Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is still big news in New York. In February earlier this year, the former Governor was caught in a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel.

The story quickly swept the tabloids, all of who soaked up Spitzer’s downfall with little mention of how and why his crimes actually came to light.

Spitzer was originally flagged when a series of Suspicious Activity Reports - reports that banks must to file with the Treasury to assist in investigating anything from money laundering to terrorist activity were submitted.

The prostitution ring that counted Spitzer as a customer had been responsible for shady bank accounts, checks and wire transfers of up to $400,000, they soon became under-investigation.

According to the FBI’s complaint:

“In or about October 2007, the FBI and the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigative Division (IRS-CID) began an investigation focusing on an organization suspected of conducting prostitution and money-laundering crimes in the United States and Europe.”

The investigation began with a suspicious activity report on Spitzer. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spitzer’s transactions were regular and always kept under $10,000. A pattern that the Feds class as suspicious.

“There has been a massive federal crackdown on money laundering in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and banks have been extremely diligent in filing such reports. Those reports often include details of transactions done by innocent people.”

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) there have been 4.7 million SARs filed as of June 30, 2007.

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For the last 18 months Google has been working to develop their personal health records solution. So far we haven’t been given much insight into what the product will be like, however there is promise that it will be comprehensive and user-friendly.

As of last month Google received a large endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic to help in the development of the technology.

The big medical center has now started a pilot project to begin linking the health information for some of its patients with Google’s personal health records.

Cleveland Clinic currently employs a sophisticated IT system to store their 100,000+ patient’s personal health records.

But a sizeable portion of those patients are retirees that may spend four or more months elsewhere, typically in Florida or Arizona. When these patients travel, their electronic health records don’t follow them explains Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

“It forces the patient to become his or her own medical historian,

“Google personal health record is a solution to that problem”

Using Google’s technology, a person can approve the transfer of their medical records from the clinics computers to series of secure Web pages.

The pilot project is scheduled to last six to eight weeks, and will involve approx 10,000 patients.

Marissa Mayer, a vice president, who took over management of the health team six months ago said, “The project with Cleveland Clinic is “a milestone” for Google”.

Google’s personal health records is still in development, and it will be introduced publicly and made widely available, after the pilot project is concluded, Ms. Mayer said.

With Cleveland Clinic being at the forefront of health information technology, the recent endorsement is more promise that Google’s Personal Health Records will provide a one-stop solution for all health records.

Although we may not know much until the release of the product, what we do know is that Google will offer a fresh new user-interface as well as automated data links, so the patient does not have to type in personal data, as is required with some personal health records.

The recent endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic has also prompted other medical centers to sign up.

“This is truly a patient-controlled health record, and that’s a very significant step in the drive toward a more consumer-oriented system of health care,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Halamka is also chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which plans to link its electronic patient records with Google personal health pages.

With email providers giving away more and more online storage space, many people have taken to using their email account to store personal information.

While being able to access your details using an internet connection may seem like a good idea, an inbox/outbox or folder with passwords, bank account numbers, account usernames and other crucial information is a jackpot bonanza for identity thieves who manage to hack your email.

Even if you are careful not to store this type of information in your email account, you may still be inadvertently revealing personal information in emails conversations between family and friends.

The worst of it all is that you may never even know if your email is being hacked. A hacker can easily read an email then mark it as unread, if nothing appears to be different how are you going to know?

The easiest way to find out if your email is being hacked is by setting up an electronic tripwire which alerts you if an unwanted intruder breaks into your account.

1. For our example we will use OneStat. You must first sign up (you can leave a fake name and URL but must provide an email address).
2. You will receive a welcome email from OneStat, with a link to download an attachment. The attachment will contain your account number, write this number down and delete the attachment; you wouldn’t want a hacker to find this information!
3. Change the name of a text document to something that will attract an email hacker such as ‘password list’ or ‘account number and pin’. Also change the file format from a text to a website page, for example ‘account number and pin.htm’
4. Then attach this dummy file to an email and send it to the account you want to monitor. Make sure the email subject title also lures in the snooper (List of Passwords, Bank Details etc)
5. Now the trap is set, if someone opens the email and the attachment, OneStat will record a hit. If you log into your account everyday you will be quickly notified if anyone has been snooping around.

The OneStat account page then gives you details on each “visitor” including the date and time they accessed the web document and more importantly their location and IP address!

Although this may not stop your email being hacked, it’s a good way to monitor your account. If your email does get hacked then you should quickly change your password to something stronger.

