One year ago, the founders of Foursquare stepped onstage before a tech-savvy crowd in Austin, Texas, to announce their concept: a smartphone app that lets you tell friends where you are.
Now, as Foursquare's entrepreneurs head back to the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, they've hit a half-million users of their buzz-creating mashup of social networking and mobile games.
Smartphones could very easily become spy phones, with hackers able to eavesdrop on your conversations, researchers at Rutgers University in the US have warned. The handsets could be hijacked using malware as they have now become as advanced as computers, say experts.
Researchers at Rutger's University have developed a proof-of-concept rootkit that can be ported to multiple smartphone operating systems such as the Apple iPhone plus Google Android, and allows hackers to remotely turn on the GPS function, as well as remote-enable the phone's microphone.
Not too long ago, David Finland built a device capable of communicating with just about any model of iPod via the dock connector using an Arduino Nano, PodGizmo breakout board, an old USB iPod connector, and a momentary switch. While it may not sound like a big deal, there is more to it than one might think: namely programming a device (in this case the Arduino Nano) to be able to receive, interpret, and respond to messages sent from an iPod.
So you told your boss that you bought your Android smartphone so that you could track your business calls, be more effective when traveling for your company, have easy access to Gmail and keep your organization's Twitter feed current. But we know what's really going on -- you got that smartphone because it was cool and because you wanted to play with all the apps. (And possibly because it wasn't Apple or AT&T.)
Developers of the Google-backed Android mobile application platform have released revision 3 of Android NDK (Native Development Kit), which complements Android SDK by enabling developers to build performance-critical portions of an application in native code.
Release of NDK r3 was noted in a posting on the Android Developer Blog on Monday. Version 3 includes OpenGL ES (Open Graphics Library for Embedded Systems) 2.0 native library support. Also featured is a sample application making use of OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex and fragment shaders.
If you worry that your organization's applications are vulnerable to attack, then you're not alone, according to study results released yesterday.
In a survey at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco last week, researchers from security vendor Fortify found that most security pros are stressed about potential attacks on their apps.
There are many Linux distributions readily available. This however should not stop you creating your own version of a UNIX forensic tools disc. Whether you are on Solaris, HP-UX or any other variety of UNIX it is simple to create a forensic tools CD that can go between systems. The added benefit of this method is that the tools do not need to be left on the production server. This in itself could be a security risk and the ability to unmount the CD and take it with you increases security.
Developers kicked out of the iTunes store for using private APIs are turning to the unregulated Cydia store, and think the demographic might even suit them better.
Last week Apple kicked out a handful of applications that made use of "private framework" APIs to enable scanning for nearby hot spots. Now those apps are popping up on Cydia, with one already hitting 18,000 downloads by iPhone users willing to jailbreak their handsets to get applications that Apple won't allow.
This year instead of creating PCQ Linux from scratch, we have decided to go with one of the most renowned LiveOS for penetration testing called Backtrack. This has become the de-facto OS for security related tasks in last couple of years. It consists of all popular hacking and vulnerability assessment tools. Some tools which you would love in this distro are Metasploit and a front end for it called FastTrack . We have also talked in detail about how to use such tools in the pages to follow.
North Korea's self-developed software operating system named the "Red Star" was brought to light for the first time by a Russian satellite broadcaster yesterday.
North Korea's top IT experts began developing the Red Star in 2006, but its composition and operation mechanisms were unknown until the internet version of the Russia Today-TV featured the system, citing the blog of a Russian student who goes to the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.
