Facebook users wage condom campaign against Pope

Critics took to the social networking site Facebook to voice their fury over Pope Benedict's remark that condoms do not prevent HIV.

Thousands have pledged to send the pontiff millions of condoms to protest the controversial comment he made to journalists as he flew to Cameroon last week.

"You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms," the pope told reporters. "On the contrary, it increases the problem."

Pope Benedict XVI has made it clear he intends to uphold the traditional Catholic teaching on artificial contraception. The Vatican has long opposed the use of condoms and other forms of birth control and encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of the disease.

About a dozen Facebook groups have sprang up, mostly from European countries, criticizing the pontiff.

"The clergy aren't supposed to have sex at all, but they are free to tell people how to conduct themselves? That's like a girl who wears no make-up as the CEO of CoverGirl," one member posted on the page, "Condoms for Pope Benedict XVI."

"It frightens me that a man who has devoted his life to moral guidance ... and is undeniably a learned, intelligent man can be at the same time so narrow-minded, bigoted and irresponsible," posted another person on a different page.

The online campaign added another voice to a deluge of criticism, which includes the governments of France, Germany and Belgium. Aid agencies and other health organizations have also chimed in.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, urged the pope Saturday to issue a retraction for the "outrageous and wildly inaccurate" statement to journalists aboard his plane.

"When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record," The Lancet said in an editorial.

"Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide."

Some in the Catholic Church have rallied to the pontiff's support.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian Bishops Conference, told Times Online in Britain that Benedict was simply pointing out that condoms "had not solved and could not solve the AIDS problem."

Despite the controversy, the pope's pilgrimage spurred excitement in Africa. An estimated 1 million people turned out to hear him preach a Mass in Angola on Sunday, the last major event of his trip. He spoke of the need for reconciliation in the country, which has endured a brutal civil war.

"Look to the future with hope, trust in God's promises and live in his truth. In this way you will build something that will stand and endure," he said.

Read more.....

Swiss Banks Call Tax Evader Label Unfair

The Swiss Bankers Association has launched a blistering attack against the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calling the OECD's treatment of Switzerland disgraceful. The bankers say the OECD's threat to put Switzerland on a blacklist of countries that allegedly shield tax evaders is unacceptable and seriously damages the OECD's credibility.

The President of the Swiss Bankers Association, Pierre Mirabaud, categorically denies that Switzerland is a tax haven. He says 99.9 percent of tax evaders do not have a bank account in Switzerland.

He says Switzerland is an easy target to attack because there is no political risk involved. He says the Swiss have no powerful lobby in the United States or the European Union that it can mobilize. "As a banker I know what my clients are in my bank and I talk to a lot of bankers in Switzerland and I see what they are doing," said Mirabaud. "And, I can tell you that it is completely absurd to think that the Swiss private banking industry is based on tax evasion. This, I am sorry to say, is a very good story, but it is not the truth."

Swiss bank secrecy laws made neutral Switzerland a popular destination for capital during World War II, and for generations the confidentiality of bank customers has been a hallmark of the country's banking business.

Earlier this month, Switzerland agreed to ease its rules on banking secrecy. It said it would cooperate with other countries on cases of tax evasion and would no longer protect wealthy foreigners accused of stashing billions of dollars in secret bank vaults. Switzerland said it would adopt international rules on tax cooperation to avoid being blacklisted at next week's G20 meeting in London.

Mirabaud accuses Germany and France of backing the move to blacklist Switzerland in order to divert attention from their own tax loopholes and overly complicated tax systems. He says efforts by these two nations to punish Switzerland for failing to cooperate in tax investigations stems from their jealousy of his country's financial industry.

He says the OECD has had a long established blacklist of suspect countries, but Switzerland has never been on that list. "And, all of a sudden because Germany and France asked Mr. Guria to change the list, they did it without discussing it neither in the commission, which treats the question of tax things, nor with the country which were going to be put on the list, like Luxembourg, who was not on the list before, like Austria, which was not on the list before," said Mirabaud.

Mirabeaud says, as far as he knows, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Austria will not appear on the G20 blacklist and will not be liable for economic sanctions.

U.S. President Barack Obama supports moves to crack down on tax havens around the world that cost the United States an estimated $100 billion in tax revenue every year. Relations between Washington and Bern have dipped over illegal activities committed by Switzerland's largest bank, UBS in the United States. The American government has been pressuring Switzerland to release the names of alleged tax evaders.

Mirabaud says before pointing fingers at others, the United States should put its own house in order. He says he believes there are more tax evaders with accounts in Florida and Delaware than in Switzerland.

Read more.....

Adobe details secret PDF patches

Adobe Systems Inc. revealed Tuesday that it patched five critical vulnerabilities behind the scenes when it updated its Reader and Acrobat applications earlier this month to fix a bug already under attack.

