Showing all newswire headlines

For the past seven years, an annual hacker competition that pays big cash prizes has driven home the point that no Internet-connected software, regardless of who made it, is immune to exploits that surreptitiously install malware on the underlying computer. The first day of this year's Pwn2Own 2014 and the companion contest that ran concurrently stuck with much the same theme, with successful hacks of the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers and Adobe's Flash and Reader applications...

... During day two, Chrome was on tap to be tested. If it is successfully felled, it wouldn't be the first time. Meanwhile, George "GeoHot" Hotz, the hacker who famously bypassed the copyright restrictions of the Sony PlayStation 3, reportedly became the fourth contestant to defeat Firefox during day two. Update: Vupen has reportedly pwned Chrome as well.

Open source news for your reading pleasure. March 8-14, 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the new Raspberry Pi sound card, open source kitchen design, and more.

[We already knew that the NSA has weaponized the internet, enabling it to "shoot" exploits at anyone it desires. A single web fetch, imitated by an identified target, is sufficient for the NSA to exploit its victim.

Researchers on Wednesday cracked Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 (IE11), Mozilla's Firefox and Adobe's Flash and Reader at the Pwn2Own hacking contest, earning $400,000 in prizes, a one-day record for the challenge.

Get the official Ubuntu 14.04 wallpapers for your computer.

Our latest benchmarking of Ubuntu 14.04 is looking at the 2D X11 and 3D OpenGL performance of six different desktop environments when benchmarked on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The tested desktops included Unity, Xfce, KDE, LXDE, GNOME Shell, and Openbox.

The Web @ 25 "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

There was a time, back before smartphones and tablets, when most of us used, at most, only three operating systems. Indeed, for the average computer user there was only one operating system that mattered and that was Windows, which held a 95% market share. Even those of us who used Linux or Apple at home usually had to use a Windows computer at work–which remains true today.

New features like HiDPI and local menus are still being tuned within the Unity 7 desktop environment ahead of next month's debut of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Huawei is planning an assault on the American smartphone market with a dual-boot smartphone running both Google's Android operating system and Redmond's Windows Phone.

With my upgrade to a new Intel Haswell ultrabook from ASUS, I am no longer relying upon an Apple Retina MacBook Pro and thus no OS X... I also switched from Unity to Xfce with my Linux environment. However, so far it hasn't been a totally positive experience.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.0-Plavsk ships today with an experimental / tech preview user-interface powered by HTML5 and other new features to bolster the software's capabilities for open-source benchmarking and automated testing.

After initially launching to an iOS-only audience late last year, Jawbone's UP24 wireless fitness tracker on Tuesday finally arrived for Android. With the UP24 wristband and accompanying app, users can wirelessly sync sleep, movement and diet data to the app via Bluetooth Smart. "Our entire community can enjoy the benefits in real time," said Jawbone VP Travis Bogard.

Google will finally be migrating from GTK2 to their own Aura UI code with a target of Chrome/Chromium 35.

In a bid to make its online productivity software more competitive with Microsoft Office, Google has announced that Google Docs and Sheets users can now install add-ons that bring new capabilities to their documents and spreadsheets.

Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in Wireshark.

Red Hat has woken up to the growth of Linux containers – cough, cough, Docker – and has begun certifying applications running in the sandboxing tech.

An updated sudo package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Moderate security impact.

The KDE community today released the second beta of Applications and Development Platform 4.13. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. We kindly request your assistance with finding and fixing issues.

LinuxSecurity.com: When I decided to post an exploit a day from the TAO implant catalog, my goal was to highlight the myriad of capabilities of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations group, basically, its black bag teams. The catalog was published by Der Spiegel along with a pair of articles on the NSA's CNE -- that's Computer Network Exploitation -- operations, and it was just too much to digest.