Seagate Technology, the largest maker of computer hard drives, Smade a pre-emptive strike against an emerging competitor on Monday when it filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. of patent infringement. In the suit, Seagate contends that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering how such drives interface with computers.

"So, on a sunday morning, I was watching some hacker activities. These hackers were doing the following pattern:"

- Using bots based on Perl
- Querying Google for parts of the urls that may identify some applications, using the inurl: parameter.
- Scanning the Google results sites for vulnerable applications
- Exploit those applications in a way to run remote commands on the machine, giving orders like download additional software to the machine, like the same perl bot."

PunBB developer Rickard has released a security update to address a few issues (v1.2.12). On May 5th "o.y.6" discovered a vulnerability in PunBB, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks. It seems that due to mailing-list issues this release has not been announced properly. Be sure to UPDATE!

What is hot, interesting, or just plain weird this week on the Internet front? Check out my weekly dug web sites, from my Digg profile.

Free partion software is a great alternative to the typical Partion Magic. Also see this list of Small, clean, no-install software, a guide to very small software for your PC. Once you grab some tiny apps you are ready to, run Windows with NO services.

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Miranda IM users will be able to find a working AIM plug-in (download .dll at 126 KB) released by snaphat. It's basically a buggy hack job and it will connect with updated buddy status.

A recent update to AOL’s AIM has rendered Miranda’s AIM plug-in useless, causing all clients to be unable to connect. A forum topic about this has been created and after seven pages no word of a solution.