Backdoor in industrial networking hardware
ROS is designed for service with electricity suppliers and in the transport and defence sectors The Rugged Operating System (ROS), an operating system created by the developers at RuggedCom, contains an undocumented backdoor. RuggedCom, a Siemens subsiduary, specialises in industrial grade networking equipment for "harsh environments" and recommends its switches and servers for use in power plants, oil refineries, military environments and traffic monitoring systems.
A posting on a security mailing list has now documented that all ROS systems have a "factory" user account that, the author says, cannot be disabled. Its password is derived from the hardware address of the network interface; a small Perl script demonstrates how a MAC address of00-0A-DC-00-00-00 turns into a password called 60644375. Read more...
Hacker leaks source code of old VMware software
EMC subsidiary VMware has acknowledged that a hacker has released some of the company's source code. The currently accessible code includes a file containing C macros for generating code on x86 platforms and a lightly documented Perl script that could be relevant for the processing of object code. VMware said that the files date back to 2003 and 2004 and are part of the ESX hypervisor, which has since been superseded by ESXi.
A post on the threatpost blog, run by security firm Kaspersky, shows a copy of an email which is nine years old and contains the subject line "code review: untruncating segments". The article continues by saying that a hacker who goes by the name of "Hardcore Charlie" downloaded 300MB of VMware sources. Read more...
Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to the iPhone
In an era when security is at the top of our minds, mobile web browsers seem to be lagging behind. There are few options for secure web sessions on smartphones, but a new iPhone app called Onion Browser is changing that. Onion Browser connects to the Tor network to encrypt all your data.
The Tor Onion router network is essentially a series of virtual tunnels that your connection will bounce through before reaching the destination. While connecting through Tor is slower than a non-tunneled connection would be, it has the upshot of making it almost impossible to monitor your activity online — it’s the closest you can get to anonymity online. Read more...
Anti-Piracy Group Asks Court to Gag The Pirate Party
The Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN is going all out to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible to the Dutch public. After successfully blocking The Pirate Bay through court, and then censoring proxy sites that linked to it, they are now demanding that the Pirate Party should be banned from “discussing” how easily Internet censorship can be circumvented. The political party is baffled by the proposed gag-order and has asked the court to lift all censorship efforts.
The legal battle over Internet censorship is reaching new heights in the Netherlands, as the local anti-piracy group BREIN is now asking the court to gag the Pirate Party. Read more...
60 percent of US parents spy on teens’ Facebook accounts: survey
To spy or not to spy on your teen on Facebook, that's the question for parents, and most seem to be okay with it. According to a new survey, 60 percent of U.S. parents of teenagers seem okay looking in their kids' social accounts without their knowledge. And moms are most likely to be the ones doing the spying.
The information comes from security software company AVG Technologies, which surveyed 4,400 parents with children ages 14 to 17 in 11 countries. American parents aren't alone in their snooping, but they seem to be more aggressive about Facebook spying. Globally, only 44 percent of all parents said they spy on their teens' Facebook accounts. Read more...
Opera 12 Beta Launches, Loses Voice, Unite and Widgets
Opera is launching the first official beta of the next version of its desktop browser today. As usual, the Opera 12 beta includes a number of new features and enhancements, but this release also marks the end of some of the company’s more ambitious projects. With Opera 12, the company is ending support for Unite, the browser’s built-in personal cloud/streaming media platform that made its debut in 2009, and Opera Widgets. Opera is also phasing out support for its built-in speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML technologies.
This release isn’t just about removing features, though. Far from it. Among the new features is a new engine for writing and displaying browser themes (Opera previously called these ‘skins’). Read more...
Comparing Pre-IPO Facebook To Pre-IPO Google: Fair, Or A Case Of Apples And Oranges?
Facebook, in its updated S-1 released on April 23, dazzled us with more milestone user numbers: 901 million monthly active users, and 500 million on mobile. But it also reported a “seasonal” decline in revenues — $1.058 billion compared to $1.131 billion in the quarter before — and (perhaps more importantly ) annual revenue growth slowed down: in Q1 2011-Q1 2012 it was 44.7 percent, nearly half of the 88 percent for the same period the year before.
Some new data from Privco teases out those revenue growth numbers even further by comparing Facebook’s financials to those of pre-IPO Google, in an attempt to show that it is not seasonality but more particular issues with Facebook. The picture is not pretty — and some might wonder if it’s fair.
With Facebook expected to go public in the next quarter, Privco notes that when Google was in the same position, its revenues were still on the rise — albeit at a smaller rate. Facebook’s decline of 6.4 percent, Read more...
Apple’s WWDC sells out in 2 hours
Apple today announced that its annual developers conference would run June 11-15 in San Francisco. And inside of two hours, Apple said the event had sold out.
Tickets for the five-day Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were again priced at $1,599, the same as for the last two years' confabs.
The quick sell-out wasn't a shock: A year ago, Apple exhausted supplies in under 12 hours, a huge acceleration over 2010, when tickets were available for eight days. Read more...
Appvetica turns the iPhone and iPod Touch into a controller for Wii-like iPad gaming
While there’s no doubt that tablets are becoming a huge market for gaming, the touch screen interface provides a number issues for both gamers, who want a quality experience, and developers who have to adapt to a control-pad-free environment.
However, one Polish startup is giving developers the tools to provide a more functional gaming experience and free your thumbs. Read more...
Facebook marks pictures of a child with Down syndrome offensive
Posted by vica
In terms of size, social networking giant Facebook is bigger than big — over 2.7 billion comments are posted to the site each and every day. That's far more content than Facebook's 3,000 or so employees can moderate, so they largely rely on special filtering software to weed out offensive content. But that filtering process has landed Facebook in hot water after mother Diana Cornwell was forced to remove photos of her child with Down syndrome after they were flagged as offensive content. Read more...