Private access
Two Purdue University students discovered a major flaw in the highly-regarded Kerberos software, developed by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and International
Business Machines, US. Steven Lodin
and Bryn R Dole claim that a hacker
can read confidential mail and masquerade as anauthorised user once
he can penetrate into corporate networks. "Once you know the trick, it's
really trivial to exploit," says Eugene
Spafford, a professor of computer
sciences at Purdue.
Casual classification
More than 2,000 pages were yanked
off the 'Gulflink' site of the World
Wide Web at the urging of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as
the material reveals too much about
how American intelligence agencies function. A Pentagon task force was
created to 'classify' the material in
September 1995, to enlighten the
masses about threats from possible
exposure to chemical and bacteriological agents of Iraqi arsenals. The
CIA and other intelligence agencies,
however, allege that the classification
process was too casual.
Notes on TB
The last few weeks left the European
nations more scared than ever over
the mad cow crisis. The World
Health Organization, however, posted repeated warnings on its web site
on the Net that tuberculosis (TB)
may have escaped attention altogether. More than three million people died of TB in 1995. Action
Coalition, a non-profit organisation,
has started its site at http:
action.org/tuberculosis.html to provide valuable information about the
history of present research on TB.
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