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Could Math Equation = E-Disaster?
Jeremy Muncy
Contributing Writer
2004-09-08
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
In a story that sounds like a combination of Indiana Jones and Good Will Hunting, one of the seven "holy grail" math equations are on the verge of being solved, most notably being the Riemann hypothesis.
 | | The Holy Grail Of Math Equations... |  |
This sounds pretty wild, some mathematicians are close to solving a problem that has stood for a century or more... but with the glory, financial disaster could follow closely behind. All cryptic codes could be breakable; no Internet transaction would be safe. The solving of the Riemann hypothesis would shine some light on the random pattern of prime numbers, numbers only divisible by themselves and one. Prime numbers are also the key to internet cryptography, the same cryptic language that keep banks and credit cards secure.
"The whole of e-commerce depends on prime numbers. I have described the primes as atoms: what mathematicians are missing is a kind of mathematical prime spectrometer. Chemists have a machine that, if you give it a molecule, will tell you the atoms that it is built from. Mathematicians haven't invented a mathematical version of this. That is what we are after. If the Riemann hypothesis is true, it won't produce a prime number spectrometer. But the proof should give us more understanding of how the primes work, and therefore the proof might be translated into something that might produce this prime spectrometer. If it does, it will bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big implications," said Marcus du Sautoy of Oxford University.
Apple Releases Update To Patch 15 Holes In Mac OS X. Apple Computer's released an update yesterday that will fix 15 various security issues in their operating system.
Most of the flaws with OS X could be found in the open-source software, which includes a critical flaw in the Kerberos authentication system. This patch is readily available for Mac OS X 10.3.5 and Mac OS X 10.3.4, and also fixes issues in Mac OS X 10.2, known as "Jaguar."
"All security enhancements... are also available for Jaguar, if the issue could occur on Jaguar systems," a security advisory from the company said.
Patch Released For WinZip Flaw. Last month WinZip warned of a security flaw in their compression/ decompression tool for the Windows operating system. WinZip computing released the WinZip 9.0 Service Release 1, which claims it will resolve the buffer overflow issue.
The versions of WinZip that could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code are 3.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x and 9.x. The way WinZip handles command line inputs, could potentially be exploited by hackers to cause a buffer overflow, upgrading to the newest version has been suggested by the company to avoid harm.
It has been reported that the company was not aware of the vulnerability having been exploited in the wild when it released the patch.
Red Hat Increases Security for Enterprise Linux 3. Yesterday Linux software, maker of Red Hat, announced the release of an update for their enterprise product with security upgrades. The upgrade also included new driver support, IBM POWER5 support, and various bug fixes.
Also included in with the update are Exec-shield and Position Independent Executable (PIE) to help protect against function pointer, stack, or buffer overflows.
Bagle Tries To Make A Return. A new version of the un-popular mass-mailing computer worm started spreading last week, but didn't get far.
It's been said that the worm, known as Bagle.dll.dr and W32.Beagle.AQ, tried to make an attempt to turn off security software on a victim's PC and then tries to download its harmful programming from 125 websites, many of those sites couldn't be contacted which resulted in the worm not being spread.
"Overall, this is not one that we are watching to increase dramatically at all," said Alfred Huger, senior director of Symantec's security response group.
About the Author:
Jeremy Muncy is a staff writer for WebProNews.com
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