If you’re ever thirsty for delicious carbonated sugar syrup and find yourself without any cash or quarters, maybe you’ll be wise enough to carry around a measuring tape with you. Turns out, the wild minds of Russia have developed a slick vending machine hack that’ll give you free sodas. And it only takes just a little bit of force. Here’s how they do it. More »
Yesterday, The Verge uncovered a security breach that allowed malicious users to reset Apple ID passwords with nothing but an email and the user’s birthday. Luckily, the process didn’t leak out in full before the whole thing was patched up, but now iMore was able to reproduce the hack step by step and now it’s sharing details on how the whole thing worked. More »
Apple begins rolling out two-step authentication for Apple ID and iCloud users, highlighting the growing importance of security as our digital lives move to cloud-based services. Here’s how to set it up (and why it’s important).
A Brooklynite named Matt Richardson has built a working prototype of a bicycle headlight that uses a Raspberry Pi to project his current traveling speed as he rides around the city. Richardson calls it the Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight, and it’s one of those jaw-dropping DIY projects that makes you wonder why this isn’t something you can buy in a store yet.
The prototype has a small projector mounted to the handlebars of the bicycle, which is connected to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI cable. The projector and the Raspberry Pi are both powered by a USB battery pack. The Raspberry Pi and the battery pack seem to be crudely glued to a triangular piece of wood that is strapped onto the center of the bike, but Richardson says in his video that he’s hoping that future prototypes will combine all the components into one single piece that will be mounted onto the handlebars.
The Dynamic Headlight for now only projects the speed of the bike, but Richardson is looking to add all sorts of interesting functions to future iterations like GPS and other “animations and visualizations”. He’s also planning on writing about it for MAKE and including instructions for those that are brave enough to build one for themselves.
Someone needs to get him some of that Veronica Mars Kickstarter money, stat.
Apple officially released iOS 6.1.3 unto the public today, and we knew it would patch up the infamous Evasi0n jailbreak, meaning that if you update your iPhone 5 or other newer iOS device to iOS 6.1.3, you’ll lose your jailbreak and won’t be able to go back. However, another jailbreak method has been released, and it works on iOS 6.1.3 on older iOS devices.
The jailbreak comes to us from Redsn0w, and it only applies to iOS devices running an A4 processor. It’s also a tethered-only jailbreak, meaning that you’ll have connect your iOS device to your computer each time you want to boot up your device, which can be a pain sometimes. The jailbreak isn’t compatible with any iPad, including the first-generation iPad (although iOS 6 isn’t even available for this iPad anyway).
Of course, it’s still best to remain on iOS 6.1.2 that way you don’t lose your untethered jailbreak. Plus, there could be a few jailbreak tweaks that you use that may not be compatible with iOS 6.1.3, so it’s always best to wait in that case as well. However, if you accidentally updated to the latest version that rolled out today, there’s still hope with this Redsn0w jailbreak.
This specific jailbreak tweak only works on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and the fourth-generation iPod Touch. You’ll need the Redsn0w software and the iOS 6.0 IPSW file for the jailbreak. From there, it’s just a matter of opening up Redsn0w and installing the various files necessary for the jailbreak. Again, this is a tethered jailbreak, so if you need to reboot, you’ll have to plug in your device to your computer and fire up Redsn0w to get it past the Apple boot-up logo.
[via Redmond Pie]
iOS 6.1.3 tethered jailbreak hits for older iOS devices is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Unless you’re blasting through red lights and stop signs, you don’t really need to care what speed you’re riding a bike at. But maybe knowing that you’re careening through traffic at a blistering eight miles per hour gives you some kind of thrill. In that case, check out Matt Richardson’s Dynamic Bike Headlight hack. More »
Forget dropping thousands of dollars on the monstrously spec’d gaming laptops sold by the likes of Alienware. As long as you’re not itching to play the latest titles, you can look to the hacker who created this brilliant working NES laptop for some money-saving DIY inspiration. More »
China has once again denied its involvement in a series of hacks that plagued various entities in the United States, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and several U.S. companies. The Chinese government believes that the allegations were based on groundless facts and that this is just some scheme to worsen China’s reputation.