Also if you see the hacker’s location and you only know one or two people in that area, then it can narrow down your list of possible suspects.

Lobster Vision is the forefront of a new technology being developed for Home Security by Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, California.

The handheld device prototype called the LEXID (Lobster Eye X-ray Imaging Device) is based on the lobster’s ability to see through the dark murky waters of the deep sea and may help security officers see through wood, concrete and steal.

Rick Shie, senior vice president at Physical Optics Corporation said that the patented device, which radiates objects with tiny amounts of X-ray energy,

“Is modeled exactly after the lobster living in the deepest, darkest part of the ocean,”

A lobster’s eyes are made up of thousands of tiny square channels that focus by reflection, rather than by refraction (or the bending of light) as human eyes do.

This unique optical geometric design, which allows lobsters to see in the dimmest light, is being adapted into a “lobster-eye lens” that focuses the X-ray images so that the device can actually see through solid objects.

The Californian Company are still in the early stages of development however She says his company hopes to have the device perfected within a year so that Homeland Security agents can test it on the job.

I am sure everyone has heard about it, but what exactly does it meant to have your identity stolen and how much of a threat is it actually.

What is Identity Theft

Identity theft is a catch-all term for crimes involving illegal usage of another individual’s identity. The most common form of identity theft is credit card fraud. While the term is relatively new, the practice of stealing money or getting other benefits by pretending to be a different person is thousands of years old.

According to the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center, identity theft is sub-divided into four categories:

* Financial Identity Theft (using another’s identity to obtain goods and services)
* Criminal Identity Theft (posing as another when apprehended for a crime)
* Identity Cloning (using another’s information to assume his or her identity in daily life)
* Business/Commercial Identity Theft (using another’s business name to obtain credit)

Identity theft may be used to facilitate crimes including illegal immigration, terrorism and espionage. Identity theft may also be a means of blackmail. There are also cases of identity cloning to attack payment systems, including medical insurance.

How Much of a Threat is Identity Theft to Me?

Surveys in the USA from 2003 to 2006 showed a decrease in the total number of victims but an increase in the total value of identity fraud to US$56.6 billion in 2006. The average fraud per person rose from $5,249 in 2003 to $6,383 in 2006.

Defense Link Article About Military Member Identity Theft Battle

The 2003 survey from the Identity Theft Resource Center found that :

* Only 15% of victims find out about the theft through proactive action taken by a business
* The average time spent by victims resolving the problem is about 40 hours
* 73% of respondents indicated the crime involved the thief acquiring a credit card
* The emotional impact is similar to that of victims of violent crimes

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Check out the video and then take a closer at the pics below. It is very amazing how this cop was able to survive a barrage of bullets. This happened out at the southern edge of Plano, Texas.

Here are the pictures of the police car back at the lab for inspection

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Humans have a limited capacity to remember those insignificant streams of letters and digits often used as passwords; as a result, many people choose or change their passwords so they are easier to remember.

Memorable passwords, however, can easily be hacked when faced with dictionary attacks or logical guesses. Information based on birth dates, family members or place names are an easy target for most hacking software and the time it takes for these programs to ‘guess’ your password decreases considerably if it is simple and unsecured.

A recent meeting of the Computer and Communications Security interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery saw an improved description of a password security system called ‘Draw a Secret’.

This system is based on the fact the humans excel at image recognition and memory, for this reason passwords should be designed to leverage this ability. The Draw a Secret password method incorporates a touch screen and stylus for the user to sign freeform shapes as their password. This can be anything from pictures to graffiti style tags.

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Hackers are getting assistance from a female stripper by the name of Mellisa. She is a digital girl that is helping spammer hack a security measure that has helped slow the spamming community.

To help solve the mystery and security behind Captcha text images, the spammers enlisted the help of Mellisa. By inserting and deciphering the text, users get to see explicit images. Seems like a fair enough trade-off. In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.

This software by Trend Micro and Panda Security that is helping to defeat the anti-spam security check is a Windows game that arrives on machines that are already infected with malicious software. The program comes to life when the Internet Explorer browser is used on infected machines. The Captcha-busting program can run on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. You win (getting to see the explicit image) by correctly typing the text shown in an accompanying image. This seems like an easy enough game with great rewards. The creators of the game in turn take the deciphered text that stop spam robots from automatically signing up to create accounts that can be put to illegal use. By getting people to type in the text the spammers can are also able to take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

This online anti-spam security measure of using a image of text is known as Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Typically they feature a disfigured word or one overlaid with static that make it difficult for anyone but a human to decipher.

