Hackers Took More Than $120M in Three Months

Ongoing computer scams targeting small businesses cost U.S. companies US$25 million in the third quarter of 2009, according to
the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Online banking fraud involving the electronic transfer of funds has been on the rise
since 2007 and rose to over US$120 million in the third quarter of 2009, according to estimates presented Friday at the RSA Conference
in San Francisco, by David Nelson, an examination specialist with the FDIC.

The FDIC receives a variety of confidential reports from financial institutions, which allow it to generate the estimates, Nelson said.
Almost all of the incidents reported to the FDIC "related to malware on online banking customers' PCs," he said. Typically a victim is
tricked into visiting a malicious Web site or downloading a Trojan horse program that gives hackers access to their banking passwords. Money is then transferred out of the account using the Automated Clearing House (ACH) system that banks use to process payments between institutions.

Even though banks now force customers to use several forms of authentication, hackers are still stealing money. "Online banking customers are getting too reliant on authentication and on practicing layers of controls," Nelson said. That's bad news for businesses,
which are increasingly on the hook for any losses "Commercial deposit accounts do not receive the reimbursement protection that consumer accounts have, so a lot of small businesses and nonprofits have suffered some relatively large losses," Nelson said. "In
the third quarter of 2009, small businesses suffered $25 million in losses due to online ACH and wire transfer fraud."

That's led to some nasty legal disputes, where customers say the banks should have stopped payments, and the banks argue that
the customers should have protected their own computers from infection. Often small businesses do not have the controls in place to prevent unauthorized ACH payments, even when their banks make them available, Nelson said. "Hackers are definitely targeting higher-balance accounts and they're looking for small businesses where controls might not be very good."

The FDIC's estimates are "reasonable," but they illustrate a problem that is becoming too expensive for banks and businesses,
said Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner. She said that attacks that install a password-stealing botnet program, known as Zeus,
have increased so far in 2010, so those losses may be even higher this year.

PC World

Sony Online Entertainment Launches Facebook Game

For the first time in its decade-plus history, Sony Online Entertainment will publish a game for another platform besides the PC
and Sony consoles, as the publisher announced the release of its first Facebook game, PoxNora, with many games to come to
the social networking service in the near future.

Sony Online Entertainment may be publishing games for a new gaming platform besides PC and PlayStation consoles. It all depends on your definition of the term "gaming platform." Sony Online Entertainment announced today that it has launched its
first Facebook game, PoxNora, a free-to-play strategy game that is also available on the PC. According to the announcement,
SOE is planning "additional games for the Facebook platform based on both existing franchises and new intellectual property."

While this isn't as much of a seismic shift as seeing Sony's console properties come to the social networking service, it does
mark a major change for the company as the one of the first PC-focused online gaming developers to make the jump to Facebook. Will companies like NCSoft and Blizzard join suit? This promises to be an interesting topic of discussion for this week's Game Developer's Conference.

PC World

Georgia could restrict sex offenders from Facebook

Georgia sex offenders could soon be removed from popular online social networking sites.

State Rep. Rob Teilhet is introducing a measure Tuesday that would allow the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to send sex offenders' information to Facebook, MySpace and other sites.

The sites could then remove their information, ban them from creating profiles and notify state authorities of any suspicious activity.

Teilhet, a Smyrna Democrat running for attorney general, said the proposal will help clear the Internet of dangerous child predators.

"The Internet is a powerful social and educational tool for our children. It should not be a danger-zone populated by pedophiles."

A similar proposal has already been adopted in New York and others are being considered in California and Oklahoma.

AJC

ressed by Charters, Public Schools Try Marketing

Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people in to hear
her pitch. She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.It is all an effort to build awareness for her product, which is not new, but is in need of an image makeover: a public school in Harlem.

As charter schools have grown in New York City, both in number and in popularity, public school principals like Ms. Espinal
are suddenly being forced to compete for bodies. So among their many challenges, some of these principals, who had never
given much thought to attracting students, have been spending considerable time toiling over ways to market their schools.

