Latest Technological News: 2011

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Never Leave Your USB Drive Behind Again With USB Alert

Everyone knows the horror of looking for it when you need it only to realize that you left it behind plugged into the last computer you used.
With USB Alert, you'll get a warning when you shut down to unplug your USB drive before you go.

USB Alert will play a warning sound and display an on-screen alert every time you issue a shutdown or lock command warning you that you have a USB storage device still connected to the system. From there you can see your connected devices or dismiss the alert – but the warning makes all the difference.

Download USB Alert

How do you make sure you don't leave your drives behind when it's time to leave the office for the day?
Leave your tips in the comments.

How To Merge Avi Movies With VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a software with the ability to merge avi files.
You can also use this tutorial for other purposes, for instance to merge episodes of a TV series, or multiple videos that you have shot with your camcorder, digital camera or smartphone. Everything is possible as long as the input format of the videos is avi.

First download the latest version of VirtualDub from the official website. Unpack the portable software to your hard drive after download, and run the VirtualDub.exe afterwards.

You load the first movie with a click on File --> Open Video File. Click on File again and select Append Avi Segment for each additional part that you have as a file on your hard drive.

You can only load one movie at a time, which makes the process somewhat unhandy if you have many different parts.

Switch to the Video menu and make sure Full Processing Mode is selected there. Click on Compression under Video afterwards, and select one of the available video codecs. Please note that you need suitable codecs installed on your system for a solid result that offers a good image quality and suitable file size.

You can furthermore add filters to the process, for instance if you would like to resize the video, change the brightness and contrast or add a logo to one of the corners. You can preview the changes by pressing enter or by selecting File > Preview Filtered.
Once you have made your selection select File > Save as Avi and pick a directory on the local hard drive to save the video to.

VirtualDub will display a status window where you can get information about the current processing status, as well as an estimation of the file size of the new video file. You can jack up the process priority if your computer is idle otherwise.
And that’s it. Just wait for the process to finish. It is recommended to play the video once on your hard drive to make sure that the merging was successful and without errors like out of sync audio.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Malware Steals Your Bitcoin

Bitcoins have become popular as an alternative to government-controlled currencies, but a new Trojan seems to be specifically targeting Bitcoin wallets in an attempt to steal funds, security firm Symantec warns.

The malware, Infostealer.Coinbit, is fairly simple: It targets Windows machines and zeros in on the standard file location for a Bitcoin wallet. It then e-mails the wallet — a data file containing private crypto keys — to the attacker by way of a server in Poland, according to Symantec, which was first to alert on the attack.

“If you use Bitcoins, you have the option to encrypt your wallet and we recommend that you choose a strong password for this in the event that an attacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open,” Symantec’s Stephen Doherty wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Current exchange rates place the value of one Bitcoin to about $23.50 USD as of late Friday afternoon, according to bitcoincharts.com. For an overview of how the system works, see the currency's official site.

Earlier this week, a hack on a Bitcoin user's Windows computer was said to have resulted in the loss of the equivalent of $500,000 USD. While the amount is said to be disputed -- such a large amount transferring would have caused a drop in the value of the Bitcoin, and some claim the system wouldn't have been able to handle such a large transfer.

Regardless of the claims validity, it is believed that hackers have been able to develop botnets to exploit the Bitcoin system, Symantec reported earlier this week. It is believed that based on current valuations, these efforts could be netting these botnet owners the equivalent of $100,000 per month.

German Hacker Gets Therapy After Hacking Lady Gaga

An 18-year-old who hacked the computers of pop stars including Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake has been ordered to undergo therapy to break his hacking addiction. He must also carry out six months of community service.

The teen had confessed to planting Trojan horse malware on stars' computers to gain access to their personal information and unreleased singles and compromising photos.

The judge ruled that the teen was driven more by a desire for recognition than by criminal intent, which contributed to his receiving a lighter sentence.

Friday, June 17, 2011

LulzSec Releases Over 62.000 Hacked Passwords

Hacker group LulzSec published the accounts of over 62,000 emails and passwords for free for download.

Mikko H. Hypponen from F-secure believes that the emails and passwords were from a database kept by website Writerspace.com, according to the Hacker News.

Gizmodo took the database and has made a script for users to input their email address to check it against the release from LulzSec. Unless you were a member of Writerspace, you're probably not affected, but this is a good way to confirm.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Citigroup Hack Hit 360,000 Credit Cards

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JANUARY 18: A sign is dis...

