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Showing posts from November, 2008

Gmail Exploit May Aid Domain Hijacking

A vulnerability in Gmail that lets the bad guys access and manipulate filters in your Gmail account has once again reared its ugly head according to a recent post on GeekCondition . The exploit, similar to the one David Airey was a victim of in December 2007 when his site was hijacked, caught our attention thanks to Philipp Lenssen's post this morning over on Blogoscoped. While the general consensus is that Google had fixed the vulnerability, turns out it's still there. How the Gmail Exploit Works It begins when you visit a malicious site while logged into Gmail. Whether the link is initiated through your Gmail account or not, the malicious site can access your internal credentials. The malicious site then, unbeknownst to you, can create an automatic filter that diverts your e-mail to a different e-mail account. Given all this happens on Google's mail servers, you are none the wiser until you look at your filters. A detailed write up about this proc

How to Lock you Laptop with a SMS ?

Lenovo is working with Phoenix on a BIOS that will let you disable a ThinkPad notebook PC by sending it an SMS text message. The feature should be available early next year, reports TG Daily . The story says: The lockdown will happen immediately if a notebook is turned on or, when it is turned off, the next time the system signs on to a cellular network. To reactivate the disabled PC, a user needs to enter a pre-set passcode created during notebook startup. I think it is a first step in GSM enabled laptops

Transmitting Electrical Power Wirelessly

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This first started in MIT labs, and we wrote about it since around a year, Now Intel is demonstrating it. Intel claims it has improved the efficiency of a method for powering devices wirelessly. Intel's "Wireless Energy Resonant Link" (WREL), technology was demonstrated by transmitting electricity wirelessly to a lamp on stage and lighting a 60 watt bulb, which consumes more power than an average laptop computer. This innovation is hoped to be embedded into tables and work surfaces so that as soon as a device is placed on the surface, it will be able to draw power. The technology uses magnetic fields to transmit up to 60 watts of power to a distance of up to two to three feet while only losing around 25% of the power during transmission. A major concern of any wireless power technology is its possible effects on users. Fortunately during the demonstration the electricity was broadcast without electrocuting anyone who passed between the transmitter and the receiver. Inte

11 Business Related Open Source Applications

OrangeHRM Free and open source human resource management software with rich features and easy to use interface. It provides a perfect platform for re-engineering and aligning your HR processes along with the organizational goals. Magento Magento is the eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry. It’s modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility means your business is no longer constrained by your eCommerce platform. Kaltura Kaltura is the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction and collaboration. Kaltura enables sites to integrate advanced interactive rich-media functionalities. Concrete5 Concrete5 is a content management system. Concrete5 is easy for site owners to use, flexible for developers to work with, and runs a wide variety of powerful websites. Tellmatic Tellmatic is the newsletter machine that is a PHP based script to send newsletters. Use a generic browser like Seamonkey o

Millions of historic photos to be hosted by Google

Google Announces hosting Life Photo Archive, with Description on each picutre, that is amazing - Quoted "We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s. Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos." Link of Life photo Archive hosted by Google is

What If Matrix runs on Windows ?

A Video shows how things will go if Matrix runs on Windows See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor . Thankx to Maddog

IBM bringing broadband over power line to rural America

IBM has been hired to help rural Americans get broadband access using power lines. On Wednesday, Big Blue announced it has signed a $9.6 million contract with International Broadband Electric Communications to bring the technology to rural America where it hopes to deliver high-speed broadband connectivity to millions of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to get it. IBM and IBEC, which will build and manage the networks, are working with over a dozen electricity cooperatives in seven states, The Wall Street Journal reported. For years, people have hoped broadband-over-power line technology, or BPL, would allow power companies to become the third alternative in the broadband market, competing against cable operators and telephone companies. But technical limitations and interference issues with local emergency radios and short-wave ham radios have stood in the way of mass adoption. .

USB 3.0 spec finalised

USB 3.0 is complete, the group of companies behind the project announced last night. The specification is now officially at version 1.0. Also known as SuperSpeed USB, the device-connection technology has a peak throughput ten times greater than USB 2.0's 480Mb/s. SuperSpeed uses new ports to deliver the greater bandwidth. But they're designed to be backwards compatible with full-size USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports. With the specification now complete, suppliers can work on building ports and the chips that manage them. That said, don't expect standalone USB 3.0 controllers to appear for the best part of a year. Consumer kit equipped with the new standard won't appear until 2010

Announcing Fedora Sugar Spin!

