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Sony

Submission + - Sony Canned Security Staff Just Before Data Breach (thinq.co.uk)

Stoobalou writes: A lawsuit filed this week suggests that Sony sacked a group of employees from its network security division just two weeks before the company's servers were hacked and its customers' credit card details were leaked.

The suit, which seeks class action status, is being brought by victims of the massive data breach that took place in April.

Security

Two Unpatched Flaws Show Up In Apple iOS 171

Trailrunner7 writes "The technique that the Jailbreakme.com Web site is using to bypass the iPhone's security mechanisms and enable users to run unapproved apps on their phones involves exploiting two separate vulnerabilities. One of the vulnerabilities is a memory-corruption flaw that affects the way that Apple's mobile devices, including the iPad and iPod Touch, display PDFs. The second weakness is a problem in the Apple iOS kernel that gives an attacker higher privileges once his code is on a targeted device, enabling him to break out of the iOS sandbox. The combination of the two vulnerabilities — both of which are unpatched at the moment — gives an attacker the ability to run remote code on the device and evade the security protections on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The technique became public earlier this week when the Jailbreakme.com site began hosting a set of specially crafted PDF files designed to help users jailbreak their Apple devices and load apps other than the ones approved by Apple and offered in its official App Store."
Hardware Hacking

Home-Built Turing Machine 123

stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"
Encryption

Submission + - SHA-3 Second Round Candidates Released

Jeremy A. Hansen writes: "NIST just announced their selections for algorithms going to the second round of the SHA-3 competition:

NIST received 64 SHA-3 candidate hash function submissions and accepted 51 first round candidates as meeting our minimum acceptance criteria. We have now selected 14 second round candidates to continue in the competition. Information about the second round candidate algorithms will be available here.

We were pleased by the amount and quality of the cryptanalysis we received on the first round candidates, and more than a little amazed by the ingenuity of some of the attacks. We thank all the submitters, those who provided analysis, those who provided valuable implementation performance data (particularly e-Bash, and the papers dealing with the effects of the AES round instruction, FPGA implementations, and working store requirements of the algorithms). We were also pleased and grateful (although not surprised) for the graceful and forthright manner with which several of the submitters took bad news, and confirmed attacks, or recognized the shortcomings of their submission. In selecting this set of second round candidates we tried to include only algorithms that we thought had a chance of being selected as SHA-3. We were willing to extrapolate higher performance for conservative designs with apparently large safety factors, but comparatively unforgiving of aggressive designs that were broken, or nearly broken during the course of the review. We were more willing to accept disquieting properties of the hash function if the designer had apparently anticipated them, than if they were discovered during the review period, even if there were apparent fixes. We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.

There are still some details of a few of the second round candidates that concern us. We will shortly post a statement describing each of the second round candidates, the factors that we liked about the submission and identifying any lingering concerns that we have. Submitters of the second round candidates are invited to tweak their submissions to improve them if they wish, fix any inconsistencies, problems or shortcomings in the specification or source code, and submit them to us by Sept. 15, 2009."
Image

Gamer Plays Over 30 Warcraft Characters 189

If your significant other complains that you play too much World of Warcraft, just show them this article about a user named "Prepared." He plays an amazing 36 World of Warcraft accounts on 11 different computers at the same time. He is his own raid group. "It costs me exactly $5711 in subscription costs per year with 36 accounts on the 6 month pay schedule," he writes. "Not bad considering I'm looking at it like it's a hobby and there are more expensive hobbies out there than World of Warcraft."

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