Archive for January, 2008
Darko on January 29th, 2008
A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday.
The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret.
“Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, when asked about the situation after it was disclosed by other officials. “Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause.”
He would not comment on whether it is possible for the satellite to be perhaps shot down by a missile. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss any specifics at this time.
A senior government official said that lawmakers and other nations are being kept apprised of the situation.
Such an uncontrolled re-entry could risk exposure of U.S. secrets, said John Pike, a defense and intelligence expert. Spy satellites typically are disposed of through a controlled re-entry into the ocean so that no one else can access the spacecraft, he said.
Pike also said it’s not likely the threat from the satellite could be eliminated by shooting it down with a missile, because that would create debris that would then re-enter the atmosphere and burn up or hit the ground.
Pike, director of the defense research group GlobalSecurity.org, estimated that the spacecraft weighs about 20,000 pounds and is the size of a small bus. He said the satellite would create 10 times less debris than the Columbia space shuttle crash in 2003.
As for possible hazardous material in the spacecraft, Pike said it might contain beryllium, a light metal with a high melting point that is used in the defense and aerospace industries. Breathing beryllium can lead to chronic, incurable respiratory problems.
Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, said the spacecraft likely is a photo reconnaissance satellite. Such eyes in the sky are used to gather visual information from space about adversarial governments and terror groups, including construction at suspected nuclear sites or militant training camps. The satellites also can be used to survey damage from hurricanes, fires and other natural disasters.
The largest uncontrolled re-entry by a NASA spacecraft was Skylab, the 78-ton abandoned space station that fell from orbit in 1979. Its debris dropped harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and across a remote section of western Australia.
In 2000, NASA engineers successfully directed a safe de-orbit of the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, using rockets aboard the satellite to bring it down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean.
In 2002, officials believe debris from a 7,000-pound science satellite smacked into the Earth’s atmosphere and rained down over the Persian Gulf, a few thousand miles from where they first predicted it would plummet.
Darko on January 28th, 2008
When it first launched in 2004, Facebook swept across college campuses and became forever embedded in our popular culture.Just two short years later, anyone older than 13 could join, making the social networking site one of the most popular sites on the Internet with 60 million registered users. It became so popular, in fact, that a 2006 study found that college students named the site as the second most “in” thing, tied with beer and sex - losing only to the ubiquitous iPod.
So how could something that became as popular as two of the most common college traditions go so wrong in just a few years after its creation?Even though many of us enjoyed the welcomed distraction of friending, tagging and poking people for countless hours, it soon became apparent that Facebook was going to have to do more than connect us with our friends to hold our attention - and keep turning a profit. And it was downhill from there. Unfortunately, to accomplish its revenue goal, the creator of the billion-dollar Facebook decided it would have to sell our privacy to the highest bidder. And with the extremely profitable market that the site had captured so quickly, it wasn’t unexpected. Sure, students quickly caught on that maybe posting everything on Facebook wasn’t such a good idea. When public scandals involving inappropriate photo postings continued to make the news on campuses across the country, users became more selective about what they were posting on the site. After all, not everyone wanted the world to see documented proof of a typical weekend’s worth of their debauchery. However, the more clandestine, corporate violations of personal privacy that a Facebook account might allow were not so obvious to the millions of the site’s devotees. We can trace the beginning of the end of Facebook as we knew it to Nov. 7. The site introduced Facebook Beacon, a marketing scheme that includes a system to allow users to share information about their activities on other Web sites. When people realized that what they purchased or viewed on these “partner Web sites” was immediately published on Facebook without their permission, red flags went up across cyberspace. Realizing the potential for destructive blows to his company’s net worth, founder Mark Zuckerberg made yet another public apology for the way that a new application was launched. Beacon was later changed to require that any actions transmitted to the site would have to be approved by the user. But, by then, the damage was already done. So, when it was revealed last week that Facebook is now the target of an investigation from the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, it came as no surprise to us. The site is currently facing questions about how it protects users’ data after someone complained that the social network did not fully delete their information even after they had terminated their account. We won’t try to deny the potential benefits of having a Facebook account, which is why we were so infatuated with it in the first place - hell, you can even friend the Alligator if you want. But we continue to be disappointed with the way the site is transforming into another tool for corporate America’s quest to acquire more consumers at the expense of personal privacy. The once genius idea generated from a Harvard student’s dorm room has become a corporate pirate holding hostage something some people would be willing to pay any price to have access to - our information.
