Flying Pasties aren’t stickers or paper cut-outs. They’re 2mm thick pieces of rubber that adhere to your skin to cover your breasts and genitalia.

Foxconn Technology Group showed off a motherboard factory, swimming pool and a hot line center for workers with emotional problems Wednesday as the giant company – maker of iPods and other popular gadgets – tried to repair an image damaged by a spate of employee suicides in China.

Earlier this month I had the chance to visit Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto. I spent my time there talking to a number of senior engineers and scientists about the exciting technology they’re working on, much of it related to the Internet of Things (a trend I’ve paid particularly close attention to over the past 18 months).

South Korea said after a rare emergency security meeting on Friday it would respond prudently to the sinking of one of its naval ships by the North, but Pyongyang warned the peninsula was being driven to war.

Undercover police spot a suspected suicide bomber apparently about to attack a crowd: They alert a commander, explaining the evidence is inconclusive.

The iPad is not ready for some universities, Dow Jones reports.

George Washington University and Princeton are rejecting the iPad, citing security issues, according to Dow Jones. Cornell University is seeing connectivity issues.

GW says its wireless network’s security features don’t let the iPad, or iPhone or iPod touch connect.

Dow Jones says Princeton blocked 20% of iPads from its network when it realized malfunctions could screw up the school’s computer system.

Maybe there’s something to Israel’s plan to ban to the iPad, after all?

NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander tells senators the U.S. Cyber Command aims to protect the privacy of American citizens despite the uncharted legal territory in cyberspace.

Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander told the Senate Armed Services Committee April 15 that he would work to protect the privacy rights of Americans—even as he noted the amount of uncharted territory in cyber-law.

Currently director of the National Security Agency, Alexander has been nominated by President Obama to head the U.S. Cyber Command. The Cyber Command is a subordinate unified command under the U.S. Strategic Command, and was created in 2009 to protect Department of Defense networks and coordinate the country’s cyber-warfare operations.

Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

You should read the full story, but basically, he built a simple crawler for public Facebook info, initially for his own purposes. He made sure that Facebook’s robots.txt didn’t block such crawlers — and he also emailed someone at Facebook (who he had dealt with before), but didn’t hear back from anyone. As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

After playing with some of the data himself, he started making some interesting maps and charts with the data, and did a simple analysis of geographic locations of Facebook friend connections to show people what you could do with the data. He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped). The chart he released got picked up by a variety of sites and quickly got passed around.

Backup vendor Quantum has announced a new enterprise tape library to help IT managers deal with tape consolidation in tiered storage environments as data growth skyrockets.

Scalar i6000 is based on Quantum’s Scalar i2000 architecture and increases the capacity, availability and security compared to previous generations of its enterprise library, according to the vendor. It scales up to 12 modules holding more than 5300 cartridges and storing up to 16 PB of data. It uses LTO-5 tape drives to help deal with increasing capacity needs and growth.

It also incorporates the company’s next-generation iLayer software with new archiving and management functions.

Quantum also released version 4.0 of its Vision software, which supports tiered storage through centralised monitoring and reporting of its Scalar tape libraries and DXi-series disk-based backup and deduplication products.

“As a result of regulatory compliance, litigation risks and a mix of other internal initiatives, roughly 85 per cent of all storage infrastructure deployments today use tape as part of their recovery architecture,” vice president for storage technologies and strategies at Gartner, Dave Russell, said in a statement. “Estimates show that the average annual growth rate of data is 60 per cent, so managing this data growth continues to be a top priority for IT. Tape is still the best solution for long-term data retention due to its low total cost of ownership over a multi-year timeframe.”

“The industry-accepted standard for confirming someone is who they say they are and that they control a domain is that ‘the CA takes reasonable measures to verify,’ which is very ambiguous at best and meaningless at worst,” wrote world-renowned security expert Kurt Seifried in an article on SSL security keys published in the May 2010 issue of Linux Magazine.
Two university researchers discovered at a recent security conference that security companies often deal with governments that can compel certificate authorities to produce SSL security keys for them, which Betanews reported last week. Those keys can then be used to sign certificates as any other Web site, enabling a law enforcement authority — hypothetically speaking, of course — to spoof virtually any other site.

World-renowned security expert Kurt Seifried, author of numerous books on Linux system administration, network security, and cryptography, contacted Betanews on Wednesday. In the May 2010 issue of Linux Magazine, Seifried reports on his own discovery, which goes one very critical step further: You don’t need to be a government, he found, to compel a certificate authority (CA) to issue an SSL certificate for a major Web mail service of your choice. You just need a valid credit card.

“Brief summary: One way to get certificates for domains you don’t own: 1) Find a free Web mail provider. 2) Register an account such as ssladmin. 3) Go to RapidSSL.com and buy a certificate. When given the choice of what email address to use, simply select ssladmin. 4) Go through certificate registration process (this takes about 20 minutes). 5) You will now have a secure Web certificate for that Web mail provider,” Seifried told Betanews Wednesday afternoon.