John Lister

Microsoft is offering a huge reward to encourage tech savvy users to come up with new security ideas for its operating system. The company is running a contest for users to create "a novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the ... exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities." Put in simple terms, that means the winning entries have to halt malware that takes advantage of exploits in computer memory. An exploit of this nature is an extremely common source of security breach. It works by taking advantage of the fact that computer memory is used to serve multiple programs, often ... (view more)

Cable TV network Cinemax has launched a streaming video app on the iPad that has raised questions about whether the company's more risque content violates Apple's strict rules about mature subject matter. The app is an iPad version of the Cinemax ... "Max Go" website that allows subscribers to the TV channels to watch movies on the Apple device. It includes a special section known as "After Dark" that includes content normally restricted to late-night viewing on the channels that, although not explicit, is certainly suggestive and contains images. Two of the prominent movies available ... (view more)

The PC is 30 years old this month. But IBM, the company that established the system, believes the PC will soon be outdated. Until 1981, the "personal computer" was simply another term, like microcomputer, for any machine that was small enough and ... cheap enough that consumers could own one at home rather than it being a purely business tool. At the time, there were many different architectures for computers, meaning rival models weren't just different in design, but were largely incompatible. IBM's 5150 machine, however, changed all that. Also known as the IBM Personal Computer, the ... (view more)

Hackers calling themselves members of the Anonymous group claim they intend to take down Facebook on November 5th, 2011. The threat was originally made in a video posted on YouTube several weeks ago, which now has more than a million viewers. Those ... who posted the video have since attempted to get other members of Anonymous to back the attack. The video clip complains about Facebook's handling of personal data and its lack of privacy controls. It also attacks the site for allegedly handing over information to governments in the Middle East and North Africa. (Source: youtube.com ) It's ... (view more)

Social networking has been blamed for helping promote rioting and looting in the United Kingdom. But the culprit is not, as some have assumed, Twitter. Riots broke out in the Tottenham area of London this past Saturday after a protest about the ... shooting of a local man by police two days earlier. The initial riot has been followed by numerous outbreaks of violence and looting in other areas of the city. Twitter Users Ahead of Media in Reporting Violence The events have been discussed extensively on Twitter, with local residents reporting on incidents before they are covered by mainstream media ... (view more)

A new study suggests that computer data centers might not be using as much power as previously estimated. It appears that power use is still rising, but at a slower pace than in the past. The report comes from Jonathon Koomey, a Stanford University ... professor that works at the Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory. He's put together figures on the growth of data centre electricity use around the world between 2005 and 2010, which follows on from a previous report he produced for the period from 2000 to 2005. A data center is a facility that houses special computers known as servers. Rather ... (view more)

Microsoft has released test editions of its next update to the Windows Phone operating system (OS). It should mean some of the changes will be hitting new and existing phones relatively soon. The update has been codenamed 'Mango' and is the largest ... set of changes to the Windows Phone 7 OS yet, though the company hasn't yet decided to officially dub it version 2.0. There are two slightly different versions of the update in circulation at the moment. One has gone to phone manufacturers and is designed to allow them to test it on both existing and forthcoming handsets to spot any potential ... (view more)

A ten-year-old has revealed a flaw in mobile-based video games that could potentially expose these devices to a security risk. The discovery came when the youngster got bored with the pace of farming games. The self-described hacker, who has not ... revealed her real name and prefers to be known publicly as CyFi, had been playing games similar to Farmville, which allow players to set up virtual farms and often either compete or co-operate with online friends. However, partly for realism and partly to keep gamers playing, it can often take hours before planting virtual seeds leads to crops growing ... (view more)

Microsoft's online services division, which includes the Bing search engine, has lost more than $2.5 billion in the past year. But the company is continuing to fight to attract search users by adding special features for mobile users. In its press ... release covering financial performance, Microsoft proudly announces that revenue from the online services edition grew by 17 per cent in the last three months of the year, and 15 per cent over the year as a whole. Bing Revenue Still Far Below Expenses Unfortunately, what it doesn't mention in the main release, but is detailed in the full financial ... (view more)

Chinese officials have forced the closure of two bogus Apple Stores after they were exposed by a blogger. But the closure doesn't appear related to any trademark infringement, and three other similar suspected knock-off stores remain open. There is ... a key difference between these stores and those traders who offer counterfeit Western products: in this case, it's the store itself that is posing as a legitimate Apple outlet. The stores came to international attention after an Internet blog post by a woman who lives in Kunming, a city in Southern China. She spotted the store in the city and at ... (view more)