Since its fist arrival, many spammers and hackers have been vigorously working to defeat the system and regaining acess to net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect. Although this game seems like a bunch of fun and gaining popularity, it is likely to increase the annoyance of spam and weaken our hold in the War on Spam.

First we would like to apologize to all of our customers who received our Email newsletter and who were dissatisfied. We received many complaints and questions regarding it - and I was not what it was suppose to be. It was our first attempt at communicated with our customers via Email and we wanted to do it professionally. We searched and we were referred to Jerry Hart - who from his website seemed like he was going to help achieve our goal and more.

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A gift that at the same time was a curse, the Digg effect took us down back on September 11, 2007 - ironic date I know. However, we did survive and we are in the process of improving the blog and posting articles that were missed during the month of October. Thanks to Girls Of The Israeli Army post done back on August 5, 2007 we got well over 2000 Diggs before our MySQL database could take no more connections.

For those of you who do not know Digg, it is best to just head on over to the community to sign up and start clicking around. Start viewing the Digg review of our page that created a lot of traffic for us and then begin exploring Digg. It is somewhat of an easy concept to grasp but here is what the ol’ mighty internet resource has to say about it:

A community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control

According to Wikipedia. Basically that all means that the readers vote - “Digg” - webpages, blogs, photos etc. that they like. The more Diggs you get the higher your ranking in the community. Voters do not all carry the same vote. People who are reputable and have the most friends get more say and weight. This helps when an average Joe trys to cheat and vote his webpage up.

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Storage and disk space have always been a problem since computers were first invented. Organizing files, creating compilation music CDs, cataloging your movie collection, and backing up your files that you hope will be available when you need them; all consume large amounts of your vital virtual reality. Now if that wasn’t enough, after we have gone through all the trouble of moving all these files around, we have to make sure we bring the right CD or thumb drive at the time they are needed. Being randomly deployed and stationed at various bases has only added to the trouble. Thanks to the advancement of fast internet, there is actually a solution that helps organize your files and have all your files at a moments notice known as online storage.

Some sites require you to login and access the files. However, if you really wanted to do this correctly you would create a network drive to a dedicated server, so all you had to do a was click an icon to access the folders. But this requires a lot of money to make sure you have good server with a fast connection and that was very secure and maintained properly. Well with IBackUp all of your storage needs are finally resolved and you have the ability to secure personal data online while having the ability to access your files easily anywhere!

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If you spend alot of your time using the internet for work or pleasure, you’ll know computer virus’s and spyware are at constant battle with your anti-virus software, even downloading tool bars or add-ons can be a pain to get rid of if you decide not to keep them. Enter Sandboxie, a great piece of free software that not only protects your systems drive but allows you to completely delete anything you have installed or added to you PC with a click of the mouse.

In computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for safely running programs, hence the name sandboxie, a sandbox provides a tightly-controlled set of resources for guest programs to run in, such as scratchspace on disk and memory. Sandboxie incorporates this technology by creating a sandbox as a temporary drive for all data transferal.

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the program to the hard disk via write operations. With Sandboxie running all data is intercepted in the sandbox, data then flows in both directions between the program and the sand box, leaving your permanent drive free from read and write operations.

Sandboxie intercepts all changes to both your files and registry settings, making it virtually impossible for any software to reach outside the sandbox. Even browser items are intercepted, so when you throw away the sandbox, all the history records and other side-effects of your browsing disappear as well.

This great piece of software is free so trying it out should not be a problem, however if you find it makes your Web experience that much safer, you are encouraged to register the program for a small fee.

During a family member’s, who is a former Marine, recent vacation in the Richmond area, he met a family who had pulled into the same motel. They had a Marine Corps sticker on their vehicles so obviously he was interested to learn when he had served. He said that he hadn’t but that his son had and was killed in Iraq recently. He then told him about what the program below, and then told me about it. Maybe you can send some small items maybe you can’t. But this is non-political and a small way to show support. Think about it anyway. It’s nice to live in relative safety and FREEDOM! Think about those that provide that for you!

At The Least, Please Help Get This Message Out To As Many People as Possible! It is A Wonderful Way to Support Our Troops and Provide Them With A Little Comfort From Home.

Remember there are two battle fields. The one overseas and the one here at home. It seems like we have to battle the media and the cowards in congress. The American’s of the World War II era helped shaped the great lives we share today by greatly helping the outcome of the War by sacrificing a little bit of their time and little bit of their luxuries.

