Tag: Prevention »

It’s hard to work up sympathy for one of nature’s most efficient aquatic killing machines (a few species, anyway), but I think it’s do-able. Sharks might not be cuddly, and they have been known to attack and/or kill people, but that’s no reason to hunt them to extinction. Especially for some overpriced soup. Which is why WildAid, The Discovery Channel, and Gameloft have joined forces for Shark Week to raise awareness and do a bit of fund raising through Shark Dash.

For the rest of the month and a few weeks in August, players of both the iOS and ad-supported Google Play versions of Shark Dash will be able to purchase special “limited time only” content – most notably a new skin for Sharky – for a monetary show of support. Proceeds will go toward raising awareness and hopefully reducing the demand for shark fin soup; a luxury dish with rapidly growing demand and a rapidly diminishing source. Over 70 million sharks per year, in fact.

The special content will be available until August 18th, and I urge anyone with the means to do their part. Sharks may not be cute, fuzzy, or huggable (I sure as heck would never go swimming with one, except possibly a whale shark), but they don’t deserve to die out over something like this.

A vulnerability has been found in iOS Safari after the new 5.1 update. The bug can be used to trick Safari into showing a URL in the address bar that’s different than the actual site being visited.

The problem has been tested and happens on the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad when they’re running iOS 5.1. Apple acknowledged the bug on March 3, so I’m sure an update with a bug fix is imminent. But until then, keep these tips in mind when browsing on Safari:

- Don’t open links from sites you aren’t 100% sure are from a trusted site.

- If you aren’t sure about a link, hop on to a computer and check it out there. If it’s a spoofed address bar, the address bar will probably say “about:blank” but will say the name of a trusted site on your iOS device.

- Go to TheNextWeb and try out the demo offered by David Vierra-Kurz from MajorSecurity. He reproduced the bug. Firsthand knowledge is always useful in protecting against security exploits (in a controlled environment, of course, like this demo).