Micropost

A major security vulnerability has been discovered in some TouchWiz-based Samsung smartphones, including the Galaxy S2 and certain Galaxy S3 models on older firmware. The bug was first demonstrated days ago by security researcher Ravi Borgaonkar at the Ekoparty security conference. It involves the use of a single line of code in a malicious web page to immediately trigger a factory reset without prompting the user, or allowing them to cancel the process. Even more serious is the possibility that this could be paired with a similar glitch to render the user’s SIM card inoperable. And as the malicious code is in URI form, it can also be delivered via NFC or QR code. ...

In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way more likely to get you a satisfactory answer. Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can often get as good answers from other, more experienced users as from hackers. This is a Good Thing; users tend to be just a little bit more tolerant of the kind of failures newbies often have. Still, treating experienced users like hackers in the ways we recommend here will generally be the most effective way to get useful answers out of them, too. ...

» Matthew Inman | theoatmeal.com

Dear Sen. Rockefeller, I am a cyber expert. I invented a key technology known as ”IPS” that is a standard part of network defense. I invented hacking techniques like ”sidejacking” that are a standard part of network offense. I am a coder who has written a million lines of production code. I am a ”pentester” who has performed simulated attacks that confirm your worst nightmares about power-grid blackouts and financial meltdowns. ...

Cosmo is huge ” 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he’s getting bigger, because Cosmo ” also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft ” is just 15 years old. He turns 16 next March, and he may very well do so inside a prison cell. ...

It’s September of an election year, and people are drawing lines, taking stands, and proclaiming their political beliefs. Even the lurkers, who brag that they ”never post political stuff on Facebook” find their trigger fingers twitching over the ”share” button. The internet is a battlefield, and you simply can’t get around online without being drawn into a shootout from time to time. When that happens, these tips will keep you knocking down opponents without losing your cool or becoming a troll. ...

Computational Engineers at the University of Southampton have built a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pi computers and Lego. The team, led by Professor Simon Cox, consisted of Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O’Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment, along with Professor Cox’s son James Cox (aged 6) who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing. Professor Cox comments: ”As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.” ...

As software developers, we develop habits that allow us to build products that work and do not fail under stress. Every software developer knows what an ”off-by-one” error is, and like the Karate Kid, we train extensively so we can avoid those traps. We learn how to avoid these and other similar software problems and we sharpen our skills to find logic errors. As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us. ...

This proposal adds new elements and attribute to [HTML5] to enable different sources of images based on browser and display characteristics. The proposal addresses multiple use cases such as images used in responsive web designs and different images needed for high density displays. This proposal allows content authors to provide user agents with the information they need to select the best image source. The current img element only allows for a single source of an image, but there are numerous use cases where document authors need to define different image sources depending on the factors such as the design, size resolution, and display density. ...

As you probably already heard in recent news, 1,000,001 Apple UDID’s were leaked. It’s unfortunate that so many apps use UDID’s to identify users since it’s extremely insecure. This brings me to WhatsApp, a free messaging service, used by millions of people. Their system runs on a modified version of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). There is nothing wrong with using XMPP, but there is a problem in how WhatsApp handle authentication. ...