They are revamping school logos, encouraging students and teachers to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the new designs. They emphasize their after-school programs as an alternative to the extended days at many charter schools. A few have worked with professional marketing firms to create sophisticated Web sites and blogs.Brochures, fliers and open houses have become all but required in neighborhoods like Harlem, where parents once simply sent their children to the nearby school but now can enter lotteries for two dozen charters.

“We have to think about selling ourselves all the time, and it takes a concerted effort that none of us have ever done before,”
said Ms. Espinal, who is in her first year as principal of P.S. 125, also known as the Ralph Bunche School. “We have to get
them in the door if we are even going to try to convince them to come here.” Five years ago, P.S. 125, on West 123rd Street,
had more than 460 students. Today, the school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade, has fewer than half that and
shares its building with the Columbia Secondary School, which serves students in grades 6 to 12.

During her open house last week, Ms. Espinal spent more than two hours channeling her enthusiasm to persuade half a dozen parents that P.S. 125 was the best place for their children. She walked quickly and spoke even faster as she led the parents
through the school, proudly showing off a building with an ornate auditorium and a spotless gym. And then there was the functioning pool, where she held the chat last summer. Few other public schools in Manhattan have one, she boasted.

Parents oohed and ahhed at the pool and ran through dozens of questions about which reading program the school used, how
often students used the science lab and which students used the gym on rainy days. Several counted the children in each classroom and smiled contentedly when they did not get to 20. “That’s key,” said Shoshana Haulley, whose 4-year-old son will
enter kindergarten next year. After the tour, Ms. Haulley said she was impressed with Ms. Espinal’s assertiveness but was unsure where she would ultimately send her son. Officials at Alain L. Locke Elementary School, on West 111th Street, spent months with
a professional marketing firm, which worked free of charge to develop a blog and sophisticated Web site to keep parents up to date. Since 2005, enrollment at the school has dropped by more than 25 percent, but has stabilized this year.

“Sometimes it’s just a matter of sharing what’s happening,” said Susan M. Green, the principal of the school. Like other school leaders in Harlem, Ms. Green said sometimes parents were “pleasantly surprised” when they visited open houses, which the schools now routinely hold. River East Elementary, on East 120th Street, draws students throughout Harlem and typically has
more applicants than seats. But at this time of year, staff members spend hours scurrying to day care centers, churches and apartment complexes to find prospective parents, said Katie Smith, the assistant principal. “We have to be out there constantly representing ourselves,” Ms. Smith said.

Keeping the classrooms full is not just a matter of pride. Dwindling enrollment is one of the criteria that schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein uses when deciding which schools to close, saying that it shows parents are “voting with their feet.” The prospect of being
shut down has left educators in Harlem’s public schools anxious. Teachers from closed schools keep their salaries even if they cannot find new positions, though Mr. Klein has been seeking the power to lay them off after a certain time. In some cases, principals and other administrators can lose their jobs or be pushed out of the system.

Last year, the Education Department moved to shut down Public School 241 and replace it with a charter school run by the
Harlem Success Academy network, but backed off after the teachers’ union filed a lawsuit. Still, Mr. Klein sent a letter home to parents at the school, encouraging them to “seriously consider” applying to Harlem Success, which now shares the building with P.S. 241. This fall, 232 students enrolled at the traditional school, a drop from 299 the year before. For most schools, the marketing amounts to less than $500, raised by parents and teachers to print up full color postcards or brochures. Typically, principals rely on staff members with a creative bent to draw up whatever they can.

Student recruitment has always been necessary for charter schools, which are privately run but receive public money based
on their enrollment, supplemented by whatever private donations they can corral. The Harlem Success Academy network, run
by the former councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, is widely regarded, with admiration by some and scorn by others, as having the most extensive marketing effort. Their bright orange advertisements pepper the bus stops in the neighborhood, and prospective parents receive full color mailings almost monthly.