Citigroup's said that about one percent of customers had been affected, implying that around 200,000 had been affected.

Citigroup released a letter to its customers implying that around 360,083 card accounts had been affected.

Citigroup now says it's replaced the cards of about 217,000 customers.

It seems California was the hardest-hit state, with about 80,000 affected accounts.

Citigroup has reiterated that the information taken won't allow hackers to access funds directly.

The Spaceship Office of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs presented plans for an office building that is completely circular in shape.

Jobs himself characterized the building concept as looking a bit like a spaceship.

The building will be quite expensive to make due to its lack of flat surfaces.

The outside windows will require large sheets of curved glass, which aren't even common at Apple Stores.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

iOS 5 Jailbroken

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

iOS 5 just came out yesterday and only to developers but that did not stop super jailbreak MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team from successfully jailbraking it.

The jailbreak proof comes via MuscleNerd on Twitter who posted two images of an iPod touch 4G running a jailbroken version of the new iOS.

The first shows the Cydia store installed, the second shows root access has been gained.
MuscleNerd forms part of the iPhone Dev Team who are well-known for performing jailbreaks on Apple’s iOS versions. T

his latest jailbreak required the use of Geohot’s Limera1n exploit and unfortunately is tethered, meaning each reboot of your device requires connection to a PC in order to retain the jailbroken state.

The good news is that this method will work on the final version of iOS, so you can jailbreak the day iOS 5 is released this Fall.
Thanks to the work of lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iPhone jailbreaking is exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The same statute has been invoked in several high-stakes jailbreaking lawsuits involving Sony's PlayStation game console, which enjoys no such exemption.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Twitter Launch a Photo-Sharing Service

Twitter announced to the world that Twitter was going to be rolling out its very own photo-sharing service over the next few weeks.
Twitter photos won’t be competing with Facebook albums because it’s organized around conversations and is relevant in the moment. Videos, however, will still be hosted by third parties.

Twitter is also putting the “smack-down” on third-party client for photo-sharing services. The company has already acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. Recently, it was announced that Twitter had acquired Tweet Deck.

Twitter, developed in March of ’06 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year, has gained popularity in leaps and bounds since its launch. In July of 2007 it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter.
In only a year, this number grew to 100 million posts per quarter and now, with an estimated user base of over 200 million people worldwide, users of Twitter purportedly issue around a billion tweets every six days.

The company reports 13 billion API requests coming in every single day. Despite being censored in Iran, China, Egypt and South Korea, Twitter continues to see rapid growth and it is generally felt that this is due to the company’s commitment to keeping up with their user base and constantly striving to improve the service and its relevance to the user community.

How the world will use the internet in 2015

Image representing Cisco as depicted in CrunchBase

Cisco, one the world's biggest maker of networking gear predicts that in 2015

Internet traffic will quadruple and reach 80.5 exabytes per month (80 exabytes would fill 20 billion DVDs.

That year, for the first time, Asia will generate more traffic (24.1 exabytes per month) than North America (22.3 exabytes per month)—although Amercia still beats China (6.9 versus 5.6 exabytes per month).

Yet if traffic figures are divided by population, a somewhat different (and more meaningful) picture emerges: South Korea is and will be the world's most data-hungry country in Cisco's sample.

Even Canada and France (and, by 2015, Britain) will consume more gigabytes per month per person than America. As for China, it drops down the list and will be overtaken by Brazil, but remains way ahead of India.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Chinese Gmail Attack Targets 'Senior' U.S. Officials

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBase

Google revealed the suspected source of a hacking attack on Gmail accounts: users originating in China.

Eric Grosse, engineering director on the Google Security Team, said in a blog post Wednesday that specific user account credentials were targeted.

Targets included government officials from the U.S. and "several Asian countries" as well as political activists, journalists, and military personnel, Google said.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' e-mails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings,"

"It's important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected--these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online," Grosse continued.

Google says it's notified those with affected accounts and has also secured the accounts. The company is encouraging users to add extra layers of security including designing more complex passwords, turning on two-step account verification, and only going through the company's secured "https://www.google.com" domain when logging on from a Web browser.

Google's blog post notes that "internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself."

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Flight Schedules on Google Search

Image representing Google Search as depicted i...

If someone were to tell you that Google just launched flight travel search results without using data it culled from ITA Software, you'd probably think it a joke.
You'd be wrong.

Google has added the ability to obtain flight schedule information for all airports directly on Google search results page.

Although, you’ll still need them to book your tickets, but for a quick search for available flights, you no longer have to open another website.

