Ed Oswald

The three students were set to highlight security holes in the automated fare collection system used by the city's transit service, at a security conference on Sunday.

Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan, and Alessandro Chiesa were set to give the talk at the DEFCON Conference in Las Vegas (PDF of full presentation available here from MIT). The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority complained that the students were going to show attendees how to exploit the hole, without first giving it a chance to fix the problem.

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In a Texas court case, the recording industry group may be forced to accept a lower penalty per song as part of an "innocent infringement" defense by one defendant.

Whitney Harper, a college-aged woman, had previously admitted to copyright infringement through the use of the Kazaa P2P system when she was 16. However, unlike other defendants who had plead guilty, her lawyers are providing an interesting defense.

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The presumptive Democratic nominee for President said over the weekend that subscribers to his text messaging list would be the first to find out his vice presidential choice.

Alerting users of such important news via text is only the latest way Barack Obama has turned his back on political conventions. Typically, such an announcement comes during a carefully staged rally or campaign event. While such an event may still happen, it surely wouldn't have the suspense of other campaigns.

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CEO Steve Jobs said that nearly 60 million applications have been downloaded, generating about $1 million in sales per day for the company.

Obviously with an average selling price of 50 cents -- and the minimum charge for an application being 99 cents -- a large portion of iPhone applications downloaded through the Apps Store have been free. Even so, the number is quite impressive.

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Last week, Congress sent letters to Internet platform providers expressing concern over targeted advertising. Now those letters have resulted in action from at least one company, which will now enable users to opt-out.

As part of its new privacy policy announced this afternoon, Yahoo will give its users a choice as to choose whether to opt-out of the company's targeted advertising across its properties. It is already offering its users an option to opt-out of similar ads served by third-party networks.

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Three French journalists have been shown the exit from the yearly hacking confab after it was discovered they were hacking into the press room's Wi-Fi network.

Dominique Jouniot, Marc Brami, and Mauro Israel of the French IT publication Global Security Magazine are being accused of the hack. The magazine had been a sponsor of the conference, however organizers said they had ended the partnership as a result of the actions.

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Armin Heinrich, the developer of the 'I Am Rich' application that sold for $999.99 and does essentially nothing, isn't sure why his submission was pulled from the App Store as it was done without warning.

Eight people are said to have downloaded the program, including six in the US, one in Germany and another in France during the day it was live. Using the App Store's revenue split, Heinrich would have made nearly $5,600 in revenues from an program that essentially does nothing.

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11:10 am EDT August 8, 2008 - Another technical writer has disagreed with author Jonathan Zdziarski's and the media's initial suppositions about the whether the list he discovered on his 3G iPhone truly is a blacklist-in-waiting.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that its a Core Location blacklist, and that the "clbl" in the called URL stands for exactly that. Applications who use that portion of the iPhone code must follow some very strict rules for privacy reasons.

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7:18 pm EDT August 7, 2008 - In a statement this afternoon which Valleywag ran in its entirety, a representative of BitTorrent called allegations that the company laid off most of its sales and marketing department "inaccurate," "irresponsible journalism," and "outright false."

However, the statement did say that employees were laid off. "Contrary to published reports, we reduced less than 20% of our team and those impacted were distributed across our organization, rather than focused on a single department," stated BitTorrent representative Lily Lin. "Also contrary to published reports, the layoffs were unrelated to any ongoing discussions to divest a portion of our business...While it is our policy to not comment on rumors, the company has indeed been involved in strategic discussions with potential partners who are interested in the BitTorrent online store. These discussions continue."

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Tests by The Times of London indicate that new passports aimed at curbing forgeries and claimed to be unhackable can be cloned and pass as legitimate documents.

Officials who had been pushing for adoption of the new microchip-equipped passports lauded them as a way to cut down on terrorism. Under the old paper-only system, the documents could easily be forged.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched the Coders' Rights Project at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, aiming to give protection to those developers who may be hindered in their research by threats of legal action.

Most of the group's work seems focused on protecting researchers' rights to reverse engineer software to see how it operates, as well as continuing to allow security researchers to publicize vulnerabilities in today's software.

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Confirming about six months of speculation, the search giant said Wednesday it had launched a music search feature on its Chinese site with partner Top100.cn.

Rumors of a tie-up first appeared in early February in The Wall Street Journal, and later it was rumored that Top100 had signed a deal with Google. Wednesday's news confirms that speculation.

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The maker of Flash and the leading security lab said earlier this week that a worm first discovered last Thursday is being spread through social networks disguised as a update to Flash Player.

Adobe says there is no update. The worms, dubbed Koobface.a and Koobface.b by security firm Kaspersky, spread themselves through leaving comments and messages on Facebook and MySpace, which are sent to friends of an infected user.

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Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes confirmed yesterday that his company will split its Internet division into two components, while stopping short of spinning either off or selling them as was expected.

The split, expected to be completed by early next year, may make it easier for Time Warner to sell either or both units, or to spin off those units into separate entities. While AOL's dial-up business has been the target of most of the sell-off speculation, AOL may also get rid of its advertising business as well.

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While Apple's release notes only mention "bug fixes," early updaters are noting improvements to the second major release of the iPhone software.

Many have complained that the new iPhone software overall has been slow, in some cases taking five seconds or more for applications to load. Early indications are that some of this has been addressed.

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