hacker

The folks over at Make magazine are nutty and brilliant. Witness their open-source gift guide, inspiring for the electronics geek in us all. It's not the guide that's open-source, it's the gifts themselves: They're all hackable, and they're also (largely) on the cheap.

In essence, it's an irresistible gift guide for the serious tinkerer. Make your own LED menorah, modify a teeny Linux computer to your heart's content, or start your four-year-old out on her very own microcontroller board.

Read the fine print at Make: "Open source hardware gift guide"

Files that have been uploaded to hosting sites tend to have a short shelf life, but there are few that manage to keep them around indefinitely. In many cases, users will simply forget about a previously uploaded file, or have no more use for it. To help give these orphaned files a second life is FilesTube, a search engine that monitors files that have recently been uploaded to a handful of file-sharing sites and makes them easily searchable. While the files aren't in any way hosted to FilesTube, the service acts as a middleman to point you to where … Read more

A few weeks ago I had the chance to ask Dave Merkel, vice president of products for Mandiant, a digital forensics company, if there was a point where investigators say "well, that's the best we can do." Apparently a lot of cybercrime cases do hit a brick wall. Merkel said it was a one-in-a-hundred or one-in-two-hundred chance that investigators get the kind of resolution that results in someone's arrest.

"The big challenge is--and this is still true today--there is no Internet equivalent to a local cop or local police agency. You work with actual local … Read more

Windows is hyper-secure. Just ask Microsoft.

But if you ask people outside Redmond, like Beau Butler, who demonstrated a massive hole in Microsoft's Windows security last week, things aren't so rosy, as The Register reports.

Microsoft knows about the flaw and spent the Thanksgiving holiday trying to fix the error, as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald:

The flaw is an old one, first exposed and apparently fixed more than five years ago. But it appears Microsoft's fix was only partially effective. [GASP!]… Read more

McAfee announced plans on Tuesday to acquire ScanAlert in deal worth approximately $51 million in cash.

And what is McAfee looking to get for its money? For starters, it'll snap up ScanAlert's Hacker Safe Web site security certification service, bolster its own SiteAdvisor security-rating system, and become the keeper of ScanAlert's proverbial "good housekeeping" seal for sites seeking to reassure customers that they are conducting safe online transactions.

The acquisition, expected to close in the first quarter, calls for integrating ScanAlert's e-commerce security certification service into McAfee's SiteAdvisor system. McAfee last year acquired SiteAdvisor, … Read more

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:59 a.m. PDT.

Steve Jobs made it official Wednesday morning: third-party applications are coming to the iPhone.

Apple's CEO posted another of his open letters to the world Wednesday on Apple's Hot News section of its Web site, confirming reports that a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone will be released to developers next year. It's coming in February, rather than January as reported, but application developers and iPhone owners will probably be able to wait the extra month.

"We are excited about creating a … Read more

A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class.

AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn't work for the iPhone, and it's only available for iPod Touch owners who are using Intel-based Macs. I don't have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I'm unable to test whether it actually works, but some users on MacRumors.com reported that … Read more

From time to time, I'll post a brief summary of some interesting items I come across during the day that I don't have time to call out in more detail. If you see anything interesting out there, drop me a line at tom dot krazit at cnet dot com. Take that, you e-mail harvesters.

LEGAL DEPARTMENT: There's some news about a couple of items that will soon await new Apple General Counsel Daniel Cooperman. Information Week notes that the company has been sued over the iPhone--again--this time by a man claiming that Apple is breaking … Read more

If you happened to visit the official Web site for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the weekend, you may have found its signature list of news releases swapped for an antiwar message in red capital letters.

"Hacked By kerem125 M0sted and Gsy That is CyberProtest Hey Ysrail and Usa dont kill children and other people Peace for ever No war" was the line repeating itself over and over on the affected pages, according to published reports and screenshots taken by bloggers. The perpetrators appear to have used a well-known and highly preventable technique called SQL injection, which … Read more