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An independent researcher has demonstrated a flaw in Internet Explorer that he says can be used to steal access credentials to Facebook, Twitter and hoards of other sites.

He calls the technique "cookiejacking", as it relies on the cookie information stored by the web browser to keep users access credentials and other information for certain websites. Depending on many conditions, stealing cookie credentials (which is by no means a new attack method) could allow a hacker to access the account of a victim on a certain website.

In this case, the Italian researcher, Rosario Valotta, finds that to exploit the flaw, you need to persuade a victim to click an item in the browser, drag it and then drop it somewhere. While it sounds like a difficult task, Valotta put it to test with his Facebook account with surprising results.

He built a puzzle which allows a user to use their pointer to undress a photo of an attractive woman. The drag/drop motion needed by the puzzle is enough to exploit the flaw in IE.

"I published this game online on FaceBook and in less than three days, more than 80 cookies were sent to my server," he said. "And I've only got 150 friends."

Two-day forum in Paris highlights rift in philosophy between tech giants and policy makers.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt used the e-G8 forum in Paris to warn governments to be very careful when it comes to regulations and restrictions imposed on the Internet.

Zuckerberg received a warm reception at e-G8, with comments about how Facebook was used as a tool in the creation and rise of democracy movements in the Arab world. "People tell me on the one hand 'it's great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it's also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people'," Zuckerberg said.

"But it's hard to have one without the other .... You can't isolate some things you like about the Internet and control other things that you don't."

Eric Schmidt had also put his views forward on a number of occasions. He warned that technology moves forward faster than any government, and so it would be unwise to legislate quickly without understanding the possible consequences of the actions.

Facebook is reportedly set to add streaming music to its site, through a partnership with Spotify.

If accurate, the social networking giant will launch the add-on within two weeks.

Spotify would not confirm the deal:

We have a Facebook integration. We're continuously working with them to make that as good as it can be. But that's the extent of our relationship.

The reports state that the new Spotify icon will be on the left of the newsfeed, underneath "events."

By clicking the icon, users can then listen to Spotify's catalog and share with their FB friends.

Movie and video games rental service confirms the acquisition of the digital distribution service.

GameFly officially confirmed that it has acquired Direct2Drive, but did not offer up any financial details of the deal with IGN. News Corporation (IGN owner) will maintain a minority stake in GameFly and will have a representative on the company board.

However, News Corp (or IGN) will not play any direct part in the future running of GameFly or Direct2Drive. Currently, Direct2Drive offers 3,000 games for PC and Mac users.

"We're very excited to bring the D2D team on board at GameFly and expand our ability to deliver games to consumers," said GameFly CEO David Hodess.

"Only GameFly can offer a complete library of physical and digital games for the PC, Mac and consoles in one place."

New Internet traffic report shows that Netflix is now the application responsible for the highest levels of traffic in the U.S.

The movie streaming service accounts for 24.71 percent of peak time aggregate traffic in America, ahead of BitTorrent which stands at 17.23 percent. In comparison, in Europe, BitTorrent accounts for 28.4 percent of peak-time traffic, just ahead of all http traffic.

BitTorrent remains #1 in the United States for peak upstream traffic, with 52.01 percent, but Netflix again tops the Downstream chart with 29.70 percent (Downstream traffic is great than upstream by about 4:1).

In regions where there are very few legal services, P2P services dominate the charts. In Latin America, for instance, the Ares Galaxy file sharing network accounts for 15.48 percent of peak-time traffic just behind HTTP.

Netflix is helped by the nature of its relatively inexpensive bundles, and a broad number of platforms on which subscribers can view content streamed directly from Netflix.

Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.

"Skype's full potential hasn't been realized yet," he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.

"I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services," Zennstrom said. "Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more."

Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.

Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.

Twitter will alert users that they are being pursued if they are forced to hand over user information to authorities.

Tony Wang, who heads up Twitter's European operations, commented when asked about an online privacy dispute that is beginning to boil over in the UK. "Platforms should have responsibility not to defend the user, but to protect that user's right to defend him or herself," said Wang.

On several occasions, information has shown up on Twitter that could be found to violate the law in the UK. This often includes personal information about people in the public eye, such as celebrities and athletes.

The case that has brought the questionable legality of some tweets to the front pages started with a so called superinjunction granted to a Premier League footballer when it became clear that the mainstream media was throwing around a story alleging he had an affair.

When a superinjunction of this nature is issued, the mainstream media (newspapers and their websites, television news stations etc.) generally honor it. However, it becomes blurry when you consider that a UK citizen can use Twitter to publish that information quite easily, and it can quickly spread across the site.

YouTube has just turned six years old, and has more milestones to report to the world on its relentless growth.

Founded in 2005, YouTube's ease of use and potential has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the service. The idea that a video in almost any format could be uploaded by the user, and then converted and provided on its own YouTube page (and could be embedded anywhere else) attracted drones of people to the service.

That growth only seems to accelerate for YouTube, which is now reporting that over 48 hours of video is uploaded to the site every single minute. So in just one minute, two whole days of video content has been added to YouTube's incredibly vast digital vaults.

To compare that to last year, it represents a 100% increase in the amount of content being uploaded at any given time.

All of that content needs viewers to have any purpose on the video sharing giant, and YouTube is now reporting that it delivers 3 billion video views every single day.

