Tatum and Denim blog

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

According to an AP article released today, Diebold, one of the prominent makers of the recently embattled electronic voting machines, says that the company has failed to make its e-voting business profitable. If you’ll recall, Diebold machines have repeatedly been the target of various hacks, many of which have proven the machine to be susceptible to intrusion from outside elements and thus unreliable from a security standpoint. The company has reduced its revenue outlook by $120 million, and has plans to allow its e-voting unit to operate more independently, giving the team its own board of directors and possibly a new management structure. To complete the overhaul of the ailing division, the company will also change the name of the branch from “Diebold Election Systems” to the starkly different “Premier Election Systems.” Diebold blames the “rapidly evolving political uncertainties and controversies surrounding state and jurisdiction purchases of electronic voting systems,” for much of its problems… as opposed to the fact that they currently produce faulty, unprotected, and unreliable machines.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

The fact that some individuals still have any level of faith left in Diebold is quite baffling, but in case you were looking for just one more episode to dash your hopes of a hack-proof voting machine, open wide. As fate would have it, a fresh study in Florida has found that even optical scan voting systems “can be hacked into,” which is causing quite a bit of concern considering that touchscreen alternatives aren’t exactly an option in the Sunshine State. Reportedly, the document noted that “official memory cards in the optical scan machines could easily be exchanged with ones altering the vote count,” and it was also stated that Diebold must “deal with the flaws” by August 17th. Yeah, we’re sure it’s all over that.

[Thanks, Josh]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

In a move which will bolster your undoubtedly high sensations of “faith” in the US voting process, a group of University of California researchers have just hacked their way through security on nearly every voting machine certified by the state of California. According to Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who initiated these tests, the team was able to “bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested.” The group, which was sanctioned by the state, was given full access to the machines, as well as their source code and manuals, leaving some to argue that the test doesn’t accurately depict how vulnerable the machines are — because we all know how hard it is for hackers to get their hands on that kind of stuff. The report will affect whether or not Bowen approves the systems for use throughout California in its upcoming presidential primaries. It looks like 2008 is going to be an exciting year, to say the least.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

In 2005, Greek authorities discovered a plot hatched and executed by unknown sources which allowed the tapping of wireless phones on the Vodaphone network belonging to the country’s Prime Minister and other top officials, making it one of the furthest reaching covert infiltrations of a government in history. A recent report from IEEE Spectrum shows that the tap was made possible by a 6,500 line piece of code called a rootkit, the first-ever to be embedded in a phone switch’s OS. The complex hack took advantage of aging phone systems by disabling transaction logs on calls and allowing call monitoring on four switches within the teleco’s computers, thus sending the call to another phone for monitoring (similar to a legal wiretap). The spies covered their tracks by creating patches on the system which routed the calls around logging software which would have alerted admins, and were only discovered when they tried to update their software. The case clearly exposes holes in call security amongst providers (due largely in part to outdated systems), and suggests the possibility that this kind of thing could easily happen again… to you!

[Via textually]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

To no one’s surprise, hackers have been hard at work on the iPhone since day one, and it looks like they’re already turning up a few vulnerabilities. As The Register reports, the folks at Errata Security seem to have been the most successful to date, finding not one, but two “bugs” with the phone. The first is apparently similar to one of the bugs recently found in the Windows version of Safari which, in this case, allows someone so inclined to take control of the browser and run applications by causing a buffer overflow. The second, somewhat simpler flaw Errata discovered is that the device can apparently be easily locked up when exposed to a so-called Bluetooth “fuzzer.” Despite that, the Errata folks say that they think the iPhone “is inherently more secure than competing smartphones,” largely due to its dependence on iTunes and its ability to push out security updates faster than carriers are able to. As The Register points out, some intrepid “researchers” also recently discovered the passwords required to give an application root access although, as of yet, no one’s actually found anything useful to do with them.

[Thanks, Jags]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Storage

As if TiVo honestly needed any more reasons to fear for its life, it looks like the forthcoming version of the General Public License could actually do more “harm to its business.” It the firm’s most recent regulatory filing, it warned that the third version of the aforementioned license “would prohibit manufacturers of consumer appliances that use open source software from implementing technical measures designed to prevent user modifications,” essentially giving the TiVo hackers of the world even fewer hoops to jump through. TiVo fears that if GPLv3 is widely adopted, it may be “unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU / Linux operating system into its software,” which would obviously affect the outfit in a negative fashion. Notably, Novell has also spoken up about how this latest document could “disrupt its Linux distribution partnership with Microsoft,” but unless something major happens rather hastily, the Free Software Foundation reportedly expects GPLv3 to be published sometime this summer.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: GPS

We hate to break it to you, but that oh-so-reliable GPS system that you simply obey each day could eventually lead you down a dark, perilous path. No, we’re not referring to the blind faith drivers who throw caution common sense to the wind and drive directly into sandpiles and bodies of water, but a new discovery has found that the unencrypted data that’s beamed to drivers everyday via RDS-TMC navigation systems could be undermined with relative ease. Andrea Barisani, chief security engineer with Italian consultancy Inverse Path, has claimed that the wireless signals could not only be intercepted, but incorrect directions could actually be used to lead motorists into a trap, direct traveling competitors away from a sales presentation, or create a massive gridlock by instructing the weary working crowd to all take the same “detour” home. It was noted that some firms are already looking into more secure methods of delivering such critical information, and considering the lessons we’ve already learned about GPS-addicted drivers, the updates can’t come soon enough.

[Thanks, Andrea B.]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

Even though there’s no love lost between Sony and Nintendo fanboys, the two ancient rivals may soon have one thing in common: an ongoing battle with their respective deities over modding their precious consoles for homebrew. PSP owners are well aware of the epic back-and-forth struggle between hackers like Fanjita and Dark_Alex and the obviously-frustrated firmware programmers over at Sony, and now DigiTimes (they of the rather dubious Apple rumor track record, mind you) is reporting that Wii lovers may soon be faced with yet another round of modchip-nullifying hardware revisions from Nintendo. The good news is that — as usual — the altered circuit layout shouldn’t thwart modders for more than a few weeks at most, even if Nintendo decides to move over to so-called ball grid array IC packaging according to “providers of Wii modification services in Taiwan.” Still, if these rumors turn out to be true, it would seem that Nintendo is pretty committed to tripping up the Wiinjas and TeamCyclopses of the world, and making your choice of their wares just a little more difficult.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

Everyone enjoys a good Xbox hack, but they’re not so fun when the tables are turned and it’s your Live account that’s been commandeered by crooks — who are supposedly draining your credit card while you’re stuck on the sidelines with a duplicate, unusable Gamertag. While it’s not surprising that hackers would hijack online accounts to snatch valuable personal info, the question being raised in forums and now in the media is how Microsoft has been dealing / plans to deal with these breaches. The company first admitted that “there have [recently] been reports of fraudulent activity and account theft taking place” on Live when contacted by CNET, and went on to say that it is “actively investigating all reports of fraudulent behavior and theft.” However, Major Nelson is now reporting that Redmond has found “no evidence of any compromise of the security of the Xbox Live Network or Bungie.net,” and is attributing all of the recent incidents to “malicious users…attempting to draw personal information from unsuspecting users.” It’s hard to imagine that the uptick in fraud revealed to CNET is due solely to an increase in gullible gamers, but unless Microsoft plans on tightening security, all you can really do is continue to exercise the usual precautions or cancel your account and get your MMO fix from Yahoo! Bingo.

[Via Joystiq]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!