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Mission Statement:

We are a non profit organization. We do not support nor oppose the war. Our only interest is in supporting the brave men and women who put their lives on the line everyday to protect our great country. Their mission in Iraq is a difficult one, both physically and mentally. Our goal is to show them how grateful we our for their service and sacrifice.

Our mission is to send some of the comforts of home to those who so diligently watch over and protect us.

We appreciate all the supply donations you have to offer. Please click here to learn more about where to send them. http://www.adamconboymemorialfund.org/

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A three letter abbreviation that’s becoming synonymous with the Iraq War is IDE. Improvised explosive device (IED) is a bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than in conventional military action.The Navy recently pressed for new out-of-the-box technologies that could predict where IED bombs will explode, now the Marines have just ordered 1000 mine resistant, ambush-protected vehicle (MRAP’s) to further save lives on the streets of Iraq.

The Cougar (known in the United Kingdom as “Tempest”, and previously it seems in the US as “Lion” and “Typhoon”), is designed to withstand a 30-pound blast of TNT to either the front or rear axles as well as a 15-pound blast to the center portion of the vehicle. The Cougar Hardened Engineer Vehicle, until 2002 marketed as the Lion, can be configured to complete a wide variety of mission requirements. The new HEV can serve as a mine-proof troop transport vehicle, a law enforcement special response vehicle, a weapons platform, or an escort protection vehicle.

The $490 million contract, which will be the biggest order for MRAP’s so far, calls for 300 Cougar 4 x 4s and 700 of the larger, six-wheeled Cougar 6 x 6s. Whilst no vehicle is completely safe from an IDE the Cougar is better armored than the Humvee and features a V-shaped undercarriage that partially redirects explosive blasts around the vehicle. The Marines field-tested various mine-resistant vehicles before settling on the Cougar. In 2006 this Cougar RG-31 suffered a direct IED hit, but none of the crew were killed.

The Cougar 4 x 4 and 6 x 6 models both have 330-hp diesels, top speeds of 65 mph, a 600-mile range, and seating for 10. The 6 x 6 can haul 14,000 pounds, nearly triple the 4 x 4 max load. Cougar, developed and produced by Force Protection Inc. is a multi-purpose, 12 ton mine protected armored patrol vehicle. The design uses a monocoque, bulletproof and blast-proof capsule fitted with transparent armored glass, which protects the driver and crew from small arms fire, mine blasts and IED.

Typical roles for the vehicle are armored, mine protected troop transport for security, stability and peacekeeping missions, protected weapons platform, law enforcement special response vehicle, counter IED an EOD / Range Clearance vehicle. The vehicle can accommodate 10 passengers in a 4×4 configuration and 16 passengers in a 6×6 configuration. Cougar was selected to serve with the US Marine Corps as a Hardened Engineer Vehicle (HEV), to support engineer mine clearing and explosive ordnance disposal teams deployed in Iraq.

As of June 2006, there are more than 130 Cougars and Buffalos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since their deployment to Iraq in 2003 the Cougar and Buffalo vehicles employed with explosive ordnance disposal teams and engineers units have taken about 1,000 IED hits without a loss of life, said Wayne Phillips, a company vice president in charge of Marine Corps programs. The vehicle has proven to be superior to less protected vehicles, such as the up-armored Humvee or armored trucks.

Bigger plans to order more MRAP’s are still caught up in political controversy however the Pentagon hopes to eventually deploy a total of 7774 MRAPs at the total cost of 8.4 billion dollars. A small price to pay for the lives of our Troops on the streets of Iraq.

Defense Technology on the H Series Cougar Armord Truck

NetCam XL - Rugged Design, Beautiful Results

With images up to 2048×1536 in resolution, the new NetCam XL 3MP is the highest quality network camera on the market. Using a 3.1 megapixel sensor, the NetCam XL 3MP is the perfect tool for web attraction, weather monitoring or high definition security camera.

Bring on the cold! NetCam XL can withstand temperatures down to -40° degrees without a heater.

The NetCam XL is the latest generation in the popular NetCam series of network cameras. Designed for both indoor and rugged outdoor installations, the NetCam XL streams video and produces some of the highest quality images found in a network camera.

No computer is required to operate the NetCam XL — it is a standalone solution that can connect to a local network, DSL, cable modem, satellite modem, cellular, wireless Ethernet or even a phone line. You simply browse to its IP address to view live video and access configuration options. Set up is straightforward and simple and NetCam XL is designed to run unattended for years on end.

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