31 May 2012

মধ্যপ্রাচ্যে ভাইরাস আতঙ্ক 'ফ্লেম'


নতুন কম্পিউটার ভাইরাস ‘ফ্লেম’-এর আক্রমণের শিকার হচ্ছে মধ্যপ্রাচ্যের দেশগুলো। ক্যাসপারস্কি ল্যাব সম্প্রতি তাদের এক প্রতিবেদনে জানিয়েছে, গত দু’বছর ধরেই মধ্যপ্রাচ্যের কয়েকটি দেশের কম্পিউটারে গুপ্তচরের মতো চুপিসারে তথ্য সংগ্রহের কাজ করছে ভাইরাসটি। খবর নিউ ইয়র্ক টাইমস-এর।

ফ্লেম ভাইরাসটির আবিষ্কারের ঘটনা অনেকটাই কেঁচো খুঁড়তে সাপ বের হবার মতোই। কম্পিউটার থেকে বিভিন্ন প্রোগ্রাম মুছে ফেলতে থাকা ‘ওয়াইপার’ নামের আরেকটি ভাইরাসের তদন্ত করার সময় ‘ফ্লেম’ ভাইরাসটির অস্তিত্ব আবিষ্কার করে ক্যাসপারস্কির টিম।

ইরান, ইসরায়েল, সৌদি আরব, লেবানন এবং মিশরের মতো মধ্যপ্রাচ্যের দেশগুলোই ফ্লেম-এর আক্রমণের মূল শিকার। ব্যবহারকারীর কম্পিউটারের হার্ডওয়্যার বা সফটওয়্যারে সরাসরি কোনো ক্ষতি করেনা ভাইরাসটি। কম্পিউটার ব্যবহারকারীর সব ইনস্ট্যান্ট মেসেজিং এবং কম্পিউটারের সব ডেটা ট্রান্সফার রেকর্ড করে নেয় ফ্লেম। ব্যবহারকারীর অজান্তেই মাইক্রোফোন চালু করে কথাবার্তাও রেকর্ড করে নেয় ভাইরাসটি। এক কথায়, ব্যবহারকারী তার কম্পিউটার দিয়ে কি করছেন, কি না করছেন এসব তথ্য সংগ্রহ করে তা পাঠিয়ে দেয় এক অজানা ঠিকানায়। আর এর সবই হয় কম্পিউটারের সামনে বসে থাকা মানুষটির একেবারেই অজান্তে।

এ ব্যাপারে ক্যাসপারস্কি টিমের আলেক্সান্ডার গোস্টেভ বলেন, ‘এ পর্যন্ত আবিষ্কার হওয়া সবচেয়ে জটিল কম্পিউটার ভাইরাসগুলোর একটি ফ্লেম। সাইবার ওয়ারফেয়ার বা সাইবার এসপিওনাজকে নতুন এক পর্যায়ে নিয়ে গেছে এটি।’

সূত্র জানিয়েছে, ২০১০ সাল থেকে আবিষ্কার হওয়া সবচেয়ে বিপজ্জনক ভাইরাস তিনটির একটি হচ্ছে ফ্লেম। অন্য দু’টি হচ্ছে, ‘স্টাক্সনেট’ এবং ‘ডুকু’। ২০১০ সালে স্টাক্সনেট আক্রমণে ক্ষতিগ্রস্ত হয়েছিলো ইরানের একটি পারমাণবিক স্থাপনা। অন্যদিকে ডুকু, স্টাক্সনেট-এর মতো আক্রমণাত্মক না হলেও এর মূল উদ্দেশ্য ছিলো ফ্লেম-এর মতোই তথ্য সংগ্রহ করা। তবে স্টাক্সনেট এবং ডুকু একই ব্যক্তি বা দলের তৈরি হলেও ফ্লেম-এর নির্মাতা ভিন্ন কেউ বলেই জানিয়েছে ক্যাসপারস্কি।

