For the first time, Google has officially published details about the next major update to its open source Android mobile operating system, Android 3.0 code named "Honeycomb". Aimed at tablet computers, the first preview of Honeycomb comes as this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas.
Last week a group of hackers, working under the name fail0verflow, managed to hack the PS3 thanks to its poor implementation of public key cryptography. Building on that work, another hacker has created the very first custom firmware for the game console. However, at present, it doesn't do a whole lot.
"Thanks to the tools made by the fail0verflow team (and thanks to sven in particular for his work on the pkg/unpkg tools), the first 'Custom Firmware' is now available for the PS3!" KaKaRoToKS wrote on his blog.
Michael Zalewski (lcamtuf) yesterday announced the availability of cross_fuzz - an amazingly effective cross-document DOM binding fuzzer he claims helped him identify about 100+ bugs in all the browsers on the market - many of the bugs found are exploitable and he's still finding more. From his blog post:
The fuzzer owes much of its efficiency to dynamically generating extremely long-winding sequences of DOM operations across multiple documents, inspecting returned objects, recursing into them, and creating circular node references that stress-test garbage collection mechanisms.
Android Honeycomb - which features optimized support for tablets - may not be set at version 3.0. Rather, Google has reportedly designated version 2.4 to represent the long-awaited iteration of the popular mobile operating system.
Indeed, as Artem Russakovskii of Android Police notes, a quick check of the site's statistics seem to indicate that Android 2.4 is none other than Honeycomb. "Specifically, in the last 30 days, we have had 15 visits from Android 2.4. On another hand, we had 0 visits with Android 3.0," explained Russakovskii.
In his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with go to Statements", famed computer scientist Donald Knuth famously proclaimed premature optimization to be "the root of all evil." While it is indeed a good idea to avoid spending too much time on code optimization during the early stages of any project, eventually you'll want to seek out and resolve any bottlenecks in order to ensure your application is operating at its full potential.
One of the key developers behind hit mobile game Angry Birds has given a scathing appraisal of the future of paid apps on Google's Android platform. In an interview with Tech n' Marketing, Rovio Games developer Peter Vesterbacka left no one in doubt as to his views about the future of Google's mobile OS.
''So many different shops, so many different models...Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android,'' he said. He later added that ''nobody has been successful selling content on Android.''
OTTAWA - The city is calling on tech-savvy residents to compete for cash – and bragging rights – for the most useful mobile application, or “app” that uses the city’s data.
From finding fun Saturday-morning activities for children to locating the best dog parks in the city, the applications that will be developed during the contest will bolster resident’s ability to use the city’s new “open data” policy.
Google's new Nexus S smartphone is the first Android device to use the Ext4 filesystem. The company published a statement on the official Android developer blog earlier this month to discuss how adoption of Ext4 on Android will impact third-party application developers.
In a follow-up post last week, Ext4 developer Ted T'so commented on the transition and offered some further clarification regarding concerns about fsync data loss issues, which he says pose minimal risk on Android due to the higher level of quality assurance testing.
There's nothing nicer than getting a new piece of hardware and finding some untapped power under the hood. Judging by what the folks at TechPowerUp are reporting, that's just what owners of AMD's new Radeon HD 6950 graphics cards can look forward to. The cards can apparently be turned into Radeon HD 6970s with a simple BIOS flash—and a reportedly high success rate.
Hackulous, the picaresque pirates best known for plundering Apple's DRM and capturing unprotected software for iPhone, iPod and iPad, yesterday unleashed an onslaught of updates, including cracking software for the much-anticipated Mac App Store and a "reverse BitTorrent" for jailbroken devices that aims to increase availability of cracked apps across the Web.