To quickly find out which airlines serve a specific route and when they fly, simply type “flights from "your city" to "destination city" ”.

So Google's flight search move is clearly aimed at planting a seed for the summer vacation rush, which yields millions of searches and ads to pair with them. And that's Google's play here.

How To Stop People From Adding You To Facebook Groups

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

How can you stop people from adding you to Facebook Groups automatically?
The answer is, you cannot.
The only option you have is to leave the group and contact the friend to let them know that you do not want to be part of the group.
If you get re-added, your only option is to leave again and / or remove the friend who has added you from the friend list.

Here is how you leave groups.

Click on Groups on your Facebook profile page.

The groups link is located near the top right corner of the page.

There you see a list of all groups that you are a member of. To leave a group, hover your mouse cursor over the group. A blue x is displayed next to the group. Click on the x to leave the group.

You will get a remove group membership confirmation prompt. Select Remove if you are sure and want to leave the selected group on Facebook.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Google Cooling Entire Data Center With Seawater

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

In 2009 Google purchased a former building of a paper mill in Finland. Since then, the search giant has been hard at work designing a water cooling solution that would take the seawater into the data center and then channel it back out with minimal environment impact.

Any PC building enthusiast will know the merits of water-cooling.

Check out the video that Google made on its new location:

Automatically Move Photos to Folders Based on Exif Date

If you want to automatically move and sort your photos to directories based on the specific date the photo was taken, I suggest you to try a free program called PhotoMove.

Simply choose the directory where your photos are saved, choose the directory under which you want the date sorted files to go and then click on the ‘Find Photos’ Button.

PhotoMove is based on the Perl library ExifTool, using which you can either move or copy your photos to date based subdirectories.

Wait for it to finish scanning and the program will show the number of files found and number of photos that has a valid EXIF creation dates. Then click on either ‘Copy Image Files’ or ‘Move Image Files’.

By the way PhotoMove operates on all files with embedded Exif data, not necessarily picture files.

So if the source folder contain other files that uses Exif to store dates such as Microsoft Excel files (.xls) and Adobe Acrobat PDF files (.pdf), these will get moved or copied as well.

So pay attention to what directories you pick to move or copy files from.

For Command Line users I recommend you the ExifTool by Phil Harvey

Monday, May 30, 2011

283,000 Car Owners Lose Personal Data From HONDA

DES PLAINES, IL - MARCH 16: (FILE PHOTO) A Ho...

Japanese carmaker Honda is confronting a theft of personal information from 283,000 Honda and Acura customers in Canada.

Executive vice-president and chief compliance officer at Honda Canada Inc., confirmed Thursday that names, addresses and vehicle identification numbers were taken from the company's e-commerce websites myHonda and myAcura.

In a letter to affected vehicle owners dated May 13, Honda Canada said it was alerted by unusual volume on the sites, including “some unauthorized attempts to access account information.” The letter said financial information was not compromised.

Honda, which does not sell customer data to third parties, is investigating the incident, which has been reported to police. Perpetrators have not been identified and no group has claimed responsibility.

The letter warns of “possible improper access of information,” but said customers are not at risk for fraud and identity theft. Chenkin said federal and provincial privacy commissions were notified and customers were warned of the breach “as soon as possible.”

The letter said customers should be on the alert for marketing overtures that reference ownership of a Honda or Acura vehicles.

Online security experts said the information can ultimately be used to steal identities.
Honda late last year warned more than two million of its customers in the U.S. that an email database containing some of their personal information had been stolen.

The list contained names, login identities, email addresses and vehicle identification numbers of the Honda owners, while another list containing only the email addresses of nearly three million Acura owners was also taken.

Related articles

Email Accounts Hacked in 15 Minutes

KTTV Fox 11 investigative report on Anonymous.

A recently posted video on YouTube teaches viewer's how to hack into someone's email account in just 15 minutes.

The video showed a group of volunteers follow an online "man in the middle technique" tutorial. It showed them learn in just fifteen minutes how to hack into a computer network. It went on to show them using the technique to obtain each other's login details and passwords.

To date there are an estimated 20,000 videos available on YouTube alone that teach viewers the basics of hacking social media profiles, email accounts, smartphones and PayPal accounts.

A report from the Daily Mail has already speculated that as many as 16 per cent of the British population have had their social networking profiles broken into and a further 10 per cent have suffered financially as a result.

Here's some tips to avoid falling victim to cyber crime.

Users change their password regularly and use more obscure word and letter combinations.

