Items tagged with Hacking
One of Google's 2011 April Fools' Day pranks was the so-called Gmail Motion feature, whereby you could control Gmail using full-body gestures. Many noted at the time that this could probably be done using Kinect, and viola: it's done. Built by the In fact, it was done by the same crew that developed a way to control World of Warcraft using...
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Renowned jailbreaker George Hotz, AKA geohot, has fled to South America, according to court documents filed by SCEA in the matter. Hotz is well known for jailbreaking the iPhone, but his issues with Sony Computer Entertainment America stem from jailbreaking the PS3. Not only is Hotz in South America, according to the filing, although he has...
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Security firm Imperva reports that a hacker is selling access to military, educational, and government websites for bargain basement prices ranging from $55-499. Imperva, which reported on the hacker on Friday, believes that he was able to gain access to the sites through a SQL injection technique. The priciest hack is access to the homepages...
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Google has served up noticed for malware-infested sites for years, but they've gone one better with their latest feature. The company has altered its search results notifications with a “This site may be compromised” link to help in safer searching. According to Google's blog post, the company uses "a variety of automated tools...
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Ah, the more users play with Kinect, now that there is an open source driver, the better things become. Here we see a Jedi Knight in training who has used the OpenKinect drivers and OpenCV to make himself into a Jedi Academy cadet. Here's what he said on his YouTube post: Proof of concept of tracking and rendering a lightsaber in real time...
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Adafruit, the folks behind the bounty for an open-source Kinect driver, one that would allow end users to use the Kinect with more than just the Xbox 360, have posted a how-to guide. It should be noted, however: it's not exactly drop-dead simple. The guide comes via an Adafruit employee with the handle Ladyada. You can see, in a video...
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You would have had to travel all the way to Budapest in order to attend "Hactivity 2010," the largest hackers' conference in Eastern and Central Europe. But for those of you who didn't make it -- which we're assuming is everyone reading this -- we've dug up one of the more interesting sound bites. "The Internet is the greatest generation gap...
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At the Usenix security conference, an "unusual" but still useful study was discussed. It involved using the smudges on touch screens to break into smartphones, among other devices. The study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania focused on smartphone touch screens, but researchers added that such "smudge attacks" could be applied...
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In need of extra cash? Who isn't, right? If you're a smart hacker, you may be able to make a small fortune by simply tricking an ATM or two into spitting out money for you. We know that sounds crazy, and it certainly is, but it's true nonetheless. At the annual Black Hat conference -- where hackers and security...
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It is said that anything that can be hacked, will be hacked, and that pretty much anything can be hacked. In this case, the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the sad tale. It reported on Thursday that Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq are using a software package, SkyGrabber, one that costs a mere $25.95, to download imagery...
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Thinking of using those newfound hacking skills to engage in nefarious behavior? Think again. Albert Gonzalez is a name that'll go down in hacking history, but it's not for anything positive. After being charged with stealing some 130 million credit and debit card numbers, Albert plead guilty to previous data-theft...
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In what some might consider the most visible Internet-based prank to date, frequenters of the 4chan image-based bulletin board site's "/b/ - Random" imageboard claim to have rigged Time Magazine's Top 100 online poll, so as to render 4chan's founder, "moot," the winner. And even though some fairly convincing circumstantial evidence points...
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No less than three different browser platforms have succumbed to zero-day exploits by the end of the first day of the three-day long, third-annual Pwn2Own contest being held at the CanSecWest 2009 digital security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Safari on Mac OS X was the first to fall, followed by Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on Windows...
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Those white-hat-wearing, security-exploit-finding folks over at TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Laboratories are at it again. At the CanSecWest 2009, digital security conference to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, next month, TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) team will be sponsoring their third annual Pwn2Own contest. This time...
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Crackulous is a one-click iPhone / iPod Touch app cracking tool. Previously it was only available to a select few, but it's now been released as a public beta. Obviously not good news for developers, it adds yet another reason to the list of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch. Some of them are legitimate, such as being able to...
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When we were a teenagers, we might TP the house of someone we disliked. Some Maryland teenagers instead have figured out how to fool speed cameras by spoofing the license plates of their "enemies," resulting in those spoofed receiving unwarranted speeding tickets.Students have dubbed the prank the "Speed Camera Pimping Game." Originating from...
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A report, to be presented at a California computer-security conference in May, suggests that pacemakers and defibrillators may be targets for hacking.Millions of Americans have pacemakers, which keeps hearts beating regularly, or an implanted defibrillator, which can restart stopped hearts with an electric jolt. After implanting a defibrillator...
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According to research provided by the security firm Securina, Mac OS X has approximately 10 times the number of critical vulnerabilities of Windows XP and Vista combined. We'll let the numbers speak for themselves:“While Mac OS X had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities reported in 2007, Vista and XP combined had 23, Ou wrote."This shows...
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Microsoft and Toshiba today announced the formation of a consortium to hype advanced HD DVD interactive technology. They mentioned "interactivity and interoperability" and said they'd "maximize consumer satisfaction," among other things. Long story short: They want to sell you things while you're watching movies. Major Hollywood...
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Bank hacking is up, despite new & improved security measures and growing public awareness regarding internet security: “SecureWorks reported that between June 2006 and December 2006, they blocked attacks from about 808 hackers per bank per month. From the beginning of this year through June, there's been an average of 1,462 hackers launching...
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AMD got a little buzz last week when they talked about the bigtime capabilities of their next-generation processors, code-named Barcelona, due out later this year. As usual, Intel doesn't hesitate to ramp up the pressure on their competitor, and is planning huge price cuts on their existing versions of quad-core processors for desktops...
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Intel announced price cuts, as much as 40%, on both its desktop and server processors. Rival chipmaker AMD announced a 611 million dollar loss for the first quarter already. Someone please take AMD's belt and shoelaces away for the rest of the week. For the desktop market, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 has fallen in price to US$530 while...
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