Archive for February, 2012

When it comes to big companies and vulnerabilities in their systems, hackers can easily be ruled as the best paid freelancers ever. Google is just the latest to challenge hackers to put their minds to work to show vulnerabilities in the Chrome. And the incentive isn’t at all to be taken at ease. Google gives a $1 million incentive to hack their Chrome.

March 7 is the time for Google’s CanSecWest security conference and for its famous contest called Pwn2Own. Basically, hackers are invited to do their thing and then present vulnerabilities found in Google Chrome’s system. For that, the company will offer up to $1 million worth of monetary prizes.

As the Chromium blog writes, a Full Chrome exploit will bring the skilled hacker $60,000. Second place will take home $40,000 for a Partial Chrome exploit and last prize, the so called “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows/ other” will win $20,000.

Read more: http://www.dailygossip.org/google-gives-1-million-incentive-to-hack-chrome-2620

By David Murphy

A new report from the crash report analytics company Crittercism indicates that iOS apps tend to crash more than Android apps. But are the numbers truly indicative of an Apple issue, or are they typical of what one might see in the app landscape shortly after a major iOS release?

Crittercism’s crash survey analyzed more than 214 million different app launches between November and December of 2011 to determine the source of most app crashes. And, in doing so, the company came up with the statistic that more iOS apps crashed versus Android apps by around 162 million to 52 million – basically, three times as many iOS crashes.

But here’s the interesting part: Crittercism’s analysis took place just a few weeks after the launch of a major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5, and during the release of the incremental upgrade iOS 5.0.1. Go figure, then, that the company’s analysis of app crashes between December 1 and December 15 of 2011 indicates that crashes for apps installed on both iOS 5 and iOS 5.0.1 make up 32 percent of all recorded app problems.

“I expect as Ice Cream Sandwich just launched and the new Nexus S phone launched (during the study), we’ll expect the same situation to occur (with Android) as what happened (with iOS),” said Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy in an interview with Forbes.

Read more: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399852,00.asp