Ms. Moskowitz said the extensive outreach was necessary to make sure they were drawing from a broad spectrum of parents.
Ms. Moskowitz said they spent roughly $90 per applicant for recruitment. With about 3,600 applicants last year for the four
schools in the network, she said, the total amounted to $325,000.

NYT

D.C., first U.S. city to give away female condoms

The District will become the first city in the United States to distribute female condoms free, part of a project that will make
500,000 of them available in beauty salons, convenience stores and high schools in parts of the city with high HIV rates.
City officials said the distribution could begin within the next three weeks in parts of wards 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7, where a study
showed that large numbers of African American heterosexuals engage in risky sexual behavior that could easily lead to infection.

The move is an official acknowledgment of the futility of relying solely on the use of male condoms, which have been distributed
citywide for nearly a decade, to stem the District's epidemic of HIV and AIDS. Officials said they are turning to female condoms to
give women more power to protect themselves from HIV and sexually transmitted diseases when their partners refuse to use protection.
HIV/AIDS infection is the leading cause of death for black women 25-34 nationwide. A 2008 report showed the District's HIV/AIDS rate at 3 percent, or about 15,100 adults, a major epidemic.

"Anywhere male condoms are available, female condoms will be available," said Shannon Hader, director of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration. "We're not saying that if you're a school in this area, you can't get female condoms. We're trying to make every effort
count to build on what already exists . . . to expand options rather than limit them." The project is funded through a $500,000 grant from
the MAC AIDS Fund, a subsidiary of MAC Cosmetics, which contributes to numerous city programs, including two of the city's needle exchange programs. The grant helped the city buy the condoms at wholesale prices from the Female Health Co. and provide them for distribution by social service organizations, including Planned Parenthood, the Community Education Group and the Women's Collective.

In recent months, the HIV/AIDS Administration came under scrutiny after a Washington Post investigation revealed that some groups
with which it contracted to provide services failed to obtain business licenses and file tax returns. Others gave false information about employee résumés and consulting contracts, or spent lavishly on travel and executive salaries. The U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development threatened to withhold $12.2 million in federal funding but released the money after the District agreed to improve its tracking of spending by AIDS programs and monitor the services they deliver.
'Get with the program'

Hader said her agency is working to fix its problems while moving aggressively to attack the city's disproportionate rate of HIV infection.
She said staffs of community organizations are training to demonstrate how the condom should be used properly. One group is in talks
with a hair salon on Martin Luther King Avenue in Southeast Washington to introduce the condom and provide instruction on its use there.
"There are areas where the city is not doing a good job [with AIDS], but in some areas they are cutting edge. On this one, they're cutting edge" said Walter Smith, executive director of D.C. Appleseed, a watchdog group. "The very fact that they're doing this . . . says to women of the city that this is important to you. This is important to your families. Get with the program."

Nancy Mahon, executive director of the MAC fund, said she approached Hader last year after the city released the statistics on its AIDS
rate and asked: "If you could have a dream project here, what would it be?" Hader thought of HIV/AIDS "hot spots" identified in the HIV Heterosexual Behavior Study, which was released in tandem with the epidemiological report. In the behavior study, 75 percent of participants said they were in committed relationships. But nearly half, 46 percent, said they thought their last sexual partner had had sex outside the relationship. And nearly half, 45 percent, said they had had sex outside the relationship.

More than 70 percent said they didn't use condoms, and only 60 percent said they had been tested for HIV. Hader and other health officials said they think the District's HIV rate is closer to 5 percent because many people might be unaware that they are infected. Activists say poor women often are reluctant to protest when their husbands and boyfriends refuse to use male condoms because they are dependent on the man's income. The female condom has been available in Europe for nearly two decades and was first approved for use by the FDA in 1993. Its use in the United States was limited and ineffective. Women complained that the first version, FC1, was too expensive, about $17 for a box of five, and unsatisfactory.
New condom approved

Last year the Federal Drug Administration approved a second version, FC2, with a thinner polyurethane that conducts body heat and enhances sexual sensation for men and women, according to its designers at the Female Health Co. The new condom was developed in 2005 and became widely used in South Africa. It is now in use in nations such as Indonesia and Brazil. Mahon and Hader entered into discussions with Mary Ann Leeper, senior strategic adviser for the Female Health Co. The company was in the process of contacting the health departments in cities with the highest rate of infection when the call came, Leeper said.