29 May 2012

ইরানের সঙ্গে পারমাণবিক উন্নয়নে মার্কিন কোম্পানি


পারমাণবিক শক্তি নিয়ে যুক্তরাষ্ট্র ও ইরান সরকারের রেষারেষির মাঝে স্রোতের বিপরীতে হাঁটছেন এ দুই দেশের বিজ্ঞানীরা। পরিবেশবান্ধব পারমাণবিক শক্তি উৎপাদনের জন্য নতুন একটি নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশন প্রজেক্ট-এ একসঙ্গে কাজ করতে একমত হয়েছে তেহরানের ইসলামিক আজাদ ইউনিভার্সিটি এবং আমেরিকার নিউ জার্সিভিত্তিক কোম্পানি লরেন্সভিল প্লাজমা ফিজিক্স (এলপিপি)। খবর দি গার্ডিয়ান-এর।

সূত্র জানিয়েছে, এলপিপি এই নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশন প্রকল্পটির জন্য আমেরিকান ট্রেড সেকশন থেকে অনুমতি পাবে কিনা তা নিয়ে অনেকেই সন্দেহ প্রকাশ করেছেন। তবে প্রকল্পটি আমেরিকান ডিপার্টমেন্ট অফ ট্রেজারির নিয়ম মেনেই করা হচ্ছে বলে জানিয়েছে এলপিপি কর্তৃপক্ষ। প্রেসিডেন্ট বারাক ওবামার বিজ্ঞান ও প্রযুক্তি বিষয়ক পরিষদকেও এ ব্যাপারে জানানোর কথা রয়েছে এলপিপি কর্তৃপক্ষের।

প্রচলিত নিউক্লিয়ার ফিশন আর নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশন-এর মূল পার্থক্য হচ্ছে, ফিশন পদ্ধতিতে ক্ষতিকর বর্জ্য উৎপাদন হলেও ফিউশন পদ্ধতিতে বর্জ্য তৈরি হয় না। এ কারণে পরিবেশবান্ধব নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশনকে বলা হয় ‘হোলি গ্রেইল অফ এনার্জি সোর্স ’।

নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশনের মাধ্যমে শক্তি উৎপাদনের এই পদ্ধতির একমাত্র সমস্যা হচ্ছে প্রযুক্তিটি অনেক বেশি ব্যয়বহুল। এ কারণে ৫০-এর দশক থেকে বিজ্ঞানীরা নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশনকে ‘ভবিষ্যতের মূল এনার্জি সোর্স’ বলে আসলেও এখনো বাস্তবে কাজে লাগানো সম্ভব হয়নি একে।

তবে এলপিপি জানিয়েছে, তেহরানের ইসলামিক আজাদ ইউনিভার্সিটির বিজ্ঞানীদের সঙ্গে তারা এমন একটি নিউক্লিয়ার ফিউশন পদ্ধতির উন্নয়ন করবে, যার মাধ্যমে কম খরচে ফিউশন শক্তি উৎপাদন করা যাবে এবং শিল্পোন্নত দেশগুলো তা ব্যবহার করতে পারবে।

28 May 2012

America Delayed 6-Strikes

Once the entertainment industry and all of the country’s largest broadband providers reach an agreement, millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be monitored by the RIAA and MPAA. 

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The agreement in question says that people caught sharing copyrighted files will get several notifications, and eventually be punished if they don’t stop infringing. Such measures were supposed to kick-start last July, but they had to wait, because the involved parties did not meet the deadline.

In the nearest future, the Center for Copyright Information will start hunting and tracking down copyright infringers, thanks to an agreement between the US entertainment industries and the broadband providers. The parties have negotiated a system designed to warn and eventually stop copyright violators. After 6 notifications, Internet service providers could take a series of repressive measures, including “chocking the Internet pipe” and temporary disconnections.