Published on The independent Florida Alligator By the Editorial Board
Darko on January 28th, 2008
Last May, the web sites of a number of high-ranking Estonian politicians and businesses were
attacked over a period of several weeks. At the time, relations between Russia and Estonia were chillier than usual, due in part to the Estonian government’s plans to move a World War II-era memorial known as the Bronze Soldier (pictured below at its original location) away from the center of the city and into a cemetery. The country’s plan was controversial, and led to protests that were often led by the country’s ethnic Russian minority. When the cyberattacks occurred, Estonia claimed that Russia was either directly or indirectly involved—an allegation that the Russian government denied. Almost a year later, the Russian government appears to have been telling the truth about its involvement (or lack thereof) in the attacks against Estonia. As
InfoWorld reports, an Estonian youth has been
arrested for the attacks, and current evidence suggests he was acting independently—prosecutors in Estonia have stated they have no other suspects. Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, however, it’s impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.
Dmitri Galushkevich, a 20-year-old Estonian student, launched the DoS (denial-of-service) attacks from his own PC last year. Although he’s a native Estonian, Galushkevich was angry over his government’s plans to move the statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is an startling development. Understanding why Estonia and Russia got into a tiff about a war memorial statue in the first place, however, requires that we take a trip down history lane.
American history tends to focus its coverage of World War II on the theaters of combat we participated in. This makes logical sense—but it leaves the story of the eastern front largely untold, and doesn’t begin to explain why the Russians would be upset over Estonia’s movement of a statue nearly 63 years after the war’s end—or why the Estonians would want to move it in the first place.
The Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940 as part of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Once it held the country (Russia, to this day, insists the USSR was invited into Estonia and did not “occupy” it), extraordinary elections were held with the ballots restricted to pro-Communist choices. The country became a member of the USSR in August 1940—and was promptly invaded and occupied by the Germans in 1941 when that country opened the Eastern Front of the war.
Germany’s eastern front with the USSR was both the longest and the deadliest in worldwide military history. Contemporary estimates on how many Soviet soldiers and civilians died can vary widely, but the median figures suggest that the Red Army lost approximately 10 million men, with an additional 20 million civilian casualties. Soviet casualties and losses dwarfed those of any other nation, and the conflict left an indelible imprint on Russian society.
The war memorials built in Soviet-occupied territories after the war ended weren’t just monuments to the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the conflict—they were Soviet ideological bulwarks and physical representations of what the Great Patriotic War had cost the motherland.
The majority of Estonians, however, have a different view. To them, the Bronze Soldier was a symbol of 50 years of Soviet and communist oppression—many Estonians, in fact, voluntarily enlisted and fought with the Germans in 1944 once it became apparent that the Soviets were about to reoccupy the country. Combine the two viewpoints with a significant minority of ethnic Russians who still identify with the memorial as a reminder of Soviet sacrifice, and you’ve got a pile of tinder just waiting for a spark.
The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations.
Posted On Arstechnica By Joel Hruska
Darko on January 27th, 2008
Truecrypt is one of the most vital tools that any geek should have.
TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. In plain English, Truecrypt will create encrypted drives that you can mount hide your data and dismount in just a few seconds.
Run the program and click on Create Volume
-Select the “Create a standard TrueCrypt volume”
-Select the path and filename of the new drive
-Selecting the encryption algorithm is a very simple. TrueCrypt Can crypt your data with 8 different algorithms, but any of the algorithms will offer you high level protection. Here’s an interesting excerpt I found about what algorithm to choose:
First of all, if speed is your thing than you need to seriously
consider the container type. File containers will typically be slower
than entire encrypted partitions. A *lot* slower in some cases. This
decision alone will have a much bigger impact on throughput than
algorithm choice.
That said, speed comparisons are going to be system dependant and
arbitrary. Any flat comparison might be misleading. And I think the
differences are going to be so minute in the real world that they’re
insignificant. I’ll offer a specific opinion later on, but first some
examples of why they’re arbitrary.
Key size shouldn’t directly directly impact speed, but it may change
the algorithm’s “rank” among its constituents from a 32 bit to a 64 bit
environment.
Your specific usage can also affect speed. Encryption almost always
takes more clock cycles than decryption. For some algorithms the
difference is more pronounced. If your activity is more “write
oriented” you might want to consider an algorithm with a
better encrypt/decrypt “ratio”.
