Software-Programming

A computer consultant is embarking where Apple has refused to go, adding a security measure known as ASLR to iPhones to make them more resistant to malware attacks.

Facebook has announced its 2011 Hacker Cup, a competition in the search of a world champion hacker. For those that are already weary of the narrative we've been hearing the last week-and-a-half - that hackers are suddenly posing this grave threat to national security, national pride, holiday shopping, what have you - maybe this will prove a better image. "Hackers solving algorithms" seems less threatening than "hackers launching DDoS attacks."

LOIC ("Low Orbit Ion Cannon") is an application developed by 4Chan-affiliated hackers designed to—when used en masse by thousands of anonymous users—launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Like Visa.com and Mastercard.com, for instance.

The idea behind LOIC is that it can allow you to participate in attacks even if you've no clue how to hack. Just download a copy of LOIC (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux!), punch in the target information like a URL or an IP address and zap.

Like previous Android releases, the Android developers are very busy porting the Android Gingerbread SDK to other phones. XDA is often the first place where these ROMs become available, and we’ve created a list containing all Gingerbread ROMs, sorted per device. We’ll be updating this article very frequently, so if you are looking forward to some gingerbread-goodness, you can check out this article to find out if it’s available for your device.

It's taking longer than Google anticipated to deliver a new operating system designed to make computers run faster. After more than a year building a much-anticipated system around its Chrome web browser, Google announced Tuesday that the first laptops powered by the new software won't hit the stores until the middle of next year. The revised timetable is about six months behind Google's goal of having the Chrome OS completed in time for it to debut during the current holiday season.

Playstation has just announced the upcoming PS3 Firmware Update 3.55 which will include a minor security patch…most likely to fight Jailbreaking and Piracy.

The smart people at XDA-Developers are now working on porting Android 2.3 to the HTC Evo 4G. The port started as soon as the SDK became available. However, at the moment, don't get too excited as it really doesn't work and isn't usable.

At the time of writing this post, the Android 2.3 is on Build 4. It started at build 1 where a message on the forums said "almost everything doesn't work" although it does boot and the screen works. Moving up to build 4 and a few of the bugs are being ironed out.

A security and stability update has been released for Adobe Illustrator CS5, fixing a DLL preloading vulnerability which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code.

Also known as DLL hijacking, binary planting or DLL side loading, this type of vulnerability stems from the use of an insecure search path by some library loading functions. When a DLL is called by a program without specifying its full path, the operating system automatically searches for it in a series of predefined places in order.

A car magazine once declared that a car has "character" if it takes 15 minutes to explain its idiosyncrasies before it can be loaned to a friend. By that standard, every piece of software has character -- all too often, right of the box.

Most programming "peculiarities" are unique to a particular context, rendering them highly obscure. Websites that deliver XML data, for example, may not have been coded to tell the browser to expect XML data, causing all functions to fall apart until the correct value fills the field.

Today we have an exciting breakthrough for the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community - the ability for anyone to unlock a WP7 device without a Marketplace developer account.

Unlocking allows the sideloading of experimental applications that would otherwise can’t be published to the Marketplace, such as those which access private or native APIs.