Ebook and Presentation can be downloaded from ;http://system-override.co.uk/tcpip
Saturday, 29 May 2010
How to hack WEP wireless connection in Backtrack 4
How to hack WEP wireless networks with Backtrack 4
Websites:
Ebook:
Friday, 28 May 2010
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Unreleased MacBook shows up in Vietnam
Vietnam, previously known for its awesome food and friendly populace, has recently become the go-to country for Apple hardware leaks. And these aren’t your usual, suspicious shaky-cam leaks, either. The photos and video coming out of the Tinhte.com news site are sharp, comprehensive and professional. As iFixit CEO and friend of US Wired Kyle Wiens Tweeted: "Man, these Vietnamese leakers are schooling everyone in the quality photo department."
After that iPhone 4G video comes the new MacBook. The white plastic unibody MacBook will get a processor speed bump from 2.26GHz to 2.4GHz and the current Nvidia GeForce 9400M will be replaced with the Nvidia GeForce 320M, putting it almost on a level with the newly updated aluminum MacBook Pro. It also appears to come with the new fray-free MagSafe connector.
The news in this story isn’t that the MacBook is getting an update, but that the whole machine has leaked out in its final, store-ready packaging. What’s going on at Apple? Where’s that famous secrecy? And why is this all happening in Vietnam?
Hotmail revamped by Microsoft
Microsoft has taken the scissors to Hotmail and given it a haircut that the company hopes will stop all the kids laughing at it in the playground. There's a whole host of new features, including the ability to view messages in a thread, and a function that lets you 'sweep' unwanted email out of your inbox.
A majority of the additional features seem to only be there to let Hotmail continue to compete with Google's rapidly-expanding Gmail service. There's a better search box, no doubt powered by innovations from Bing. There's the aforementioned message threading, where back and forth messages between a group of senders are clustered onto one page. There's storage in Microsoft's SkyDrive for attachments, and unlimited storage in the mailbox itself.
There's in-line viewing of multimedia links. If someone sends you a YouTube video or a Flickr set, then Hotmail will give the content to you right there in the message -- not forcing you to click through to an external page. Best of all, though, is the ability to edit Office documents within email messages - taking advantage of Office 2010's sharing features. If someone sends you a spreadsheet, or a presentation, you can tweak it and send back a link to the attachment stored on SkyDrive, rather than the document itself.
Elsewhere, there's the ability to star messages, and to apply "flags", which don't just rhyme with Gmail's tags -- they do pretty much the same thing. There's a "Hotmail Highlights" view for your inbox, which shows you at a glance any emails from your friends, social network notifications, package tracking emails, calendar items and birthday reminders. There's also an interface that's more text-based than before, which will please people who prefer simplicity to icons.
On the security front, there's an improvement in the spam filters that Microsoft reckons can cut down the amount of unwanted and malicious emails in your inbox to only about 4% of total messages received. There's the ability, already offered by Gmail, to identify trusted senders with a distinctive logo, and full-session SSLencryption if you want it. Rather neatly, Microsoft's also offering the option to text you a single-use password for using at public machines that you don't trust.
For mobile phone users, the inbox has been redesigned for touch input, and you can access filters, message previews, offline viewing, conversation threading and the ability to flag messages from your handset. Back on the desktop, there's access to Windows Live Messenger from the inbox, along with the ability to chat to people on Facebook, and you can update your Facebook and Windows Live Messenger status from the Hotmail homepage.
The new features are rolled up in a package called Hotmail Wave 4, which isn't yet available to the general public. The roll-out begins in mid-summer, but you can get a full preview of what the new service is going to offer by heading over to hotmailpreview.com.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Roommate’s tip led police to iPhone 4G's finder
Police closed in on the man who found and sold a prototype 4G iPhone after his roommate called an Apple security official and turned him in, according to a newly unsealed document in the ongoing police investigation.
The tip sent police racing to the home of 21-year-old Brian Hogan, and began a strange scavenger hunt for evidence that a friend of Hogan’s had scattered around Silicon Valley. Police recovered a desktop computer stashed inside a church, a thumb drive hidden in a bush alongside the road, and the iPhone’s serial-number stickers from the parking area of a petrol station.
The 10-page search-warrant affidavit (.pdf) -- unsealed Friday at the request of US Wired and other news organisations -- sheds new light on the events surrounding the sale of the prototype to Gizmodo, the Gawker Media-run gadget site that paid Hogan $5,000 (£3,500) for the device.
