Fun and Informative President’s Day Apps

Techlicious - With President’s Day approaching, many preschools and classrooms will explore a handful of U.S. Presidents with stories, songs and reports. For parents looking for homework help, or to inspire kids with presidential examples beyond George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, you can take your young learner on a fun and educational meet-and-greet with the 44 U.S. Presidents.

 

Presidents vs. Aliens

Who wouldn’t want the chance to defend the Earth from aliens? There’s a section for learning via flashcards about the presidents, but the real fun begins when quizzed about the material in order to earn president heads that you can fling at alien invaders ala Angry Birds. There are two other gaming opportunities: “Heads of State” where you choose the correct president head floating in space to answer a question, and “Executive Order” where you put the presidents in correct order.

Price: $0.99 in iTunes
 

 

US Presidents

Review each president’s fact sheet with years in office, birthplace, trivia, party, vice presidents and more. Then test yourself with in quiz mode. There’s also a slideshow of all of the U.S. Presidents.
Price: free in Android Market

 

Brittanica Kids: U.S. Presidents

Check out profile info for all presidents, quizzes to test your knowledge of the U.S. Presidents, and a “Hail To The Chief” sing-along with lyrics and music. It includes some fun facts about Mount Rushmore, The Oval Office and The White House Bowling Alley among other related topics.
Price: $2.99 in iTunes

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8 Out of 10 Software Apps Fail Security Test

Desktop and web applications remain a wasteland of bugs and holes that only a hacker could love, according to a report released Wednesday by a company that conducts independent security audits of code.

In fact, eight out of 10 software applications fail to meet a security assessment, according to a State of Software Security report by Veracode. That’s based on an automated analysis of 9,910 applications submitted to Veracode’s online security testing platform in the last 18 months. The applications are submitted by both developers — in the government and commercial sectors — as well as companies and government agencies wanting an assessment of software they plan to purchase.


The company examined commercial and government applications for more than 100 different flaw types, and found that applications created by the government fared worse when it came to cross-site scripting and SQL injection flaws, while commercial applications were more often marred by remote-execution flaws. About 75 percent of government web applications had cross-site scripting issues. Cross-site scripting flaws allow an attacker to inject malicious code into a vulnerable web application to obtain sensitive data from users.

“Government is doing worse for cross-site scripting, which is a bad place to be doing worse for,” said Chris Wysopal, co-founder and chief technology officer at Veracode.

As for SQL injection flaws, 40 percent of government applications contained these flaws. While the prevalence of SQL injection flaws has gone down 6 percent overall in the last two years in the apps market as a whole, it has remained even in government applications, indicating that government apps have made no improvement in this regard. SQL injection flaws allow an attacker to breach a backend database through a web site, usually in order to obtain information from the database.

Veracode says the bad grade for government might be due to the fact that a lot of government applications are built with Cold Fusion, a programming language that has a higher incident of cross-site flaws than C, C++, Java and PHP, the languages more prevalently used in commercial-sector software, Wysopal said. The use of Cold Fusion also suggests that government developers may be less-skilled overall than other developers and don’t have the same pressures to build secure software that commercial developers have.         More