Mobile UI

GOG.com has announced the free release of Runic Games' dungeon crawler Torchlight, but you have to act fast, because the deal only lasts for 48 hours, and they announced it yesterday.

Torchlight was created by some of the folks behind Diablo and Diablo II, and its heritage shines through - it's a classic dungeon crawler action role playing game. You make your way through randomized dungeons, rendered in an isometric (or three-quarters) perspective.

There are three character classes to choose from: the Destroyer (a warrior), the Alchemist (a magic user) and the Vanquisher (an archer who can also set traps). You set out to explore the mines beneath the bustling town of Torchlight, rich with a magical substance known as Ember. As you make your way through more than 30 levels, you discover that Ember can corrupt its users (and those who are exposed to it). Eventually you have to square off against the evil Alric and the source of Ember's corruption.

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Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Mark Gurman, and I talk all about WWDC 2013, iOS 7, Mavericks, the new MacBook Air, AirPort Extreme, and more.

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Registered Apple developers have been able to test OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 since their announcement at WWDC 2013, but reports are now emerging that Apple is widening the reach of both slightly. According to 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, selected Apple retail employees are now receiving an invitation to test out Mavericks for themselves:

"You are invited to participate in the pre-release OS X Mavericks seed program. Participation, including submitting feedback, is completely voluntary and not an expectation of your job. If you accept, we will provide you with a pre-release version of OS X Mavericks to install and use. You will get to preview all of the exciting new features like iBooks, Maps, Calendar, Safari, iCloud Keychain, Multiple Displays, Notifications, Finder Tabs, Tags, and much more! You should use OS X Mavericks only your personal computer and on your personal time. Apple will provide you with ways to submit feedback on your experiences with OS X Mavericks, should you choose to do so. Apple also asks that you use future builds of OS X Mavericks as they are made available. The responses from prior seed programs have been overwhelmingly positive. Thank you to everyone who participated!"

Sources have also indicated that Apple is turning to the residents of Cupertino to assist with iOS 7 testing. Apple is said to be holding on-campus sessions with the locals in order to garner feedback on the latest version of iOS. It's unclear how people have been selected, but it's said that they are likely relatives of Apple employees.

Source: 9to5Mac

Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg have discovered weaknesses in the Personal Hotspot feature in iOS. The weak, and somewhat predictable password generation -- used in all current versions of iOS up through iOS 6 -- means people are susceptible to brute force attacks when using the personal hotspot feature on their iPhone or cellular iPad.

A brute force attack is one that systematically tries all possible combinations of a password until the correct one is found. The more complex a password, the more computing power and/or time it takes to try the combinations. Under Settings on iOS, inside Personal Hotspot, you will normally find Wi-Fi Password to be pre-populated with a memorable password followed by four digits. Andreas Kurtz, Daniel Metz and Felix C. Freiling found that iOS chooses from only 1,842 words in a wordlist, each 4 to 6 characters in length, when generating these default passwords. iOS generates these passwords with one of the words from the list, followed by a four-digit number. This combination only leaves the possibility of about 18.5 million different passwords, a relatively low number when it comes to password cracking, making it an easy target for a brute force attack. It was also discovered that words from the list aren't chosen randomly, and some words are chosen much more frequently than others. This knowledge can potentially speed up the process of cracking the password by trying the most commonly chosen words first. The researchers state that all of these factors make it possible to compromise a hotspot connection in less than 50 seconds.

The Personal Hotspot feature employs WPA2-PSK encryption, which is generally regarded as secure for WiFi. However, the short list of known passwords being used in iOS means that these default passwords are extremely susceptible to brute force attacks. When a device connects to a hotspot, a handshake takes place in which the client and the hotspot negotiate their connection. This is also the time where the client authenticates with the hotspot using the pre-shared key. By capturing this handshake, an attacker is then able to run a brute force attack using the known word list to generate and attempt all 18.5 million possible passwords, until it finds a match. Once a match is found, an attacker could then connect to your personal hotspot to use your connection, or potentially leverage further attacks against other connected devices. The report also mentions that other mobile platforms showed signs that they were affected by similar problems, including Windows Phone 8 and some vendor-modified versions of Android.

The researchers also released the source code for Hotspot Cracker, an iOS app that demonstrates their findings. The app allows you to generate and export the wordlist from iOS, view the 20 most common words used for personal hotspot passwords, enter your hotspot password to find out approximately how long it would take to crack, and gives instructions on how to crack a password once you have captured the handshake. When calculating how long it would take to crack your password, the app presumes a GPU cluster of four AMD Radeon HD 7970s, which can run about 390,000 guesses per second. With these calculations, the app determined my iPhone's personal hotspot password would take just under 25 seconds to crack.

The reason iOS and other mobile platforms generate passwords automatically is to avoid having users set up hotspots without any encryption. These passwords are certainly better than having no encryption at all, but this research shows that these passwords should not be considered secure.

iOS shows you how many devices are connected to your hotspot, making it easy to recognize if there are ever more devices connected than you expect.

Until Apple changes to more secure defaults, the easiest thing for iOS 6 (and earlier) users to do is simply set their own unique password for Personal Hotspot.

Lots of people itch to try new iOS beta versions when they become available and iOS 7 has definitely attracted lots of people that were curious to try out the new features ahead of time. If you were one of those and didn't heed our warning about betas, you may find yourself frustrated with lots of bugs and annoyances.

Fortunately, there's a pretty easy way to get back onto iOS 6 without too much fuss. If you're regretting the decision to install iOS 7 beta, follow along and we'll help you get back to iOS 6.

Before you begin

Please keep in mind that if you downgrade back to iOS 6, you'll only be able to go to the most current version, which is 6.1.4 for iPhone 5 users and 6.1.3 for iPhone 4S and below. When it comes to iCloud backups, you won't be able to use an iOS 7 backup on an iOS 6 device, so be aware that you're going to lose any information you may have in those backups.

You also won't be able to recover any jailbreak with saved blobs. If you're still wanting to downgrade after understanding all this, continue on...

How to downgrade from iOS 7 beta to iOS 6

1. First download the most recent firmware file for your device from our downloads section. Save it somewhere easy to access such as your desktop.
2. Launch iTunes on your Mac or PC.
3. Now you'll need to plug in your device and put it in DFU mode, NOT recovery mode. If you don't know how to do this, you can click here for directions. Once it's in DFU, return to this guide to complete the downgrade. Make sure the screen is black and does not say connect to iTunes. This is recovery mode, not DFU. Try again until you successfully achieve DFU mode and have a black screen before continuing.
4. Once you're device is in DFU mode, you'll see a message pop up from iTunes saying the device can't be used until it's restored. Just click Ok.
5. Now hold down the alt/option key (Shift for PC users) on your keyboard and click on Restore iPhone in iTunes.
6. Navigate to the firmware file for iOS 6 that you saved in the first step and click Open.

Now just let iTunes do its thing and if all goes according to plan, your device should eventually reboot and be downgraded to iOS 6 again.

If you've managed to successfully downgrade your device to iOS 6 again, let us know how it went in the comments!