Hasta La Gadget!

Way back in 2010, a security breach exposed the emails of 114,000 iPad owners. Eventually, the hackers behind it were arrested—and now one of them, Andrew Auernheimer, has been found guilty. More »

A man whose daughter enjoys video games has released a lovely hack for the game Zelda: Windwaker in which all of the gender pronouns have been switched, thusly creating an environment that allows his young girl to be the hero and cementing himself as the Greatest Dad in History. This simple trick allowed a bit more gender equality – or flipping, in this case, in an industry where it’s incredibly rare for a woman character to save the day. Here with Zelda, the graphics already supported the idea that the boy needed saving and the girl did the saving – all this man had to do was switch some words around.

Of course no hack is ever as easy as it looks, and doing this sort of switch-up required a bit of the ol’ Dolphin emulator to make it happen. For those of you interested in creating a bit more of a positive place for girls to be superstars, head over to the “Blarg?” post here to do it. In the words of the creator of this modified environment:

“Maya and I have been playing through Windwaker together; she likes sailing, scary birds and remembering to be brave, rescuing her little brother and finding out what’s happening to Medli and her dragon boat.

She’s the hero of the story, of course.

It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character’s name, of course – I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist – but all of the dialog insists that Link is a boy, and there’s apparently nothing to be done about it.

Well, there wasn’t anything to be done about it, certainly not anything easy, but as you might imagine I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers.”

The creator of this vision for the future goes by the name Mike Hoye and was interviewed this week by Daily Dot, asked there about not just the game, but his daughter’s playing of video games as well. Hoye speaks on how he’s both scared and encouraged by his young one growing up in our modern technologically futuristic world.

“It’s more than a little scary. But it’s also pretty inspiring, to see how fast she learns and grows. The situation in tech now is, depending on what corner of that world you’re in, either “kind of bad” or “extraordinarily bad.” but it’s also changing. But those changes don’t just magically happen. So on the one hand, yes— I’ve had that in mind while I did this, and it feels like it was valuable work as a result.

On the other hand, this is also something I’m doing just for Maya, hopefully to make her a little bit happy this year, and maybe in a few years when she has a better sense of what’s going on, to show her that the culture around software isn’t carved in stone any more than the software itself is.”

Keep that in mind, folks, when you’re thinking your device, game, or anything in-between is stuck on crappy mode. Make it better! And let us know about it, too!

Zelda trades places with Link via Greatest Dad Ever is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A hacker from a group called UG Nazi was sentence in Long Beach, California on Wednesday. Going under the moniker “Cosmo” or “Cosmo the God,” the 15-year old pleaded guilty to multiple felonies including credit card fraud, identity theft, bomb threats, and online impersonation. The young hacker says that the juvenile court has sentenced him to a probationary period up until his 21st birthday. During the period, he will not be able to use the Internet without the approval of his parole officer. He will only be allowed to use the Internet given that he will be fully-supervised and that it will be for any purposes other than education.

The juvenile court is also requiring Cosmo to hand over his account logins and passwords and must put in writing the devices that he has used to access any network. More importantly, Cosmo is also ordered not to communicate or contact fellow members of UG Nazi, also known as the Underground Nazi Hacktivist Group. During his stint with the group, Cosmo participated in many high-profile hacking activities that includes NASDAQ, CIA.gov, and UFC.com. Cosmo reportedly pioneered social-engineering methods that hacked the accounts of some Amazon and PayPal users.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Russian cybercrime market is well-established, says report, GoDaddy Attacked, Millions Of Sites Down,

In a report entitled “Russian Underground 101,” Japanese security software company Trend Micro claims that the cybercrime market in Russia is getting more commercial than ever, with hackers offering services for a price. Using data gathered from online forums and few articles written by actual hackers, Trend Micro was able to write a paper detailing the kinds of services that are being offered on popular cybercrime forums like antichat.ru, xeka.ru, and cardingcc.com. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: GoDaddy Attacked, Millions Of Sites Down, Apple’s leaked UDIDs: Blue Toad Publishing may be the real source,

It would appear that the folks at Google – or at least one of their ranks – wants to prove the versatility of the hardware behind the newest Chromebook on the market with a port of Ubuntu as an operating system. We’ve reviewed the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook in full and can say with some confidence that it’d be amazing to have more options than just Chrome as an OS, especially given the undeniably low price point of the unit at $249 USD. The process has already begun with Google’s Olof Johansson, right on down on the case – with a dirty port going strong here right as the Chromebook is arriving in mailboxes!

What Johannson has shown thus far is that he’s been able to do a “messy” dump of Ubuntu to his ARM-based Chromebook thus far, starting with putting the device in devmode. For those of you that wish to enter devmode, you can do it via instructions provided by The Chromium Projects – but KNOW THIS: you could seriously mess up your device if you do anything wrong inside this very fragile state. This mode is made for developers (and hackers) only, not the general public, and Google will most certainly not be apt to give you a new unit if you bust yours up from the inside out.

Johansson moved forward with a tarball Ubuntu filesystem he created himself with the “rootstock” tool – this available in a Ubuntu-distributed Ubuntu-core tarball if you like as well. The process requires a full-sized SD-card (which you’ll be popping in to the device in its handy-dandy full-sized SD card slot), and a few code tappings along the way. Of course it’s much more complicated than that, and you’ll want to check the full instructions over on the Google+ post that Johansson made just last night to make it all work.

It would appear that Johansson is essentially done with his part of the work here, pushing others to continue on at this point. If you’re a lover of the Ubuntu universe or just straight up want to get some other sort of operating system working on your Chromebook, let us know! We’ll be following this hacking project as long as there’s interest, folks!

[via Google+]

Samsung Series 3 Chromebook gets Ubuntu hack via Google itself is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.