The Chinese government has issued a call for international “rules and cooperation” on the recent hacking issues. China has stated that they have been the target of several internet hacks as well, and that it’s not just the United States who are the victims. They stated that by tracing the cyber attacks, they discovered that the hackers were located in the United States. This could just be a case of finger pointing, or the attacks may be a case of retaliation.
A United States security firm, Madiant, issued a 60+ page report that provides evidence that there is a link between the cyber attacks on U.S. businesses, the Chinese hacking groups, and also the Chinese government. The cyber attacks originated at the HQ for the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398 in China. China has stated that those accusations were false and that the IP addresses could have been easily spoofed in order to plant the blame on them.
Yang Jiechi, China’s Foreign Minister, stated that the “international community is closely interconnected on the Internet, therefore cyberspace needs rules and cooperation, not war.” He says that he hopes the accusations against China would stop because they will “not be able to blacken the name of others nor whitewash themselves.” However, it’s hard to refute the report from Mandiant, that shows that around 141 companies had their data stolen by the People Liberation Army, and 115 of those companies were from the United States.
[via New York Times]
China calls for global “rules and cooperation” on hacking issues is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Four days after the highly-anticipated iOS 6 jailbreak, 7 million iOS devices were running the hacked firmware. Now, exactly one month after the jailbreak’s release, over 14 million iOS devices are running Evasi0n, with 23 million iDevices running all versions of a jailbreak, both past and present.
Pod2g, one of the dev team members of Evad3rs (the team responsible for the iOS 6 jailbreak), tweeted the statistics this morning. Jay Freeman (a.k.a. Saurik, the man behind the Cydia jailbreak store) clarified that the 23 million iOS devices jailbroken are only the devices seen on Cydia within the past month.
These are numbers are astronomical no doubt, but there’s always the chance that iOS jailbreakers may go back to the stock version of iOS, and compared to the number of iOS devices sold during just last quarter (a whopping 75 million), 14 million iOS devices jailbroken isn’t that huge of a percentage, considering that number consists of all iOS devices ever sold.
That 14 million figure may not go up much from here on out, mainly since an upcoming iOS update will patch the Evasi0n jailbreak. iOS 6.1.3 is currently in beta mode, and the Evad3rs dev team has confirmed that the new update patches up some of the exploits used to jailbreak the mobile platform, and the team members aren’t sure if they’ll be able to come up with a fix anytime soon.
Evasi0n jailbreak now running on over 14m devices is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The Java zero-day exploit has been making the rounds lately, hitting both Facebook and Apple just recently. However, it doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. A newly discovered zero-day vulnerability in the most recent versions of Java 6 and Java 7 has been discovered, and it allows attackers to install malicious software on vulnerable PCs, specifically a new “McRat” trojan.
Security firm FireEye has detected the vulnerability, and they have “observed successful exploitation” against browsers that are running Java 1.6 update 41 and Java 1.7 update 15. These are the two most recently released versions of Java 6 and Java 7. The vulnerability allows the install of a remote-access trojan called McRat.
However, the attack is only triggered when people with an infected version of the Java browser plugin visit a website that has been infested with the malicious code. Plus, FireEye says that the exploit “is not very reliable,” since it just simply tries to overwrite a large chunk of memory. In other words, hackers can succeed in downloading malicious code onto victims’ computers, but most of the time it fails to actually execute.
FireEye suggest disabling Java until a patch has been applied, or if you don’t use Java, you can simply uninstall the plugin altogether. Last month, Apple employees were targeted by a Java zero-day exploit, and while a handful of company computers were breached into, the company says no personal data was stolen. The same goes for Facebook, which experienced the exploit a few days before.
[via Information Week]
Java zero-day exploit strikes again is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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