CVS became the nation's first pharmacy to sell the new condom after the group contacted the company, said Vernon Goad, CVS's field marketing manager in the Washington area. Goad said the pharmacy will offer the female condoms next to male condoms in all of its
56 city stores, not just in target areas. A package of three female condoms sells for $6.50. A three-pack of male condoms sells for $5 to $7.
The female condoms went on sale in December, but sales have been slow. "I don't think people are aware that we have them," Goad said.

Washington Post

Earth’s Magnetic Field Is 3.5 Billion Years Old

Evidence for the existence of Earth’s magnetic field has been pushed back about 250 million years, new research suggests.
The field may therefore be old enough to have shielded some of the planet’s earliest life from the sun’s most harmful cosmic
radiation. Earth’s magnetic field was born by 3.45 billion years ago, a team including researchers from the University of Rochester
in New York and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa report in the March 5 issue of Science.

That date falls during life’s earliest stages of development, between the period when the Earth was pummeled by interplanetary
debris and when the atmosphere filled with oxygen. Several earlier studies had suggested that a magnetic field is a necessary
shield against deadly solar radiation that can strip away a planet’s atmosphere, evaporate water and snuff out life on its surface.

“I think it’s a magnificent piece of work, a real landmark,” says geophysicist David Dunlop of the University of Toronto, who was
not involved in the research. “It pushes the boundary back about as far back as you could reasonably expect to measure on Earth.”
The researchers measured the magnetic strength of certain rocks found in the Kaapvaal craton of South Africa, a geologic region
known to date back more than 3 billion years. Just finding old rocks wasn’t enough, though. “It’s a Goldilocks theory of finding
rocks,” says John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, a coauthor of the new study. Iron minerals record the strength and direction
of the magnetic field that was present during their formation. But when rocks are heated in subsequent geological processes, they
can lose or overwrite that record.

“We had to find a rock that had just enough iron to record a magnetic signature, but not so much that it would be affected by later
chemical changes,” Tarduno says. The Greenstone Belt in South Africa had rocks that were just right: crystals of quartz less than
two millimeters long with nanometer-sized bits of iron-containing magnetite embedded in them. “Quartz is the perfect capsule,”
Tarduno says. “It’s not affected by later events, but it has these [iron] inclusions in it.” Tarduno and his colleagues had studied
similar rocks in 2007 and found that a magnetic field half as strong as today’s was present 3.2 billion years ago. Using a specially
designed magnetometer and improved lab techniques, the team detected a magnetic signal in 3.45-billion-year-old rocks that was
between 50 and 70 percent the strength of the present-day field, Tarduno says.

“When we think about the origin of life, there are two threads to follow,” Tarduno says. “One obviously is water. But you also have
to have a magnetic field, because that protects the atmosphere from erosion and the complete removal of water.” Mars may be
dry today because it lost its magnetic field early on, he adds. To determine if the early magnetic field was enough to hold back the
rain of radiation, the team needed to know what the sun was doing. Tarduno and Eric Mamajek, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, used observations of young sunlike stars to infer how strong a solar wind the Earth was up against.

The young sun probably rotated more quickly than it does today, Tarduno says. This quick rotation powered a strong magnetic field,
which heated the sun’s atmosphere and carried away mass and angular momentum in a strong solar wind of charged particles.
The team calculated that the point where the Earth’s magnetic field cancels out the solar wind would be only about five Earth
radii above the planet’s center, less than half of the 10.7 radii it is today.

