US corruption probe nets dozens

More than 40 people, including politicians, officials and several rabbis have been arrested in a major FBI operation in the US.

Three hundred agents raided dozens of locations in New Jersey and New York as part of a 10-year probe into corruption and money laundering.

Three mayors from the state of New Jersey and two members of the state legislature were among those held.

One man is accused of kidney trafficking involving Israeli donors.

Prosecutors say the arrests were part of a "dual-tracked" investigation.

Acting US Attorney Ralph Marra told reporters there were 29 suspects on what he termed the "public corruption" side of the investigation, including the politicians.

On the other side, he said, there were 15 suspects in connection with alleged international money-laundering, including the rabbis and their "associates".

Prosecutors accuse one man of dealing in human kidneys from Israeli donors for transplant for a decade.

It is alleged that "vulnerable people" would give up a kidney for $10,000 (£6,000) and these would then be sold on for $160,000 (£97,000).

Informant

Officials say investigations originally focused on a network they allege laundered tens of millions of dollars through charities controlled by rabbis in New Jersey and neighbouring New York.

ARRESTED Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez State legislator Harvey Smith State legislator Daniel Van Pelt Rabbi Eliahu Ben Haim, Deal, NJ Rabbi Saul Kassin, Brooklyn, NY Rabbi Edmund Nahum, Deal, NJ Rabbi Mordechai Fish, Brooklyn, NY Informant leads FBI sting operation

Investigators used an informant to approach a group of rabbis from the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and the New Jersey borough of Deal for help hiding his assets.

The rabbis cashed cheques he made out to charities they oversaw and paid the money back to him, minus a cut, investigators say.

The probe then widened to include alleged official corruption with links to a New Jersey construction boom.

The informant was introduced to a series of politicians and powerful local officials. Posing as a developer, he offered bribes to return for favourable treatment.

State legislators Harvey Smith and Daniel Van Pelt were arrested, as well as the mayors of some of the state's major cities and boroughs.

A number of city building, planning and fire inspectors were also held.

Mr Marra said: "It seemed that everyone wanted a piece of the action. The corruption was widespread and pervasive. Corruption was a way of life for the accused."

He said politicians had "willingly put themselves up for sale" and clergymen had "cloaked their extensive criminal activity behind a facade of rectitude".

'Misunderstanding'

The BBC's Jane O'Brien says the money laundering ring reportedly spanned the US, Israel and Switzerland.

Jon Corzine, the Governor of New Jersey, said: "The scale of corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated."

Ed Kahrer, an FBI agent who has worked on the investigation from the start, said: "New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation.

"It has become ingrained in New Jersey's political culture," he said.

Another FBI agent said: "The list of people we arrested sounds like it should be the roster for a meeting of community leaders, but sadly they weren't meeting in a boardroom this morning, they were in the FBI booking room."

Most of those arrested have been released on bail.

Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano was accused of taking a bribe. His lawyer said he intended to fight the charge "with all his strength until he proves his innocence".

A lawyer for 87-year-old Rabbi Saul Kassin of Brooklyn said it was a shame his client had been "caught up in this misunderstanding".

Correspondents say the number of people arrested is large even by New Jersey standards, where more than 130 public officials have either admitted to corruption or been found guilty of it since 2001.

Modi can be questioned for '02 riots: High Court

New Delhi: The Gujarat High Court on Friday rejected a petition which sought a stay on the Special Investigation Team (SIT) from questioning Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 62 others in a 2002 communal riot case.

The petition was filed by former BJP MLA Kalu Maliwad, who challenged the Supreme Court’s order asking the SIT to “look into” a complaint by Zakia Jafri, wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was among those burnt alive in Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad in 2002.

Zakia Jafri has made accusations against Modi and 62 others, including senior bureaucrats and police officers, and demanded a fresh investigation into their role in the Gulberg Society massacre.

Maliwad claimed that the Supreme Court had not issued any specific direction to the SIT, and the probe team doesn’t have the power to summon or question the accused.

