javipas writes "An insightful article at Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror reveals the power inside Ophcrack, an Open Source program that is capable of discovering virtually any password in Windows operating systems. The article explains how passwords get stored on Windows using hash functions, and how Ophcrack can generate immense tables of words and letter combinations that are compared to the password we want to obtain. The program is available in Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be careful: the generated tables that Ophcrack uses are really big, and you should allow up to 15 Gbytes to store these tables."

tobs writes "Matt Hartley of MadPenguin.org fame has published an open source way of solving the Linux Wi-Fi problem. He writes, "For intermediate to advanced users, who are willing to track down WiFi cards based on chipsets, live without WPA in some instances or have opted to stick with Ethernet, buying a new notebook for the sake of improved wireless connectivity may seem a little overkill. When a new user faces problems jumping through the NDISWrapper hoops, tracking down WiFi cards from HCLs and other related activities, the end result is almost always the same — they give up. What so many of us, as Linux users, fail to grasp is that projects like OpenHAL are critical to long-term development. The education on what to expect and what not to expect remains a complete load of hot air when articles claim how easy it is to setup wireless Internet on Linux machines. It's downright misleading."

Bombula writes to let us know that Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar" and getting ready to implement image and video ads in sponsored searches.

A report released by casual gaming mecca PopCap Games indicates that white collar workers play games constantly throughout the day. The study indicates that as salaries and titles improve on the organizational chart, the amount of gameplaying in a given day increases substantially. "Considering that the casual games market is around 200 million people, PopCap estimates that the executive crowd is very much into casual gaming, with about 80 million 'white collar' workers playing. 24 percent of the 'white collar' employees said they do play at work, and that number jumps up to 35 percent for CEOs, CFOs and other senior executives. 98 percent said that they play casual games at home too." What's your favorite on-the-job casual title?

Groklaw Reader writes "Just days after Microsoft's attempt to buy the Swedish vote on OOXML came to light, SIS declared its own vote invalid. The post at Groklaw references a ComputerWorld article with revelations from Microsoft: 'Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard. Microsoft said the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body. "We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy," said Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "That communication had no impact on the final vote." ...'"

mrcgran writes "Users of Skype for Linux have just found out that it reads the files /etc/passwd, firefox profile, plugins, addons, etc, and many other unnecessary files in /etc. This fact was originally discovered by using AppArmor, but others have confirmed this fact using strace on versions 1.4.0.94 and 1.4.0.99. What is going on? This probably shows how important it is to use AppArmor in any closed-source application in Linux to restrict any undue access to your files."

An anonymous reader writes ""There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client." As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license."

The Webguy writes "Apple has released the first update for the iPhone. Updated components in the v1.0.1 update include Safari, the WebCore, and the WebKit. Quoting from the Apple Knowledge Base, the 'update is only available through iTunes, and will not appear in your computer's Software Update application, or on the Apple Support Downloads site.'" One source speculated that Apple wanted to get fixes in users' hands ahead of the Black Hat conference where details of early iPhone vulnerabilities could be revealed.

At midnight on Friday Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, ending the ten year run of J.K. Rowling's extremely popular book series. I imagine that there are a few folks here who have already read the book and want to talk about it. Likewise, the movie version of Order of the Phoenix was recently released (a film I was kind of underwhelmed by). So ... what did you think of them? Be forewarned: I imagine the comments will be filled with spoilers.

Eatfrank writes "A recent CNet article suggests that Mozilla should pipe a lite version of Firefox into older PCs to further attack IE's dominance: 'Firefox supporters, take note. A bare-bones Firefox will get the browser into more houses, increasing the Fox's market share and keeps it in novice users' eyes for when they get a new PC ... a truly great super-lightweight browser would have the security of Firefox, without the add-ons, without the tabs, yes, even without favourites, history lists and customisability. The Firefox name is synonymous with security and Web-browsing vigilance. Why not give this to the processing lightweights of the PC world?'"

newsblaze writes "In the Media space, the internet has been threatening to be a highly disruptive technology for some time now. So far it has done quite a number on newspapers, who still don't understand the internet. There are a lot of people who like to have the paper in their hands, though, so newspapers are holding on. Television has no such ties to a physical medium. When Murdoch bought Myspace, I wondered how long it would be before he either found something to do with it — or gave up. Now it seems Murdoch has found a way to leverage his position, and put a massive squeeze on television. How far can he take this — and what will be the result?"

*SECADM writes "Learning from Microsoft's error, Google is building a lobbying power house in Washington." From the Washington Post article: Two years ago, Google was on the verge of making that Microsoft-like error. Davidson, then a 37-year-old former deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, was the search-engine company's sole staff lobbyist in Washington. As recently as last year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had trouble getting meetings with members of Congress. To change that, Google went on a hiring spree and now has 12 lobbyists and lobbying-related professionals on staff here — more than double the size of the standard corporate lobbying office — and is continuing to add people.