The Edge of I-Hacked

IOL: Computers / IT

Washington - Computer users already anxious about viruses and identity theft have a new reason to worry: hackers have found a way to lock up the electronic documents on your computer and then demand $200 (about R1 200) over the Internet to get them back.

Data at Band of America, Wachovia, others compromised - May. 23, 2005

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp. are among the big banks notifying more than 670,000 customers that account information was stolen in what may the biggest security breach to hit the banking industry.

Account information on the customers was illegally sold by bank employees to a man identified as Orazio Lembo, whom police said was doing business by illegally posing as a collection agency.

When police in Hackensack, N.J., first announced arrests in the case on April 28, they estimated that more than 500,000 people were affected. That number was raised to 676,000 Friday. Because some people have more than one account, Hackensack Police Chief Charles “Ken” Zisa says the number of accounts breached may top 1 million.

Wired News: Next for BitTorrent: Search

SAN FRANCISCO — Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.

The free search tool will be the first large-scale commercial offering from BitTorrent, a five-person company headed by Cohen that so far has drawn most of its revenue from T-shirt sales and PayPal donations.

O’Reilly Radar > Podcast support in next version of iTunes

At the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference, Steve Jobs tonight showed ipodder-like features in the next release of iTunes, supposedly available within about 60 days. I was glad to see this, since the “architecture of participation” has been the only one of the big Web 2.0 themes that Apple had seemed to be missing. He was slightly dismissive of populist podcasting, describing it as “Wayne’s World for radio”, and celebrating the arrival of professional radio stations into the market, but nonetheless, he was very high on the podcasting phenomenon, and the excitement that millions of users have displayed about it. In the Q&A, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. asked if there was any possibility of using the iTunes music store for paid podcasting. Jobs replied that for the moment they were only considering it as free content, but that he was open to looking into it.

PSP Hacker: PSP v1.5 Firmware Cracked ?
PSP v1.5 Firmware Cracked ?

It looks like the PSP scene may have already been cracked. Here is a movie of what appears to be Team Xecutuer running Wipeout on a v1.5 PSP via the Memory stick. I know this sounds like a good thing for PSP users but a for profit mod chip developer cracking the PSP so quickly can not be good for the PSP scene as a whole.

The good news is if this is real when they release the mod chip you will be able to do v1.5 homebrew with it.

Google Catalog Search

Wow… pretty cool

Google

Portable Firefox (USB Drive-Friendly) :: Mozilla Stuff :: JohnHaller.com

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more (Note: It will not run from read-only media like a CD-R, but Portable Firefox Live will).

Sent from Ledger….

http://eu.playstation.com/ingame_sites/wop_us/en/index.html

Whilst being bored and playing Wipout i checked out the wipeout download link from the “Using the PSP Browser Article“. For no reason atall i changed the index.html extension to downloads.html. And to my suprise i was greeted with the downloads section! At present you can download Gamma package one. At present i havent tried it but will be right now. Its supposed to have a custom skin, a new track and new music. I’ll contact again if its possible to chagne the music etc.

I have just noticed that the URL redirects to a european download section. I am unaware if the downloads are already avaliable in the us (they arent here in the uk at the moment). And another thing you have to be using the PSP to download the pack… yet i had a quick glance at the source code to arrive at this file

download.pspdif

the pspdif file i imagine goes straigt on to the memory stick.

After reading up on some forums, it links to a data.pspdat file. Which unzips with a few files in which presumably is put onto the memory stick.
Again unaware if this is already avaliable in the US.

http://eu.playstation.com/ingame_sites/wop_us/en/downloads/pak_gamma1/data.pspdat

Final Link. Open this using winrar and extract the
“UCUS98612DGAMMAPACK1″ folder to ‘PSP/SAVEDATA’ on your memory stick
and you have 1 New Track, 1 new Phirana skin and some new music.

Yahoo ‘Web Beacons’ Spy On And Track Yahoo Users!

Yahoo tracks all of its users everywhere on the web and the way to opt-out is detailed below. If you have a Yahoo e-mail account or belong to one of Yahoo’s many Yahoo groups, this probably applies to you. Yahoo has probably been tracking everything you do online. Follow the instructions precisely to opt out of this. Notice the important part at the very end.

“Yahoo is now using something called ‘Web Beacons’ to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you’re doing and where you are going similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.

Take a look at their updated privacy statement:

http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy

About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons.

http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/beacons/details.html

That will bring you to a paragraph entitled “Outside the Yahoo Network.”

In this section you’ll see a little “click here to opt out” link that will let you “opt-out” of their new method of snooping.

Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the “Success” message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a “Cancel Opt-out” button that, if clicked, will **undo** the opt-out. So don’t reflexively click that button, or you will undo the opt-out ! Feel free to forward this to other groups.”