Blog

The MacBook Air was the first computer to fail in a hacking contest between laptops made by Apple, Windows and Linux at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Charlie Miller, the participant who was able to hack into the MacBook in two mintues, won $10,000 – plus the MacBook laptop that he successfully hacked.

No one was able to hack into any of the machines through the network on the first day of the contest, however, yet Mr Miller was able to do so once the event’s organisers allowed the hackers to direct human operators from the three machines to visit websites and open emails.

While details of the hack are not being made public, experts are assuming that the vulnerability must be within Apple’s Safari browser because Mr Miller was only able to use software preinstalled on the Mac laptop.

Rich Mogull, the new security writer at Tidbits wrote: “Although we need to take contests like these with a grain of salt, we can’t dismiss the results. Since it took Mr Miller only two minutes to compromise the MacBook Air, it’s clear that he walked in the door with a complete exploit ready to go.”

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The long awaited 2.5 release of the great blog engine is out! WordPress 2.5 has officially been released. Along with the release is a refresh of most WordPress properties, including WordPress.org.

Here is a link to WordPress 2.5.

read more | digg story

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the European startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine.

read more | digg story

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Greater vigilance is necessary to combat the threat posed by malware, a new report warns this week, as the criminals distributing it get more sophisticated.

“There are countless examples where trusted sites have been compromised to host malware, or code that will redirect the user to a malware site,” Chenxi Wang of Forrester Research warned.

Once restricted to marginal domains and sites, malware is increasingly being inserted into mainstream, popular websites, often with very damaging results for users and site operators alike.

“It’s important for operators of trusted sites to be extremely vigilant about the security of their sites so that there is no possibility they could be compromised,” Dr Wang said.

Forrester’s new report, “Threat Report: 2007 and Beyond”, is due to be published this week at the analyst’s Security Forum Emea event in Amsterdam.

In it, the firm examines the complex criminal networks that create and distribute malware, and the purposes it is put to.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yahoo!’s performance guidelines are pretty famous by now, and they’ve again added 20 more rules, as reported on Ajaxian. Especially when your Ajax applications are used world-wide or used over modem connections, these guidelines squeeze additional performance out of your Ajax app.

Read the 20 New Yahoo! Performance Rules.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

In my last post about release of WordPress 2.5, I mention that it’s impossible for the development team to release the version on the scheduled date as there were still so many issues are not resolved.

John Havlik quite rightly points out the main reasons for delay and I could not disagree with him. There are a good number of tickets were moved to 2.6 as there was no patch or developer assigned to them.

Matt released a Screencast and WordPress 2.5 RC2 covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2.

Also looking at Milestone 2.5 its seems the development team decided that it would be good idea they would release 2.5 after most of us have expired by setting the due date to 22 years in future. But little clue that suggest that it may be released on the April 1st, but hey they are just playing April Fool on us all.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A significant proportion of computers being used by companies in the UK are not properly protected against security threats, according to a new study.

Research from Sophos has found that two-third of corporate machines may not be secure as a result of falling behind on security patches, virus updates and non-functional firewalls, IT Pro reports.

“It’s a lot to do with how difficult it is for IT managers to keep control of what end users are doing with their computers,” John Shaw from Sophos told the website.

“You might send out computers to users in a good and healthy state but it’s hard to do anything once it’s in the user’s hands.”

He added that network access control could help improve security by allowing firms to take preventative action.

A recent study from AEP Networks found that 91 per cent of IT chiefs in the UK and the US felt remote working increased security risks to company data.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Research has shown that using email as a means to provide customer service to customers in the UK is the most ineffective way to communicate.

Eservice provider Transversal looked at how well 100 leading UK companies across various sectors could answer simple questions through email, website and by phone and found that less than half (46 per cent) of questions answered through email were answered effectively.

This figure is down compared to email response satisfaction since 2006, when email responses were satisfactory for 60 per cent of customers.

Dee Roche, director of marketing at Transversal, said that companies are playing “ping pong” with emails, sending them back and forth and confusing customers, with the general picture one of laziness.

While insurance companies were found to be the worst in responding effectively, 80 per cent of CD/DVD retailers had the quickest response time (one hour) and answered with the most correct emails.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Senior researcher at MIT and so-called inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has condemned all variations of ecommerce-based web tracking that serves to target certain audiences based on their browsing habits.

His comments follow the debate over an internet ad platform developed by web technology company Phorm, whose clients include such companies as TalkTalk and Carphone Warehouse.

Mr Berners-Lee explained that this type of targeting could lead to information about a user’s habits getting into the hands of unwanted parties and that instead, ISPs should have to comply with the same rules and regulations that any other utility company would.

Phorm touted its service as one that could create a ‘gold standard’ for user privacy and make more marketing more efficient for advertisers, publishers, internet service providers and others.

Mr Berners-Lee said a user’s internet activity information was akin to a person’s private property, however.

“It’s mine – you can’t have it. If you want to use [that data] for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return,” he said.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I must be the first to notice that WordPress team has just bumped the version number to Release Candidate 1. Also to follow that there is a post Sneak Peeks into details of what has been done.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!