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Security

Severe Vulnerabilities Uncovered In Popular Password Managers (zdnet.com) 122

chiefcrash shares a report from ZDNet: Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published an assessment on Tuesday with the results of testing with several popular password managers, including LastPass and KeePass. The team said that each password management solution "failed to provide the security to safeguard a user's passwords as advertised" and "fundamental flaws" were found that "exposed the data they are designed to protect."

The vulnerabilities were found in software operating on Windows 10 systems. In one example, the master password which users need to use to access their cache of credentials was stored in PC RAM in a plaintext, readable format. ISE was able to extract these passwords and other login credentials from memory while the password manager in question was locked. It may be possible that malicious programs downloaded to the same machine by threat actors could do the same.
The report has summarized the main findings based on each password management solution. Here's what ISE had to say about LastPass and KeePass -- two of the most popular password managers available:

"LastPass obfuscates the master password while users are typing in the entry, and when the password manager enters an unlocked state, database entries are only decrypted into memory when there is user interaction. However, ISE reported that these entries persist in memory after the software enters a locked state. It was also possible for the researchers to extract the master password and interacted-with password entries due to a memory leak."

"KeePass scrubs the master password from memory and is not recoverable. However, errors in workflows permitted the researchers from extracting credential entries which have been interacted with. In the case of Windows APIs, sometimes, various memory buffers which contain decrypted entries may not be scrubbed correctly."

Submission + - Turbulenz HTML5 games engine goes Open Source

JoeKilner writes: The Turbulenz HTML5 games engine has been released as open source under the MIT license. The engine is a full 3D engine written in TypeScript and using WebGL. To see what the engine is capable off, check out this video of a full 3D FPS running in the browser using the Turbulenz engine and Quake4 assets.

You can see some of the games already developed with the engine at Turbulenz.com. Note — to try the games without registering hit the big blue "Play as Guest" button! Also, IE doesn't have WebGL support yet, so to play without a plugin try Chrome or FIrefox.

Comment Three options (Score 1) 351

You have three options:

1) Get working in the games industry and hold on to the idea. Once you are an established team member and have honed your skills you might get a chance to take your idea and run with it. Be prepared to wait a long long time with no guarantee of success.

2) Start your own company. The game will probably have to be unambitious technically to get it out the door. If you are lucky and it succeeds you might get a chance to make the game you really wanted to make as a sequel.

3) Become a pig-headed self-obsessed git with no inter-personal skills, technical knowledge, artistic sensibilities or management skills. Develop your fawning and butt-kissing techniques to a high level. You are then in the perfect position to take on a project lead role in a games company from where you can marshal a group of highly-skilled but lowly paid workers to do your every insane bidding.

I'd go for option 3. As a side benefit you get good parties, chicks and drugs.

        Joe

The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Kodak Challenges HP Printer Sales Model

Radon360 writes: Kodak has decided to attempt to buck the trend set by HP by offering low cost printers and exorbitantly priced ink cartridges. According to this WSJ review, three of their new printers start at $149, with ink cartridges costing $9.99 for a black cartridge and $14.99 for a five color cartridge. To counter, HP has announced a release of lower-priced cartridges, though with less ink and they are still more expensive than Kodak's. It will be a matter of time to see whether Kodak can upset the practice of ink cartridge extortion.
Linux

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released 296

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.21 after months of development. This release improves the virtualization with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware. KVM does get initial paravirtualization support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called 'Dynticks', built in top of 'clockevents', another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based 'celleb' Toshiba architecture, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements."

Feed Humanizing Elder Care May Extend Patients' Lives (sciencedaily.com)

An intensive comparative study of two nursing home units using contrasting approaches to dementia care for elders with severely disturbed behaviors finds that "humanizing" approaches to dementia care may not only extend quality of life for patients, but also their length of life.

Feed US Army considering Mobile WiMax for military use (engadget.com)

Filed under: Wireless

Fresh from showing off its Mobile WiMax wares at the recent 3GSM conference, Samsung's now providing some of its gear to the U.S. Army, who's apparently considering the speedy wireless technology for possible military use. Unsurprisingly, neither party is spilling a whole lot of details on the arrangement, with Samsung only saying that the Army's Communications Electronics Research & Development Engineering Center (or CERDEC) will spend several months evaluating the equipment, measuring the performance of both mobile users and mobile base stations in a military environment, among other undisclosed things. What is fairly clear is how eagerly Samsung will be anticipating the results, as Korea's Hankook newspaper speculates that a deal with the U.S. military could be worth as much as $3 billion for the company.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


The Internet

RIAA Wins In Court Against UW Madison 200

Billosaur writes "A judge has ordered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to turn over the names and contact information for the 53 UW-M students accused of file sharing over the university's networks by the RIAA. 'U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.' The ruling came as no surprise to the university, which had previously rejected the request of the RIAA to hand out their settlement letters to alleged copyright violators on their campus. The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."

Feed BlueSky Positioning brings GPS down to SIM size (engadget.com)

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS

BlueSky Positioning looks to have taken advantage of the altogether too cleverly-named SIMposium conference to trot out what is surely its biggest product to date: a complete GPS system embedded on a SIM card, The Register reports. Partly responsible for that shrinkage is the use of Assisted GPS (or A-GPS) instead of standard GPS, although they still had to contend with some serious power consumption challenges and the small matter of actually getting a signal. That was apparently accomplished by using the cellphone itself as a makeshift antenna, which supposedly provides just enough of a signal when the SIM card comes into contact with it. While its seems to have gotten the size right, BlueSky's SIM card does currently fall short in a few fey areas, failing to pass ISO tests for flexibility and robustness. That doesn't seem to be holding 'em back, however, with the first production samples reportedly on track for June.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


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