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Security

Submission + - PBS Web Sites and Databases Hacked (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Late Sunday night, hackers gained access to several areas of PBS Web servers and were able publish a fake news story on a PBS news blog. The group also published PBS internal user login information that they wer able to siphon out of PBS databases. The fake story was about rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996 after being shot in Las Vegas, being been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand.

PBS News Blog Hacked by LulzSec group going by the name of “LulzSec” claimed responsibility for the hack, saying the attack was a protest against a PBS FRONTLINE broadcast last week about WikiLeaks.
Apple

Submission + - Apple's XCode IDE Is No Longer Free (apple.com) 1

Submitted by GlobalEcho
GlobalEcho writes: Apple has historically made its development tools available free to anyone willing to register on their website and wait for a 1GB download. Starting with XCode 4, the software will cost $4.99 for anyone not already a paid member of their Registered Developer program ($99/year). The new version will now come as an App Store download.
Crime

Submission + - AT&T Sued for Systematic iPhone Overbilling

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: UPI reports that AT&T is facing a lawsuit that says AT&T routinely bills for 7 percent to 14 percent more data transactions than normally takes place that could blossom into a costly class-action case. Court papers claim that attorneys set up a test account for an iPhone, then closed all of its apps and left the device unused for 10 days. AT&T still billed the account for 2,292 KB of usage. "A significant portion of the data revenues were inflated by AT&T's rigged billing system for data transactions," say court papers filed on behalf of AT&T customer Patrick Hendricks. "This is like the rigged gas pump charging you when you never even pulled your car into the station." Attorneys say they would file to have the case moved to class-action status, which makes the outcome relevant to all of AT&T's iPhone accounts.
Firefox

Submission + - Geolocation in Firefox vulnerable to theft

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a recent post to the BugTraq mailing list, noted Google security researcher Michael Zalewski brings up the topic of designing secure user interfaces to take human cognitive deficiencies into account. More interestingly, the same post also provides an example of a simple attack that apparently exploits the HTML5 geolocation feature in Firefox to pinpoint your location without your consent. According to the researcher, other browsers are also vulnerable to the same trick. A bit scary, especially coming on the heels of the bug covered earlier today.
Science

Submission + - ScienceBlogs.com Facing Writer Mutiny over PepsiCo (guardian.co.uk) 2

Submitted by History's Coming To
History's Coming To writes: Several writers for the ScienceBlogs.com collective have Publicly resigned from the site, and many more have voiced concerns over parent company Seed's decision to include a paid blog under the nutrition category from PepsiCo. The blog is written by PepsiCo food scientists, detailing their work. The UK's Guardian newspaper has picked up on the story, and includes a letter from Seed editor Adam Bly which covers the company's rationale. Troy McClure has been quoted as saying "Now, turn to the next problem. If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?".
Encryption

Submission + - Skype Encryption Revealed (h-online.com)

Submitted by TSHTF
TSHTF writes: Just weeks after Skype unveiled a public API for the service, a group of cryptographers led by Sean O'Neill have successfully reverse engineered the encryption used by the Skype protocol. Source code is available under a non-commercial license which details Skype's implementation of the RC4 cipher. Is it just a matter of time now until there is a true open-source Skype client?
Music

Submission + - Open Source Music Fingerprinter C&D'd (google.com)

Submitted by Nushio
Nushio writes: The code wasn't even released, and yet Roy van Rijn, a Music & Free Software enthusiast received a C&D from Landmark Digital Services, owners of Shazam, an Android application that allows you to find a song, by listening to a part of it. And if that wasn't enough, they want him to take down his blog post (Google Cache) explaining how he did it because it "may be viewed internationally. As a result, [it] may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world".
Security

Submission + - Do cyber vigilantes make computing world safer? (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: Fed up with companies failing to address security holes fast enough, white hats are turning up the pressure by quickly making the vulnerabilities public. First Goatse Security made public thousands of email addresses of iPad users that it swiped from AT&T's Web site — after AT&T failed to disclose the data theft fast enough. Next a Google security engineer publicized an exploit for Windows XP — which is now being used widely — after deciding Microsoft was moving to slowly to fix the problem. In both cases, the Goatse and the security engineer are claiming they did what they did for the greater good: Though their actions put users at risk, it forces the offending companies to worker faster to fix the problem. Do the ends justify the means?
Security

Submission + - Hackers Exploit Google-Outed Windows XP Zero-Day (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: A compromised Web site is serving an exploit of the bug in Windows' Help and Support Center, identified by a Google engineer last week, to hijack PCs running Windows XP, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at antivirus vendor Sophos. Cluley declined to identify the site, saying only that it was dedicated to open-source software. 'It's a classic drive-by attack,' said Cluley. The tactic was one of two that Microsoft said last week were the likely attack avenues. The other: Convincing users to open malicious e-mail messages. The vulnerability was disclosed last Thursday by Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy. Ormandy, who also posted proof-of-concept attack code, defended his decision to reveal the flaw only five days after reporting it to Microsoft — a move that Microsoft and other researchers questioned. Cluley called Ormandy's action 'utterly irresponsible,' and in a blog post asked, 'Tavis Ormandy — are you pleased with yourself?'

Submission + - Digitally filtering out the drone of the World Cup 1

Submitted by qubezz
qubezz writes: World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called Vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though.

A savvy German hacker, 'Tube' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts.
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone 4's 'Retina Display' Claims Challenged

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Of the many things that buyers might need to know about the new iPhone; Raymond Soneira — president of DisplayMate Technolgies, added one more to the list. Raymond Soneira challenged Apple's claims that Apple's new iPhone contains a so-called "retina display". In his keynote speech, Steve Jobs noted that there was a point at which pixels blurred together into continuous curves, and that point is about 300 ppi when the phone is held at about twelve inches from one's eye. According to Raymond Soneira the the resolution of the retina is in angular measure, 50 cycles per degree, whereas a cycle is a line pair which is two pixels, so the angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel. So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes that works out to 477 pixels per inch and at 8 inches it's 716 ppi. You have to hold iPhone 4 out about 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi. So the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the retina.

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