There’s a lot of other little gotchas that might make one algorithm
perform better than another on your system, and with your usage. But if
you really *must* know which algorithms are considered “faster”…
Rijndael (AES) and Twofish are two of the best performers on a
“standardized” Pentium Pro, in a standardized implementation. Twofish
is slightly faster at encryption, but Rijndael takes the checkered in
key setup. I think overall, Rijndael would be the “winner” in a
standard usage scenario. CAST is not so far behind these two. I’d say
you’d be good with any of the three. On the other end, 3DES is probably
going to be one of the slowest.
FWIW, if you get down to the nitpicking “what if” of the thing, Twofish
is thought to be slightly more secure than Rijndael too.
So select the one you prefer
-Choose the drive size. This depends on the amount of data you want to hold inside the drive. I recommand that before selecting the size, put all the applications and data you want to store on the drive inside a folder and select the size of the drive based on the size of that folder. You might want to have a bit of free space for future modifications. So if the folder size is 20 MB, create a 30 MB drive…..
-Selecting a password is the most important task. You need to have a strong password, that can be immuned to brute force attacks and any kind of decrypting methods. The password should have letters(a b c), characters(!@#) and numbers (1 2 3).
-Now, all you have to do is format the drive
Of course there are many more options you can try but that the quick way to do it.
I should also mention that Truecrypt has lots of command line options and is a completly portable application
TrueCrypt: Official Website
Downloads Page
Direct Links to latest stable version - 4.3a:
Windows Vista/XP/2000/2003
Linux distributions:
OpenSuSE 10.2 x86
OpenSuSE 10.3 x86
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS x86
Ubuntu 7.04 x86
Ubuntu 7.04 x64 (64-bit)
Ubuntu 7.10 x86
Ubuntu 7.10 x64 (64-bit)
Source Code
Darko on January 27th, 2008
After my old AP fried to death, I had to buy a new access point. I got an new Edimax EW-7206APg for 80$. Well after installing the hardware on the roof, for better reception it took less then two days for problems to arise. Suddenly the AP wasn’t receiving any signal, I contacted the ISP and he said that the network was up and running. After some digging around, we found out that the problem is in the Network cable. The only thing is that we only figured that out at about 22:00. Witch meant that the cable cannot be replaced or fixed at the moment since the ISP guy didn’t have any plugs. Well, what should I do? Spend the evening without an Internet connection when the AP is perfectly fine? That just seems like a big waste to me. So, we brought the AP down from the roof and installed it on a ladder, and I had to sit in the cold so i can work, since I only had a short network cable that cannot reach were I usually place my laptop.
the next days, we reinstalled the box back in it’s place, everything is working fine, for now…..
Darko on January 24th, 2008
On January 10, four young men from Université Saint-Joseph’s Zahle campus were held in Zahle prison for a week on charges of making crude and harassing remarks on a Facebook group dedicated to a female student at the university. Another underage female student was also named in the complaint but was released to the custody of her father. The plaintiff has accused the other students of defaming her, a criminal charge in Lebanon.
The bizarre case highlights the ease with which the average Lebanese citizen can find him or herself sharing cell space with dozens of serious criminals, as well as the legal confusion that the internet has introduced here just as it has in the West. With more and more Lebanese both publishing and socializing online, the ambiguous and at times arbitrary legal framework may have a profound chilling effect on the freedom of expression that the country is rightly so proud of.
Crime and punishment:
The individuals involved were careful about giving their own accounts while the case is still open, but what does seem clear is that the Facebook group began as a collection of juvenile jokes revolving around a fellow student. After complaining to university authorities and being told that the matter was not a university concern, the woman took her case to the Zahle attorney general, Abdullah Bitar. When Bitar advised her to come back with evidence of a crime, she and a friend monitored the site for a few weeks and returned to Bitar with printed transcripts of “wall” conversations. (“Walls” are the space on each Facebook member and group profile that allows friends to post public messages). After reviewing the transcripts, Bitar called the students in for questioning.
The students were interrogated from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 10. At 2:00 p.m., the courts close, but Bitar ordered that they be held for further questioning. The next day, the attorney general declared that he had enough evidence for an arrest and transferred the four men to Zahle prison. With the court offices closed on Saturday and Sunday, the young men were kept in prison until Monday, at which point a hearing was set for later that week. On Thursday, January 17, the judge at that hearing released each of the four on LL 500,000 bonds and set a final hearing for February 28.