At least 1,180 people, mostly Muslims, died in riots in Gujarat which began after a train carrying Hindu activists was set ablaze at the Godhra railway station in 2002. The cause of the fire has not been clearly established with two government-appointed panels giving differing versions.

The SIT, which has been set up on the Supreme Court’s order, comprises former Central Bureau of Investigation director R K Raghavan., former director general of Uttar Pradesh Police C D Satpathy and three IPS officers from Gujarat: Geeta Johri, Shivanand Jha and Ashish Bhat.

Could You be Hacked Like Twitter?

The French hacker who broke into Twitter's Google Apps and stole more than 300 private company documents has revealed in detail how he did it. Using a method known as "cracking," the man who goes by the name Hacker Croll was able to break down Twitter security by trolling the Web for publicly available information, according to TechCrunch. Eventually, Croll found one weakness many of us are guilty of -- using one password for everything -- and Twitter's security was compromised. Read on to see how Hacker Croll did it, and consider whether access to your digital life could be breached by his methods.

Croll Cracks Twitter

Hacker Croll started by building a profile of his target company, in this case Twitter. Basically, he assembled a list of employees, their positions within the company, and their associated e-mail addresses. After the basic information was accumulated, Croll built a small profile for each employee with their birth date, names of pets, and so on.

After Croll had created these profiles, he just went about knocking on doors until one fell down. That's exactly what happened when he did a password recovery process for a Twitter employee's personal Gmail account. Croll discovered that the secondary account attached to this person's Gmail was a Hotmail account. The problem was that Hotmail account had been deleted and recycled due to inactivity -- a longstanding policy on Hotmail. Now, all Hacker Croll had to do was reregister the Hotmail account for himself, go back and do the Gmail password recovery, and then Gmail sent the password reset information straight to the bad guy.

But it's not over yet. Gmail asked Hacker Croll to reset the password of the Twitter employee's personal e-mail account, which he did. But now the original user was locked out of their account, which would send up an obvious red flag. So all Croll did was search the Gmail account itself for passwords from the person's other active services. Then he entered a commonly used password he'd found, and waited to see if the person began using their account normally. Croll now had access to the Gmail account from behind the scenes, and was able to access information undetected. Making life even eaiser, the Twitter employee used the same password on her business and personal accounts, so the hacker now had access to both, and the rest was history.

Are You Vulnerable to the Same Crack?

The alarming thing about Croll's methods is they could happen to anyone. I checked my own Google account last week, and discovered I was open to the same security flaw the Twitter employee was. I had registered my Gmail account so long ago, that I'd forgotten all about my secondary e-mail address. Just like the Twitter employee, the secondary email attached to my Google Account was defunct and possibly open to re-registering by anyone. That has since been changed. I also did a search within my own email for passwords I've used, and I was amazed at how many results were returned. Do a search in your e-mail account using your most common passwords, and see what turns up. You might be surprised.

But there are a myriad of other ways a hacker could get your information. Have you ever received a Happy Birthday greeting on a public service like Twitter? Have you ever sent someone your phone number or any other information that way? What information is sitting on your social networking sites? Are your MySpace and Facebook accounts closed off, or can anyone view them who searches for you? Does your Facebook page have your birthdate, the past schools you've attended, your pet's name? Could your mother's maiden name -- a common security question -- be discovered through your social network account? What about the myriad of other services you use? If you think it's unlikely that someone could find this information, then try searching for yourself in the so-called "Deep Web" search engines like Pipl or Spokeo and see what comes up. You may find online accounts you'd completely forgotten about.

Webmail Security Similar

The other problem is that most of the major e-mail services use similar recovery methods to Google's. Hotmail is almost exactly the same as Gmail. Yahoo is even easier, since if you tell Yahoo you can't access your secondary e-mail account you can answer a secret question. Those security measures are what made it possible for a student to hack hack into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account last year. In my tests of Yahoo Mail's recovery page, I got what seemed like an unlimited number of opportunities to guess my Yahoo Mail secret question. AOL Mail isn't much better, since you have a choice of entering your secondary e-mail (you have to know it or guess) or you can enter your exact birthdate plus your Zip code on file with AOL. The Zip code barrier makes it harder for someone to break in, but by no means impossible.

