A booby-trapped game of noughts and crosses (BBProxy) has been used in Black Hat hacker conference to show how a Blackberry can be easily hijacked to steal confidential data.

Mozilla Corp. delayed the release of the second beta of its Firefox 2.0 browser by a week. Firefox 2.0, which appeared as Beta 1 last month, was to shift into Beta 2 Aug. 8, but will now be posted Tuesday, Aug. 15 according to minutes of the company's weekly status meeting. via InternetWeek

The University of California is joining Google's book-scanning project, throwing the weight of another 100 academic libraries behind an ambitious venture that's under legal attack for alleged copyright infringement.

The AdWords API Sandbox is an environment that replicates the API of the live site, for developing, testing and debugging applications that use the AdWords API. When a developer logs in, AdWords accounts are automatically created in the Sandbox, then the developer can create and run campaigns, adgroups, creatives, and other operations on those accounts without incurring any quota. There is no quota on the Sandbox system -- users are free to make all the calls they want. All account, campaign, adgroup, creative and criteria data that you submit can be read back as usual. However, the extra information based on usage and ad impressions such as traffic estimates, statistics, reports, and keyword suggestions, will be fake. The details on fake data are listed throughout this document. The Sandbox is not meant for load testing.

I previously mentioned that I intended not to use any Java ORM frameworks. ORM frameworks I have seen so far have a steep learning curve and tend to shoe horn your architecture into their model. So I started fresh without any ORM frameworks like Hibernate or Spring (which I have heard is better). I am happy coding my queries in SQL and don't need to use any ORM specific language like Hibernate OQL. SQL is best for what it does. Why re-invent the wheel? Also I like the fine-grained control over my database as I am processing very large amount of data. My experience will be primarily relevant to sql happy java developers.