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SalesForce Goes Hacking
Salesforce.com really wants to attract lots of developers to its Dreamforce conference next month in San Francisco. As in, really.
Last Friday, the cloud software vendor announced a “hackathon” would be held at the conference, with US$1 million going to the developer or team who creates the top prize-winning mobile application with Salesforce.com technology.
“It’s not going to be easy — $1 million is going to bring out the best of the best,” Salesforce.com said in Friday’s announcement. “So don’t wait until Dreamforce! You’re going to want to get started now. With Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget Fuel, Mobile Services and more — you’ve got a killer array of platform technology to use.”
Salesforce.com will also be providing some “pretty amazing new technology” for use at the show, the announcement adds.
In order to participate, developers have to either register for a full conference pass or a special $99 hacker pass.
The hackathon reflects Salesforce.com’s long courtship of developers to its development technologies, its AppExchange marketplace and recent efforts to build out more tooling for mobile application development.
Developers taking part in the hackathon will have plenty of competition, with some 20,000 programmers expected to attend Dreamforce overall. A “Hack Central” area will be open around the clock, supporting coders who want to work until the wee hours on their application.
In order to qualify, an application can’t have been previously released. The entries will be judged on four criteria counting 25 percent each: innovation, business value, user experience and use of Salesforce.com’s platform.
The second-place finisher will receive $50,000, with $25,000 going to the third-place winner. Fourth and fifth place will get $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.
Some 120,000 people are expected to register for Dreamforce this year. While some of that total will be watching online rather than in person, Dreamforce is now operating at a scale rivaling Oracle’s OpenWorld event, which happened last month.
Symantec’s Virus Code Hacked
Symantec is looking into an Indian hacking group’s claims that it accessed source code used in the company’s flagship Norton Antivirus program.
A spokesman for the company on Thursday said that one claim by the group was false, while another is still being investigated.
Meanwhile, the Indian group, which calls itself Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code very soon.
On Wednesday, the group posted on Pastebin what it claimed was confidential documentation related to Norton AntiVirus source code. A review of the material showed what appears to be a description of an application programming interface (API) for Symantec’s AV product.
The group also posted what it claimed was the complete source code tree file for Norton Antivirus. That document appears to have been taken down.
‘Yama Tough,’ the hacker who posted the documents, released at least two more on Google+ allegedly related to Symantec source code. One of the documents appears to be a detailed technical overview of Norton Anti-Virus, Quarantine Server Packaging API Specification, v1.0. The other document, from 2000, describes a Symantec Immune System Gateway Array Setup technology.
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Facebook’s Users Info Was Leaked
May 12, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Facebook users’ personal information could have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past several years, Symantec Corp said in one of its blog postings.
Third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages, the security software company stated.
“We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage,” the blog post said.
” … Over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties,” posing a security threat, the blog post said.
The third-parties may not have realized their ability to access the information, it said.
Facebook, the world’s largest social networking website, was notified of this issue and confirmed the leakage, the blog post said.
It said Facebook has taken steps to resolve the issue.
“Unfortunately, their (Symantec’s) resulting report has a few inaccuracies. Specifically, we have conducted a thorough investigation which revealed no evidence of this issue resulting in a user’s private information being shared with unauthorized third parties,” Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich said in a statement.