The 787 Dreamliner was first unveiled to the public in July 2007.

Boeing announced on Thursday that the first flight of its 787 Dreamliner is now expected by the end of the year, with first delivery anticipated for the fourth quarter of 2010.

The Dreamliner has been grounded by a series of delays since its rollout in 2007. Boeing said the latest schedule change is due to its need to reinforce an area within the side-of-body section of the plane. The company also plans to add several weeks to its schedule to reduce risks in the flight test and the aircraft’s certification.

“This new schedule provides us the time needed to complete the remaining work necessary to put the 787′s game-changing capability in the hands of our customers,” said Boeing CEO Jim McNerney. “The design details and implementation plan are nearly complete, and the team is preparing airplanes for modification and testing.”

Boeing said the team reinforcing the side-of-body area has finished initial testing and is finalizing the design of new fittings to ensure structural integrity. The first 787 test airplane and the static test unit have been prepared for the new fittings, with installation expected to begin in the next few weeks. The test that discovered this issue will be repeated and the results analyzed before the first flight takes off.

Boeing revealed the Dreamliner in July 2007 to a huge, excited throng of thousands. At that time, the company said the aircraft would take its first flight in late 2007 and carry its first passengers in spring 2008.

But delays quickly set in. Boeing was soon forced to revise its initial estimates, saying first flight would occur in the fourth quarter of 2008 with first delivery in the third quarter of 2009. Then in December 2008, Boeing said a machinist’s strike had caused yet another delay, with first flight reset to the second quarter of 2009 and delivery in the first quarter of 2010.

Once the Dreamliner gets off the ground, Boeing expects to manufacture 10 planes a month by the end of 2013.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10319203-76.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Researchers said on Tuesday that they are seeing something unusual in the malware world–a virus that targets a development environment.

The virus, dubbed Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus researcher at Sonicwall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

When an infected program is run on a machine running Delphi, the virus infects any software that gets compiled on that machine. The virus spreads the executable file of itself as well as the source code. It looks for a compiler on the infected system and re-compiles the source code, inserting its code into any programs compiled on the system.

“This malware just spreads; it doesn’t delete files or do anything malicious,” he said. “But if you create software and you have this code in it, the software will be blocked by antivirus (technology).”

Developers whose systems are infected will pass the infection on to the programs they are creating, Bilogorskiy said.

Already, two free tools that are included in certain magazine CDs and are among the top 100 downloads on some portals–Any TV Free 2.41 and Tidy Favorites 4.1–have been infected, he said. “As many as 30 percent of developers who use Delphi have this,” he added.

Sonicwall and a number of antivirus vendors have updated their software to block the virus.

Sophos has more details on its SophosLabs blog.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10312628-245.html

A new alliance has been created to formalize information sharing on security protection and develop industry standards.

The Industry Connections Security Group (ICSG) is parked under the IEEE Standards Association and includes mostly security heavyweights and antivirus players. The founding members are AVG Technologies, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro.

Announcing the group in a blog post on Monday, Mark Harris, vice president of SophosLabs, said security researchers have had a tradition of sharing virus samples but that the sharing arrangements “are still based on individual relationships rather than formal agreements.”

The formation of the group makes for a “more organized” security industry, he added, in the current landscape where attacks are increasingly structured and malware samples grow at “astonishing rates.”

The ICSG currently has a malware working group, but intends to add other working groups over time.

According to a July 20 presentation document (PDF), the group aims to improve the efficiency of the collection and processing of the millions of malware file samples handled by security vendors each month by focusing on an XML-based metadata sharing standard. The standard is expected to undergo ratification by the end of this month.

Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, said the announcement of the group was both interesting and confusing. The rationale for the new alliance was the need for a more comprehensive approach to countering malware writers, he said, but the focus of the group appears to be limited.

The group addresses “all aspects of malware and its membership includes most of the main antimalware vendors–Kaspersky being the most notable absentee–and so the ICSG represents progress on countering the so-called ‘blended threats,’” he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail. “However, it does not seem to be taking the battle to the criminals or probing the criminals’ business networks. The focus is on setting up the infrastructure and protocols to allow rapid information sharing on threats and making the day-to-day operation of the members more efficient.

Titterington added: “I would have expected a body affiliated with the IEEE to be putting more emphasis on the development of improved methods for disrupting criminal activity and on new ways of protecting users.”

Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia reported from London.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10313027-83.html