer-to-peer plug-in for various e-mail, Web mail, and instant messenger clients, so you don't have to go to the Web site to transfer files.

Xdrive.com: Gives you 5GB of free storage space, accessible through the Web or a Windows Explorer plug-in that also allows for sharing with others.