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A group of hacktivists acting under the banner, " Anonymous ," has warned a church with a controversial history that unspoken retribution will follow it continues its practice of inflammatory protests. In an open letter to the Westboro Baptist Church, Anonymous has put the anti-gay, fundamentalist church on notice that "the damage incurred will be irreversible," and that "neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover." The Westboro Baptist Church is led by Rev. Fred Phelps. It has drawn particular attention for carrying out anti-gay protests at funerals of military servicemen with signs celebrating the deaths of the soldiers with signs like " God Hates the USA " or " Thank God for 9/11. " The group operates a  website  with the URL godhatesfags.com. In its letter, Anonymous wrote the following: Open Letter to Westboro Baptist Church AN OPEN LETTER FROM ANONYMOUS February 16, 2011 TO THE CONGREGAN...

Following in the steps of the HTC Evo before it, the Motorola Atrix 4G has been hacked to give root privileges before the phone is even available to buy. In more evidence that Android hackers are frequently out-pacing the creators of the phones themselves, the third post in the xda-developers thread where the root was announced was a half-sarcastic "why did it take so long?" Right now, this is more of an academic achievement than a practical one for two reasons. First, the actual steps to obtain root privileges haven't even been released to the public. Second, there is still a good chance that one of the main draws of rooted phones, custom ROMs, will be difficult to install thanks to an encrypted and locked bootloader. While rooting your phone is highly discouraged (as it's likely to cause an increased security risk, break all kinds of terms of service and make your carrier very unhappy) the speed of this announcement is nothing short of astounding. If the amount o...

A security researcher has released proof-of-concept code for an unpatched security vulnerability affecting all versions of Windows, prompting a warning from Microsoft that remote code execution attacks are theoretically possible. Details on the vulnerability were released on the Full Disclosure mailing list earlier this week and Microsoft followed up with two separate blog posts discussing the ramifications of the problem and suggesting workarounds until a patch can be created and released. According to Microsoft's Mark Wodrich, the vulnerability was identified in the BROWSER protocol and although all versions of Windows are vulnerable, the issue is more likely to affect server systems running as the Primary Domain Controller (PDC). "In environments following best practices, the BROWSER protocol should be blocked at the edge firewalls thus limiting attacks to the local network," Wodrich said. Wodrich provided technical confirmation of the buffer overrun vulnerability and expla...

An 'ethical' hacker demonstrates how one can break into the civic corporation's e-governance site and I P Gautam's official domain to access confidential info. The state government's websites are under threat of being hacked. A BCA student, who calls himself an 'ethical' hacker, demonstrated how it was possible to hack into the e-governance site of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and civic chief I P Gautam's official domain.  Falgun Rathod showed on his home PC how these websites are vulnerable to misuse, poking the bubble of the state government that prides itself in winning three National e-Governance Awards recently.  Rathod also demonstrated how one can access the balance sheet of all nagarpalikas in the state that use the double entry accounting system. He pointed out that one can easily update any file on the website or change the face of the websites by using defacer websites.  While checking the AMC website, the 20-year-old student came across the 'Administ...

The HTC HD Mini, also previously known as Photon, is pretty old as far as smartphones go--the Windows Mobile 6.5 phone was first released back in February 2010. So a XDA Developer member has given the cellphone a new lease of life by bringing Android and Linux OS to it. Forum member "Cotulla" managed to get the HD Mini running Android via the Haret Launcher, a file used commonly to boot Android on Windows Mobile phones. The ROM for the hack was created from similar HTC handset HTC Aria, which can be booted from a SD card. Add the files (Cotulla made a developer file and a user file, so pick your camp), launch Haret, and Android for HD Mini is yours! Sadly, the Linux OS is far from complete. Although the hack is up and running, it's not without it's problems. The battery driver doesn't work, and neither does the GSensor or WLAN. Some of the touchscreen buttons are also not perfectly aligned, so need a bit of work. Unfortunately, Cotulla is no longer working on...