New Gadgets and Gizmos

As you’re probably aware, with analog TV signals being killed off next year, you’ll need a converter for old and crappy TVs. The government is offering up DTV converter vouchers worth $40 towards the…

The thing those two happy chappies are demonstrating is yet another high-tech clothes-drying device: the Cord-o-Clip. What makes this gadget whizzy? Well, you know when you go out to hang clothes on…

Microsoft’s pursuit of a global industry standard for its open-document format, which set off a protracted battle with its commercial rivals over the burgeoning market for interchangeable Web-based documents, is set to conclude this week after a final round of voting.

Delegations from as many as 87 nations were expected to have cast ballots by a deadline Saturday with the International Organization for Standardization, the standards-setting body in Geneva whose ISO designation could influence software purchasing by some governments and large businesses.

Advocates and opponents of Microsoft’s proposed standard, Office Open XML, or OOXML, declined Friday to predict the outcome, and an unofficial tally by the Malaysian delegation showed the result as too close to call. An ISO spokeswoman, Sandrine Tranchard, said her group would publish official results early this week.

Industry experts said the outcome of the vote on the 6,000-page OOXML specification, which was steeped in arcane technical debate over software coding and licensing, could have commercial ramifications for Microsoft, as well as for International Business Machines and Sun Microsystems, which helped develop a rival technology called OpenDocument Format, or ODF.

ODF is so far the only interchangeable document format bearing an ISO standard, an endorsement that its backers have used to promote the technology to governments and businesses around the world. The ODF format, available at www.OpenOffice.org, lets users save text and spreadsheet documents in many formats, including Microsoft’s.

Microsoft, facing increasing client demands for interchangeable formats, responded by developing OOXML, but initially did not let users save documents as ODF files. Microsoft eventually relented and financed a free software add-on that enabled OOXML users to save documents in the rival format. OOXML was designated a European standard in December 2006 by a Geneva group called ECMA, formerly known as the European Computer Manufacturers Association.

Through ECMA, Microsoft sought fast-track approval from the…

In what was possibly an inside job, thieves worked a massive data breach on the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain, installing malware on servers in each of the company’s 300 grocery stores. The software captured credit- and debit-card data when consumers swiped cards — and sent the data overseas, the company reported on March 17.

The attack represents a “new and sophisticated” attack on computer networks, the company told the Massachusetts attorney general and the state’s consumer-affairs agency.

The Hannaford breach is notable because — unlike the notorious breach of The TJX Companies in 2006 — the company did not store the customer data. Rather, the hackers captured the stream of data as card information was sent to banks for verification.

Inside Job?

The scheme may have compromised 4.2 million cards used at the stores between Dec. 7 and March 10, the company said. About 2,000 cases of fraud have been linked to the Hannaford breach.

The Hannaford breach appears to have been a professional, sophisticated attack, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, in an e-mail. “The means by which the malware was introduced and the data extracted only furthers the speculation that Hannaford was victim to a sophisticated attack,” he said. “We have further information in the last few days that indicate this may have been an inside job, which seems to nicely explain some of the bigger questions.”

The questions include how was the malware introduced and why was the attack so successful? “For example, it’s unlikely that an outsider would have had such an incredibly high success rate at distributing the correct malware to all the correct systems,” Storms said.

Furthermore, writing sophisticated software to intercept credit-card information at the time of a card swipe means “an attacker would have needed to have some prototype systems in-hand first to…