USA Teaching 8-Year-Olds How to Be Hackers

Have things gotten so bad online security-wise that the government is now recruiting adolescents?

Want to teach your kids how to hack? There's a conference for that.

Reuters reports that the first-ever Defcon Kids conference will take place this August in Las Vegas, and will teach children ranging from ages eight to sixteen the basics of computer hacking, and how to protect themselves against cyber attacks. It will also serve as a recruiting farm for U.S. federal agents looking for the next-generation of "digital crime fighters."

Nokia's First Windows Phone 7 Device Leaked

Images and video of Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 device have been leaked.

Earlier this week, Nokia was making a big fuss over the its first MeeGo device and the shipping dates for the latest version of its proprietary OS, Symbian Anna. However, it seems today has brought news of a much more interesting ‘first’ for Nokia -- the company’s first Windows Phone 7 handset.

Here are photos of Nokia’s first smartphone running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system. Of course, anyone can take a couple of low quality photos and claim they depict an unreleased and highly anticipated handset. To that end, there’s also video footage that leaves very little doubt that this is the real deal. It shows Nokia CEO Stephen Elop unveiling the device at a private event. Despite the Chief Executive’s request to turn off all cameras because he was going to show something ‘super confidential [they] do not want to see it out in the blogosphere,’ one wily attendee managed to catch a glimpse of the phone on camera and has posted it to YouTube for all the world to see.

Wi-Fi Enabled Fridge is Equipped With Apps, LCD

Samsung's new fridge comes with apps!

We've seen some pretty cool futuristic refrigerator concepts out there such as the self-cleaningfridge, and the cooking assistant fridge, but who knows how long we'll have to wait to be graced with some of their technological wonders. It might be awhile until we can rely on our refrigerators to clean themselves out and teach us how to cook but Samsung has brought us one step closer to high tech refrigerator awesomeness.The brand new Samsung Wi-Fi equipped refrigerator features an impressive 8 inch touch screen that allows you to play with eight included applications: Memos, Photos, Epicurious, Calendar, WeatherBug, AP, Pandora and Twitter. These applications make your stop to the fridge much more organized and informative by allowing you to write and view memos, notes, and calendar reminders. You can even immediately update your twitter status for emergency situations! "@Cheeseloverxoxo HELPP!!! NO MORE CHEESE!!"

Samsung's innovative fridge can even enhance your dining experience by acting as a digital picture frame or lightening the mood with some Pandora music. Although the fridge doesn't do anything fancy like cook your meals or stock itself, Samsung's Wi-Fi Fridge would be a great addition to any tech lover's home. Unfortunately for the price of $3,499 for the four door and $2,699 for the two door, it may be cheaper and more efficient to mount an iPad on top of your existing refrigerator.

Windows Much Safer After Microsoft Killed Autorun

A safer, more idiot proof autorun.

Autorun is one way for malware to trick a user into installing some nefarious software from removable storage media. An executable could reside on a USB flash drive and, when inserted into a PC, would prompt the user to click the autorun file.

Back in February, Microsoft released an update that curbed autorun behavior for all supported Windows platforms stretching back to Windows XP SP3 to Windows Vista SP2 (Windows 7 already had a "fixed" autorun behavior and Windows XP SP2 was no longer supported through updates).

When comparing stats before and after the Microsoft update, we clearly see that blocking the autorun of removable storage had a significant effect on the infection rate. It may have been a tweak to stop a certain action on the users' part, but it was certainly effective.

BestConfigs Is Back, And Powered By You!

BestConfigs is back, and we're ready to update our pre-defined configurations using the top hardware suggestions presented and voted-on by our community. Use our Tom's Hardware System Builder Facebook app or your BBCode-formatted submission!

Our BestConfigs section is atrociously outdated. We know this, are we’re going to rectify the situation as quickly as possible.

As a quick refresher, BestConfigs is a section of the site with recommended configurations that fit within a specific theme, and duck under a set budget. The last time we updated our nine builds, we used audience-suggested configurations that were presented by our readers and then voted on by the community. A software bug stopped us before we could get each winning configuration posted to the site. But that has since been fixed, and we’re ready to roll again (this time with one addition: a do-it-yourself NAS).