Geemodo: October 2006

Monday, October 30, 2006

Free book on Asterisk IPPBX setup

All those who dabble or dibble in VOIP, Asterisk, Get this book.
VOIP IP Telephony: Free Asterisk Book AsteriskTFOT

Friday, October 27, 2006

Bittorrent pirate Admin goes to jail,

Torrentfreak reports;

The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for his role in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents. This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US.
Earlier He had admitted that he was guilty of pirating software, Via Elitetorrents, snatched by the FBI operation better known as 'Operation D-Elite.
Operation D-Elite was carried out by the FBI with help from the MPAA in May 2005, and resulted in the shutdown of one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers at that time.
Go read the article and the following conversation at Torrentfreak and DIGG it if you like the article.
Slashdot also carries a conversation. Where I first learned about this news.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

iTunes Doubletwisted, detuned.

Jon Lech Johansen has "reverse engineered" the FairPlay system by Apple that prevents iTunes downloads from being played on any MP3 player other than iPods. Bummer.
Mr Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, rose to fame at the age of 15 when he wrote and distributed a program called DeCSS that cracked the encryption codes on DVDs.
Mr Johansen first distributed a program to bypass the Apple system, called QTFairUse, in 2003. Since then several versions of the program have been distributed to keep up to date with new versions of iTunes and FairPlay. Although these hacks were distributed on the web for free but were difficult to use without technical know-how, meaning not everyone could detune and Itune. But now there is another twist to this, Mr Johansen and DoubleTwist plan to commercialise the technology. Currently iTunes controls 88% of the legal music download market, while 60% of those possessing a portable music player own an iPod.
So what does this fairplay does? All music sold through iTunes uses the FairPlay system that restricts the use of the downloads. Purchased music can only be moved between five computers and played on an Apple iPod. Downloads cannot be transferred to players made by other manufacturers, such as Creative or Sony.The new "workaround" could help companies like these sell iTunes compatible products that could start to scratch away at the iPod's dominance.
His latest feat could help companies such as Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which have all announced plans over the past few months for music download services combined with new devices to challenge Apple. So take a byte, DeTune iTune.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Firefox 2.0 will be released tomorrow, but you can download it today!

We all have been waiting for Firefox 2.0, which will let M$ to spend few years to catch up, (Firefox 1.5 was caught up by IE7 but all I know is reports and what I ran on Vista beta.). Anyway I happened to be running Firefox 2.0 right now, down loaded from this site. I don't know how it leaked but I am happy!
Thanks Firefox.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Skype Love! love skype or remove skype

VOIP IP Telephony: Skype Love! For free or almost free!

Friday, October 20, 2006

Fix your Asterisk, 1.0, 1.2 etc

Ravenii reports;
VOIP IP Telephony: Asterisk remote heap overflow
A security Advisory has been issued on Asterisk open source PBX, IPPBX. Please fix as soon as possible, any application or servers using Asterisk like TRIXBOX, should fix this overflow. I am running Asterisk 1.4-beta2 and not affected.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

San Francisco Google Free Wireless gets a Blow, almost literally

After reading this article VOIP IP Telephony: San Francisco picks Google for its Wireless!, I was waiting happily to connect my notebook or ipaq to free wireless from Google and earthlink, the chosen vendors from multiple picks.
I have been waiting too long, much too long. I thought it was on the way but I read today, on Davis Freeberg's blog about a townhall meeting. My jaw fell! Why do we have to deal with these stupid uneducated politicians? As David says I can understand if city has to pay or tax payers money is used to provide these services, activity groups has right to protest, but not violently, as may have happened as David describes.
David's description of opposition to free wireless;
"Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a Â“requirementÂ” for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts."
made me laugh and pity the stupid dumbnuts.
But I was sad to see this that this deal might go down the drain. Yes nothing comes free, but there are many a users in San Francisco that do dial up networking, so 300K connection, free will benefit many a folks.
I think those nuts should study the city of Mountan view; VOIP IP Telephony: Google wi-fi (goofi) approved by Mountainview City.; may be I will move there!
There is good discussion going on adavid'sds site and you better hurry over there, you might even get hints of as whom to vote for in next city elections.
Well here is the link to David's article.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

ALL Video to PSP, portable TV, you name it, gadget

I read about this in boingboing and I think I want one. But I am getting another gadget today, so it has to wait. I will write about my gadget tomorrow! it is a networked DVD player!
What BB writes about is;

Gadget turns all your video into iPod/PSP/phone/laptop video,
Neuros Recorder 2 and there is also Recorder 2 plus!

