Living

Twenty-four years ago today, I had a very bad day. On August 8, 1988, I was a senior in high school. I was working my after school and weekend job at Safeway as a cashier, when the store manager suddenly walked over and said I better stop ringing up customers and talk to my mother on the store phone right now. Mom told me to come home immediately because, well, there were police at the front door asking for me with some legal papers in hand. Life as a hacker before hacking—or the Internet itself, for that matter—was mainstream might seem thrilling, even glamorous. And to hear writer, developer, and Stack Overflow kingpin Jeff Atwood tell it, in a lot of ways it kinda was. Like I said, definitely not a good day. The only sliver of good news was that I was still 17 at the time, so I enjoyed the many protections that the law provides to a minor. Which I shall now throw away by informing the world that I am a dirty, filthy, reprehensible adult criminal. Thanks, law! One of the problems y...

When Gizmodo alumnus and wonderful human Mat Honan got hacked, the point of entry for the hackers was through Amazon and Apple's lax security policies. Amazon immediately admitted its fault in the situation and updated its security policy accordingly. Apple? Well, Apple still doesn't know what do yet. You see, Apple isn't pointing the finger at itself and its wafer-thin security policies but accusing a rogue customer service rep of not following standard operating procedure when it came to Honan's hack. If you remember, Honan's iCloud account was seized by the hackers when they offered up Honan's last 4 digits of his credit card as proof of their identity as Honan to Apple. But according to what Apple has been saying publicly, that isn't how Apple security policies work. Apple issued a statement saying "we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely." Basically, Apple claims Honan's hack shouldn't of happened like tha...

Jul 23, 2012 9:00 AM   What looks to the layman like a chunky under-the-desk computer power strip is actually a full-fledged hacking tool designed to let white hat hackers (aka the 'good' guys) test the security level of a given computer network, wired or wireless. With Wi-Fi, ethernet, Bluetooth, and an entire suite of hacking software tools built-in, the Power Pwn can let anyone put an office's computer network to the ultimate security test. And with an optional 3G/GSM adapter, they don't have to be anywhere near the facility being compromised. Not surprisingly, the development of the Power Pwn was partly funded by DARPA, which has a vested interest in protecting the government's networks, but with a pre-order price tag of almost $1,300, it might just push some non-government types into a life of hacking crime to afford it. [Pwnie Express via BoingBoing] View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org Thi...