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Lettuce is useful for a lot of things but its presence in the world of gadgets is sadly limited for some reason. The lactuca sativa – we know our Latin on here and we don’t mind showing off now and then either – is great for making your burgers slightly less unhealthy and, well, that’s probably about it really. It’s just as well then that some crazed gadget maker decided that the time was right to make a lettuce based product. To understand what this gadget is about we need to understand what a burglar would and wouldn’t...

Is there anything more annoying in the modern world than the string of passwords we need to remember to check our mail, look at our bank accounts or do pretty much anything else online? Sure, global warming, overpopulation, the financial crisis and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are all pretty worrying. However, none of that seems so important when we are faced with the problem of trying to remember yet another one of our passwords. Use Your Body Not Your Mind The good news is that our old friends at Google are here to help us. They...

Users who receive an email from the Apple Store that seems to be a billing statement may have to think twice before they reply because chances are it is a new form of phishing scam. According to security firm Sophos, the latest phishing attack appears to fool computer users with Apple accounts to give attackers their account information. “With more and more people having Apple IDs (used by millions for purchasing software from the Mac or iPhone App stores, or downloading music and movies from iTunes) it’s inevitable that criminals...

In a similar incident that ravaged Sony’s PlayStation Network earlier this year, a list of usernames and their corresponding passwords of Xbox Live accounts, Microsoft’s gaming network, has been posted online. According to tech news site PC Magazine, the software giant has downplayed the data dump, where 90 Xbox Live gamertags were posted on Pastebin.com. Microsoft said that it is only a “minor phishing incident,” not a big network breach, unlike what happened to the PlayStation Network. “We do not have any...

Last week, social networking site Facebook has announced that around 600,000 accounts get hacked in one day. The company then decided to add the “Trusted Friends” feature, a new security feature that will help prevent attacks that allows users to choose 3 to 5 friends that they can trust. Now, a hacker group warned that this may actually backfire. The Hackers Online Club said that the social network’s “Trusted Friends” can fail if the victim is fooled into accepting accounts from the hacker as friends. Facebook...

A new malware that targets Apple Mac OS computers has been discovered, and packs a double whammy: it uses the system’s graphics processing unit (GPU) to mine for Bitcoins, and it spies on the user. Security experts at Sophos said that the malware, named DevilRobber (also known as OSX/Miner-D), comes with copies of Mac OS X image editing app GraphicConverter ver. 7.4 that are uploaded to torrent sites and other file-sharing networks. “If your Mac computer was infected by the malware, the first thing you might notice is performance...

Micro blogging site Twitter has launched in June the t.co URL shortener and began formatting links that are 20 characters long or greater. Now, the service has announced that the program will be expanded to reformat all posted links in the future. “Tens of millions of links are tweeted on Twitter each day,” said the developers from Twitter in a post in its official blog. “Wrapping these shared links helps Twitter protect users from malicious content while offering useful insights on engagement. All links submitted within...

A computer virus has infected the United States Air Force’s Reaper and Predator drones, logging every keystroke of the pilots as they remotely fly missions over warzones, including Afghanistan. The virus was first detected around two weeks ago by the U.S. Military’s Host-Based Security System. Even though it has been detected, it did not cause massive panic and did not prevent pilots at Creech Air Force base from flying their missions. According to reports, there have not been any incidents of classified data that has been...

Security researchers at Trend Micro have identified a virus for the Android operating system, whose makers are using blogs as a redundancy and update mechanism. The security firm named the trojan “ANDROIDS_ANSERVER.A,” which poses as an e-book reader and is distributed to unofficial app stores in Chinese websites. These app stores are very popular in the country because mobile phone owners do not have access yet to Google’s Android Market. Once a user downloads and installs the app to their smartphones, it connects to...

Social networking site Facebook is now ramping up its fight against annoying and harmful scam attacks by checking outbound links for malware and viruses. According to a report by The Next Web, by using a system developed by security company Websense, the service will scan links as a precaution to protect users. “A platform as popular as Facebook is naturally a target for attackers,” wrote Websense on its blog. “We have been working with Facebook and their security teams for a number of years in order to keep their users...