BB further says;
"It's seems ridiculous that you can record a TV show to play back on your TV, but you have to buy it again if you want to watch it on your iPod, phone or PSP. Why do you need to buy a DVD and an iPod version? Why can't you "home-tape" your media to something more convenient, the way you could with your old LPs? Thank (or curse) the entertainment companies: they have threatened to sue any company that makes a better digital VCR (they put one manufacturer, ReplayTV, out of business, by sucking up all their dough with legal fees). They've even proposed legislation to close the "analog hole" that makes this recording without permission possible. That's right, Hollywood's media-savvy technophobes really think that they'll be able to convince Congress to help them with something called the "A-Hole problem." Hey, if the shoe fits."

Neuros, which produce the gadget, also has a link to explain why SONY would not do this!

Go ahead and read the article.

links;

BB Gadget turns all your video into iPod/PSP/phone/laptop video,

Neuros Recorder 2, Recorder 2 Plus and more

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Whopper of a USB Flash Memory Stick

Toransendo as transcend is known in day to day Japanese speak, has JetFlash™2A (16GJF2A) ready to ship.
16GB is larger than most of the hard disks shipped with note book a few years back. I still have two notebooks that I use for Network testing and analysis, with 20GB hard drives.
Back to the JetFlash™2A 16GB Flash memory stick, is USB2.0, it has maximum read and write speeds of 25/20MB.
But that is not all, it comes with a slew of software, alas for windows only, Automatic login to accounts via saved passwords (Don't loose that stick!), data backup and E-mail backup, secure Zip Encryption or password protected), and Bookmarking.
Price is unknown at the moment.
Read more here, Japanese transcend site.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Don't be a skype supernode, or how not to be!

Voip IP Telephony
VOIP IP Telephony: How to be or not to be a skype supernode?
explains how you can use skype for your day to day communications and yet not become a supernode. Usually Network admins, ISPs oppose use of Skype due to bandwidth consumption by the Skype application. Usually this happens when the computer, a node, becomes a supernode. The Skype has developed over the years and have attracted millions of users. So to support millions of users, Skype needs thousands, may be hundreds of thousands of Supernodes. So if you are skype a user may be you ought to read it.
But be forewarned, if all skype users do not want to become suppernodes, skype will collapse!

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Google Doc's at web application harbor.

Today I tried my Google Doc, formerly Writley, and I liked it. (I have been using Google spreadsheets for a while now.) Not much
different from my Open Office write. I also noticed that I could email a
document to my account at writley.com! I could also upload using browser
based interface. The document types that you could upload are;
*Documents*

* HTML files and plain text (.txt).
* Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt)
and StarOffice (.sxw).

*Spreadsheets*

* Comma Separated Value (.csv).
* Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

I emailed my self this document to my docs account and it appeared there in seconds and the rest will be done on writely, oops google doc. All the amenities for documenting is available to me, if I knew how to. I can embed links and images as I would do at the blogger editor too.
Best thing is spelling check! I do need it and sometimes I get confused in the blogger editor. But I had to add GOOGLE, google to my dictionary!
Well that covers almost a half of many office suites. I think a casual user can do entirely without any office suite on his / her computer if he /she has a n Internet connection. You can write, calculate, save and share your documents.
I tried uploading some docs and spread sheets from the open office suite and it worked. I also saved documents as M$ file formats within the open office and they also worked. I will try from office , tomorrow, a real M$ office 2003 documents to see how they behave. (I still have to learn to format!!)
Later I noticed on google blog, this snippet;
Get a taste of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets combo with our mini tour. Really, though, the best way to get a flavor is to sample it for yourself. Anyone can use it -- after you log in just click on the links for New Document, New Spreadsheet, or Upload(lets you upload your desktop files) to get going. Help yourself and let us know (via this new D&S Google Group) what you think.
There is also a blog dedicated to Google docs and you can read the first article here.
Only thing you need is a google account.

