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Unix

Submission + - Leopard's Unix conformance is spot on (itwire.com)

Submitted by
WirePosted
WirePosted writes: "Both the desktop and server versions of Leopard have been awarded a certificate of conformance to the latest Unix standard, making these the first operating systems derived from the open source BSD base of historical Unix products to meet the certification requirements."
Music

Submission + - Universal blocks Trent Reznor's fan remix web site (cliveholloway.net)

Submitted by
cLive ;-)
cLive ;-) writes: "Trent Reznor's recent departure from Universal was meant to leave all this crap behind but, even now, the suits are stopping him from helping to bring the music industry into the 21st century (eg, with new distribution models). Having previously fallen out with his record company by urging fans to steal his music when he thought his CDs were overpriced, now he's being "lawyered" over his upcoming fan remix web site. The main gist of the problem is that Universal are scared to host his remix site when fans could be submitting mashup tracks that would infringe on other artists' rights, as this would affect the industry's ongoing lawsuit against YouTube et al...

When will these dinosaur industries get it?"
Security

Multiple FLAC Vulnerabilities Affect Every OS 360

Posted by kdawson from the don't-hit-play dept.
Enon writes "eEye Digital Security has discovered 14 vulnerabilities in the FLAC file format that affect a huge range of media players on every supported operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, BSD, Solaris, and even some hardware players are vulnerable). Heise points out a number of vulnerable apps that use the open source libavcodec audio codec library, which in turn relies on the flawed libFLAC library. These vulnerabilities could allow a person of ill will to trojanize FLAC files that could compromise your computer if they are played on a vulnerable media player. eEye worked with US-CERT to notify vulnerable vendors."
Government

Submission + - Pics Don't Lie But Doctored Photos Change History (scientificblogging.com)

Submitted by
TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: "People had different feelings and memories about protests in Tiananmen Square and Rome after viewing doctored photos of the events. Recalling doctored photos placed in Reuters and USA Today, study author Elizabeth Loftus said they are "potentially a form of human engineering that could be applied to us against our knowledge and against our wishes and we ought to be vigilant about it."
Security

Submission + - Survey shows majority of DNS servers vulnerable (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
ddubie
ddubie writes: "More than half of Internet name servers today allow requests that leave networks vulnerable to cache poisoning and distributed denial of service attacks — a fact that has not improved over the past year. The finding is part of the third annual survey of the Internet's domain name servers released this week by The Measurement Factory, which conducted the survey for DNS management appliance maker Infoblox. The survey is based on a sample that included 5% of the IPv4 address space — nearly 80 million devices — and works to reveal configuration errors that compromise network security and availability. Filed under bad news, more than 50% of Internet name servers "allow recursive queries," which is unchanged from 2006, and such queries require a name server to relay requests to other name servers. That action leaves many name servers vulnerable to pharming attacks, according to Infoblox, which can also enable those servers to be used in DNS amplification attacks."
Wireless (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone lock in Germany challenged

Submitted by no-body
no-body writes: German Vodaphone obtained a preliminary injunction against T-Online, the only iPhone supplier, to question the legality of locking the iPhone to a single service provider.

The court approved the injunction and T-Online has now two weeks to respond.

It is said that Apple receives 1/3 of T-Online's iPone revenue.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - High-tech toilets (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
inkslinger77
inkslinger77 writes: "Today (November 19) is world toilet day, and what has this got to do with IT or science? It appears, from this article on Computerworld Australia, quite a lot. With remote controls, wireless sensors and built-in accessories, there are high tech (and high-end!) toilets that can play surround sound, respond to voice commands, self wash/heat/deoderize and more. There is even an Intelligent Toilet that can measure a person's blood sugar, blood pressure, body fat and weight using built-in testing devices. Its measurement tools can be linked to a PC for tracking data over time via health management software."
United States

Submission + - SenatorsUrge FTCtoReview GoogleDoubleClick Closely (techluver.com)

