Vista exposed at Black Hat

Microsoft`s decision to surrender Vista to hackers at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas resulted in flaws in the operating system being exposed, according to News.com.

Joanna Rutkowska, a Polish researcher at Singapore-based Coseinc, demonstrated how to bypass security measures in Vista that prevent unsigned code from running.

A spokesperson has assured users that Microsoft is investigating solutions to help protect against the attacks that were demonstrated.

Also at Black Hat, a demonstration showed biometric e-passports can not only be hacked, but embedded information can be copied and transferred to another device, says Xinua.net.

The US, UK and other countries have been implementing a passport-upgrading scheme, and now face doubt over these security measures.

Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant responsible for exposing the flaw, says although the data held on a passport chip is not encrypted, it is not yet possible to change the cloned data without alerting the authorities.

Google has teamed up with the Stop Badware Coalition to bring Web surfers an environment safe from sites potentially distributing malicious code, reports News.com.

Sites that host malicious software will be flagged and users who attempt to access them will be taken to a safe warning page instead.

The interrupt page suggests users choose a different result, or try another search. They can also continue to the potentially malicious site.

Previously disadvantaged Mac and Linux owners can now play a plethora of PC games, says Short News.

Cider, the software that makes it possible, operates as a portability engine that allows PC games to operate on Intel-based Macintosh computers.

The software will also offer a path for PC games wrapped in this Intel-Mac Cider engine to run on Linux-based code, under the Cedega program.

Handheld game title Mario Kart DS is in the lead with regards to nominations at this year`s Golden Joystick awards, says BBC News.

The gaming awards were founded in 1982 when Atari, Commodore and Spectrum were the dominant players in the market.

Other nominations for game of the year include Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty 2, Guitar Hero and Pro Evolution Soccer 5.