A remotedesktop access feature found in some Macintoshes is being credited with leading police to two suspects in the burglary of an apartment in New York.

In addition to flatscreen TVs, iPods, and DVDs, the thieves made off with two laptops, one of which belonged to Kait Duplaga, an Apple store employee, according to a report in The New York Times on Saturday.

While police in White Plains, N.Y., were coming up empty with their investigation, Duplaga learned that her computer was being used on the Internet, and she turned on the Back to My Mac feature installed on her Mac from another Mac, according to the report.

The feature allowed Duplaga to see immediately how the computer was being used at the time, as well as operate it remotely. Recalling that she had a camera installed on the computer, the fastthinking Duplaga snapped images of...

A recent statement from antimalware and threatdetection software manufacturer PC Tools claims that Windows 2000 is a more secure operating system than Windows Vista. The companys claims, as covered by Infoworld, have attracted a good deal of coverage—no one wants to miss out on a good Microsoft bashing—but an examination of the companys methodology raises serious concerns about the validity of the conclusions.

According to company CEO Simon Clausen, "recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37 percent more secure than Windows XP." This certainly sounds dire, and at first glance, the companys numbers back its statements up. Data reports from the companys ThreatFire...

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, event, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming...

With just a few days from its official release, the Windows XP Service Pack 3 is already receiving a large numer of postinstalation complaints.

Apparently, the update causes a series of problems, from random bluescreens to continuous reboots.

Jesper Johanson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft, who now runs a Windows blog, explained the situation in one of his recent blog posts:
"At this point, I want to clarify that the endless rebooting is not at all related to SP3 per se. The problem is that with some configurations, SP3 causes the computer to crash during boot, and Windows XP, by default, is set up to automatically reboot when it crashes. That is why you end up in the endless rebooting scenario."

According to Mr. Johanson, the easiest solution is to disable the "automatic restart on system failure" option,...

The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups.

The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. Thats because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter (NSL), is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

The 2001 Patriot Act and its subsequent reauthorization dramatically expanded the FBIs ability to use NSLs, which do not require a court order...