Comment Silly tags (Score 1) 569
Penis mightier?
Submission + - Proof of concept app turns iPhone into spyPhone (daniweb.com)
coomaria writes: Apple has known about a serious flaw that can allow iPhone data to be harvested by rogue apps for more than a year, now one security researcher has created an app that turns the iPhone into a spyPhone and he's open-sourced it.
Comment Nokia moving to Open Source? (Score 2, Interesting) 189
It seems that Nokia is positively moving towards oss lately. I certainly did not expect Nokia to be first to ship smartphones with a very compatible Linux distribution and root access out of the box.
Submission + - Military service with botnet participation?
An anonymous reader writes: So i was just thinking and would like everyones response on this question spawned from the recent talks about the US's new cyber warfare squad.
If your government asked you to volunteer your computer as a weapon would you? all it would take would be a small download, a click, and instant service to your country by participation in a military controlled botnet. What if they demanded service, or did it on the sly? Voluntary help could even earn you military status of some kind, or some other bonus, perhaps free health care? Service could be given in the sence of computing cycles in the vein of SETI@home and others or pure might of range and bandwidth. Sure the military could just build a supercomputer or two(hundred) to accomplish this but why waste a valuable resource. I'd like to know international opinions aswell, what if your homeland asked you as a computer consumer to potentially defend your country by joining a botnet or donating cycles? Huge security concerns asside. Also, what about potential to assist(or perhaps harm) emerging third-world countries defend themselves if they make botnets out of their own loyal citizenry lucky enough to have a computer mandatory.
Hackers of all hats, what would be your feelings on working on a project to create such 'evil monstrosities' as military applications of offencive cyber tools such as virus/botnet/invasion tools.
If your government asked you to volunteer your computer as a weapon would you? all it would take would be a small download, a click, and instant service to your country by participation in a military controlled botnet. What if they demanded service, or did it on the sly? Voluntary help could even earn you military status of some kind, or some other bonus, perhaps free health care? Service could be given in the sence of computing cycles in the vein of SETI@home and others or pure might of range and bandwidth. Sure the military could just build a supercomputer or two(hundred) to accomplish this but why waste a valuable resource. I'd like to know international opinions aswell, what if your homeland asked you as a computer consumer to potentially defend your country by joining a botnet or donating cycles? Huge security concerns asside. Also, what about potential to assist(or perhaps harm) emerging third-world countries defend themselves if they make botnets out of their own loyal citizenry lucky enough to have a computer mandatory.
Hackers of all hats, what would be your feelings on working on a project to create such 'evil monstrosities' as military applications of offencive cyber tools such as virus/botnet/invasion tools.
Submission + - Google deducing wireless location data (bnet.com)
bizwriter writes: When it comes to knowing where wireless users are, the carriers have had a lock on the data. But a patent application shows that Google is trying to deduce the information based on packet headers and estimated transmission rates. This would let it walk right around carriers and become another source of location data to advertisers.
Submission + - Carrier forcing firmware update on Android Users (howardforums.com)
Wolfier writes: It seems that "Customer Safety" only becomes a concern after months of negligence. An Android firmware bug that prevented users from making 911 calls under certain situations were fixed and informed to the only GSM carrier in Canada — Rogers Wireless — months ago by a customer (there's a link to a recording of the call on the forum), but they're only doing something now — by cutting data access of paying customers until they update to a mandatory firmware by Rogers — that doesn't only have the feature fixed, but also contains those "extra" features that prevents users from ever gaining root access of their phones — even non-subsidized ones. Did I mention that some phones are also bricked by this "official" update?
Conclusion: we really need opening up the competition here up North.
Conclusion: we really need opening up the competition here up North.
Submission + - CherryPal's $99 netbook scam 1
psergiu writes: Hailed everywhere as revolutionary, Africa, the $99 netbook from CherryPal has failed to deliver. At all. Thousands of orders were made and nobody has received yet a unit or even their money back. Max Seybold, the CEO of CherryPal has even started to send threatening e-mails to the owners of blogs with unfavorable comments posted by the users. The only Africa netbook that was supposed to be delivered turned out to be a hoax too.
So, no $99 netbook for us yet.
So, no $99 netbook for us yet.