PDF spammers giving you Haxdoor rootkit

Malware being spammed as PDF from retail stores by ZDNet's Suzi Turner -- Reports surfaced today of spam purporting to be from Dell, Walmart, Circuit City or Sony confirming an order for a Sony Vaio computer with a PDF attachment, but the attachment is, in fact, a very nasty piece of malware named Haxdoor. Text of email: Subject: Order ID : 37679041 Dear Customer, Thank you for ordering from our internet shop. If [...]

What ever you do if you get an email from above sources, do not hesitate, you know you did not order it, so delete it immediately.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

M$ has one up on RIAA, sues Ghosts

The release of FairUse4WM is sure to have irritated Microsoft a lot. The software allowed any user to strip the Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) software from legally downloaded files, thus allowing him or her to do whatever he pleased with them like loading them on to iPOD. As the release of a anti-FairUse4WM had proved to be just a temporary solution, Microsoft now seeks to put an end to this threat the best way it can: with a lawsuit. However, the company might have a lot of trouble in the court.
M$ started the anti-FairUse4WM by sending out odd takedown notices against people who host copies of FairUse4WM, a program that lets you get more use out of the music and video you buy by breaking off the DRM.

Microsoft takedown notices to FairUse4WM hosters is asserting that FairUse4WM violates Microsoft's copyrights in Windows Media Player. This proved to be an odd claim -- it may be that FairUse4WM is a DMCA violation because it circumvents Windows Media Player, but it's quite a stretch to say that it violates Microsoft's copyright. But with the endless supply of lawyers M$ has at hand they might prove it.
Here is one such notices posted on forum.doom9.org.
But it seems that M$ is still not happy and went on filling a law suit against the creators of FairUse4WM software.
But still it has to find those creators. By looking at the filling M$ does not know much yet about those who created the software, like most of us!, it has named ""viodentia"" as the ring leader of the team (supposed to be about 10).
To unearth the real names behind those ghost or nick names, M$ plans to subpoena e-mail service providers. May be that will unearth those programmers.
It is so funny to read comments on the digg story, the best so far for me is;
Fastest Windows Patch: Two Weeks
Fastest Windows Media DRM Patch Three Days

But Apple's iTUNES is not faring better either, here is a comment about Apple, "I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto."
All I know is that this whole DRM thing is silly. Only music I listen is on the radio and TV, and I wonder how long that will last, way these mega billionairs go. I think these things bother and scare me more than north Korean dummy for a dictator does.
I think people ought to look more in the direction of EFF
Read here a talk EFF fellow gave in front of a Microsoft crowd, he started his speech with;
"Here's what I'm here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don't work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT"
If you did not know what EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) it is time you did, go over there, see what they do and if that is your cup of tea, join, you might save your children's cups of teas.

New gadget tax in Europe alarms manufacturers

Electronics manufacturers railed against a European tax on recordable discs and music players like iPods on Friday, even as a Dutch industry group was getting ready to impose new local levies on recordable media. According to PC Magazine's news article.
Nokia Multimedia chief Anssi Vanjoki, Philips Consumer Electronics head Rudy Provoost and others urged the European Commission to reform the "antiquated system of rough justice" as the law comes up for evaluation this year.

New taxes would mean an mp3 player like an Apple iPod would cost 25 euros ($32) more and a hard disk TV recorder 80 euros more in Europe, the electronics industry's lawyer, Dirk Visser, said.