This plan was announced as “Copyright Alters” a year ago. The deadline passed, but the measures are still not implemented. The CCI said that the dates mentioned in the Memorandum of Understanding weren’t hard deadlines. Instead, they were supposed to keep the outfit on track to have the Copyright Alert System up as soon as possible. They also claimed that they weren’t going to launch until they were confident that the regime is consumer-friendly and could be implemented in a manner consistent with all their goals. The implementation is expected to start later this year.

The industry has already selected a 3rd-party company to monitor BitTorrent swarms, but doesn’t want to disclose the names. According to the agreement, the “technology partner” in question will be tested by another independent expert.

As for the ISPs, they have to implement a system able to keep track of all the sent notifications. Such database won’t be stored centrally in order to ensure the subscribers’ privacy. Verizon, for example, agreed that copyright violation is not right and through the suggested voluntary consumer-friendly system, the ISP believes it can educate its subscribers and offer them access to legitimate alternatives.

Verizon points out that this program can offer the best approach to the problem of unauthorized file-sharing while respecting the privacy and rights of the Internet users.

Anti-Piracy Outfit Calls to Arrest Half the World

The BSA has published another study which contains the usual statistical nightmares, specifically designed to frighten politicians into locking up more people.

The publication claims that 50% of Internet users are copyright infringers and have installed unlicensed software. The 9th annual Global Software Piracy Study has revealed a sharp increase in software piracy, particularly among emerging economies. The anti-piracy outfit said that in the United Kingdom over 25% programs users installed last year were unlicensed.

The survey involved 15,000 PC users from 33 countries across the globe, and 57% of them admitted to unlicensed software use, which is an increase of 42% from the year before. The outfit estimates that the global annual cost of software piracy is somewhere $63.4 billion.

However, the United Kingdom is still below the global average, with only 27% of PC users admitting they have got software illegally in 2011. As far as the anti-piracy outfit is concerned, that means that the industry lost around £1.2 billion. The BSA explained that the United Kingdom is in a double dip recession and believes that it is very important to protect the entertainment industry’s intellectual property and its contribution to the economy. However, the outfit didn’t seem to think that the recession could become the cause of piracy and that its products were now too expensive.

Moreover, the BSA ignored the fact that the more expensive the content is, the more likely it’s to be pirated. This is born out by the fact that piracy is more widespread in developing countries, because people there are broke. Instead, the BSA says that the penalties for piracy are not very strict. According to the results of its survey, over 3/4 of British users surveyed don’t think the risk of getting caught is an effective deterrent to piracy.

The anti-piracy outfit is now calling for a stronger damages legislation, which includes double damages, in order to stop the increase in unauthorized software use. As a result, general counsel at Federation Against Software Theft called for the government to introduce new legislation which could make it easier for the entertainment industry to lock up pirates.

Meanwhile, this problem has another side which the industry hasn’t worked out yet. In fact, if over 50% of the world are pirates, then democratically they are in the majority! The conclusions are up to you.

Google: Another massive data protection violation

A specialist in data protection from Germany has made Google reveal all of the informationthat Google have been collecting from millions of German’s while mapping their country with the use the of Google Street car.

Not only were the cars taking pictures and mapping the streets and surrounding areas but they were also scooping up information from unsecured wireless internet connections.
Google alleged that it was an error with the computer software used and that it included some developmental software unintentionally installed in the street car's computer programming.
The collected data included, Internet search history, Emails, images,passwords, website postings and more.

Following this information release, at least another 12 countries began questioning the legality of the way the information is secretly gathered, and the content of the information and the proposed use of it, and to date so far no regulating body in the USA has be able to see any of the data Google’s cars have collected from its public.

This breach of data protection and secret information collection has been reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who did issue Google with a $25,000 fine as Google hindered their investigation into this affair, although the FCC did not find any breach of American laws in the way the information was gathered.

