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Games

Submission + - Confirmed: Steam Not Coming To Linux (digitizor.com) 5

dkd903 writes: A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now.

Submission + - Electronic voting machine hacker arrested in India (indianevm.com)

whatajoke writes: Hari Prasad, a security researcher in India who had demostrated the vulnerability of Electronic voting machines (EVM) used in all elections in India, was arrested by the Police on charges of stealing an electronic voting machine. The election commission of India has maintained that EVM are non hackeable. The election commission had previously provided access to the device to the security researchers for a day and asked for a hack in only that time.
Handhelds

Real-Time, Detailed Face Tracking On a Nokia N900 139

ptresadern writes "Researchers at the University of Manchester this week revealed a detailed face tracker that runs in real-time on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. Unlike existing mobile face trackers (video) that give an approximate position and scale of the face, Manchester's embedded Active Appearance Model accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline. The extra level of detail that this provides potentially indicates who the user is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. The face tracker was developed as part of a face- and voice-verification system for controlling access to mobile internet applications such as e-mail, social networking and on-line banking."
Idle

Submission + - Inmates escape as guard plays Plants vs. Zombies (gamepron.com) 1

dotarray writes: Everybody knows that there'(TM)s a certain risk one takes when playing addictive, engrossing games when you’re meant to be doing something else. The prevalence of awesome games on the iPhone hasn'(TM)t helped that risk -" as a Philippines police officer has learned.
Patents

Submission + - Letter to abolish software patents in Australia (softwarefreedom.com.au)

Ben Sturmfels writes: "400 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter, urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government's response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August."
Iphone

Submission + - Browser-based Jailbreak for iPhone 4 Released (appleinsider.com)

WrongSizeGlass writes: Apple Insider is reporting on a browser-based 'jailbreak' for iPhone 4. Hackers on Sunday released the first "jailbreak" for the iPhone 4, a browser-based exploit that allows users to run unauthorized code. Unlike previous jailbreaks, which required users to run software on their Mac or PC and tether their iPhone to their computer, the latest hack is done entirely within the Safari browser. Users simply visit the URL to begin the process, which modifies the iOS mobile operating system found on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Some users have reported that the modification results in broken MMS and FaceTime functionality. This jailbreak does not work on iPads running iOS 3.2.1.

The ability to modify iOS simply by visiting a website leaves these iDevices vulnerable to all sorts of malicious possibilities. I'd bet the ranch that Apple isn't the only one analyzing the website in order to diagnose this major security hole ... so are those with more nefarious intentions.

Announcements

Submission + - Linux Kernel 2.6.35 Released (lwn.net) 2

eldavojohn writes: Linus has announced the release of 3.6.35 for people to download and test after he found not a lot of changes between this week and last. The big features to look out for include: "Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs, Btrfs improvements, KDB kernel debugger frontend, Memory compaction and Support for multiple multicast route tables" as well as various performance and graphics improvements. Linus also praised the community saying that 'regression changes only' after rc1 improved this time around and gave numbers to back it up saying "in the 2.6.34 release, there were 3800 commits after -rc1, but in the current 35 release cycle we had less than 2000." Good to see the process is becoming more refined and controlled after the first release candidate — hopefully there's no impending burnout.
Education

Submission + - The Network is the Textbook

theodp writes: Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the U.S., he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school.
Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla finds flaw with Black Hat video stream (blogspot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla web security researcher Michael Coates found a flaw in Black Hat's paid video feed. The flaw allowed him to watch a live feed of the conference for free instead of the $395 a head to connect. Unlike many presenters at Black Hat, Michael responsibly disclosed the flaw to organizers who quickly fixed the issue. Black Hat researchers generally target Firefox for vulnerabilities, yet this year Mozilla helped make Black Hat more secure!
Security

Submission + - BlackBerry encryption 'too secure' (zdnet.com)

climenole writes: "Research in Motion, the creator of the widely used enterprise-come-consumer BlackBerry device, has an uncertain position in India. The Indian government’s internal security and intelligence services cannot break the encryption of the device, which makes countering terror threats and national security matters difficult — especially for a region which faces constant threats and attacks from domestic Maoist insurgents and extremist Islamic groups."

Submission + - Paypal virtual card alternatives (paypal.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Paypal has quietly killed the paypal plugin and the related virtual card service. The service generated on the fly, one time use credit card numbers. When I called in and inquired about the service I was told that the service has been discontinued, but may be relaunching something similar depending on interest. They are treating inquiries as a sort of petition, taking down names and contact info. The forums seem to be a lost cause, as no Paypal reps have replied to the numerous posts regarding Virtual cards being discontinued. Does anyone know of a good alternative source of one time use credit card numbers?

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