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Google offering more than $2.7 million to people that can successfully exploit Chrome OS

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HP Chromebook 11

HP Chromebook 11

Since its release, Google has touted that Chrome OS is incredibly secure and can be used for any type of use case. In a blog post on the Chromium Blog, the company announced today that it is offering a total of $2.71 million USD to anyone that exploit Chrome OS. In order to compete for a portion of that pot, developers have travel to the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, which takes place in March.

The criteria for this Pwnium contest, which Google has been holding for years, is pretty specific. Developers and hackers won’t get money for exploiting any portion of the operating system. Instead, Google has guidelines for how much they will be paid, depending on how deep the exploit is.

  • $110,000 USD: browser or system-level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user, delivered via a web page.
  • $150,000 USD: compromise with device persistence: guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a web page.

Google will also consider cash bonuses for demonstrating a particularly impressive or surprising exploit. Hackers will be able to choose between the Haswell-based Acer C720 and the ARM-based HP Chromebook 11.

If this sounds like something you want to try, Google requires that interested parties register ahead of the even by emailing security@chromium.org. Registration will close at 5:00 P.M PST on March 10th.


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Google kicking toolbars, “multipurpose extensions” out of the Chrome Web Store

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Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 8.27.17 AM

Google’s Chromium Blog just announced intentions of the search engine giant to knock out toolbars and “multipurpose extensions” out of the Chrome Web Store. The update to the policy is basically summed up as: “extensions in the Chrome Web Store must have a single purpose that is narrow and easy-to-understand.” That sounds simple enough, no?


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New and improved developer features for Chrome Web Store

In a recent post on the Chromium Blog, Google detailed some new features and improvements that have recently been implemented for developers in the Chrome Web Store.

The first announcement was the addition of six new countries developers can now sell apps to, including: Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. The new additions bring the total up to 42 countries that currently have access to the store. Next Google noted it has added a new “Offline Apps” category that will allow developers to better promote apps that include offline functionality. The post explained how devs can get their apps included in the new section:

If you are a developer, getting your app listed in this collection is as simple as adding theoffline_enabled flag to your app’s manifest file (note: to avoid negative user feedback, please ensure that your app does indeed work well offline before you do this).

The third new enhancement announced by Google is better insights into how apps are performing from within the developer dashboard:

To help you with your data needs, we’ve created a new graph view to help you understand the performance of your apps. To make this data more accessible, you can easily download it as a CSV file. Currently, we provide 90 days of history information.

Google said it plans to provide even more data to developers in the near future to help them understand how their apps are being used.