According to a security bulletin issued Tuesday, the updates to Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 that Adobe delivered on March 10 included patches for not just one bug -- as Adobe indicated at the time -- but for five other vulnerabilities as well.

Foremost among the five were a quartet of bugs in Adobe's handling of JBIG2 compressed images, which was also at the root of the original vulnerability made public in February. When Adobe updated Reader and Acrobat to Version 9.1 two weeks ago, it fixed all five JBIG2 flaws, though it admitted only to the one at the time.

That bug has been used by hackers since at least early January, when they began sending malformed PDF files to users as e-mail attachments.

"The way we always handle this," said Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of product security and privacy, "is, will publicly released information help more users than not releasing the information?" Adobe, said Arkin Tuesday, decided the answer was "no," since it had yet to issue updates for all users when it first patched the software on March 10.

The decision was prompted by the staggered release of the Reader and Acrobat updates. Although Adobe patched the Windows and Mac OS X editions of the two apps on March 10, offered updates to the Version 8 line on March 17, and didn't issue Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 for Unix until Tuesday. It also didn't produce a fix for the even-older Version 7 until Tuesday.

"With this JBIG security incident, we wanted to patch as soon as possible," said Arkin, "and staggering the updates like we did was going to get the patches to the biggest demographic as soon as possible." More users run Version 9 on Windows and Mac than any other edition of Reader and Acrobat, Arkin added.

The four newly revealed JBIG2 vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe after Symantec Corp. said it had found a new Reader bug in the wild, said Arkin, but there was enough time before the March 10 update deadline to add fixes for them to Version 9.1.

That matches the schedule spelled out by iDefense Labs, a computer security research arm of VeriSign Inc. In its own bulletin Tuesday, iDefense said it had notified Adobe of a JBIG2 bug on Feb. 24, and provided the company with proof-of-concept code a day later.

All four of the already-patched JBIG2 bugs were classified by Adobe as critical, and could "lead to remote code execution," according to the bulletin.

The fifth vulnerability detailed Tuesday was also critical, and had actually been patched in the Unix edition of Reader 8.1.3 and Acrobat 8.1.3 last November. "That had not been ported over to the other platforms, however," said Arkin, referring to the Windows and Mac versions of the software.

One security researcher said that while he agreed with Adobe's call, the company could have done better at communicating about what it was doing. "It does make some sense if you are forced into doing a staggered release," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "There's no sense in exposing users any more than necessary. But what gives us the bad taste is how they aren't being upfront about it now," referring to the security bulletin, which doesn't mention the newly revealed bugs in its summary, but tucks them deeper in the document.

Users who have already updated to Reader or Acrobat 9.1 or 8.1.4 -- the versions pushed out March 10 and 17, respectively -- don't need to take any further action, Adobe's Arkin said, because they're fully patched against all the flaws, including those announced Tuesday.

Read more.....

Indonesian dam burst toll rises

Rescue workers have resumed searching for more than 100 people feared missing after about 400 homes were deluged in the Tangerang district early on Friday.

Visiting the scene, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono promised to help families reconstruct their homes and pledged to rebuild the dam.

Residents likened the onrush of water to the impact of a tsunami.

Torrents of water mixed with boulders and debris crashed through a 70m (230ft) gash in the dam, sweeping away buildings in the Cirendeu suburb.

The deluge destroyed hastily erected flimsy wooden houses as well as more solid concrete buildings.

Local police chief Ngisa Asngari told the Associated Press on Saturday that hundreds of soldiers, police and volunteers were continuing to dig through piles of mud and debris, searching for survivors or bodies.

The BBC's Katherine Demopoulos in Jakarta says funerals for many of the dead have already been held.

In Islamic practice the dead are supposed to be buried by sunset on the day they died.

Maintenance questions

The Situ Gintung dam, which stood 16m high and held back a lake of two million cubic metres of water, was built out of dirt by Dutch colonialists in 1933.

Experts told the BBC that little maintenance had been carried out on the dam since then, and warned that many dams in Indonesia are in a similar state.

The Jakarta Globe newspaper reported that Cirendeu residents had spotted cracks in the dam a year ago.

They were so fearful of a flood that they had even practised evacuation drills, the newspaper reported.

But following hours of heavy rain during Thursday evening, the dam burst at 0200 (1900 GMT Thursday) when most people were asleep.

Our correspondent says the city has an ageing, poorly maintained drainage system which struggles to cope with heavy rainfall.

Inquiry promised

After touring the disaster site, Mr Yudhoyono told Indonesia's Antara news agency the dam "must be rebuilt".

"We will design the new structure in a proper way so that it will not cause any further public concern," he said.