There so far has been no statement issued from Google about this collection of personal information, or who at Google had knowledge of it, and what the intended use of the collected information was to be for, with Google stressing that any collected information was not for use with/for any Google service or product.

20 May 2012

বৃটিশ ওয়েবসাইট হ্যাকার গ্রেপ্তার


বৃটেনের সিরিয়াস অরগানাইজড ক্রাইম এজেন্সির ওয়েবসাইট হ্যাক করায় নরওয়েতে দু’জন হ্যাকারকে আটক করা হয়েছে। খবর বিবিসি-এর।

জানা গেছে, গ্রেপ্তারকৃতদের হ্যাকিংয়ের উদ্দেশ্য ছিলো সেখানকার কম্পিউটারে রক্ষিত সব তথ্য নষ্ট করে ফেলা। বৃটেনের ওয়েবসাইটটি সাইবার আক্রমণের পর সাময়ীকভাবে বন্ধ হয়েছিলো বলে জানিয়েছে বিবিসি।

নরওয়ের প্রসিকিউটর এরিক ময়স্টু জানান, ‘সন্দেহভাজন দু’জনকে আটক করা হয়েছে। বিষয়টি নিয়ে আমরা আরো মানুষের সঙ্গে কথা বলছি।’

গ্রেপ্তার হওয়া ১৮ ও ১৯ বছর বয়স্ক এ দু’জন হ্যাকারের অপরাধ প্রমাণিত হলে সর্বোচ্চ ছয় বছরের জেল হতে পারে।

জানা গেছে, নরওয়ের একটি লটারি ও জার্মান সংবাদপত্র বিল্ড হ্যাকিং এর ঘটনায়ও তাদের সম্পৃক্ততার বিষয়ে সন্দেহ করা হচ্ছে।

নভেম্বরে আসছে উইন্ডোজ ৮ ট্যাব


সম্প্রতি জানা গেছে, উইন্ডোজ ৮ চালিত ট্যাবলেট বাজারে আসবে এ বছরের নভেম্বরের দিকে। খবর ম্যাশএবল-এর।

নতুন এক প্রতিবেদনের বরাত দিয়ে ম্যাশএবল জানিয়েছে, নভেম্বরের দিকেই মাইক্রোসফট উইন্ডোজ ৮ আনুষ্ঠানিকভাবে উদ্বোধন করবে বলে জানা গেছে। আর ঠিক ওই সময়েই বিভিন্ন কোম্পানির চিপে তৈরি উইন্ডোজ ৮ চালিত ট্যাবলেটগুলো কিনতে পারবেন ক্রেতারা। 

উইন্ডোজ ৮ বর্তমান এক্স৮৬ এবং ট্যাবলেট ডিভাইসের এআরএম প্রসেসর উভয়েই চলবে বলে অনেক আগেই জানিয়েছে মাইক্রোসফট। নতুন এই প্রতিবেদন থেকে জানা গেছে, নভেম্বরকে লক্ষ্য রেখেই এসব ট্যাবলেট ডিভাইস উৎপাদনের কাজ চলছে।

15 May 2012

Yahoo CEO Exits; Activist Shareholder Added To Board

Yahoo (YHOO) shares rose 2% Monday after the company on Sunday said CEO Scott Thompson has been replaced amid a scandal over a false educational claim on his resume.
The company on Sunday also announced the end of a proxy fight with big shareholder Third Point, the immediate appointment of an interim CEO and the immediate appointment of a new chairman.
Thompson also reportedly has thyroid cancer, which he reportedly had disclosed to the board.
Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo executive vice president and head of global media for the company, is the interim CEO.
Fred Amoroso, who joined Yahoo's board in February, is the new chairman. Amoroso is former CEO of digital entertainment tech company Rovi (ROVI).
The company also named activist shareholder Daniel Loeb, head of Third Point, to the board, along with Loeb allies Harry Wilson and Michael Wolf. Third Point will end its proxy fight against the Web portal, which has struggled to boost revenue vs. more focused rivals such as Google (GOOG) and Facebook.
Two week ago, Loeb revealed that Thompson didn't have accounting and computer science bachelor's degrees from Stonehill College, as stated in his bio. Thompson last week said, via Yahoo, that he had only an accounting degree.