Comment A great idea (Score 1) 1
I am in Latvia and my ISP is already offering a similar service for traffic trough Google, Yahoo and Microsoft owned domains on ISP level.
Submission + - Unified Aussies take filter fight to parliament (computerworld.com.au)
mask.of.sanity writes: The first serious bid to stop Australia's mandatory nation-wide internet content filter was launched yesterday in the form of a parliamentary petition and a series of co-ordinated, politically-backed protests.
Signatures for the petition (here) were pouring in at the rate of one hundred an hour. An Australian online privacy advocacy group is taking point on the attack and coordinating a whole swath of existing opponents of the scheme. It's next job is to elevate the content filtering debate to the general public: "If we can do a good job of explaining that the filter will not [reduce child porn] we will get widespread opposition in the [general] public."
Australians primarily from the tech industry (and some from the sex industry) have consistuted the majority of the protests to date (see photos), arguing that the filters will be expensive, ineffective and infringe on human rights.
The petition gathered more than 1000 signatures over the first 24 hours, without any publicity.'"The most important thing about the petition is that it is valid for parliament...it is not just clicking a button,' the online advocacy group said.
Protests will kick off next week on the nation's day of founding — Australia Day — as a major politicial party and industry members will change the colour of their websites, facebook and myspace accounts, and hold street protests to voice collective opposition to the content filter policy, dubbed the Great Australian Internet Blackout.
The Australian Democrats said: "people should not be fooled that this proposed measure is about protecting children: this issue is about not letting an unchecked, secretive list of websites be censored by the government.
Signatures for the petition (here) were pouring in at the rate of one hundred an hour. An Australian online privacy advocacy group is taking point on the attack and coordinating a whole swath of existing opponents of the scheme. It's next job is to elevate the content filtering debate to the general public: "If we can do a good job of explaining that the filter will not [reduce child porn] we will get widespread opposition in the [general] public."
Australians primarily from the tech industry (and some from the sex industry) have consistuted the majority of the protests to date (see photos), arguing that the filters will be expensive, ineffective and infringe on human rights.
The petition gathered more than 1000 signatures over the first 24 hours, without any publicity.'"The most important thing about the petition is that it is valid for parliament...it is not just clicking a button,' the online advocacy group said.
Protests will kick off next week on the nation's day of founding — Australia Day — as a major politicial party and industry members will change the colour of their websites, facebook and myspace accounts, and hold street protests to voice collective opposition to the content filter policy, dubbed the Great Australian Internet Blackout.
The Australian Democrats said: "people should not be fooled that this proposed measure is about protecting children: this issue is about not letting an unchecked, secretive list of websites be censored by the government.
Submission + - Google Re-enabled Chinese Censorship (google.com) 3
hackingbear writes: Google has rather quietly re-enabled search result censoring, as evident in this search query for June 4 incident. The search returns censored results not quite related to the incident and the censorship foot note is displayed. The same query returned uncensored results a few hours after Google made its China announcement. (I tested it.) According to news reports from Hong Kong and oversea Chinese media (here is the Google translation,) Google are negotiating with the Chinese government which so far has not taken any real actions but just made some standard general statements on the matter. Has Google backed down? It could be just Google's negotiation tactic, but it also casts a doubt on their stance and motive.
Submission + - Getting Google Anonymity (googlesharing.net) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Moxie Marlinspike, the security researcher who has published several SSL/TLS exploits, has just launched a Google anonymity service called GoogleSharing. From the site: "GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special "alternative" websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same."
An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."
Submission + - Verizon removes search choices for Blackberrys (theregister.co.uk)
shrugger writes: I picked up my Blackberry this morning to do a search and noticed, Bing as my default search engine. I thought this was very strange, since I didn't pick this setting. I went to change it back to Google, and to my chagrin, Bing was my only option!! Apparently Verizon has pushed updates that remove all search providers except Bing. Thanks a lot Verizon!
Submission + - Reactivating DECAF in Two Minutes (praetorianprefect.com)
danielkennedy74 writes: Two nonsensical premises are filling the InterTubes, that DECAF is fully deactivated and that it was all a non-working hoax. Neither are true, the tool does perform actions based on detecting COFEE and can be re-enabled. Praetorian Prefect explains the whole thing.
Comment It has already happened (Score 2, Informative) 152
The country of Nigeria is the physical manifestation of the botnet
