In March 2008, the Department of Defense supposedly published a memo about a perceived national security threat. The target: Wikileaks a site that had previously put out sensitive information about Abu Ghraib. More

It used to be that jailbreaking your iPhone was a long, involved process , but worth it for the freedom . We’ve reached a new age, though, where emancipating your phone is as simple as plugging in an iDongle. Liberty! More

We’ve come across plenty of robots that were controlled by phones before, but usually those phones were being controlled by human hands. Some California hackers, however, are building bots that put Android to work for their robo-brainpower. Their first creation, the TruckBot, uses a HTC G1 as a brain and has a chassis that they made for $30 in parts. It’s not too advanced yet—it can use the phone’s compass to head in a particular direction—but they’re working on incorporating the bot more fully with the phone and the Android software.

You’re probably relatively confident in your various machines’ integrity against hackers. Repeat Pwn2Own hacking competition victor Charlie Miller would like you to know that you’re wrong—especially if you have Flash. In an interview with OneITSecurity , Miller picks off questions about hacking and security with just enough ease and nonchalance to make me queasy. Like, you know how Mac OS exploits are supposed to be tougher to root out than Windows exploits? Not quite! And they’re both vulnerable: Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default).

Take a Linksys running custom firmware , tap into the hardware to power a circuit controlling the locks, and SSH into the router with custom iPhone and Android apps to flip the circuit. Easy, right? [ Sunlight via Make via Engadget ]

In today’s Remainders: solutions! Solutions for distilling water vapor into drinkable water; keeping your lunch warm with only a USB port; beaming an entire Springsteen album to your phone in under 10 seconds, and more. Wossy Jonathan Ross, a UK television personality, isn’t the first person you’d expect to deliver the latest news on Microsoft’s Project Natal, but we’ll take what we can get. Apparently he’s had some time to play around with the system and likes what it has to offer: OK. Before bed. Natal on X Box impressive. Not quite there yet i think but tye have til october and if they get it right…skys the limit

Even as US authorities are getting pretty damn sure who’s behind the high-level hacking attempts from the other month , and that they were launched from the Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, China’s all “Nuh uh, eff you guys.” I mean, that really is the essence of their rebuttal. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said that “Reports that these attacks came from Chinese schools are totally groundless and the accusation of Chinese government involvement is also irresponsible and driven by ulterior motives.” And that’s that, I’m sure . [ The Hill ]

U.S. authorities have tracked down the man who wrote the code used in the hacker attack on Google . He’s a “freelance security consultant” in China, and his participation makes it even harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement. The man’s role was an oblique one: while he wrote the code that took advantage of a security hole in Internet Explorer , he himself didn’t do any actual hacking. But according to the Financial Times, the Chinese government has “special access” to his work: “If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the US analyst said

Investigators at the NSA have tracked the huge online attacks that Google used as their reason for leaving the Chinese market to two universities, one with ties to the Chinese military. If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources. Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

At least two of them sure seem to think so! Jailbreak scenesters Sherif Hashim and iH8sn0w are both reporting bannings —by Apple ID , strangely—following their latest hacks. Is Apple attacking jailbreak from the bottom up? Maybe . Both Sherif Hashim and iH8sn0w were behind the discovery of recent iPhone exploits, and both are currently receiving a “This Apple ID has been banned for security purposes” notification whenever they try to log into the (actual) App Store to download an app. But.