The Edge of I-Hacked

from :: Hack In The Box ::

China is refusing to guarantee that it won’t censor the Internet during this summer’s Olympic Games, but insists that the international media will still be able to function normally. Officials from China’s Technology Ministry took a somewhat odd opportunity to speak about its censorship plans during a press conference after the Olympic torch relay crossed Mount Everest. They said that while the government would be able to “guarantee as much [access] as possible,” there’s no way that China would turn off the Great Firewall entirely during the Games.

“China has always been very cautious when it comes to the Internet,” Technology Minister Wan Gang said, according to Reuters. “I’ve not got any clear information about which sites will be shut or screened. But to protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy web sites.”

from lifehacker

Web application Glasnost simulates BitTorrent downloads on your computer to determine whether or not your internet service provider (ISP) is throttling your BitTorrent transfers. It does so by measuring the difference between your regular download speed and your BitTorrent download speed, testing against different ports and other variables to get a better idea of what exactly is being throttled. The tool is aggregating the results of the test, which the site is publishing to encourage greater transparency among ISPs. If your ISP turns out to be throttling your BitTorrent traffic, you can still avoid the throttling if you know the right tricks.

from heise Security UK

Members of the Gnucitizen community have announced the House of Hackers Project. House of Hackers is intended to be a social network where hackers can make contacts, form groups, and exchange views. In addition, organizations and companies in the “hacker recruitment market” can post calls for project tenders, creating a kind of jobs board for members of the network.

Companies will pay a fee for each call for tenders to find security consultants or penetration testing teams. The network founders want to use the proceeds for various research projects that will soon be up and running. So far, more than 100 members have registered for the newly founded network.

The network is intended to give companies the opportunity to draw on a broad pool of security experts, while allowing “gifted security consultants to escape from their boring everyday routine and start a new life full of excitement and new opportunities”. However, no clear statement has been made about how ethical or technical standards will be assured. Indeed, the site states “The market is open and it is only supervised by the House of Hackers board members”. This should raise very real concerns such as recently led to the formation of a validation body for penetration testers in the UK.

I suggest signing up, I am one of early adopters!

nin.com [download]- the slip

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

from Slickdeals.net
PC Welt (German PC World magazine) is giving away free licenses for WinRAR 3.62 (supports multi-core CPUs and Windows Vista). Thanks avalon

1. Start here to request the license key file, enter your information, and select Anderes Land (Other Country)
2. Once you receive a confirmation email, click on the second link and download the key file
3. Download version 3.62 of the application and install
4. Copy the key file you received in step 1 in the folder you installed the apllication in step 2
   (most commonly, “C:\Program Files\WinRAR\”)

Note, registration site is under heavy traffic and may feel slow to respond. Please be patient.

from lifehacker

Our gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here’s how:

To masquerade as an iPhone, you’ll need to tweak your browser’s user agent, which web sites use to identify your browser when you connect to the site. In Firefox, you can install the previously mentioned User Agent Switcher. In Safari, you can select the iPhone user agent through the Develop menu (which you can enable by navigating to Preferences -> Advanced and checking “Show Develop menu in menu bar.” Likewise, Opera has user agent switching built in. On the non-Safari browsers, you’ll have to manually add a new iPhone user agent like so.

new-user-agent.pngNow that you’re all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you’ve got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you’re done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.

I haven’t actually been able to verify this yet (though there are reports of success), so if you give it a try, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments.

 from arstechnica

As per the unofficial timeline, Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has been uploaded to Microsoft’s servers. Currently, the final build is only available on the download.windowsupdate domain in the following languages: Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, English, French, German (Deutsch), Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Simplified (Chinese), Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. According to Microsoft TechNet, the 300MB+ x86 standalone installer (build 5512) will not be available today on the Microsoft Download Center nor on Windows Update.

There will be no x64 version of SP3 released; Windows XP x64 will be updated at the same time Windows Server 2003 is updated, since it is derived from the codebase of the latter. Although Microsoft has still to confirm the date, SP3 should be rolled out via Automatic Updates on June 10, 2008.

(more…)

from Slashdot

“The Hardy Heron has taken flight: it’s the second LTS (Long Term Support) release of the world’s most popular distro. New features include the Wubi Windows installer and Firefox 3 beta 5. Grab a copy here, and check out Linux Format’s overview of the release.”

from lifehacker.com

The open-source-friendly folks at the FOSSwire blog have posted a PDF “Ubuntu Cheat Sheet,” covering the basic terminal commands one might have to use and, just as importantly, naming important programs and packages so you don’t end up deleting or messing with something that’ll cause headaches down the line. WIth the release of Hardy Heron one day away, adventurous newcomers might want to keep FOSSwire’s printed and handy for reference.

Ubuntu Cheat Sheet [FOSSwire]

from Darknet - The Darkside

WifiZoo is a tool to gather wifi information passively. It is created to be helpful in wifi pentesting and was inspired by ‘Ferret‘ from Errata Security.

The tool is intended to get all possible info from open wifi networks and possibly encrypted also in the future, at least with WEP without joining any network, and covering all wifi channels.

WifiZoo does the following:

gathers bssid->ssid information from beacons and probe responses
gathers list of unique SSIDS found on probe requests
gathers the list and graphs which SSIDS are being probed from what sources
gathers bssid->clients information and outputs it in a file that you can later use with graphviz and get a graph with “802.11 bssids->clients”.
gathers ‘useful’ information from unencrypted wifi traffic ala Ferret,and dsniff, etc; like pop3 credentials, smtp traffic, http cookies/authinfo, msn messages,ftp credentials, telnet network traffic, nbt, etc.

You can download WifiZoo v1.3 here:

wifizoo_v1.3.tgz