Consumer software and hardware

Before the iPad, it was often said that there has never been a successful electronics device in a screen size between the cell phone and the laptop. Indeed, the form factor and functionality of such devices have been tough nuts to crack, but there have been a few successes.

While the most widely adopted of these was the so-called "portable" DVD player embraced by many top-tier consumer electronics brands, a more modest success story has been the digital picture frame.

Cleverly branded, overgrown multimedia players that had undergone battery removal surgery, the digital picture frame was a star … Read more

A hacker involved with a highly publicized data breach is taking some flak, but he says he and his colleagues simply acted in the public's best interest.

AT&T was forced to scramble to fix a security hole in its Web site that exposed e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad users this week. AT&T says it learned about the Web site flaw from an enterprise customer on Monday and that it was fixed on Tuesday. Goatse Security, the group that uncovered the security flaw, revealed the details to a blog site on Wednesday, touching … Read more

Online storage and collaboration service Box.net is finally getting around to offering its users a feature that was long-overdue: desktop synchronization.

The feature, which rolls out to business users Thursday morning, takes whatever files you've added to your online storage account and ferries them over to a local machine. It also does the same thing going the other way.

In order to use it, users must be subscribers of Box's business and enterprise tiers, leaving those with the free and individual plans out in the cold. It's also Windows only to start with, though Box's … Read more

A group of hackers exploited a hole in an AT&T Web site to get e-mail addresses of about 114,000 iPad users, including what appears to be top officials in government, finance, media, technology, and military.

The leak could have affected all iPad 3G subscribers in the U.S., according to Gawker, which broke the story on Wednesday. Among the iPad users who appeared to have been affected were White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, movie producer Harvey Weinstein, and New York Times CEO Janet Robinson.

A group that … Read more

E-mail inboxes are getting hit this week with spam campaigns that appear to be legitimate Twitter messages but which lead to malware and phishing sites, security firms warned on Wednesday.

Some e-mails masquerade as messages from Twitter's customer support team warning the recipient that the site has detected an attempt to steal the Twitter account password and prompting the recipient to click on a link to download a "secure module" to protect the account, according to Vietnamese antivirus firm Bkis and Trend Micro.

If the link is clicked on a Trojan horse designed to target Windows will … Read more

Apple has released the latest version of its Safari browser that includes fixes for four dozen security holes, mostly in the open-source WebKit technology and many of which leave a computer open to compromise by drive-by-download attacks from visiting a malicious Web page.

Safari 5 for Windows and Mac debuted on Monday. The impact on security issues is detailed in this advisory, which applies to Safari 5.0 and Safari 4.1.

The release updates the browser to display a warning before navigating to an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or HTTPS (secure HTTP) Web address containing user information, to better … Read more

Adobe Systems said it will issue a patch for a critical hole being exploited in the wild by delivering an update for Flash Player by Thursday, and for Adobe Reader and Acrobat by June 29.

The update of Flash Player 10.x will support Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, while the date for the release of a Solaris version is still to be determined, Adobe said late Monday. Meanwhile, the Adobe Reader and Acrobat update to come in three weeks will support Windows, Mac, and Unix.

Adobe released the advisory late last week and said there had been reports of the … Read more

Microsoft issued three critical security bulletins on Tuesday, plugging 10 holes that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a Windows computer via a malicious media file or streaming content, or malicious Web content viewed through Internet Explorer.

Overall, this Patch Tuesday release involves 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting all supported versions of Windows, Office XP, Office 2003 and 2007 Microsoft Office System, Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac, Excel Viewer, and Sharepoint Services 3.0.

"This is the largest Microsoft patch release of 2010 and ties the record for the most vulnerabilities ever addressed in … Read more

A well-known hacker says he tipped authorities off to a man who confided in him about leaking a video of a U.S. military helicopter gunning down journalists and civilians in Iraq in 2007. Other information allegedly being leaked could compromise U.S. foreign policy and lead to deaths, the hacker said.

"I turned him in to protect lives and to protect information that's essential for the U.S. to be able to effectively carry out foreign policy abroad," Adrian Lamo, once busted for breaking into computer networks of high-profile companies, told CNET in a phone interview … Read more