Leave any website that makes overt use of unknown certificates and pop ups.

Avoid sending data over unsecured or public wireless networks.

Always check the security behind free wireless connections.

If using a smartphone disable its auto Wi-Fi connect feature.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sony PlayStation Network Restart in Japan Blocked By Government

Sony will not be allowed to restart its halted online game services in Japan until it provides further information on what measures it has taken since an earlier hacking incident, a Japanese regulatory official said Sunday.

A Japanese government official said the country has not yet allowed Sony to launch PlayStation Network within its borders because of concerns over the security of the service.

"We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them," Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, told Dow Jones Newswires.

He listed two areas where it requires further explanation before approval will be given following the incidents regarding its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment videogame services.

"The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference," he said, adding that he could not provide details on the outstanding issues for security reasons.

The second was in how Sony hoped to regain consumer confidence over personal data such as credit card information.

Sony began a limited and phased restoration of the services Saturday, bringing the company a step closer to normalcy following an attack on its systems that compromised personal information for more than 100 million user accounts last month. It said that it would begin bringing its PlayStation Network back online in the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East.

Monday, May 16, 2011

A Schizophrenic Computer Created By Scientists

Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.
The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."

"It's an important mechanism to be able to ignore things," says Grasemann. "What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia."

"Information processing in neural networks tends to be like information processing in the human brain in many ways," says Grasemann. "So the hope was that it would also break down in similar ways. And it did."

How Bin Laden Baffled US Electronic Surveillance

Osama bin Laden didn't have an internet connection or a phone, but for years he was a prolific user of email by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe.

Bin Laden would type the messages on a computer that had no connection to the outside world and then instruct a trusted courier to drive to a cafe so they could be emailed.

The courier would then save messages addressed to bin Laden to the same drive and bring it back so his boss could read them offline.

The process was so tedious that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at the al-Qaida chief's ability to maintain it for so long.

US Navy Seals seized roughly 100 flash memory drives when they killed bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound.

The cache of messages is so big that the government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over them.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Help Light Your Face During Video Chats With an Empty Browser Window

If you live in your basement or a place where you don't have a lot of light, your webcam may have some trouble seeing you.

The solution? Use the light from your monitor.

If you're video-chatting with someone, simply open an blank browser window and type in the URL bar about:blank

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

ALL Your Music From the Cloud With Google Music Streams

Google Music, the streaming music answer to Amazon, MOG and Rdio, is here.

You can access music in the cloud and stream to devices. But unlike MOG and Rdio, you can only play what you upload.

How do you use it? You use Google's Music Manager on your desktop to add your songs to the service. It adds play counts and ratings as well. It's a "full featured music manager", so you can search and do all the other things you could in iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Here's a look at some of its features:

• Library Upload: With the Music Manager app, you can upload your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries with one click. You can also upload by file or folder.

• Offline Listening: It's a pretty standard feature, but Google's gives this feature a neat twist by automatically caching songs you've recently listened to. I'd also love to see them do this for most listened songs. And of course, you can also cache specific songs you select. Necessary, since you can't re-download music from the service.

• Seamlessness: Any change you make to your Google Music library on one device is automatically pushed to other devices.

• Playlists: Once you upload your tracks to the Google Music cloud, you can play around with it just like it was in a music app. That means playlists which automatically sync across all your connected devices. They also have a smart playlist feature called instant mix, which will automatically build a list for you based on one song. It's like iTunes' genius or Pandora's recommendation bot. Google says that they have servers actually listening to the songs to make their playlist selection.

The service can store up to 20,000 songs per user on up to eight authorized devices and took five minutes or so for the first 150 songs to upload.

But you don't always have an internet connection, or a good enough one to stream music. So you can either select certain music to cache on your device, and the service automatically caches your recently listened-to music as well.

You can request an invitation to Music Beta here.

Monday, May 9, 2011

White Hat Hackers Find Skype Security Hole For Mac

Skype has issued an update for all Mac users, due to security concerns in Skype version 5.x for Mac which allows a malicious user to activate code on the victim’s computer.

A security researcher said today that he found a serious hole in the Mac version of Skype and proving that it was possible to send a specific message to a user of Skype and it would crash Skype and make it unusable.

Gordon Maddern, says he discovered the vulnerability about a month ago. He was chatting on Skype to a colleague about a payload when the payload executed in the colleague's Skype client accidentally.

He created a proof of concept that can be used in an attack but is not releasing details on it until Skype fixes the issue. He could not find the vulnerability in the Skype client for Windows and Linux, he said.