The Pirate Bay Opposed Attacks on Virgin Media

Virgin Media has been applying blocking measures against The Pirate Bay after being ordered to do so by the British court. In response, file-sharers threatened the Internet service provider with DDoS attacks and protests at its headquarters.
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A couple days ago The Pirate Bay started criticizing the Anonymous for DDoSing Virgin Media’s official site, saying that this action may be regarded as a form of censorship. The BitTorrent tracker claimed they didn’t encourage such actions, because it believes in the open and free web, where anyone can express their opinion.

The DDoS attack was started last Tuesday, and the ISP confirmed this fact, adding that they took the website offline themselves. The same day @AnonUK Twitter feed said that the Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down Virgin Media site. In reply, The Pirate Bay asked their supporters to stop using such methods, because both DDoS and blocks are forms of censorship.

Famous BitTorrent tracker urged people to instead do something else – start a tracker, join a pirate party, set up a proxy, or come up with a new peer-to-peer protocol, as all this would be more useful than DDoS attacks. Meanwhile, Twitter users noticed that Virgin Media, as well as other broadband providers, originally refused to block The Pirate Bay and are now only following the law.

However, a faction of Anonymous calling itself @AnonAteam on Twitter was quick to claim responsibility and defend the attack, arguing that they weren’t just about facilitating access to the BitTorrent tracker, but intended to stop the type of order used to block the site being used as a precedent for further online filtering.

The Anonymous announced that the entire reason for the protest was to protect online freedom of expression from being blocked without any form of judicial process. The Internet service providers play the role of gateways to democracy in our technology age, and blocking access to the sites with such an abuse of the legal process should be treated as illegal and an abuse of power.

Recently, a group named the People Liberation Front strongly condemned the attack on Virgin Media and other British Internet service providers because it violates the 2nd principle of the hacktivists: “never attack infrastructure”.

Romanian “Witches” Googled the Future

A couple of fortune tellers managed to convince many of their clients that they knew everything about them after searching the data on Google and Facebook. Then they pretended to see all of this in their crystal ball.

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International media reported that two of Romania’s top witches had made a fortune by providing spells helping to protect clients from the devil. People thought they had the magical ability to know everything about the others through their crystal ball and the fact that dead people seemed to be in breach of any privacy policy.

Nevertheless, what the witched really did was use surveillance equipment in order to collect information on their clients. Later they would pretend that this data was transmitted to them from the spirit world. The witches spied on their clients and did plenty of Google and Facebook searches, after which they plugged in their crystal ball and told the customers what they had been doing for the last 24 hours.

Persuaded, the victims agreed to pay huge amount of money for the chance to speak to dead relatives and get protection from evil forces, believing that the Romanian women were real mystics. One of their clients was even persuaded to take thousands of pounds and go to a lake for a midnight ritual in order to release herself from the burden of her money by throwing it all into the lake. However, the woman hesitated, and a demon emerged from the water of that lake. Of course, she flung all the money into the water and ran away. Later, the country’s police found out that the demon was actually a friend of the fortune tellers who had put on diving gear and a mask in order to terrify the unsuspecting victim and make her fling the cash.

The entire scheme failed when the fortune tellers were charged with fraud and decided to bribe a local prosecutor to drop the charges. Nevertheless, the police seemed to have their own Tarot cards and predicted this could happen: in fact, the prosecutor in question was under suspicion for dropping too many cases recently. Instead of summoning a demon to watch the prosecutor, the police simply bugged his office and in result arrested all three of them.