Improvisiong Online:
Speaking to NOW Lebanon, friends and family of the four were dumbfounded. “We want to know, ‘How would Facebook get you in jail?’” exclaimed one. Lebanon has no laws governing internet usage as such, so any legal disputes involving online activities require judges to improvise new interpretations of existing laws. According to sources familiar with the proceedings, when the students’ families protested their incarceration, “the court director referred to the law governing print media.”
Viktor Harmoush, a lawyer for Anthony Jleylati, one of the students, said, “[Bitar] referred to four articles: 531 and 533 of the penal law, and 582 and 584. With 531 and 533, the judge can issue a sentence of one year in prison, or a fine. For 582 and 584, it’s six months, or a fine.” The articles in question deal with slander and libel in print media. They also deal with defamation and, in this regard, they do not specify a medium of expression.
Legal expert Ziad Baroud told NOW Lebanon, “Journalists can be sued on the basis of defamation, but they are never arrested. Journalists have this privilege in the law itself, not to be arrested before the final judgment. But this is not the case for everyone else.”
In many countries, slander and libel suits are civil matters, involving one party suing the other for damages. In Lebanon, “defamation” is a penal matter. The application of the law, however, varies depending on the circumstances and the discretion of the judge. Baroud said, “In Lebanon, the internet and emails are considered ‘publishing.’ I believe they were prosecuted on this basis. It was weird to see it handled this way, but strictly speaking, it was legal.”
Politics and intimidation:
Harmoush challenged the legality of his client’s imprisonment, however, saying, “Mr. Bitar made an illegal decision. It is not legal to hold the boys.” Indeed, while Lebanese law allows for imprisonment if convicted of defamation, it does not allow for “cautionary arrest,” or holding the accused pending trial.
Convalescing at his family’s home in Zahle, Anthony Jleylati was visibly traumatized from his weeklong stay in Zahle prison, which a lack of heating and overcrowding has made one of the worst prisons in Lebanon. “We had to stay together for protection. There were drug dealers and murders, and they offered us cocaine and other things. What’s more, we missed all of our exams, and now we’ve lost our whole last year of university,” lamented Jleylati.
Facebook’s “terms of use” specifically forbid users to “upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.” To get rid of the objectionable content, the plaintiff could easily have complained to Facebook and, very likely, had everything promptly removed. Indeed, once the group participants learned of the legal action being brought against them, they deleted everything themselves, but the plaintiff pressed her case anyway.
Friends of the students noted that the plaintiff’s father is a general in the army, and they believe that the court let his position influence its decision. “The judge himself didn’t understand the charges. And when they confronted him, he asked, ‘Are you going to teach me law now?’” said a friend of the family, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
“It’s an obvious case of intimidation. Because they cannot pin anything on them, they will impose this kind of hardship,” said Wa’il Kheir, managing director of the Foundation for Human and Humanitarian Rights in Lebanon.
He added, “These kinds of things happen quite often; it’s very unfortunate. In many cases, I know very ethical judges who will not accept to be part of this. But others, because of pressure or I don’t know what, they might be.”
Baroud added, “Unfortunately, this is what the law allows. This is what the prosecutor can do, for a brief period of time.” The tactic is almost impossible to challenge, and it is generally very difficult to prove that this sort of imprisonment was done intentionally.
New Rules:
The case now awaits a final hearing on February 28, and Harmoush maintains that his client, at least, will be declared innocent. Yet the questions raised will not be so easily resolved. While there is a relatively straightforward translation of legal rights and privileges between traditional print media and online media such as NOW Lebanon, there are 200,000 profiles in the “Lebanon” Facebook network today, and many more Lebanese that have not even registered with the country’s network. As they socialize with each other, exchanging the same kind of news and gossip and bawdy jokes that they would in person in cafes or bars, what are their rights? What of those who exist somewhere in between journalism and online communities, such as bloggers or website commenters?
These are questions that countries all over the world continue to wrestle with, as technology outpaces policy and legislation. The issues are complex, and there are few points of reference for judges or legislators in need of guidance. Naturally, recourse is necessary for anyone unfairly attacked or maligned, whether online or off. In Lebanon’s more traditional society, women are especially vulnerable to the damage that innuendo and rumors can do to reputations. But some balance will have to be found, and fast. If even allegations of ribald commentary insults could conceivably land one in jail, the effect on free speech in general can only be devastating.