"The government will help residents reconstruct their damaged houses," Mr Yudhoyono said.

The government promised millions of dollars in cash aid for the victims.

Local officials have promised to investigate the cause of the disaster.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7969397.stm

Read more.....

150 Million Photos Pictures Has Been Lost?

Facebook is still a matter of facing a new problem. What if the image of those who are lost in Facebook suddenly?

In blog.facebook.com, mentioned that Sunday (08/03) yesterday, as many as 10 to 15 percent or about 150 million images from the billions of photos on Facebook, has experienced problems in the database storage. Photos are missing, as quoted in the blog is then replaced with the image question.

However, according to Facebook engineer, Evan Priestley, the loss of the photographs are not permanent, and his side are improving around the third and hope to improve in all consecutive. "We still have all the images the user because we save by using multiple copies of data, in order to guard when there is damage to hardware such as this." Priestley said. However, the company Facebook is still debatable with the cause of the occurrence of incident.

"During our routine software upgrade since Friday (06/03), we conducted a pilot project with the image problem that we have in storage, and in fact some of the drive where we store the image the user, a failure at that time also. We try to understand the conditions that occur, because the hardware is very rare when used at the same time, direct experience failure. "Priestley said.

Read more.....

Save Your Facebook

Lately we hear flare businesses piercing Facebook account around us. How this can happen? While most of us have been very trust social networking service in this day-to-day communication. Then, at least the next question is how do we secure the Facebook account of this threat .

In the following steps are anticipated to be taken to secure our Facebook account.

1. Avoid Login http://www.facebook.com through, as this page is not encrypted. Your login information is encrypted, but because the login form is in a frame, the user can not see whether or not all encrypted.
2. Make the process of your login page: https: / / login.facebook.com / login.php? Login_attempt = 1. You can ensure that the login you would secure the right to check the bottom of the browser to display the 'lock signed'.
3. Login Do not continue the process if there is a danger warning (security alert). You can immediately stop the process that are 'not safe' with key 'ESC'.
4. Do not forget to always do after Logout access your Facebook account. With only turn off the browser without the Logout process, means that you have to leave 'session' for you to access other people. Therefore it is important to always make you Logout.
5. Do not work to the right as the system administrator. Akan very dangerous if you open the email, images and documents with the practice administrator account, as this will open the possibility for cyber criminals to get your computer.
6. Vigilant against Malicious Facebook Widget. Widget or application can provide additional opportunities for the author to work in coding the program to access important information from the target computer. Until now, there are two types of Malicious Facebook Widget is reported that the Facebook users, and the Secret Crush Error Check System.
7. Be careful in selecting a computer for use. If your computer to use a public or keep changing the computer, such as rental or in Internet cafés (cafe), then you should be careful in selecting and practice. This is not a guaranteed maximum security update from the computer. While the computer has been infected Koobface Worm, or Keylogger can steal user data and its password.
8. Be careful in selecting the network connection Wi-Fi Internet. Only the Facebook login process handle encrypted SSL / TLS (https). Mean while cookies Facebook will very easily be taken from the air (through the signal connection Wi-Fi Internet). Wi-Fi protected with a WEP encryption easy to be broken within 10 minutes. Currently, anyone can easily create any hotspot and provide free-access to you. But you must be carefull level of security access is offered, because access to the Facebook network connections that are not protected, the same private data you provide for free.
9. Think about security issues before you make a click on the 'Wall'. Post on the Wall is a way Koobface dissemination or other malware, so you should be careful access.
10. The latter is how we will increase awareness of safety hazards on Facebook is the people around us. Due to the increasing awareness in the people around us will also support our security.

Read more.....

Save The Earth!

Global warming is now starting to feel the impact all over the world . Climate change is more about the earth, the rightly concern us together. Temperature rise which is the earth where we live has brought a lot of damage to our natural habitation, from the changing mountain ice (glacier) to the polar water, to a hole in the ozone or forest fires resulting in damage to the ecosystem.

In response to this, through the Director of the WWF, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu James Leape, invites people around the world to proclaim their concern over saving the earth. Not only for the generation that currently exist, but also for the earth's sustainability for generations to come .

The form of appeal to be conducted simultaneously by all the people in this world is to shut off electricity for 60 minutes or 1 hour on 28 March 2009. For Indonesia alone, the people who care about saving the earth will be this willingness to turn off the electric start at 20:30 until 21:30 WIB (60 minutes). It is expected that the mass awareness of environmental action will knock the heart all the world leaders and business owners to be more attention to saving the earth and the environment as a place where we live today and for generations to come .

Climate change is a real world of alarm for the whole world community about the increasing damage to the condition of the earth that we don't give a response, as well as a reminder for us to hasten to take the initiative to save the earth before more late.

Read more.....