The cops pointed out that if the “witches” had been any good they would have known that the prosecutor’s office was bugged. Aside from fraud, the fortune tellers also face charges under the National Security Act for using unauthorized surveillance equipment.

Yahoo a rare gainer as most techs retreat


Technology stocks fell Monday, mirroring a broad-market selloff, though Yahoo Inc. managed some gains after the latest drama in its executive suite.
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson resigned Sunday, just four months into his tenure at Yahoo, following a controversy over inaccuracies in his academic biography. At issue was Thompson claiming he had a bachelor’s degree from Stonehill College in accounting and computer science; Thompson’s degree was only in accounting. Ross Levinsohn, who ran Yahoo’s media business, was named the company’s interim CEO.
Yahoo YHOO +2.04%  shares were among the few notable gainers by the time the market closed, rising 2%, to $15.50.
But most other tech stocks retreated, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP -1.06% closed with a loss of 31 points at 2,902. The Philadelphia Semiconductor IndexSOX -1.09%  shed 1%, and the Morgan Stanley High Tech 35 Index MSH -0.77%  was off by almost 1% `^"|^` 
The broader market declined — with the S&P 500 off more than 1% — following a slate of uncertainty from Europe, including the latest political and economic upheavals in Greece and the fallout from J.P. Morgan JPM -3.17% reporting a trading loss of $2 billion last week. 
Among leading tech stocks, losses came from Apple Inc. AAPL -1.50% , Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ -0.80% , Amazon.comAMZN -2.09% , Microsoft MSFT -1.54%  and Intel INTC -2.23%  .
Daily-deal company Groupon Inc. GRPN +18.54% , jumped 18.5% to close at $11.74. Groupon is scheduled to report its quarterly results after Monday’s market close. 
BMC Software Inc. BMC +8.71%  saw its shares rise $3.52, or 8.7%, to $43.92. The business-software company adopted a shareholder rights plan to fend off a proxy fight by hedge fund Elliot Associates LP. Elliot, which owns more than 5% of BMC’s stock, has called for a sale of the company.

Yahoo reboots: New board members, interim CEO


Yahoo became embroiled in the résumé flap when activist shareholder Third Point, which holds a 5.8% stake, disputed Thompson's résumé. Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb said the résumé inaccurately claimed Thompson held a degree in computer science, calling into question the Yahoo CEO as well as hiring committee head Patti Hart. Yahoo acknowledged the inaccuracy and bowed to pressure from Third Point to review the matter.
The fallout comes as Third Point had increased demands for Thompson's removal and a board makeover. Under the shake-up, Yahoo has relented to Loeb's demands for placement of Third Point members on the Yahoo board. Third Point board nominees Loeb, Harry Wilson and Michael Wolfwill join Yahoo's board, effective Wednesday.
Non-executive chairman Roy Bostock, along with Hart, VJ Joshi, Arthur Kern, Gary Wilsonand Thompson, all agreed to step down from the board immediately.
"The board believes in the strength of the company's business and assets, and in the opportunities before us," Amoroso said in a statement.
The résumé flap is the latest black eye for Yahoo, which has been under pressure from shareholders to reshape itself amid a withering assault from Google and Facebook.
"It's very damaging, and speaks so negatively to the (vetting process)," says Adam Hanft, an expert in management and brand strategy. "(Thompson) was hired for strategy, branding and marketing — not computer science."
The January hiring of Thompson, the highly successful CEO of eBay's PayPal unit, was Yahoo's latest stab at a turnaround. But his padded credentials raised questions about his integrity and the Internet pioneer's hiring and vetting process.
Thompson's hasty exit complicates a restructuring plan he put into place that includes 2,000 layoffs. It's just the latest in a series of missteps and stumbles in the past few years highlighted by multiple CEOs, executive defections, reorganizations and questions about deals with tech partners Microsoft and Alibaba.
For Levinsohn, it all adds up to inheriting a wayward ship with a reconstituted board and uncertain future. "Who in their right mind would take this job, and this board?" longtime tech analyst Jonathan Yarmis says. "We should have fun and answer that question: 'Who's crazy enough?' "

