Feed Tom's Hardware: The Fifteen Greatest Hacking Exploits (pheedo.com)

From feed by thfeed on Friday April 25, 2008 @05:52PM

The arrival of PCs led to the joys of unbridled hacking. Read about everything from the first computer system Pentagon break-in to phone phreaking to the first worm to the theft of Windows code.

Comment Street View is Cool (Score 1) 1

by gurubaba on Wednesday April 23, 2008 @04:52PM (#23175922) Attached to: Adventure Game Built Using Google Street View

I have always found Street View to be a cool and fun service and the picture shown here is an evidence. I am sure lot more is still to come from Street View.

DARPA Working On Arthur C. Clarke Weapon Idea 453

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 23, 2008 @02:02PM from the good-times-with-molten-metal dept.

holy_calamity writes "DARPA is working on a weapon which is similar to one first described by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1955 novel Earthlight — firing jets of molten metal using strong electromagnetic fields. The Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM) will function on a smaller scale than Clarke's fictional blaster. DARPA's write-up says it could be 'packaged into a missile, projectile or other platform and delivered close to target for final engagement and kill.' Clarke is also widely credited with suggesting geostationary communications satellites — what other ideas of his will come to pass?"

Next-Generation CAPTCHA Exploits the Semantic Gap 327

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 23, 2008 @08:03AM from the stand-and-identify dept.

captcha_fun writes "Researchers at Penn State have developed a patent-pending image-based CAPTCHA technology for next-generation computer authentication. A user is asked to pass two tests: (1) click the geometric center of an image within a composite image, and (2) annotate an image using a word selected from a list. These images shown to the users have fake colors, textures, and edges, based on a sequence of randomly-generated parameters. Computer vision and recognition algorithms, such as alipr, rely on original colors, textures, and shapes in order to interpret the semantic content of an image. Because of the endowed power of imagination, even without the correct color, texture, and shape information, humans can still pass the tests with ease. Until computers can 'imagine' what is missing from an image, robotic programs will be unable to pass these tests. The system is called IMAGINATION and you can try it out." This sounds promising given how broken current CAPTCHA technology is.

German Wikipedia To Be Published As a Book 184

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @10:44PM from the unclear-on-the-concept dept.

David Gerard writes "Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. It will cost 20 Euros, and 1 Euro from each copy will go to Wikimedia. They're editing down the most popular 50,000 articles for the 1,000-page book, to be released in September. Because of the open-source origin of the material, the publisher cannot claim copyright in the book." The German-language Wikipedia is second in size only to the English version, which has 2.3 million articles.

Google Announces Summer of Code 2008 Projects 35

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @02:58PM from the fifteen-point-eight-percent dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today it had accepted 1,125 students to work on 175 Free and Open Source Projects this summer. This represents an increase of almost 25% over last year. Nearly 7,100 applications were received. For those who weren't accepted, there is an offer to send Google Swag to any student who completes their project anyway."

An IM Patent for the iPhone? 71

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @12:01PM from the could-b-could-b dept.

Ian Lamont writes "Apple has filed a patent for IM on portable devices, which could mean that it's getting ready to launch an IM client for the iPhone. The filing is titled 'Portable Electronic Device for Instant Messaging', and covers methods for sending, receiving, and viewing ongoing conversations. The proposed GUI is similar to Apple's current interface for SMS. As for why iChat wasn't enabled for the iPhone earlier, there's some interesting background and analysis here, which also includes a discussion of AIM for the iPhone. IM also came up in the discussions last year about the most-wanted features in iPhone 2.0."

iGoogle Launches Developer Sandbox 62

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 21, 2008 @06:52PM from the another-star-in-the-googleverse dept.

gurubaba writes "Google has announced the launch of iGoogle Developer Sandbox, which will allow developers to build and test applications. The Sandbox provides support for building social applications using the OpenSocial API. 'The iGoogle OpenSocial container will allow developers to build full page applications, just like the ones on Facebook, using the Canvas View. The applications built using the developer Sandbox can display profile information, post activity updates, send messages and gadget invites and add friends. The developers will also be able to monetize the applications through ads.'"

Submission + - iGoogle Turning Into Application Dev Platform (betadaily.com)

Submitted by gurubaba on Monday April 21, 2008 @03:58PM

gurubaba writes: Google has announced the launch of iGoogle Developer Sandbox which will allow developers to build and test applications. The Sandbox provides support for building social applications using the OpenSocial API.