Network

 
Published: Friday 31 May 1996

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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