Yahoo confirms CEO is out after resume scandal


Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is out after it was found he padded his resume with an embellished college degree, ending his term at the company after just four months.
Yahoo confirmed Thompson "has left the company" in a statement posted late Sunday, after two news reports. Tech blog AllThingsD was the first to report the news, and the New York Times followed up with its own article.
Yahoo media chief Ross Levinsohn will be named interim CEO, the company said. Levinsohn had earlier been rumored as a successor to Carol Bartz, who was fired from Yahoo by phone in September. Instead, Thompson took the CEO role in January.
Thompson's resume scandal ignited just over a week ago, when activist shareholder group Third Pointalleged that Thompson lied about details of his college degree.
The saga took an even more dramatic twist Monday morning, when theWall Street Journal reported that Thompson has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. His decision to step down from Yahoo was "in part influenced" by the recent diagnosis, the newspaper said.
New board members: Dan Loeb, the CEO of Third Point, has a long history of launching proxy fights -- and Yahoo was the latest company in his crosshairs. Third Point owns about 5.8% of Yahoo, and is the largest outside shareholder. In February, Third Point filed paperwork proposing four new Yahoo board members, including Loeb himself.
At first, Yahoo didn't want to play ball. But Third Point scored a coup by finding and exposing Thompson's padded resume.
Now, Yahoo has settled with Loeb to end the proxy fight. On Sunday, Yahoo and Third Point released a joint statement explaining the terms.
Yahoo will add three of Third Point's proposed nominees to the board: Loeb himself; Harry Wilson, the CEO of corporate restructuring and turnaround firm Maeva; and Michael Wolf, CEO of media consulting company Activate.
The fourth Third Point-proposed nominee, former NBC Universal CEO Jeffrey Zucker, said in the companies' statement that he removed himself from consideration in order to more easily broker a settlement.
Loeb said in the statement Sunday that he, Wilson and Wolf are "committed to working with new leadership to unlock Yahoo's significant potential and value."
In addition, Yahoo said Sunday that it named Fred Amoroso, an existing board member, as chairman. The chairman position had been in play since a February board shakeup that wiped out most of Yahoo's previous directors.
In an internal Yahoo e-mail obtained by CNN's Dan Simon, interim CEO Levinsohn acknowledged the "very bumpy road we've traveled."
But, he said, Sunday's announcements "lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our Board going forward."
Levinsohn closed the e-mail by saying Yahoo will "go on the offensive starting today."
Representatives from both Yahoo and Third Point declined to comment beyond the joint statement.
False statements: Thompson's published Yahoo bios -- including the one in the company's latest annual report, a legal document that CEOs must personally swear are truthful -- have claimed that he holds a bachelor's degree in both accounting and computer science from Stonehill College. His degree is actually in accounting only.
Yahoo (YHOOFortune 500) called the mistake an "inadvertent error." The board said this week that it had hired outside counsel to conduct a review of the false statement. Soon after, the director who led Yahoo's CEO search committee, Patti Hart, announced that she would step down at the end of her current term.
False statements about Thompson's degree stretch beyond his time at Yahoo, which began in January. References to a "computer science" degree also appeared in his online biographical information on PayPal's website when Thompson was president of the eBay (EBAYFortune 500) subsidiary.
Thompson's degree information is listed accurately in eBay's regulatory filings and in the bio featured in filings for F5 (FFIV), where he serves as a director. In both cases, the companies state: "Mr. Thompson holds a B.S. in Accounting from Stonehill College," with no reference to a computer science degree.
But the false statement about his degree appeared in Yahoo's latest annual report filed to the SEC: "Mr. Thompson holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College."
Those errant three words could mean big trouble for Thompson and Yahoo. CEOs are required to personally certify that their company's SEC filings are accurate.