"This will lead to double or triple taxation. Soon, a consumer will pay rights to the artists when he buys on iTunes, then again when he buys a blank disc and undoubtedly it will be extended to mobile phones which can also store music," he said.

The article is here.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Is IE7 on Vista better and Secure that IE6 on XP?

It is not a security analysis but an attempt to mess up IE7 on Vista. Aptly named "IE7 in toolbar mayhem" .
It took the browser through some interesting turns. What I noticed in this prank is the fact that once you accept ONE UAC prompt in IE7 it disables the protection for subsequent browsing until you completely restart IE7. This would make it easy for malware to install itself without alerting you (too much) that it is doing so.
Other thing is still evident that a less educated user still could get spyware/malware into the system via IE7.
Well M$ I think it is bug that need to fix;) I hope not many others left hidden.
The article took IE7 from this;
to this with much more in between.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

WGA = SPP, SPP=Kill Switch, Killed Vista => Linux Desktop!

All the Linux fans and developers of desktop software should rejoice! Today is the day of the beginning of new era for Linux desktops and distros. The server side of Linux is taking care of itself with the likes of Redhat, SUSE, Centos and the likes. But the desktops are in the form of waking up. Some of them are already in the acceptable form of cooperate desktop.
Well today's blogsphere is awash with news about SPP or the new version of WGA that will come with Vista. Knowing the way WGA behaved, SPP will also will lead to false positives. There is a difference right now. Imagine you are a big cooperation with 1000's of machines running M$ vista. Since M$ is focusing on eliminating piracy of Volume licensed keys, (Volume license allows a cooperation to use a single key on multiple machines), guess what is going to happen!
Lone user of XP that was falsely recognized as a pirated copy may spend time on the phone to get his copy validated again. But a cooperation or business with hundreds or thousands of desktops does not have time to do so. Frustration will build up.
These cooperation's and users are bound to windows because of applications they use. These applications are the life blood of their day to day work. If these applications ran on any platform, I don't think these companies care. So why they are not selecting Linux?
Knowledge!! The Linux distributions like Xandros have done a lot on their distribution and Xandros can run most of the business applications. Most of the other proprietary applications (likes of Oracle etc) are slowly moving to web and dependency on OS is slowly veining.
So Linux should plan to bring about a marketing campaign tied to Vista release. Plan to promote Linux aggressively as Vista is released and bring the campaign to it's peek in about six months after Vista is out.
So the people knows when Vista, goes down, that they have another path. Xandros and like distros could offer two license per single license of Vista at a lower price. Before you know, Linux will overtake M$.

SO back to SPP, There are number of places that you can read about and better written than here are, the best aggregation of the best articles are at Computerworld's IT Blog watch. It give you enough ideas and links to other bloggers that write well on the subject.
I specially liked the way he ended the article;
"But the Best Headline award goes to Harpreet Kaur:

Microsoft To Rip Your Head Off If You Pirate Vista"

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

zunelicious

Zune ads found in New York. And according to the author of the blog, it does not say what Zune is!
He has pictures comparing Zune to iPod and Zune seems to be bigger!
But the best comment on the site and One that made me laugh....

"How often do I have to reboot it?"

Bahahahahaha :)
zunelicious

Firefox vulnerability is a HOAX and Speaker had Dinner with Microsoft !

Update II, People seems to doubt the source of the picture, It is from "Mischa Spiegelmock's" own website and it is from a collection of photos he took while attending " Seattle Mindcamp".

Take a screen capture!

Update; The hoaxer had dinner with Microsoft!, the link at the bottom.

At Toorcon this weekend, two speakers claimed they found vulnerabilities in the Javascript VM. and media was awash with many a gleeful reports. Some even claimed the vulnerability count to 30.

So Mozilla team got to work. and according to Window Snyder of Mozilla team;

"So far weÃ‚’ve been able to reproduce a denial of service issue based on the information they gave during their talk. In some cases this causes a crash based on an out of memory error. Based on the information we have at this time we have not been able to confirm whether an attacker can achieve code execution. "

Since there were not detectable problems, Mozilla team contacted the speakers. After all it turned out to be a hoax. They say it was a joke but I doubt it. Read more because they might be M$ fans.

