On Message with Ben Gross

Man accused of using LinkedIn to steal clients: The Register covers a lawsuit regarding a former employee of a recruitment firm who allegedly used his LinkedIn account to essentially export his contacts from the firm so he could use them to start a new competing firm. This is interesting for several reasons particularly with regard to who “owned” the contacts in the first place and since LinkedIn is an external service not managed by the company was he entitled to keep his account with its contacts after he left.

Inventing contact schemas for fun and profit! (Ugh): Chris Messina writes about the potential benefits that the recently released contact APIs from Microsoft, Google, and now Yahoo! as well as the problems caused by the proliferation of new contact schemas. Messina argues that the schemas should be standardized where possible using an existing standard such as vCard.

Gpcode.ak Cryptographic Challenge: Discusses the call for cryptanalysis of the Gpcode.ak virus which encrypts a users data and attempts to extort money in exchange for a tool that will decrypt all the files. They encryption key used is a 1024-bit RSA key. The hope is that through cryptanalysis of the virus a flaw in the implementation will be found that will lead to substantially faster key recovery as the current key could easily take up to a year to find even with specialized hardware and the author could potentially use multiple keys.

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