phone – Crasstalk

Droid Does: Getting the Most out of your Android Device (Part 3)

Part Three: Android Advanced

As Android becomes more and more popular, people are increasingly looking for advice on which phones to buy, which apps to download, and what settings to use to optimize their Android experience. Lucky for you guys, I’m here to help. I’ve had my Android phone (a Verizon Droid Incredible) for almost a year now, and I’ve done just about everything you can do to one.

This is the third in a series of three articles, each covering a different aspect of using and playing with your Android device. This article will cover advanced level Android topics, specifically ROMs and Theming. Continue reading →

The Lost Art of the Prank Call

I was awoken at 3:45am this morning by a prank call. It would usually be work calling and I should have answered it except that I’m not on call. Since I didn’t recognize the number calling it was probably some off shore developer that really thought his issue was urgent. I didn’t answer it thinking that if it was important they would call back. They did not.

I awoke this morning to the guilt of knowing I had let some poor Argentinian, Brazilian or Manilan person down. I checked my Google Voice for the transcription. I wasn’t expecting much since they probably left the message in poorly pronounced English. (that is still far superior to my Hindi) Indeed the transcript was useless. Continue reading →

Organized Hacking Contest: Pwn2Own

Hacking is usually an ‘underground’ sport, something nerdy Eastern Europeans do in their mother’s basements. The only time a hacker would come together to meet another hacker would be on an IRC channel. Not so anymore, with conventions like Defcon, Blackhat, and CanSecWest.

CanSecWest has an interesting contest. A hacking contest. The targets are the most common browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. A new feature this year is the addition of smartphone hacking: Apple iOS, Windows Phone 7, Google Android, and BlackBerry OS. In total there is $125,000 in cash prizes. Another cool aspect of the competition: if you hack the computer running the target browser, you get to keep the laptop.

Like any good contest, there are the favorites. Charlie Miller, a software analyst from Baltimore has won the contest 3 times before. In 2009 Miller took down Safari running on an Apple in 10 seconds! He scored $10,000 and a laptop for his troubles. “Nils” (The contest allows anonymous entries) – a German computer science student, won last year, cracking Firefox, Safari, and Chrome in less than 10 minutes. In 2009, Nils broke the encryption for IE 8 the day before it was released, netting a new Sony laptop and $5k. George Hotz, the 21 year old who broke the Playstation 3’s copy protection (not to mention being the first person to ever jailbreak the iPhone) will be competing this year.

The biggest challenge this year is Google’s Chrome browser. Chrome runs in a ‘sandbox’ mode in Windows (basically insulating bugs in Chrome from affecting the underlying Windows system.) Google has put up $20,000 if someone can break Chrome’s sandbox mode in the first day.

Contests like this just aren’t cool in the computer security world. They provide vendors with information on how to improve the security of their products. When someone hacks a browser/device they also share technical information on how they did it with the contest organizers, TippingPoint. Details on the hacks aren’t released to the public until the vendor has time to fix the bug.

Pwn2Own runs during the CanSecWest conference, being held in Vancouver CA between March 9-11 2011.