If you've discovered you're open to the same flaws that Twitter was, then consider this your wake-up call. You must regularly check the security settings on your various online accounts so that you remain in control of your security information since it's so easy to forget what you entered years ago. Pay special attention to secondary e-mail accounts connected to your primary e-mail address; consider giving a bogus answer (that only you remember) to security questions; and regularly change your passwords, either by your own invention or with a random password generator like GRC or Strong Password Generator. You could also get away from using just one or two passwords, and use password managers like Clipperz, KeePass or Yubico to remember your details instead. But perhaps most importantly, search for the most common passwords you use in your own webmail accounts and delete those messages. If the worst happens and your account is compromised, you'll be glad you did.

Google Chrome OS: Does the World Need Another Operating System?

When Google first launched its Chrome Web browser, many of us immediately saw Chrome as Google’s extension of an operating system. Now, that prophecy is fulfilled with news of Google’s plans to open-source the Chrome OS code later this year with view to have it available in the second half of 2010. But immediately, this raises fundamental questions about what, exactly, defines an operating system, and what will distinguish Android, the open-source mobile OS spearheaded by Google, from Chrome OS.

I can’t help but wonder if we’ll look back on this news and think of it as the start of the next Great OS Wars. Google says its goal is to improve the user experience with computers -- and clearly, that’s possible given the laundry list of annoyances with today’s PC-based experience. Mobile is driving innovation, too: The iPhone, Android, and WebOS mobile OS experiences have already shown us the potential when hardware integrates with elegant and well-designed software. While Microsoft Windows has competition in Apple’s Mac OSX and Linux, the truth is that Windows has really been competing against itself. Sure, Mac OS X's evolution has put pressure on Microsoft, but PC users have routinely turned to either Windows XP or Windows Vista (reviled though it may be) for their computing needs. Consider the netbook world: Mediocre Linux distributions installed on early netbooks had difficulty selling, because shoppers wanted the Windows environment on their netbook, not some merely functional, Linux-based Windows wannabe.

Fast forward to the introduction of Android. The Linux-based Android debuted just a few months after Apple introduced its sharp iPhone OS 2.0 with App Store support. And mobile OSes have been the hot topic ever since: When we most recently examined the mobile OS landscape, we noted that Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 edged out Palm’s WebOS and Google’s Android -- for now. It gained points for its smooth interface, ease of use, and its wide application support. Palm’s WebOS also gets bonus points for its interface and strong ties into Web-based services, including Google’s own calendar and e-mail. And Android gets plenty of attention, too: Its pretty-face design (though, WebOS and iPhone are prettier still) and interface makes it highly competitive with WebOS and iPhone OS 3.0, and its connectivity and integration with Google’s Web services (calendar and e-mail, but not Google Docs) made me take notice when I reviewed the first Android phone to hit the market last fall, the T-Mobile G1.

The key thing to remember is that even though these mobile operating systems are tied tightly with their handset hardware, they are not necessarily limited to smart phone handsets. Rumors of a Google operating system based on Android have been circulating for a while now, and already we’ve seen reports of planned netbooks that will run Android (Acer’s Aspire One is due in the fall). In fact, smart phones are nothing more than low-powered, highly portable computers, often running ARM or similar processors -- the same processors found in so-called smartbooks, and soon to be found in some netbooks, perhaps, as well.

The idea of an Android-based netbook OS is not new then, and makes the news of Google Chrome all the more unsurprising. However, why Android? What’s to stop WebOS for making a go of it on a larger, more powerful device than the Palm Pre? Why wouldn’t Apple pipe its iPhone OS 3.0 (based on the same kernel as Mac OS X) to a tablet or other portable device? Thus far, the sort of Google-to-Web integration we’ve seen from Android on smart phones, and from Chrome on the PC, just hasn’t seemed all that unique.

