Fedora Project leaders have banned a popular penetration-testing tool from their repository out of concern it could saddle the organization with legal burdens.
The move came on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Fedora Project's board of directors rejecting a request that SQLNinja be added to the archive of open-source applications. It came even as a long list of other hacker tools are included in the bundle and was harshly criticized by some security watchers.
A $3,000 bounty to create an open source driver for the Kinect has been won by a hacker, despite Microsoft expressing its grumblings about the affair, and a further $2,000 was donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to help defend hackers' rights.
Hackers have come up with a way of rescuing Apple fanboys who have elderly versions of the iPhone.
For a while now Jobs' Mob has been forcing its long suffering customers to upgrade their 2G and 3G phones to the broken iPhone 4 by saddling them with an upgrade which made their gizmos slower. Now Redmond Pie has come up with a method of replacing iOS on iPhone 2G and 3G models with Android 2.2 Froyo without using any tools on a host computer.
Since Mozilla couldn’t legally block the hacker extension, Firesheep, a handful of resourceful coders are doing the next best thing. One company has created a new Firefox plug-in called Blacksheep that will at least warn you that your information isn’t safe.
Google looks set to release the latest version of its Android operating system, codenamed Gingerbread, in the next few days.
Alvaro Fuentes Vasquez, a member of the leadership team at the Open Handset Alliance concerned with Android, suggested in a Twitter post written in Spanish that the over-the-air update will arrive at some point this week.
Today is when the first Windows Phone 7 models go on sale — the Samsung Focus at AT&T and the HTC HD7 at T-Mobile. As we've discussed, they're powerhouse phones with gorgeous screens and Microsoft's surprisingly nice "glance and go" operating system designed in the age of Facebook. But what matters once you get the phone is what apps to download. There are currently about 1,600 apps in the Marketplace, most of them free or dirt cheap.
DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty to anyone who can develop an open-source driver for Microsoft's newly released Kinect. Kinect is a single piece of hardware that connects to Xbox 360 game console and lets players control the game via their bodies; no controller necessary.
Mobile banking has been on the rise. In July, IDC reported mobile banking use doubled in between its annual surveys on the topic.
But the growth in popularity may not be matched by a growth in security, something underscored by problems recently reported in mobile applications from a variety of high-profile companies, including Wells Fargo and PayPal. The problems – reported here by viaForensics – include a failure to securely store passwords and usernames, and according to some, paint a not so rosy state of mobile application security.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 doesn’t support multi-touch, right? SE reps have confirmed time and time again that the hardware doesn’t support it and workarounds would not be seen via software updates. The Android 2.1 update came and went, and, sure enough, no multi-touch support. Enter those zany Android hackers who only read the words “can’t do that” as an open challenge to find a way to make it happen.
A major dashboard update hit Xbox 360 consoles on November 1, adding Kinect compatibility, features such as a Netflix search and ESPN streaming content, and it moved things around enough to anger independent developers. According to new information, Microsoft evidently also included a stealth update that protects the Xbox 360 from piracy.
The update, being referred to as "AP 2.5," apparently locks out copied games from Xbox Live and will stop them from booting up at all. The method of its operation is not yet clear, but AP 2.5 basically involves a new disc check.