To : fedora-announce-list redhat com, fedora-olpc-list redhat com, fedora-education-list redhat com, iaep lists sugarlabs org Cc : Subject : Announcing Fedora Sugar Spin! Date : Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:33:12 +0100 Hi everybody, I'm proud to be announce the availability of our Fedora Sugar Spin, which incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment on a Fedora Live CD. So, what is this in specific? With this spin, you'll be able to run Sugar, which is developed by Sugarlabs and the desktop environment used on the OLPC, directly from a Live CD! You'll find several activities on the image including most notably... * sugar-browse - a web browsing activity based on xulrunner * sugar-write - a word processor based on abiword ...among with several other applications introducing e.g. chat support. We, the OLPC SIG, will be importing further activities into Fedora, which might be installed using 'yum install sugar-*' at a later time. Where can you get it? Easily, here: ht

ReactOS 0.3.7 Released

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ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system based on the Windows NT architecture design, providing support for existing applications and drivers and an alternative to the current dominant consumer and server operating systems. Most people think of 'NT' as 'WinNT 4', while in reality the term NT is equal to the NT series, which ranges from version 3 over NT5 (2000, XP, 2003) to NT6 (Vista). The NT architecture was designed by a team lead by David Cutler, a former lead developer of VMS. It took them more than 4 years to combine the best of UNIX, VMS and OS/2 and create the NT architecture. Summing up the changes in the new release ReactOS 0.3.7 * Improved x64 architecture support * The start of a real MSVC compiler support project * Kernel improvements and bugfixes in quite a few parts: ConfigurationManager, IO Manager, KE, Memory Manager, Object Manager, Process Manager * Network stack improvements: leakage fixes, increased functionality * Filesystem driver fixes,

Creative releases Linux X-Fi driver under the GPL

Creative has officially released the Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux driver under the General Public License. The X-Fi, which was initially introduced in 2005, has been poorly supported on the Linux platform. Creative released a disappointing binary driver for the product in 2007, which was only compatible with 64-bit systems and had numerous other major technical problems. Now that the source code has been released, the open source software community can work to fix the bugs and make the driver more robust. The source code is available for download from a Creative's support forums, but the developers say that it is not yet ready for user on production systems. It supports ALSA PCM playback, recording, and mixing, but doesn't support external I/O modules. Users who are already testing the drivers are experiencing mixed results. For some, it doesn't appear to be working yet. For more details about the new driver and some background information about the status of previous X-Fi sup

Wireless WPA Encryption is Cracked!

When it came to setting up Wi-Fi networks, if you knew what you were doing you would enable WPA security. This would keep people with a small amount of knowledge from gaining access to your network, which is very easy with the much weaker WEP security. No more! WPA security has now been cracked, rendering all but the most tightly-locked networks open for hacking. Researchers by the name of Erik Tews and Martin Beck were the ones to do the cracking, finding a way to break the temporary Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) in under 15 minutes. They haven't, however, figured out how to gain access to the data that travels between the PC and the router, so that's a plus. So what should you do to secure your network? Switch to WPA2, which is still uncracked for the time being. And if you want to be one of those marginally-skilled Wi-Fi hackers? Grab the Aircrack-ng Linux program , which has already had this new code added to it. Reference URL is h3r3

Ubuntu 8.10 Screenshots

Screenshots of latest Ubuntu Release 8.10 are h3r3

How to upgrade Ubuntu to Ubuntu 8.10

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This is step by step howto upgrade your current Ubuntu Installation to the latest Ubuntu 8.10 Reference URL is h3r3 By default Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will not offer a upgrade to 8.10. This is because the 8.04 LTS version is a long term support release and 8.10 is a regular release. Upgrades from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 are fully supported , of course, and easy to enable. You can directly upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (see UpgradeNotes ). The upgrade will not be presented by default because 8.10 is not a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Be sure that you have all updates applied to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS before you upgrade. Before upgrading it is recommended that you read the release notes for Ubuntu 8.10, which document caveats and workarounds for known issues in this version. If you have a version of Ubuntu which was released before Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, please see Installation/UpgradeFromOldVersion for information on how to upgrade. Network Upgrade for Ubuntu De