Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows | VentureBeat (Build 20110608151458) Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two hacker groups that have similar origins. LulzSec has begun publicly mocking 4chan.org, the image-sharing message board where Anonymous was reportedly born, on its main Twitter account, which it has used to generate publicity for its attacks. When VentureBeat tried to access 4chan.org, the site was either inaccessible or very slow. That could incite frustration from Anonymous, which has proven time and again that it is a force to be reckoned with. “Just saw a thread on (4chan.org message board /b/) where they’re trying to hunt us: you /b/tards realize that we are everything you’ve ever tried to be?” Lulzsec said on its Twitter account. The sparring began when LulzSec initiated a “DDoS Party,” which was a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of games offline.
Microsoft refuses to endorse WebGL, labels it ‘harmful’ | WinRumors (Build 20110608151458) Microsoft said on Thursday that it refuses to endorse WebGL from a security perspective. The strong words came directly from Microsoft’s own security research and defines team. Microsoft’s MSRC engineering team has been analysing WebGL recently and concludes that Microsoft products supporting WebGL would “have difficulty” passing the company’s own Security Development Lifecycle requirements. The software giant highlighted the following concerns in a blog post on Thursday: Browser support for WebGL directly exposes hardware functionality to the web in a way that we consider to be overly permissive The security of WebGL as a whole depends on lower levels of the system, including OEM drivers, upholding security guarantees they never really need to worry about before.
Attacks that may have previously resulted only in local elevation of privilege may now result in remote compromise. As WebGL vulnerabilities are uncovered, they will not always manifest in the WebGL API itself. MIT, Google Researchers Tap Cellphone Cameras To Grab Data From a PC - Ina Fried - Mobile. Researchers at Google and MIT think they have come up with a novel way to transfer applications and data to a cellphone without a cable or wireless network. Their transfer mechanism of choice? The camera. The project, called “Deep Shot,” shows how one might zap a page on a map, complete with links, just by taking a picture of it. But instead of getting just a picture of the screen, the phone is also getting the code needed to go to that place on the map.
It works by taking advantage of widely used Web technology known as a uniform resource identifier, or URI. Programs use URIs to email links or embed code and Deep Shot transmits that URI to the cellphone camera. The benefit, though, is not constantly having to email links when one wants to download a map or other information to a mobile device. MIT graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang developed Deep Shot last summer, while an intern at Google, which owns the rights to the technology.
Here’s a look at Deep Shot in action. Obama's data.gov CIO quits White House. High performance access to file storage The man behind the launch of the US government's Data.gov website, which is undergoing a funding crisis, is standing down from his job as federal CIO. The White House confirmed today that Vivek Kundra, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in March 2009, had handed in his notice with plans to take on a fellowship post at Harvard University in August.
As The Register has previously reported, Data.gov has been the subject of serious funding cuts in recent months. Its budget was dramatically reduced from $35m in 2010 to just $8m this year. All of which has led to a campaign from the Sunlight Foundation to restore the Government Electronic Fund. Here in the UK, the inventor of the worldwide web Sir Tim Berners Lee recently told this reporter that it would be a great disappointment to see open data projects such as Data.gov closed or scaled down in an effort to cut costs.
"What does this mean in practical terms? Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics | Magazine. The Kinect lets people navigate the digital world through gestures rather than mouseclicks.Illustration: Justin Wood For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate.
Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Kinect’s possibilities. None of these projects were sanctioned by Microsoft (especially that last one). Here's Google's Secret Plan To Kill Groupon In New York And San Francisco.
LulzSec, Anonymous and hacktivism: Crappy security has caught up with us | ZDNet (Build 20110413222027) What happens when the CIA, Senate, various gaming sites, Citibank and a bevy of others are hacked on a regular basis by various groups with one-liners on Twitter and no formal organization? You lose confidence in the Internet and the data passing through it. My confidence in Internet security---not that there was much in the first place---is looking like a wall made of Swiss cheese. We've known for years that our collective security policies---personal, enterprise, consumer and otherwise---were lax. Nearly every piece of software we use has some vector to exploit.
Every site that touches a server is vulnerable. We can write about hacks, patches, vulnerabilities and attacks until our fingers fall off. Tango down---cia.gov---for the lulz. Media attention ensues in bunches. It's all good fun. The not-so-amusing thing is that all this attention will lead to more legislative and regulator scrutiny and probably break a few good---yet security clueless---brands. Related: Around the network: