The folks over at Humble Bundle are back again with another selection of titles. This time around, four award-winning titles from indie developer Introversion are up for grabs at a price as high or as low as you want it to be.

For the price of your choosing, you’ll receive Darwinia and Multiwinia in addition to the developer’s classic hacker-themed action titles Uplink and DEFCON. If you pay the average, which is sitting at around $3.58 as of writing, you’ll also be able to receive Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe at no extra charge.

As usual with these Humble Bundles, you can choose to split up where your payments go as you see fit. If you want to donate all of it to Child’s Play Charity, you can do that. If you want to donate to the developers, you can do that. If you want it split up between the developers, charity and the team behind Humble Bundle, you can do that, too.

As an added bonus of sorts, Introversion has also included two tech demos. The first of which is the Subversion City tech demo, which demonstrates the use of procedural generation to craft detailed city environments, and the second of which is a tech demo involving destructible buildings made up of voxels.

If you’re interested in purchasing the bundle, you’ve got two weeks from now to do so. Head over to this link to get started.

Humble Introversion Bundle on sale now, offers Darwinia, DEFCON and more is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hacker convention DEFCON has attracted some of the world’s best computer hackers, security experts, cyber-criminals and all around computer geeks since 1993 and now the convention, which is populated mostly with adults, will witness DEFCON kids for computer enthusiasts aged eight to sixteen years old.

During DEFCON Kids members will learn some basic skills, such as how to prevent spying over wireless networks, how to open master locks and how to find exposed code on Google, they’ll even learn how to break codes.

Promising students are expected to be offered jobs, just consider the event to be a U.S. government fueled recruiting assignment before hackers reach their prime.

Government officials believe that hiring workers at a very young age will keep them away from trouble-making cyber activities by giving them cash to perform “white-hat” jobs for the government.

Is it still called child labor if a super genius eight-year-old is sitting in a bunker somewhere cracking code for uncle Sam?

[via Ubergizmo]

DEFCON Kids: The Next LulzSec Could Be Run By Eight Year Olds is a post from: The Inquisitr

I use to tell software and web clients who where concerned about their security to head over to the nearest high school and start asking around for the best hacker in the school – then hire them to break your stuff. It doesn’t matter how good of a developer you are, web or desktop, you will always miss stuff and in most cases you are the worst one’s to try and bust the security of your own systems.

Well it seems that the US government is taking the same kind of advise to heart. After all if you want to make sure your networks are safe hiring the best of those who can slice through even the so-called toughest security like a knife through butter only makes sense. So the hiring of Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent, the founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences makes total sense.

According to a post by Elinor Mills of cnet’s Security blog Moss was genuinely humbled by the offer

Moss, who is genuinely humble, said he was "fantastically honored and excited to contribute" to the HSAC and not concerned with losing any street cred among what some would call his fan base. He did concede that his new position would give him an unfair advantage in Defcon’s "Spot The Fed" contest in which people win prizes for successfully outing undercover government agents.

Not everyone though thought as highly of Moss’ swearing in today

Moss "is a great crowd pleaser" and "he’s just bad enough for them to say ‘we’re crossing the ranks,’" said journalist and threat analyst Adrian Lamo, who served two years of probation for breaking into computer networks. "But the reality is he’s as corporate as hiring someone out of Microsoft."

You want cyber security hire a top notch hacker is a post from: The Inquisitr

A federal judge has ruled against the students’ wishes and ordered them to stay silent, upholding a temporary restraining order requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The MBTA sprung into action days before the students were set to reveal their findings at last weekend’s DEFCON 16 hackers’ conference.

The students say they found a simple way anyone could modify the cards used to pay for rides on Boston’s “T” subway system. In an nutshell, they discovered that the cards didn’t connect to a central database and didn’t have secure digital signatures — so adding hundreds of dollars in value to them wouldn’t take much.

The MBTA says it needs time to look over the data and decide how to handle it. Of course, in filing the complaint, the paperwork detailing the flaw made its way onto the Internet — so it’s all really a moot point.

That’s what makes it so surprising, then, that the judge refused to lift the restraining order and let the students discuss their discovery. Anyone can already find the information — and, on top of that, the students say they offered to give the MBTA their findings in advance. (The MBTA, for its part, says it received only a summarized version and wanted to see the whole presentation.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for the students’ side, but so far, it’s been a losing battle. Up next, the students will have to give the judge more details about the flaw they found. He’ll then rule on Tuesday whether to extend the restraining order or let them finally speak.

Is it the students’ responsibility to hold the MBTA’s hand and walk it through what they found? Seems to me that the kids have already gone above and beyond any obligation they might have had. Technically, if the MBTA can prove that the information would cause it harm if released, it’ll have the law on its side — though it does make you wonder where the line lies and why when it comes to this sort of case.

Subway Hacking Case: Who’s Out of Line? is a post from: The Inquisitr