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Sudan 'cyber jihadists' to crush dissent

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb news editor.
Johannesburg, 24 Mar 2011

Sudan 'cyber jihadists' to crush dissent

Sudan's ruling National Congress Party has warned its “cyber jihadists” will “crush” Internet-based dissent, reports the BBC.

It follows an increase in anti-government campaigns organised on Facebook and Twitter. Vice-president in Khartoum state Mandur Al-Mahdi warned opposition groups that its “cyber battalion” was leading “online defence operations”.

The country saw anti-government street protests in January. The government, which seized power in a military coup in 1989, is concerned about uprisings similar to those seen across the Middle East and North Africa.

Firefox 4 trebles IE 9 downloads

Mozilla's latest release of its Firefox browser has seen triple the number of downloads that Internet Explorer 9 achieved in its first week, in less than 48 hours after its release, according to Computing.co.uk.

Mozilla Firefox 4 boasts graphics-accelerated hardware, WebGL support, and improved JavaScript performance.

Since going live on Tuesday, Firefox 4 has achieved more than 7.8 million downloads, compared with the two million Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 managed in its first week.

RIM to remove drunk driver app

US senators yesterday said Research In Motion (RIM) has promised to get rid of a BlackBerry software program designed to help drunk drivers evade police checkpoints, states AFP.

The move came a day after Senate majority leader Harry Reid and fellow Democratic senators Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg and Tom Udall urged Google, Apple and Canada-based RIM to remove such third-party software from shops stocked with applications for smartphones.

“Drunk drivers will soon have one less tool to evade law enforcement and endanger our friends and families,” the senators said in joint statement.

Iranian hackers forge Gmail credentials

Extremely sophisticated hackers, possibly from the Iranian government or another state-sponsored actor, broke into the servers of a Web authentication authority and counterfeited certificates for Google mail and six other sensitive addresses, the CEO of Comodo said, reveals The Register.

The 15 March intrusion came from IP addresses belonging to an Iranian Internet service provider, and one of the purloined certificates was tested from the same country, said Melih Abdulhayoglu, whose company is the certificate authority used to validate the bogus Web credentials.

Other Web addresses that were targeted included www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com, addons.mozilla.com, and Microsoft's login.live.com.

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