Here is the full post from Mozilla Developer News;

"We got a chance to talk to Mischa Spiegelmock, the Toorcon speaker that reported the potentialJavaScriptt security issue referenced earlier. He gave us more code to work with and also made this statement and agreed to let me post it here:

The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous.

As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this, and I personally have not gotten it to result in code execution, nor do I know of anyone who has.

I have not succeeded in making this code do anything more than cause a crash and eat up system resources, and I certainly havenÃ‚’t used it to take over anyone elseÃ‚’s computer and execute arbitrary code.

I do not have 30 undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities, nor did I ever make this claim. I have no undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities. The person who was speaking with me made this claim, and I honestly have no idea if he has them or not.

I apologize to everyone involved, and I hope I have made everything as clear as possible.

Sincerely,

Mischa Spiegelmock

Even though Mischa hasn‚’t been able to achieve code execution, we still take this issue seriously. We will continue to investigate.

-Window Snyder"

But after that I did some searching for "Mischa Spiegelmock" and he seemed to have had dinner wMicrosoftsoft and Amazon, Proof wphotosotos from speaker own site.

The other guy seemed to be non-existant who came for the ride along!, as far as I am concerned.

This is an insane Joke mister.

Monday, October 02, 2006

VOIP IP Telephony: EEK! a mouse in a skype or Mouse with a skype Phone ASG 142

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Seitz / DALSA 160MP monster of a digital camera.

Seitz has released information on a 160MP digital camera. When I first saw the information, I was awed but I think I will stick to my $799.00 8MP Olympus for a while. This monster is around $30000.00. But it is worth at least to go through the details. If you see the sample photos and if you in any way like photographs, you would wish just to hold it and click away a few frames. These few frames will be transfered over Gigabit interface to a tethered Apple Mac mini or similar computer.
For the starters here is a sample image from the product information page which was taken by Alois Stutz;
This is a 6 X 17 image. But I can't get a true size image and this will have to do. Ok lets look at he camera now, no let's see the camera in somebody's hand. It will give you a more perspective how this monster of a hand held camera will behave in your arms.
I think it is a quite handfull!.
Here are some tech information about the camera;

Very high speed and resolution: 300 MB raw data per second!
Special imaging sensor developed by DALSA Corporation exclusively for Seitz for photography applications
Very high sensitivity and broad ISO/ASA range (equivalent): 500 - 10'000
Very high image quality thanks to 48-bit colour depth, low noise, high dynamic range, DALSA anti-blooming feature, Seitz image optimisation algorythms, freedom to use own raw-conversion workflow
Possibility to freely interchange Seitz D3 digital scan back between Seitz 6x17 camera, new Roundshot D3 panorama camera and - in the future - medium or
large format cameras

How about some features;

Create a high resolution 6x17 digital image (160 million pixels) in
one second!
Ideal for use with world-class Schneider or Rodenstock large format lenses (on Seitz lens board) or Linhof Technorama, Fuji and other large format lenses (on adaptor plate)
User-friendly camera system and software with 640x480 pixel colour touch screen for perfect preview, editing, zooming and image control
State-of-the art computer technology with gigabit Ethernet file transfer, powerful portable mini-computer (storage device) and handheld control device (PDA) with IP network WLAN connection
Fully mobile and open system:
- full mobility for outdoors assignments (with camera, portable
mini-computer, handheld control device)
- possibility to use in studio and run software on
computer with free choice of operating system (Mac OS,
Windows, Linux)
Uncompromising precision of camera body and accessories

The Digital 3 scan back sensor has been designed and developed exclusively for Seitz by DALSA Corporation.

In this multi-year project specialists around the world have brought together the best capabilities in digital technology, computer science, image optimisation and knowledge of photography applications to build a camera system that goes beyond the imaginable.

Here is the PDF of the product info and sample images. The Seitz home page is here.