Darko on January 24th, 2008
This is a follow up story to the previous article.
After my normal internet connection was lost due to a malfunctioning Ethernet adapter (Damn you SMC), I had to resort to other means in order to stay plugged in. So I turned to WAP.
For those of you unfamiliar with WAP…what the hell are you doing on a tech blog, just kidding!
WAP is “Wireless Application Protocol”, an emerging standard to allow cellular/wireless devices to access the Internet. In plain English, it’s internet for cell phones.
One of the important things that I gained from this experience is that i had the chance to use WP.com’s mobile website m.wordpress.com designed specifically to offer mobile users easier access and better blogging experience.
Of course, this page cannot replace the WP Dashboard, but nonetheless it offers key elements of it. From there, you can get a quick Stats summary, Add new articles and Add new bookmarks to your blogroll.
One of the problems that I had with posting articles is the absence of the conformity offered by WP rich text editor; witch meant that I had to add my own html tags. So here’s what I did. I have Qumana a blogging tool, installed on my computers. What Qumana offers, is the ability to see the source of the text you wrote in the WYSIWIG panel, just like the Visual and Code panels in the WordPress dashboard. Of course there are a number of programs that has this feature like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. So what I did was that I wrote the text and copy/pasted the code and saved it to file, then I sent the file to my Cell phone witch luckily support copy/pasting, witch enabled me to post the formatted article.
And here’s some more good news, m.wordpress.com can accessed from any normal web browser. At the moment I’m writing this article from it using Mozilla Firefox. This can enable a hell of a lot faster posting then using the real dashboard.
Try it yourself
Darko on January 18th, 2008
I logged into WordPress.com mobile dashboard using my mobile phone, and I’m trying to test if i can blog from here. This way i can write my articles on a pc and copy/paste them here.
Update: it worked, this is great news, i can be more active now from my cell phone, i’ll write a small report about this feature later on
Darko on January 2nd, 2008
I recently set Windows XP SP2 to Auto-update with me selecting witch updates to install. I usually let windows download and install everything on it’s own, but the purpose of my move was so that i can make a backup of all the updates and burn them on a cd, for future use.
Well, today the updater alerted me that there’s 15 new updates ready to be installed, looking through the list i found the package KB905474, witch is the infamous WGA tool used by Microsoft to determine if the copy is genuine or not. I hesitated to install the package, then said what the heck, what harm could it do. BIG MISTAKE!!!!
I use instantly notified that my windows XP copy is not genuine, now remember folks, i’m working on an HP compaq nx9010 with “Designed for Windows XP” sticker on the front and a Windows xp serial number on the back. Well, apparently the serial number has been blacklisted and now i was stuck with this stupid popup offering me to “become genuine”.
At this point i had two options:
1-Right click the WGA tray icon, and select “change notification settings”, then select “Don’t notify me again”, and “Yes I know this voids me from product support”
2-Stop or delete the whole WGA tool
Well, needless to say i opted for the second choice and here’s what i did
Start > Run > regedit > go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify > delete the WGALOGON folder and restart
After restarting everything returned to normal and i’m happy to announce that i’m back downloading updates
Darko on January 2nd, 2008
Have you noticed any of the following symptoms on your computer:
A new toolbars in your Internet Browser that you didn’t install
Your browser has been crashing without any justification
Your browser home page has changed on its own
…Then you most probably have spyware/adware on your PC
Spyware can be easily installed on computer simply by surfing through the web, witch leaves lots of system vulnerable to their attacks. They can be used to track user behavior online, redirect users to specific websites, launch ads directly in the desktop.
Spybot Search & Destroy searches the computer for +100000 different type of adware and spyware that hijacked the system.The application is well supported and updates are constantly available.
In edition to the ability of scanning computers for malware, Spybot has a function called Immunize that will help prevent any future attack by blocking all possible exploits.
Spybot is a dangerous tool, as good as it is, it can have some very destructive side-effect, this tool should be used by people who know what they’re doing, and please don’t take any action that might not fully understand it’s implications. With that being said i believe that this is a very important tool that every real geek and every IT person should have with him at all time
Spybot Search & Destroy: Official Website
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.5.1.15 : Direct Download
Spybot Search & Destroy Latest Update to install Offline : Direct Download