Now YouTube is challenging its users to keep up the momentum , so that it can one day in the near future reach 72 hours of video footage per minute, and 4 billion daily views. To help this, the service is constantly making improvements to aid content creators and to provide its service on as many platforms as possible.

According to Eurogamer, Microsoft is set to announce full stereoscopic 3D features for the Xbox 360 games console very soon.

The report says that the support works exactly like the PlayStation 3's 3D effects, providing HDMI stereoscopic 3D in the 1280x1470 twin 720p framebuffer configuration, giving a 720p image per eye.

"They'd be mad not to do it, is all I can say," said Eurogamer's source, who is said to be close to continued Xbox 360 development. "The machine is not only very capable, it's more capable than the PlayStation 3 of doing stereo, assuming you don't have one of the old crappy ones with the composite leads... assuming you have a HDMI Xbox."

The source went on to hint that the announcement will be made at E3 this year. "Microsoft is going to have to go on stage to say something, aren't they?"

The PS3 officially got stereoscopic 3D functionality last June bia a firmware update, and is still the only console to offer it as a feature. Some titles for the Xbox 360 do tout the effect, but render using 3D techniques based on the principle of two distinct images crammed into one 720p framebuffer.

The widely reported mass suing of sharers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker movie has bloated to include 24,583 file sharers.

This new number puts it on top of the list for the most number of potential defendants in a file sharing case, just ahead of the lawsuit against sharers of the "Expendables" movie, which initially took aim at 23,322 sharers. Both lawsuits are being managed by Washington, DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver.

Filed last year, the Hurt Locker lawsuit originally targeted about 5,000 file sharers, but has jumped to almost 25,000 since. Of the 24,583 people, 10,532 subscribe to Comcast services, 5,239 to Verizon, 2,699 to Charter and 1,750 to Time Warner.

This mammoth mass-lawsuit won't be carried out quickly however, as both Charter and Verizon have only agreed to provide between 100 and 150 subscriber identities per months, whereas Comcast hasn't agreed to hand over any details at all yet.

TorrentFreak is hosting documents that list all targeted IP addresses in the Hurt Locker case.

According to reports, Nvidia's Project Denver CPU will feature x86 hardware emulation.

Just like China's Loongson processors, the emulation will be achieved by use of an extra hardware layer, though it will come with a speed penalty of between 15% and 20% (still better than the Loongson's 30 percent penalty). Nvidia is expected to launch the CPU around 2013-2014.

Adding the x86 emulation to the package will help the graphics chip maker to better compete with Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices.

Project Denver is expected to launch around the same time as Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture, both of which could be interlinked to provide a very high-performance computing platform to drive the next generation of computers.

Its design allows it to be used for products that range from Desktop PCs right up to high-resource supercomputers.

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Apple has decided to acknowledge the Mac Defender malware variants and says it will help fight the FakeAV software through an update.

Recently, Mac users started reporting problems with several fake security products. The Mac Defender family of malware products works the same as countless FakeAV/scareware products that target Windows users. It will alert the user of the system to fake malware results and then try to scam a credit card number to clean the system.

At first, Apple seemed to completely ignore the malware to the disapproval of many users. The company even reportedly told its AppleCare and retail staff not to acknowledge it to customers and strangely, not to remove it from users' computers.

Now Apple seems to have had a change of heart, posting an online support document with removal instructions and promising an update for Macs that will attempt to prevent future infection.

"A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus," Apple wrote in its support document. "In the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware."

A security researcher has blasted Siemens for comments made by the company downplaying security vulnerabilities in its industrial control systems.

Dillon Beresford wrote that the German company was downplaying the threat of findings he made while testing a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC). "The vulnerabilities are far reaching and affect every industrialized nation across the globe," he wrote in an e-mail posted to a public security list.

"This is a very serious issue. As an independent security researcher and professional security analyst, my obligation is not to Siemens but to their consumers."

Siemens PLC equipment is used in all sectors of industry, being found at oil refineries, manufacturing plants and waste treatment facilities. Their security has been called into question following the Stuxnet discovery and analysis, which apparently targeted Siemens equipment used as part of Iran's nuclear program.

Beresford discovered several security bugs with a Siemens PLC he got through his employer, NSS Labs. He took issue with comments of Siemens representatives made to the media, which claimed the bugs were discovered "under special lab conditions with unlimited access to protocols and controllers," and that the vulnerabilities would be difficult for hackers to exploit.

Everything Everywhere (partnership of T-Mobile and Orange) and BT are looking for volunteers to test new high-speed broadband in the UK.

Volunteers in South Newquay, Cornwall, will take part in the trial from September to December. The object is to see whether the LTE 4G network can provide a high-speed broadband service in rural areas where it would be too expensive to lay down new high-speed lines.

The network will provide speeds up to 100Mbit or faster to the volunteers. Some of them will be given wireless rotuers capable of connecting to the 4G network and providing Internet throughout a house, while others will be asked to test wireless dongles.

"Instead of building two networks, we're trying to do it with one," explained Emin Gurdeneli, VP of network services at Everything Everywhere.

"The customer will enjoy a broadband service at their premises, at their home etc, as if they had acquired it in the usual way. What will be different is our delivery mechanism."

The trial is being supported by Nokia, Siemems and Huawei also.

4G technology is expected to roll out properly in the UK by 2014, with networks set to bid on the 4G spectrum early next year. For the trial, BT and Everything Everywhere have been granted part of the 800Mhz spectrum, which is currently used for analogue television, which is in the process of being phased out in the UK.