Security

A game of cat and mouse: The iPhone, Steve Jobs and an army of blind hackers

With Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers, the question that must be asked is how will Apple try to defeat the hackers: Frequent and disruptive software updates, or lawsuits? Will Apple risk losing its most frequently (ab)used legal tool, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to try to punish the developers of the iPhone unlocking tools?

The wait is over. After being teased over the past few weeks with rumors that Apple would turn a blind eye to iPhone hacking or *gasp* even encourage it, the news is in and it ain'… Read more

Tor anonymity server admin arrested

In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Although he was released shortly afterwards, information about the arrest had been kept quiet until his lawyers were able to get the charges dropped.

Tor is a privacy tool designed to allow users to communicate and browse anonymously on the Internet. It's endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists. Tor provides anonymous Web-browsing … Read more

Will Apple open the new iPod Touch to developers?

Apple upset a lot of developers when they released their much-hyped iPhone to the public as a locked-down, proprietary device. Developers could write custom Web-based applications, but those coders salivating at the thought of creating and distributing more heavy-duty, downloadable applications were left out in the cold.

Conjuring up the 40-year-old ghost of AT&T, Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that the reason for this was because they didn't want poorly coded apps to damage AT&T/Cingular's fragile wireless network. He told Newsweek, "You don't want your phone to be an open platform,&… Read more

Is Comcast's BitTorrent filtering violating the law?

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I'm a cybersecurity Ph.D. student and take classes in the Indiana University law school, but this in no way makes me a legal expert. CaveatlLector.

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped--or worse, blocked. TorrentFreak recently reported that Comcast, a major U.S. cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. Many forbid customers from running e-mail servers or Web servers, … Read more