Gizmodo dropped a bombshell on the gadget world on 19 April with a detailed look at the iPhone prototype, which an Apple employee named Robert "Gray" Powell had lost at a bar. Gizmodo has acknowledged paying $5,000 for the phone and returned the phone to Apple after publishing its story about the prototype.
The affidavit confirms that Steve Jobs personally contacted Gizmodo to ask for the phone back, as reported byNewsweek last month.
According to the document, the roommate said Hogan told her he received a total of $8,500 (£5,800) for the phone, but did not indicate if all of the money came from Gizmodo or other sources as well. The roommate also told police Gizmodo promised Hogan a bonus if and when Apple officially announced the product.
Police are investigating Gizmodo editor Jason Chen for possible receipt of stolen property, copying of a trade secret, and destruction of property worth more than $400 (£275), according to the affidavit, which was filed in support of a search warrant for Chen’s home. Gizmodo partly disassembled the iPhone, a process that Apple alleges left it damaged.
Apple also told the police that the publication of Gizmodo’s story was "immensely damaging" to the company, because consumers would stop buying current generation iPhones in anticipation of the upcoming product. Asked the value of the phone, Apple told the police "it was invaluable."
Apple discovered that Hogan was the person who found the iPhone the day Gizmodo’s story broke, after Rick Orloff, director of information security at the company, received a phone call from one of Hogan’s two roommates, Katherine Martinson. She told Apple that Hogan had found the phone and had been offering it to news outlets in exchange for a payment, despite having identified Powell as the rightful owner from a Facebook page visible on the phone’s display when he found it.
"Sucks for him," Hogan allegedly told Martinson about Powell. "He lost his phone. Shouldn’t have lost his phone."
Martinson turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. "Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility," according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.
An Apple spokeswoman told Threat Level that Apple officials took Martinson’s tip directly to the district attorney’s office, and did not show up at Hogan’s house, as a US Wired source claimed last month.
"We reported what we believed was a crime and the DA is taking it from there," said Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton.
Police were preparing a search warrant affidavit for Hogan’s apartment two days later, when Martinson phoned them to report that Hogan and a second roommate, Thomas Warner, were in the process of removing evidence from their Redwood City apartment: a desktop computer, stickers from the iPhone, a thumb drive and a memory card. Police raced to the apartment, but by the time they arrived, Hogan and Warner had left in separate cars with the evidence.
The police headed to Hogan’s parents’ house, and were let in by Hogan’s father. They found Brian Hogan sitting on his bed with his girlfriend. When the cops told Hogan that removing evidence implied "consciousness of guilt," Hogan agreed to cooperate, and phoned his friend Warner, who had taken the computer gear and the stickers away in his car.
Warner directed the police to the nearby Sequoia Christian Church, where the cops recovered Hogan’s black desktop PC and flatscreen monitor outside an administrative office. Warner initially claimed he didn’t know where the other evidence was, but eventually told police where they could find the thumb drive and memory stick hidden in a bush.
He then offered that he may have accidentally dropped the serial-number sticker from the iPhone at a Chevron gas station. Police found it there, in the parking lot.
Hogan’s lawyer, Jeff Bornstein, said Friday he had not yet seen the affidavit, and could not comment on its details. "Hogan cooperated fully with the police in terms of turning over the evidence that they sought," said Bornstein.
US Wired was unable to locate Warner or Martinson for comment. The apartment where Hogan and his roommates lived was vacant Friday.
The affidavit supports the story, offered by Gizmodo and Hogan’s attorney, that the phone was found, and not stolen from the Apple employee. The employee, Gray Powell, had been at the Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood City with his uncle. The last time he saw the phone was when he put it in his bag on the floor.
The iPhone may have tumbled from the bag when it fell over. It was possible, but unlikely, that it was stolen from the bag, Powell told the police.
However, it’s generally considered theft under California law if one "finds lost property under circumstances that give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner" and yet appropriates the property for his own use "without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him."
Google to offer encrypted search next week
Google will begin letting users run encrypted searches on its flagship search site Google.com starting next week, the company said in a blog post.
Allowing users to search using https -- the web security system that many associate with online banking and shopping -- would mark a first for a major search engine, and could begin a move by web services such as social networks to begin offering encryption for more than just log-ins. Such increased adoption would cut down on network eavesdropping and also have the added benefit of preventing some online attacks.
