Popular iOS apps, games go free ahead of App Store's 5th anniversary

Update: Apple has made the official announcement now. Although other apps have gone free too, officially the promotion includes five games (Badland, Infinity Blade II, Sword & Sworcery, Tiny Wings, Where's My Water) and five apps (Barefoot World Atlas, Day One, How to Cook Everything, Over, Traktor DJ for iPhone). -- Original story is below --

A number of popular iOS apps and games are currently being offered for free on Apple’s App Store. The Vergewas first to note the coordinated move, and though Apple hasn’t made any official announcement, the site speculates it may be related to the store’s fifth anniversary, which is due this week on July 10.

None of the apps have been given away for free before. Most sold for a few bucks, but there are also a handful more expensive ones on the list, such as Infinity Blade II, How to Cook Everything and Tracktor DJ -- an iPhone and iPad application for pro DJs that has gone from $4.99/$19.99 respectively to zero. Here’s the full list (so far):

Games

Title	Original price	Now	Platform
Infinity Blade II	$6.99	Free	Universal
Tiny Wings HD	$2.99	Free	iPad
Tiny Wings	$0.99	Free	iPhone
Where's my Water	$0.99	Free	Universal
Badland	$3.99	Free	Universal
Sword & Sworcery	$4.99	Free	Universal
The Idiot Test 3	$0.99	Free	Universal
Pig Shot	$0.99	Free	Universal
Liquid Sketch	$1.99	Free	iPad
Infinity Blade	$5.99	$2.99	Universal

Other

Title	Original price	Now	Platform
Day One Journal	$4.99	Free	Universal
Traktor DJ	$4.99	Free	iPhone
Traktor DJ	$19.99	Free	iPad
Over	$1.99	Free	Universal
How to Cook Everything	$9.99	Free	Universal
Map My Ride+	$0.99	Free	iPhone
Barefoot World Atlas	$4.99	Free	Universal
Knots 3D	$1.99	Free	Universal

Aside from its upcoming anniversary, the move comes nearly a month after Apple announced it had hit the 50 billion downloads milestone, and a total of $10 billion paid to developers. There are now 900,000 iOS apps available for download for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, with 375,000 designed specifically for iPad.

Hat tip to Tech Tola and Reddit for compiling the list

Researchers crack iOS-generated hotspot passwords in 24 seconds

If you're an iPhone or iPad owner who uses hotspot mode but never bothered to change the seemingly-random password suggested by iOS, now is definitely a good time. German researchers have discovered(pdf) the passwords iOS issues can be easily predicted, allowing them to be cracked in as little as one minute using consumer hardware.

The algorithm iOS uses to generate hotspot keys takes a dictionary word, adds a couple of numbers and voila -- an easily memorable password is born. The problem though, is despite the endless variety of words available in the English language, iOS draws its password inspiration from a narrow selection of just 1,842 words.

The second issue is certain words appear several times more frequently than other words. For example, out of nearly 2,000 words, "suave" had a 1-in-125 chance of being used. Meanwhile, "macaws" -- the tenth most-likely word to be used -- appeared 1-in-345 times. Knowing iOS' preferred word selection allows brute force crackers to start with the most common ones first, further reducing the time needed.

A PC armed with a Radeon HD 6990 GPU was able to crack the average iPhone hotspot in 52 seconds while four Radeon HD 7970s yielded an average of just 24 seconds. GPUs are favored amongst crackers for their ability to perform massively parallell computations.

Although researchers revealed how easily an iOS-generated hotspot password can be brute forced, other exploits like attacking iOS' PSK authentication method help to facilitate the process. Because handheld devices aren't equipped with high-end GPUs, researchers even discussed offloading the computational work to a cloud-based service like CloudCracker for cracking hotspots on-the-go.

Of course, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on devices with easily cracked hotspot passwords. Windows Phone and some Android handsets don't fare much better.

Windows Phone, for example, auto-generates hotspot passwords consisting of eight numbers. This means you already know what the password could be, making Windows Phone susceptible to brute force attacks. More research may reveal an additional weakness though, which could narrow that selection of 10^8 possibilities down to something even more tractable.

Meanwhile, Android's default password generator conjures sufficiently strong passwords, but some vendors have taken the liberty of greatly reducing its effectiveness. "Android-based models of the smartphone and tablet manufacturer HTC are even shipped with constant default passwords consisting of a static string (1234567890)" researchers noted.

When boiled down to its nuts and bolts though, the moral of this story is probably this: always create your own passwords, provided you follow some of the basic principles for creating strong ones.