It isn’t very often that hackers are rewarded for their efforts outside of events like the HackDays held across Canada. But for two students in Belgrade, it looks like their devious efforts have paid off.

As Ars Technica reports, Ivan Petrović, 21, and Filip Stanisavljević, 20, hacked into an electronic billboard in a busy plaza in Belgrade, playing Space Invaders on the screen from their iPhones, and closed their brief demonstration with the message “Hacked4Fun.”

In the description on the YouTube video, the pair explain that they don’t consider themselves hackers in the negative light with which it has come to be associated. They say they were merely trying to draw attention to a security flaw common to these kinds of billboards and they contacted the owner to tell him what they had discovered.

[ Related: Split passwords proposed as way of evading hack attacks ]

The billboard owner reacted very positively to their actions. “This has never happened before, but we appreciate the fact

Read More »from Students hack billboard to play ‘Space Invaders,’ rewarded with iPads

(Getty Images)The election of Pope Francis I as the 266th Pontiff of the Catholic Church was a watershed media event this week.

Everyone interested in the Papal elections wanted to get a glimpse of the newly-elected Pope and find out everything they could about the new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics.

And, of course, there were also people who just wanted to cash in on the Pope's election in whatever way they could.

Want proof? It was reported within hours of the new Pope's election, over 600 domain names containing derivations of the Pontiff's name were snatched up by cyber squatters. These web addresses ranged from Popefrancisi.com, popefrancis.org and many others (although some buyers of domain names have been generous enough to just hand ownership rights over to the Vatican, no questions asked).

It was a surprising digital lapse on part of the Holy See, given that the Vatican has a notoriously labyrinthine policy about the Church's role in cyberspace.

Of course, the reasons for cyber

Read More »from Three ways ‘cyber squatting’ messes with your online experience

Facebook may be significantly larger than Twitter, but it is reportedly trying to take a page out of the Twitter handbook by allowing users to group conversations and search content.

Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal the social network is planning to incorporate a hashtag. TechCrunch reports it will become a part of Graph Search.

If you are unfamiliar with this feature, it allows users to follow or get involved in conversations by adding a "#" symbol before a keyword. For example, if you wanted the latest on the papal conclave this week you could just search for #newpope or #conclave and filter out some information you don't want to see. Also, if you were in St. Peter's Square and wanted people to see what it was like you would use one of those terms with the hashtag when sending out your tweet.

[ More Right Click: Samsung unveils Galaxy 4S with eye tracking ]

While the hashtag idea isn't owned by Twitter, the company did make it popular.

Photo sharing site

Read More »from Facebook reportedly planning to mimic Twitter with hashtags

After much hype, some leaks, a short delay, some cheesy jokes and a speech by the company's president, Samsung unboxed their new Galaxy S4 - a phone that comes with eye tracking.

The handset also has features such as dual view shooting, "smart scrolling and pausing, health tracking and a translator to break down language barriers.

They showed off the phone Thursday night at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

The phone looks very similar to the S3, but the back is straighter and it is a bit lighter. The Galaxy 4S is 130 grams and comes with a 5-inch, 1920 x 1080 display. The S3 only had a 4.8-inch screen.

[ Factbox: Galaxy 4S vs. iPhone5 ]

OS: Google Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean

Eye tracking: One of the neatest and most-anticipated features is the eye tracking. If you are watching a video and look away, the video will stop playing. The same technology allows you to scroll up and down or flip pages just by looking.

Camera: It comes with a 13 megapixel camera on the back and 2 megapixel

Read More »from Samsung unveils Galaxy S4 with eye tracking, better camera

It’s a sad day for those who still get their news through RSS feeds. Google has announced that the popular Google Reader application will be officially shut down as of July 1.

Well, perhaps not ‘popular.’ Use of Google Reader has had a steady decline, and as Google software engineer Alan Green explained in a post on the Google Reader blog, Google is eliminating products in order to improve user experience on the ones they will be focusing on.

For those not familiar with the product, Google Reader is an aggregator of RSS (rich site summary) feeds that allows people to get regular updates from web content they subscribe to. There’s widespread integration into many desktop email clients now, like Mail for Mac and Outlook for PC, but Google Reader has garnered quite a few fans who want their RSS feeds available online.

[ Related: Google to shut Reader web feed application, users vent ]

The demise of Google Reader is just one more product that Google will be discontinuing in an effort to

Read More »from Google Reader is going away, so here are some possible alternatives

It might seem like a small change, but the Twitterverse is making good use out of the new feature on the social network: line breaks.

Up until now, users had only one continuous line in which to share 140 characters. Now, if you use Twitter on the web, you can post a tweet with up to about 70 lines of text, according to TechCrunch.

[ Related: Twitter’s Vine: How to get the most out of the new six-second video sharing app ]

Sure, line breaks don’t sound nearly as exciting as some of the other developments on the horizon from Twitter, like its rumoured music discovery service after acquiring We Are Hunted, but for those creative types on Twitter, it’s a great way to transform those short messages into something pretty cool.

Twitter poets are going to get a kick out of it, for starters. Line breaks mean that your feed is likely to now be filled with an abundance of haikus.

There are still a few limitations with the service; for starters, when using the Twitter embed code, it

Read More »from Twitter now permitting line breaks for web and mobile clients

File image provided by Electronic Arts/Maxis (AP)It’s been a rough couple of weeks for SimCity developer Maxis (a division of Electronic Arts). After days of trying to get players access to the servers necessary for the always-online game, there’s now the suggestion by an unnamed insider and Maxis that the burdensome servers that have been the cause of so many headaches aren’t actually necessary.

According to an anonymous source interviewed by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the servers aren’t handling calculations for the non-social aspects of running the game. EA representative Lucy Bradshaw had told gaming news websites Polygon and Kotaku on a previous occasion that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers,” and it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” in order to run it in single player mode, RPS reports.

Several people have tested out playing the game offline, including one Kotaku writer, and found that the game currently will play for about 20 minutes before

Read More »from SimCity’s problems go from bad to worse as always-online servers called ‘unnecessary’

By now, most people know the basics of how to keep their private lives somewhat private on Facebook: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your boss to read, keep your privacy settings set to ‘Friends Only,’ et cetera et cetera. But could something as innocuous as the brands and celebrities you ‘Like’ on the social network give away some very personal information, too?

A new report says yes.

According to a paper published this week on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, your Facebook ‘Likes’ can give a clear indication of your IQ, the marital status of your parents and more.

“And you can extract it very accurately – you can get my gender, race, political views, religion, sexual orientation, personality, IQ and so on,” Michal Kosinski, a University of Cambridge researcher who lead the study, told CBC.

[ Related: 104-year-old grandmother gets apology from Facebook for having to lie about her age ]

This PDF document breaks down what the ‘most predictive Likes’ are, and what

Read More »from Facebook ‘Likes’ may reveal more than you wish to share