Software-Programming

Ever since the December release of @pod2g’s “corona” untether for iOS 5.x on A4 and earlier devices, all eyes have been on the attempts to extend it to the A5 devices: the iPhone4S and iPad2.  Due to the combined efforts of @pod2g and members of the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team, we’re nearly ready for a general release!  All technical hurdles dealing with the underlying technique have been overcome, and it’s now all about making the jailbreak as bug free as possible.

A U.S. Federal Reserve contractor has been charged with copying the source code of software that keeps track of large exchanges of money between U.S. government agencies.

Bo Zhang, who lives in Queens, New York, worked for the Reserve Bank of New York as a computer programmer on behalf of an unnamed third-party contracting firm. He was arrested Wednesday and released on US$200,000 bail. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Recently, we wrote about the progress the folks over at CyanogenMod were making on baked ROMs for the extinct HP TouchPad. Today the super hackers released CM9 for the TouchPad, but in alpha form. This is awesome for owners who are stuck with a tablet that’s no longer receiving any major firmware updates for its webOS platform. Here’s a quick break down of what to expect with this alpha build:

Things that DO NOT WORK:

Ever since Apple announced that Siri would be exclusive to the iPhone 4S, hackers have been chomping at the bit to port the AI voice assistant to older devices. The jailbreak community has released several hacks, including one, Spire, that is the product of some of the most notable developers on the scene.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has released SE Android, a security-enhanced version of Android, which provides and enforces stricter access-control policies than those found in the popular mobile operating system by default.

SE Android is based on NSA's previous research into mandatory access controls (MACs) that gave birth to the Security-Enhanced Linux project back in 2000. SE Linux is a collection of Linux kernel security modules and other tools that provide a flexible mechanism for restricting what resources users or applications can access.

Symantec today backed away from earlier statements regarding the theft of source code of some of its flagship security products, now admitting that its own network was compromised.

In a statement provided to the Reuters news service, the security software giant acknowledged that hackers had broken into its network when they stole source code of some of the company's software.

Oracle’s first batch of critical patch updates for 2012 will be super-sized: 79 new security vulnerability fixes across hundreds of Oracle products.

The security fixes, scheduled for next Tuesday (January 17, 2012), will cover holes in the flagship Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle Application Server 10g and numerous additional products and components.

The most serious of these vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.

Matias Duarte is a man who loves a challenge.

It’s part of why he took his current job at Google, leading the Android operating system team as head of user experience. In a nutshell, he is the man tasked with making sure Android looks, feels, and performs as smoothly as possible. And it is not an easy job.

Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSECs), which have been mandated for all .gov sites and are moving into the commercial Internet, protect DNS servers against hacking and other malicious acts. Unfortunately, it's very complex. The new Sandia tool will make it easier for IT staff to deal with it.

The Linux Mint team has announced the availability of a release candidate for Linux Mint 12 KDE, the version of the Linux Mint distribution with the latest version of KDE, 4.7.4. Like Linux Mint 12, it is based on Ubuntu 11.10. This is the first Linux Mint KDE release which, like other recent Mint releases, has hybrid ISO images; this enables the simple creation of a bootable USB stick, which can behave just like a live CD or DVD, using just the dd command. A tutorial is provided to explain how to install Linux Mint via USB.