Google apps engine crashes

Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours, reports cnet.

Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch.

A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologised for the outage.

The Month of Twitter Bugs kicked off on 1 July with news of four cross-site scripting bugs affecting bit.ly, a popular URL shortening service used by Twitter users, reports eWeek.

The bugs are the first entry in a month-long effort to expose third-party vulnerabilities that impact Twitter.

The brainchild of security researcher Aviv Raff, Month of the Twitter Bugs follows in the footsteps of the Month of the Browser Bugs introduced in July 2006.

Apple expects to have a fix later this month for a vulnerability in the iPhone that could allow an attacker to gain control of the device remotely via SMS, a security researcher said, according to cnet.

An attacker could exploit a weakness in the way iPhones handle SMS messages to do things like use GPS to track the phone's location, turn on the microphone for eavesdropping, or take control of the device and add it to a botnet. This is according to Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook and principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators.

Miller said that, under an agreement with Apple, he was barred from providing too much detail on the vulnerability.

Within eight hours of Michael Jackson's death, the first spam messages appeared, with spammers claiming they have vital information about the death, states TGDaily.

While the body of these e-mails do not contain any URL, e-mail address or phone number, and the 'from' e-mail address is bogus, the spammer can easily harvest recipients' e-mail addresses via a free live e-mail address if computer users reply to the spam message.

Another scam involves an online campaign asking people to send donations to the Michael Jackson Organisation, nothing to do with the star, obviously.

Green IT initiatives could flourish in the recession, as constrained IT budgets force firms to look at initiatives that eliminate the need for capital expenditure, according to a new report by Datamonitor, says Computing.co.uk.

The analyst firm's 'Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn?' report argues that green IT projects such as virtualisation, more efficient data centre design and layout, and asset lifecycle management will become increasingly important as budgets remain flat in 2009.

"The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organisations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT," said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor and the report's author.