Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware just interviewed Charlie Miller, the man behind the iPhone remote exploit hack and winner of Pwn2Own 2009. He explains the (now patched) bug in the iPhone which allowed him to remotely exploit the iPhone in detail, explaining how the string concatenation code was flawed. The most surprising thing was that the bug could be traced back to several previous generations of the iPhone OS (he stopped testing at version 2.2). He also talks about the failures of other devices, such as crashing HTC's Touch by sending a SMS with '%n' in the text."

The Opposable Thumbs blog reports on a confluence of rumors and information leaks that suggest Sony will be unveiling a PS3 Slim sooner rather than later. Despite waning console sales, orders for PS3-related hardware have risen sharply. There's evidence to suggest that Sony is phasing out its 80GB model, which would help clear the way for a hardware revision. Some expect the official announcement to come as early as August 18th, during the gamescom expo in Germany.