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Apple Hacker Charlie Miller To Demo Dangers of Near-Field Communications

Posted by timothy on from the these-icons-sure-are-clastic dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's hacker nemesis Charlie Miller, who the company banned from its app store developer program, apparently hasn't been waiting around for his suspension to be lifted. His latest pet project is hacking near-field communications (NFC), and at Black Hat USA in Vegas this month, he will demonstrate the dangers of using your smartphone to pay your cab fare. (But when his Apple 'sentence' is up, look out)."

3 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. What makes you think his "sentence" is ever up? by crazyjj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    iOS is a walled garden. Apple is under no obligation to let anyone develop for it. If you're going to embarrass and criticize Apple, they are under no obligation to let you do it on their iPhones and iPads (or Macs either, for that matter).

    --
    What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
  2. The Dangers of NFC by 6031769 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Essentially with NFC you have this card/phone in your pocket which all day long is saying to every other device it meets, "Hey, are you an EPoS terminal? I'd really like to pay for something, now!". It is not clear to me why the dangers of this need to be demonstrated, least of all to delegates at BlackHat.

    --
    Burns: We're building a casino!
    McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
  3. Re:Reading comprehension is good for you by jo_ham · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you think that summary *isn't* a blatant swing at Apple, written to make Charlie's completely non-Apple-related NFC hacking look like something to do with Apple and the app store, then I have a bridge to sell you.

    If we're jumping to conclusions about what this means for Apple when two of the three sentences specifically mention Apple and his link to them and the "ban" from the App Store for violating his dev agreement. If Apple, the App Store and iOS have nothing to with this then why is 66% of the summary dedicated to it?

    The salient point appears to be that he will show something related to NFC hacking at a conference using a "smartphone". Interesting how the particular model of smartphone or the OS it runs is not mentioned, yet the other 66% of the summary heavily mentions Apple. Mmm. Seems legit.

    Either way, we know it's not an iPhone or iOS since the iPhone doesn't have any NFC hardware in it, unless he managed to get his hands on the rumoured iPhone 5 prototype that might have it included but no one knows yet.