Ironically, the announcement of the upcoming change came in a long blog postexplaining that the search company had been "mistakenly" eavesdropping and recording what people were doing on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks as itsStreet View cars were taking pictures of cities around the world and recording the IDs of Wi-Fi networks and routers. That data is used to help geo-locate people using devices without GPS, but the company has said for years it was not collecting session data.
Google turned on encryption -- better known as https:// -- as a default forGmail users earlier this year. That encrypts the data sent between a user’s browser and Google’s servers, making it nearly impossible for someone in the middle to read the contents of that email. When not using SSL, a user of a school or corporate network can have their email and web traffic content read by authorities who control the network, while anyone using an open Wi-Fi connection can have their traffic sniffed by a hacker using simple tools.
Gmail was the first major webmail service to offer encryption for full sessions, rather than just for log-ins. Google allowed power users to use https:// for years, and under pressure from privacy and security advocates turned it into the default for all users earlier this year. In contrast, Gmail’s competitors including Yahoo Mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail don’t even offer https sessions as an option.
Using https, rather than http, is not technically difficult, but the authenticating handshakes between a server and a browser do require more resources from both a server and the browser. That means it costs a company more to run a service and can slow down an application.
This story relates to Google US, but we have contacted the company to find out if Google.co.uk will also be enabling encrypted search. We will update this story when we hear back.
Update: Google UK's official response to our question about UK search encryption: "There's nothing more we can add at this stage." Oh well.
What to expect from Google I/O 2010
Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O, begins on 19 May, and is traditionally used by the search giant to unveil exciting new products. This year, however, it looks to be a massive Android-fest, with the success of the mobile platform meaning that development has focused almost wholly on the little green robot.
The conference has been running since 2008, and was preceded by Google Developer Day in 2007 and Geo Developer Day in 2006. It was scaled up to a full conference after the company realised it needed to better serve the legions of software engineers who depended on it.
In 2008, it brought us initial info on Android, lots of Google Maps mashups and sessions on Google Gears. In 2009, there was a pile of juicy Chrome details and the uber-hyped but ill-fated launch of Google Wave.
So what will 2010's conference bring us? Well, it's looking like the focus is going to be Android, Android and more Android. The big announcement is almost sure to be FroYo -- Android 2.2. Rumours suggest that the new version of the OS, which will roll out quickly to Nexus One owners, will include huge speed improvements, data tethering, the ability to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot, and the bundling of Adobe's Flash Player 10.1. It's also said to feature the decoupling of some of the main Android apps from the OS itself, so they can be more easily updated even if phone manufacturers take their time issuing OS updates.
Looking a little deeper at the list of sessions on offer, however, gives a look at what the company's major focus is for Android in the near future. There's a talk on writing games for Android -- suggesting that Google is concerned about the success of games on the iPhone and iPad. There's a session on targeting all Android devices, which seems to indicate that there's internal concern over fragmentation of the platform, too. There's also a session on app speed, which when combined with the zippiness of the 2.2 update shows that perhaps Google's focusing on speed and responsiveness as an avenue of attack against Apple.
The other big rumour for Google I/O 2010 is that a flavour of Android customised for set-top boxes will be launched. Google TV has long been said to be in development at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, and is said to allow televisions to run web applications such as Google Search, YouTube, Google Earth and Picasa. A Google-made device is supposedly in the works, but other manufacturers will be able to put the platform on their hardware, too.
Tablets are likely to be on show, too. Following the early excitement about Apple's iPad, manufacturers have been looking to Google to provide an alternative operating system. We wouldn't be surprised if a series of tablets from a range of manufacturers appear -- including Dell, Archos and Enso. Similarly, there's talk of Android appearing in cars too, with GM set to allow smartphones to sync with your car dashboard. That could set the scene for a user to save an address on Google Maps on a laptop, leave the house, and then have navigation start automatically when they set off in their car.
Aside of Android, there's a suggestion from eWeek that there'll be a big event for Google App Engine and the Google Apps ecosystem, but other than that there's radio silence. What about a merger of Twitter-like Buzz and location service Latitude to provide a rival for Foursquare? What about the future of Google Docs now that Microsoft has roped in Facebook for integration with Office 2010? What about the company's plans to roll out fibre-optic cables across the United States for super-fast broadband? And what about ChromeOS -- the lightweight desktop OS that there's been little activity on since launch?
A focus on Android is entirely understandable for the company, but we'll be very surprised if that's the whole story. Keep track on the Google I/O website, the official Twitter account and hashtag, or the YouTube channel.
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