TechBlog

German Censors Approve New Action Game

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

rockpapershotgun.com: Are you a German teenager? Then do we have some good news for you! After a short seventeen year-long wait, you are now legally allowed to buy a copy of Doom. And, indeed, Doom can now be stocked in normal shops, not just ones ominously deemed ‘adults-only’ – which was basically putting the game right up there with porn. As of yesterday, Germany’s Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (Bundesprufstelle) has removed Doom – and Doom II – from its list of ‘controlled’ games, following an appeal by id’s owners Bethesda. Their reasoning? Because the Bundesprufstelle thinks Doom is ‘now only of artistic and scientific interest and will not appeal to youngsters’, according to the BBC. ...

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Happy third birthday, Chrome!

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 5 min

Google Chrome Blog: It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome. In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers: ...

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Wikileaks website targeted by hackers

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

TechSpot: Wikileaks found itself the victim of a cyberattack on Tuesday, shortly after the release of thousands of US State Department communications. News broke of the attack on their Twitter page, which offered another link to the communications, and a message stating “WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack.” It is likely that they were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the most commonly used method by hackers to cause disruption to websites. It works by flooding the servers with traffic, overloading them, and subsequently causing the servers to crash, or become otherwise unreachable. ...

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iPhone 5 giveaways on Facebook – a scam or what?

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

SophosLabs: Even if it hasn’t been officially announced yet, and certainly isn’t available to the general public (unless an Apple employee loses a test model in a bar), there are plenty of scammers out there trying to trick you into believing you can get a free iPhone 5. Here’s just a sample of the pages on Facebook claiming to be an iPhone 5 giveaway. Typically they are trying to trick you into clicking on links, driving traffic to online surveys which earns them revenue. ...

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Facebook to launch music service on September 22

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

TechSpot: Facebook plans to launch a music service on September 22, which happens to coincide with the company’s F8 conference. The news comes via CNBC’s twitter feed which reported the headline earlier today. A quick blurb on CNBC’s website also mentions the pending music service launch, suggesting that Facebook won’t actually host the music, but will partner with a provider to offer the service. There isn’t much more to go on at the moment, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumors. Last month, Facebook announced a video calling feature powered by Skype. Software developer Jeff Ross panned through the program’s code and found references to an app called Facebook Vibes which connects with a music download dialog. Ross posted the following statement on his blog. ...

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Call of Duty: MW3 To Use Steamworks

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 1 min

rockpapershotgun.com: This just came in from Valve: “The PC version of the product will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and tangible versions of the game and, as with all Steamworks titles, offline play will also be supported along with Auto-Updating, Achievements, and more. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will also support dedicated servers on day 1.” Better, I suppose. The game is out November 8th.

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Mail.ru protects e-mail users with WOT reputation data

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

Web of Trust (WOT), the world’s leading website reputation rating service, and Mail.ru Group, Russia’s largest Internet company, have partnered together to improve online protection for 300 million people using Russia’s leading free e-mail service, Mail.ru. All links contained in emails received by Mail.ru users are checked through WOT’s reputation database to warn users from following untrustworthy links that could lead to scams, identity theft, malware and other online threats. ...

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Woman sues after firm tracking stolen laptop records nude video chats

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

SophosLabs: Imagine the scene. You buy a second-hand laptop using it to, among other things, have secret sexy video chats with your significant other. Unbeknownst to you, naked photos of you are being taken by a company hired to track down the stolen laptop. Ouch. This is what has happened to Ohio-based Susan Clements-Jeffrey and her boyfriend. Absolute Software is in the business of helping people recover their computers. Fair enough. But is taking nude snaps of the person using the stolen laptop a step too far? ...

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Julianne Hough leaked photos published after phone hack

Published: September 1, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

SophosLabs: Julianne Hough is famous in the United States not just for being an actress and country music singer, and dating “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, but also for having won ABC’s “Dancing with the stars” TV show twice. So, hardly the kind of woman who you would think would need to resort to a cheap publicity stunt to raise her profile. But no doubt there are skeptics who are right now wondering if the news that her mobile phone was “hacked” and one hundred of her private photographs published on the net is nothing more than a way of gaining attention. ...

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kernel.org compromised

Published: August 31, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

Read it yourself… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 ———- Forwarded message ———- From: J.H. Date: 2011/8/29 Subject: [kernel.org users] [KORG] Master back-end break-in To: [email protected] —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA1 Afternoon Everyone, As you can guess from the subject line, I've not had what many would consider a “good” day. Earlier today discovered a trojan existing on HPA's personal colo machine, as well as hera. Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this. As it stands right now, HPA is working on cleaning his box, and I'm working on hera (odin1 and zeus1 are out of rotation still for other reasons), mainly so that if one of us finds something of interest, we can deal with it and compare notes on the other box. Points of interest: – – Break-in seems to have initially occurred no later than August 12th – – Files belonging to ssh (openssh, openssh-server and openssh-clients) were modified and running live. These have been uninstalled and removed, all processes were killed and known good copies were reinstalled. That said all users may wish to consider taking this opportunity to change their passwords and update ssh keys (particularly if you had an ssh private key on hera). This seems to have occurred on or around August 19th. – – A trojan startup file was added to rc3.d – – User interactions were logged, as well as some exploit code. We have retained this for now. – – Trojan initially discovered due to the Xnest /dev/mem error message w/o Xnest installed; have been seen on other systems. It is unclear if systems that exhibit this message are susceptible, compromised or not. If you see this, and you don't have Xnest installed, please investigate. – – It \*appears\* that 3.1-rc2 might have blocked the exploit injector, we don't know if this is intentional or a side affect of another bugfix or change. – – System is being verified from backups, signatures, etc. As of right now things look correct, however we may take the system down soon to do a full reinstall and for more invasive checking. – – As a precaution a number of packages have been removed from the system, if something was removed that you were using please let us know so we can put it back. – – At this time we do not know the vector that was used to get into the systems, but the attackers had gained root access level privileges. That's what we know right now, some of the recent instabilities may have been caused by these intrusions, and we are looking into everything. If you are on the box, keep an eye out, and if you see something please let us know immediately. Beyond that, verify your git trees and make sure things are correct. – – John ‘Warthog9' Hawley Chief Kernel.org Administrator —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—– Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora – http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk5a5U0ACgkQ/E3kyWU9dif+1ACfYPlgq/keFrFO77AmQVduKGwx TAcAnRAu6nHt74+5aC+fPeb8aT0hcy2K =Semd —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

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