The amount of radiation regularly reaching Earth from the sun 3.45 billion years ago would be comparable to what rains down on
the planet during the most powerful solar storms today, Tarduno says. The aurora borealis, caused by solar wind particles accelerating along Earth’s magnetic field, would have been visible as far south as present-day New York City. The study “can be used to guide
our searches for other life-bearing planets” as well, says astronomer Moira Jardine of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Astronomers might want to focus more on older, less active stars or search for planets with their own magnetic fields, she says.
Despite the fact that no extrasolar planets with magnetic fields have ever been detected, Jardine and Tarduno remain optimistic.
“It’s just another parameter we need to think about,” Tarduno says.

Wired Science

FDA warns Nestle, others for misleading

U.S. health regulators warned units of Nestle and more than a dozen other foodmakers about overstating or misstating the
nutritional value of baby food, nuts and other products on their labels.Most of the letters made public on Wednesday accuse the companies of making claims on their food packages and websites over trans fat content, antioxidant advantages, and omega-3 benefits that fail to Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

The warnings come as the FDA is set to push for new package labeling to make it easier for people to understand the nutritional content of food. While Wednesday's warnings are not indicative of labeling practices in the entire food industry, they should "give food manufacturers further clarification about what is expected of them as they review their current labeling," FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in an open letter to the industry.

The FDA plans to issue draft guidelines for nutritional labeling and to work with the food industry on a new labeling system, she added. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, urged the FDA to crack down on manufacturers that "for far too long ... have exaggerated the healthfulness of their products." New regulations should take a stronger stance on claims over trans fats and whole wheat as well as make the nutritional facts panel on the back of food packages easier to understand, the group said.

In a letter to baby food maker Gerber, a unit of Nestle, the FDA cited issues with Gerber 2nd Foods Carrot and Graduates
Fruit Puffs products. It said their "labeling includes unauthorized nutrient content claims." The labels claim that the foods are "Healthy as Fresh," an "Excellent Source ... of Vitamin A" and have "No Added Sugar," according to the letter dated February 22. "These regulations do not allow the claim for products specifically intended for children under two years of age," the FDA wrote.

The FDA issued a similar warning to Beech-Nut, a unit of Swiss company Hero Group, the same day. A list of the companies that received letters and links to those letters can be found at: link.reuters.com/deb33j. Others receiving warning letters include snack food company Diamond Foods Inc, relating to the health claims for the omega-3 fatty acids in the company's walnuts, and Spectrum Organic Products Inc, a unit of Hain Celestial Group, over labeling for its vegetable shortening.

Nestle's Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream unit was warned over labeling of certain products.A Nestle spokesman said the company was cooperating with the FDA but does not comment on pending regulatory inquiries. Diamond expects to be able to make any changes required to packaging and the website "expeditiously and with minimal expense," it said in a statement. Hain and Beech-Nut could not be reached for comment.

Reuters

Guess What? Google Fears the Next ‘Google

There are millions of entrepreneurs who want to come up with the next Google. Maybe you are one of them. You almost certainly
know one.  Guess what? Google is afraid of you — haunted that the same disruptive forces which transformed the company from a
garage project by two kids maxing out their credit cards into a global superpower in 10 short years could render them irrelevant. Just
like that.

“The fear is the next Sergey and Larry will come up with a disruptive technology or service that will eliminate the need for Google,”
Google vice president of online sales and operations John Herlihy told the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, according to SiliconRepublic.com. “That spurs us on to deliver the best quality return on investment to advertisers in an open and transparent
partnership that works for them.”

Note the use of the word “eliminate.” Sure, it’s a setup for the pablum that Google is doing great stuff, better than anyone, etc. But
the public expression of that a dominant — and feared — player is driven by that kind of metaphysical fatalism should give competitors
as much pause as it does wannabees hope. More enterprise survival tips from the horse’s mouth:

* “(W)e think that scarcity breeds clarity. If, for example, we have enough resources invested in something, we halve it and eliminate overheads.”
* “(W)e … celebrate failure. Here’s an analogy — the Roman legions used to send out scouts in different directions. If a scout didn’t return, the army didn’t head in that direction. We seek feedback at every opportunity on something — we either kill it, adjust it or redeploy resources.”

Wired