Submitted by
Tech.Luver
Tech.Luver writes: "Two U.S. senators on the antitrust subcommittee urged the Federal Trade Commission's chairman to only approve Google's purchase of Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc. if it concludes there will be no adverse impact on competition in the Web advertising market as a result of the transaction. In a letter, Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras that the outcome of the agency's review of the proposed merger would have far-reaching impact. Senators argued that Google had a dominant position in a form of Internet advertising called contextual ads while DoubleClick was a market leader in display advertising. They said industry experts believed the deal could harm competition on the Web. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/19/senators-urge-ftc-to-review-google-doubleclick-deal-closely/ )"
Security

Submission + - Recovery Plan for Google Account Hijacking (blogoscoped.com)

Submitted by
arbenin
arbenin writes: "Philipp Lenssen in his post on Blogoscoped is raising a question about planning for Google account hijacking. For many users the consequences could be very dramatic — lost contacts, documents, etc. How to prepare for it and how to fight such things if they happen? Here is the true story from a person who's GMail account was hijacked. First, he couldn't login to his Inbox. Recovering credentials didn't work either because his rescue email address was obsolete for years. Then, suddenly all his friends started getting emails "from him" saying that he got stuck in some African country and now he needs money for the flight back. Contacting GMail was difficult, no support line tracking the issues. Moral: do good-old backups and keep your rescue info up-to-date."
Security

Submission + - First Web2.0 worm creator hopes to be online again (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by Arashtamere
Arashtamere writes: If Samy Kamkar plays his cards right, he may be allowed to visit MySpace again in just a few months. For the time being, however, he's not even allowed to touch a computer, following a January 2007 guilty plea for creating what many consider to be the first Web 2.0 worm: the Samy worm. Samy's worm wasn't malicious, but it did force News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking site to shut down in late 2005 after forcing more than 1 million users to declare Samy a "hero" on their profile pages. Last week, Samy, who is now 21, made his first public appearance since his conviction, attending a conference hosted by eBay in California. He was treated like a celebrity at the show, but there were some complications. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he can only use computers for work, so he was forced to show slides that he'd dictated to a friend on a computer that was operated by a conference staffer. "When I wrote the worm, it initially wasn't a worm. Initially I was just trying to spruce up my MySpace profile. I also wanted to show off to a couple of friends...So I wrote a little code and what ended up happening is whenever someone viewed my profile, they would automatically add 'But most of all, Samy is my hero' at the end of their hero section on their profile. And after that, I thought, 'If I can make this person my friend, if I can make myself their hero, couldn't I just copy this code onto their profile?' I didn't think this would be a big deal, so I tried it out. I thought maybe I'll get one friend tomorrow and a few in maybe a few days. It went quickly. Apparently, MySpace is a bigger place than I assumed."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - TI frees its DSP toolchain for open source apps

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Texas Instruments (TI) is offering open source developers free use of a DSP toolchain for DSPs (digital signal processors) found in several popular TI OMAP and DM-series RISC/DSP chips. The first-of-its-kind release may lower cost barriers for prospective developers of open source video codecs, motion sensors, and other "number-crunching" applications.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Apple release iPhone/iPod Touch dev kit (apple.com) 3

Submitted by Edgester
Edgester writes: I just received this:

Available to all ADC Members, the iPhone Dev Center is your complete source for technical information, resources, and expert advice on how to design, code and optimize web applications for iPhone and iPod touch. Take advantage of the iPhone Reference Library, web development guidelines, and sample code to build or optimize your web application. Through ADC on iTunes, you can watch iPhone experts discuss everything from user interface design to optimizing your web applications and content for iPhone.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - iphone root exploit

Submitted by
capn_nemo
capn_nemo writes: "Surprisingly, I haven't seen this on slashdot (yet), but here's a lovely video of Rik Farrow demonstrating how to remotely gain access to his iphone (by clicking on a link to a particular web page). He then demonstrates how to ssh to his phone, start a recording session, then downloads the resulting file and plays it back. Naturally, there are a lot of "yes buts" as to how he does it and how at risk your phone is, but the video is compellingly scary:

gizmodo video

My favorite part about these mobile device exploits is the "even though it looks like it's off" tagline."

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