For example, the current Chrome browser for Windows gives some insight into the blurring lines between desktop and Web browser. Chrome lets you create shortcuts on your Windows PC to any Web page or Web application, for example (this feature is not yet available in the Mac version of Chrome). When Chrome first came out, this felt fresh. Now, however, I’m less impressed -- Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 lets me do that, too, on my iPhone 3GS.

Chrome OS vs. Current Options

Before I can understand the value of a Google-owned, Chrome-based operating system, I’d have to understand what it offers to me as a user that will be different from any of the options available to me today. In Google’s blog posting announcing Chrome OS, the company notes “Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”

I spend most of my time on the Web, but the above, admittedly early, description does nothing to help differentiate Android from Chrome OS. Indeed, I question the language: Android users are more likely than anyone to be heavily tied into the Web, given the always-on connectivity on mobile devices.

So, what, exactly, might be the difference between Android and Chrome OS, and how might that challenge Windows? Presumably, for Chrome OS to truly be a competitive option to Windows 7 on full-blown laptop and desktop configurations, you’d need for Chrome to have wide device driver support for components and peripherals -- a sandbox Google hasn’t really played in before. Without such device support, Google could run into issues with far-flung devices such as printers or graphics cards. The company might even need Windows virtualization for Chrome OS: After all, users who rely on Windows apps might still need to access those apps on any Google-based device.

And speaking of apps, while Google notes that apps for Chrome OS would work on any other browser, it still opens questions about what the advantage of a browser-based app would be to begin with. Look at what happened with Apple’s attempt at browser-based apps: It fizzled and was completely forgotten once iPhone OS 2.0 hit last summer with full support for locally-stored applications. Chrome OS may have an early advantage that the iPhone lacked, in that HTML 5 has support for locally-stored data for Web apps; however, this yet-to-be implemented approach still might not help you if you're at 38,000 feet over Lincoln, Nebraska, and don't have any Web access.

High Hopes

Another statement from Google got my attention: “We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear--computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

These points are true, especially the one about software updates. But I don’t know anyone who’ll want to only store data in the cloud; nor do I know anyone who would use a device as a primary computer if it won't work with the host of devices one might attach. And to assume that a new Google OS won’t require constant software updates is a bit presumptive: Google has pushed out Android updates big and small; and Apple is continually updating is iPhone OS 3.0.

I do think that Android and Chrome OS can have a place on devices, and I believe these will give competing operating systems, mobile or otherwise, a run for their money -- if, and only if they have apps that provide cross-platform compatibility with the Windows universe. But I’m not convinced that even Google can challenge Windows (or Mac OS X for that matter) on netbooks or larger devices. The device and software compatibility issues loom large here. And until Google can sell users on the advantages of its Chrome OS over other competitive options, I think the company could have an uphill struggle for carving out the niche it clearly has targeted with Android and Chrome on mobile and non-PC devices.

Microsoft Windows 7, Google Chrome OS, the first netbook with Android -- these are just a few of the interlinked developments we have to look forward to in the third quarter of the year. It’s going to be a busy fall, after all.

How to Learn Anything on the Web

Looking to start a business, get a degree, or learn Michael Jackson's Thriller dance? The Web has a class, video, or tutorial to help you do it. Here's where to get started.

A tutorial or class for almost everything and anything is available online these days. Whether you're looking to beef up your résumé with some new skills, to get a degree while waiting for the job market to pick up, or simply to have a little fun learning something new, the Web has a wealth of educational resources--many of them free of charge.

To give you some ideas, we've put together a list of sites in several categories, from skills for budding entrepreneurs and learning foreign languages to gourmet cooking and the choreography for Michael Jackson's iconic Thriller dance.

You can always Google for anything you don't see here, but be careful as you click. In researching this story, I ran into many sites that either tried to sell me classes (with little or no real free instruction) or were infested with pop-ups and adware. Antimalware software is a must