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There isn’t a whole lot of news today, but I did come across some potentially scary news that will likely affect how we purchase computers in the future.

But first, let’s get the news out of the way.

As I said, there isn’t much to report today.  Maybe it’s because the search engines know that most of our industry will be at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose next week, so they are waiting until then to debut new products?  That way the people there won’t be able to fully appreciate the changes which have happened.  This happened to me – I was in Chicago speaking when MSN debuted the beta of their search product, so I didn’t get much chance to look at it until I got home.

In other news, there may be problems for Google’s next purchase.  For those who don’t know, Google invested in a Chinese search firm called Baidu quite some time ago.  It turns out that Baidu is set to go IPO in the next little while, so of course there is controversy.  2 companies are suing Baidu for allowing users to download copywritten material including movies and music.  This will likely be settled, however, as both publishers are suing for less than $100,000 each.  Maybe Larry or Sergey can write them a check? :)

Now available from Yahoo! - the ability to add Yahoo shopping to your site.  Yahoo! has released an API which allows you to query their shopping engine and return results.  This could be a great tool for e-commerce sites, to compare their product pricing to those sites listed on Yahoo! Shopping.  More details are available on the Yahoo! Search blog.

Now to the hacker news:

Car Whisperer is software that tricks the hands-free Bluetooth systems installed in some cars.  The software takes advantage of the fact that some of these systems require a simple security key (usually a 4 digit number such as 0000 or 1234) in order to grant access to it.  A macilious hacker could then gain access to the system to not only listen to what’s being said, but also interact with those in the vehicle.  Not to worry, however (at least for now) as the software was developed by a European security group to prove the security weakness of these systems.

And now for one to be worried about:

At yet another hacker type conference in Las Vegas recently a pair or researchers debuted a new rootkit which can allow access to any users computer without them knowing.  A rootkit is a software package which can be installed without user intervention that could give a hacker complete access to a Windows computer system.

The scary thing about this rootkit, called Shadow Walker, is that it can hide itself even from the system.  In other words, it can mask itself and make it appear that it doesn’t appear on the hard drive, isn’t a running process, and doesn’t use any memory, even when it is running in the background.

What this does illustrate is that in the future hardware and software will have to work together to ensure that this type of application can’t launch itself.  That means hardware will have to be more self-monitoring and will need to be trusted by the operating system.  If the operating system doesn’t trust the hardware, then it won’t be allowed to access the system.

This is because the rootkit could reside on any device, including a digital camera, USB drive or even a corrupted printer, where the memory of the printer could store the rootkit software.  It basically tells us that our current computers aren’t as secure as they should be.

BUT not to worry, at least for now – this software is a research project at the moment, but it does show just how vulnerable our computers still are.