Friday, May 6, 2011

How To Embed MP3 Files On Website Or Blog

How can you embed mp3 files into web pages?
Google audio player is a cool way to embed and play any music mp3 file on your website. This will allow your readers to play audio files directly from web pages.

To embed an MP3 file, add the following code to your web page or blog post.

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" quality="best" flashvars="audioUrl=LINK" width="500" height="27"></embed>

Replace LINK with the URL of the MP3 file. The file can be uploaded to any server or file hosting services including your own, as long as the file is directly accessible.

You can change the width of the Google audio player to fit your content width. If you increase the height, a black empty zone starts to appear, so best keep it at 27px.

Try to play the audio file below. It is embedded using the above code.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Sony Knew Software Was Outdated Three Months Ago

In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using seriously outdated software on its servers and knew about it approximately three months before, the company was informed by security experts monitoring open Internet forums that its version of Apache Web Server was out of date.

This version was unpatched and had no firewall protection of any kind.

Read the congessional testimony here (PDF)

Sony Blames Partially Anonymous For Security Breach and Data Theft

Sony has blamed the online vigilante group Anonymous for indirectly allowing the security breach that allowed a hacker to gain access to the personal data of more than 100m online gamers.

In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee's panel on commerce, manufacturing and trade, Sony said the breach came at the same time as it was fighting a denial-of-service attack from Anonymous, also they discovered a file planted on one of its servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion," the tagline for the group that has brought down the websites of big corporations such as Visa, the letter said.

In response, Anonymous released a statement Wednesday denying the allegations, but did allow that individual members may have been involved.
"Sony is incompetent," the group said. "While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility."

Possible Security Breach At LastPass

Users who manage and store their passwords through password management service LastPass are being forced to change their master passwords after the site noticed an issue this week that raised the spectre of a possible security breach.

LastPass wrote on their blog yesterday that because they can't account for the anomaly they detected in one of the databases, the company made the decision to assume the worst that some of its data had been hacked, even though they say you shouldn't be impacted by this issue if you have a strong, non-dictionary-based password.

LastPass hasn't identified a specific breach, it's erring on the site of caution by now forcing its members to change their master passwords.

LastPass let users create and manage passwords to more easily log in to the vast array of secure Web sites they visit.
Those passwords can be stored on a PC or mobile device as well as online. As one means of protection, LastPass typically urge users to create a single complex master password that can unlock the key to accessing their passwords.
Of course, if that master password is compromised, hackers potentially can gain access to all the individual passwords, one reason why these companies advise users to employ complex master passwords.

In the meantime, LastPass have moved services to other servers for now. They also compared the code on the live servers with code from their repositories to make sure it was not tampered with.
The company is also enhancing the encryption used to protect its data.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Woz Tells Paul Allen To Stop Trolling

Apple and Microsoft have battled it out on many fronts over the years, but now there's a new one: the battle of the lesser-known co-founders.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn't entirely happy with the behavior of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and decided to tell him so.

Wozniak dedicated some pointed, if not poignant, remarks toward Allen at the Embedded System Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, Calif., last week.

He reportedly declared: "That patent-troll thing...the other night Paul Allen was speaking at the Computer History Museum and I had four tickets. And I decided at the last minute not to go, because I remembered he's suing all these companies like Apple and Google but he's not suing Microsoft because he bought all these patents."

Wozniak later said that Allen should be "investing in companies that are doing something, making products, actually making a new future for the world," rather than "get in bed with the lawyers to make my money."

Still, you might be wondering what Wozniak did instead of going to see Allen at the Computer History Museum. He reportedly wandered off with some friends to Marie Callender's. Not so much because he loves the pies, but because he loves the split-pea soup with ham.

Post-raid Satellite Image Of Osama Bin Laden Compound

Satellite images of the compund where Osama bin Laden was likely shot and killed have been released by GeoEye, a satellite imagery provider.

GeoEye:

This one-meter resolution image shows a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. According to news reports Abbottabad is the town where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces. The image was collected by the IKONOS satellite on May 2, 2011 at 10:51 a.m. local time while flying 423 miles above the Earth at an average speed of 17,000 mph, or four miles per second.

The timing of this image would be taken place 10 hours after the attack.

The crash site of the problem-helicopter seems plainly visibly as a blackened helicopter-shaped mass.
While there are photographs around of helicopter chunks eventually being hauled away, this satellite image seems to have been taken before then: