Twitter to offer phone calling

Twitter users will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service, says Cnet.

A new third-party offering from Jajah, known as Jajah@call, is expected to go into beta this week and will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing "@call @username", where "username" is someone's Twitter ID, into any Twitter client.

During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two-minute period, after which the call will end, as "the verbal equivalent of a tweet”.

Google has acquired Recaptcha, an open source Captcha service that the search engine giant will use to bolster security and its efforts to digitise books and newspapers, reports eWeek.

Captcha technology is widely used to fight spammers by preventing them from using computers to automatically sign up for Webmail accounts or other online services. This is where Recaptcha comes into play.

Its technology uses Captcha based on words from scanned archival newspapers and old books, something the company says works well because machines have a difficult time recognising the words due to the degradation of paper and ink over time. Each word that cannot be read correctly by optical character recognition is placed on an image and used as a Captcha.

White-hat hackers have released reliable code that remotely exploits a critical vulnerability in the Vista and Server 2008 versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system, states The Register.

The exploit code, released by security firm Immunity, came as separate researchers with the Metasploit penetration testing project said they were close to releasing their own software, targeting the Server Message Block version 2 network file-sharing technology.

It was first added to Vista and has since been put into other Microsoft operating systems. The progress of ethical researchers in exploiting the bug is important because it's an indication of how other, less scrupulous hackers are likely faring.

With many who bank online now wary of phishing attacks, criminals are adding fake live-chat support windows to their Web sites to make them seem more real, reports ITWorld.

RSA Security spotted the first of these "chat-in-the-middle" attacks, according to Sean Brady, a manager with the security company's identity protection and verification group.

The phishers send e-mails that direct victims to a fake Web page designed to look like a banking site. That's a standard technique, but what's different in this case is that the phishing site comes with a fake online chat option, so that scammers can talk directly with their victims.