hacking

Megaupload users (the legal kind) are upset with the FBI's decision to shut the site down yesterday before anyone had a chance to back up their files.

In response to the lawsuit, Anonymous hit back with several denial-of-service (DOS) attacks that brought down several government-run Web sites including those for the Department of Justice and the FBI, as well as Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Today we're chatting about yesterday's Apple iBookstore announcement and what it'll mean for schools and the future of education. We'll also spend some time looking at the Megaupload arrests, and run through the top 10 questions kids ask that puzzle parents, like "Why is the sky blue?" and "How do airplanes stay in the air?"… Read more

Those of you disheartened because your older iPhone or iPod Touch won't support iOS 5 have an "unofficial" alternative.

Available for free, a piece of software dubbed Whited00r can install a custom edition of iOS 5.1 on the iPhone 2G and 3G as well as the iPod Touch 1G and 2G. The software works by tapping into the Restore feature directly through iTunes. And it automatically includes the latest release of Cydia to jailbreak your device. So unlike other hacks, Whited00r isn't too difficult to set up.

Most of the key features that iOS 5 … Read more

Symantec said today that a 2006 security breach led to the theft of source code for some of its flagship products, backtracking on earlier statements that its network had not been hacked.

The security software maker, which had previously blamed the theft on a third party, acknowledged that hackers had infiltrated its own networks. The hackers obtained 2006-era source code for Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack), and PCAnywhere, the company said in a statement.

"Upon investigation of the claims made by Anonymous regarding source code disclosure, Symantec believes that the … Read more

Zappos is urging its customers to change their passwords after an intruder gained unauthorized access to the online shoe retailer's servers.

Customers' names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of their credit card numbers, and their scrambled passwords may have been illegally accessed, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh said in a letter sent to the company's 24 million customers today. However, he said that "critical credit card data and other payment data was not affected or accessed."

The company has voided and reset customer passwords so that new ones can be … Read more

The Huffington Post's Twitter account was hacked this morning by someone who replaced the news site's usual story teases with racist and homophobic messages.

Around 11 a.m. PT, messages saying that "cloverfdch is a F#@%ing god! Hacked :)" and "New York Post rules!!!" joined the usual tweets with links to celebrity stories and animal photo galleries.

Huffington Post representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment this morning but were apparently aware of the intrusion; the posts in question were quickly deleted from the site's Twitter page, although they still … Read more

If you've been patiently waiting for a jailbreak solution for your A5-based device--in other words, your iPhone 4S or iPad 2--it should be exciting news that the jailbreak community has gotten its current program out of the sandbox stage, which generally signals an imminent release.

According to a tweet picked up by iDownloadBlog, hacker "planetbeing" has announced that the iPhone 4S/iPad 2 jailbreak has left the sandbox stage of development. He also states that the jailbreak is "turning out to be more complex than X-Gold 618."

X-Gold 618 was the baseband chip in the … Read more

Do you have mad Android hacking skills? Put them to good use and you might just earn $5,000--or more.

N2A Cards LLC, best known for transforming Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-readers into full-blown Android tablets, has thrown down the gauntlet to the development community: first person to create a bootable Android microSD card for the Nook Tablet (the Color's successor) gets $2,500.

And if you do it before midnight on January 22, you get a $2,500 bonus.

Here's a summary of what the contest entails:

In early December, Adobe issued a security bulletin regarding new zero-day PDF-based attacks that took advantage of flaws in its Reader and Acrobat programs, allowing a hacker to crash the program and take control of the system.

The flaw was initially found to be in Reader and Acrobat versions 9.4.6 and X (10.1.1) on all supported platforms, with a similar flaw later being found in Adobe's Flash Player, though in its security bulletin Adobe claims this is not the same issue as those in Reader and Acrobat.

Despite it being present in multiple platforms and … Read more

When Microsoft's mega-hit Kinect motion controller for the Xbox was released in 2010, its closed nature inspired a hefty bounty to hack it and come up with open-source drivers.

But now that Microsoft has released an official version of Kinect for Windows, the team that offered that payout is wondering whether they might have to do it again.

Microsoft eventually realized that there was an insatiable thirst for developing open-source Kinect projects and released a software development kit of its own. But now the folks at open-source hardware purveyors Adafruit are wondering if the new Kinect for Windows platform … Read more