The Edge of I-Hacked

from All About The Games .net

Red Octane confirmed today via its customer support team that unfortunately there is a batch of Guitar Hero II X Plorer controllers for the Xbox 360 with a faulty whammy bar. The problem causes whammy bar movements to either not be registered withint the game, or for there to be a slight delay before you whammy bar movements are represented on screen.

Red Octane has promised that unsatisfied customers can exchange their controllers at their place of purchase, or if purchased via their online store, can submit an RMA request and have the faulty controller exchanged.

The problem is isolated to two specific models of the controller, the numbers of which are 95065 and 95055 and which you can see an example of below:

However all is not as bad as it seems as we have discovered a remedy to this problem which is as simple as loosening two screws and which does not void your warranty.Carefully follow the simple instructions below and click on each of the images in order to view larger high resolution versions.

from Boing Boing:

Microsoft says that it’s dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we’ve all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be implying that it’s going to sell DRM-free tracks from labels other than EMI.

profit42.com » Blog Archive » OSX 10.4.9 / Vista dual boot on your Windows machine.
What is this?
This guide tells you how to install OSX 10.4.9 on your Intel or AMD Windows machine, dual booting with Vista. This guide is for information purposes only.

Read this before reading the guide:
There are only two ways to install OSX 10.4.9 legal on your Windows computer:
1. Become an Apple developer
2. You can also buy an Intel Mac (I would recommend the Mac Pro!), install Windows Vista on it using Apple’s Boot Camp and remove OSX completely, so that you have a legally bought osx86 licence. This method isn’t confirmed and some people say it’s illegal because the EULA says that you aren’t allowed to install OSX on non-Apple hardware.
This means that for most people it is ILLEGAL to install osx on their computer. If you aren’t an Apple developer, leave page now. This site is in no way liable or responsible for the actions of its visitors.

IMPORTANT: DOWNLOADING OSX86 (a prepatched OSX 10.4.8 install image) IS ILLEGAL. Don’t ask me where you can download OSX86, not in a comment, not by e-mail, not by phone, not by sending a telegram and not by any other way you can imagine. Just don’t ask me. If you don’t know it and still want it, become an Apple developer or BUY A MAC!

Warning: This could be one of the hardest things you have ever read. Maybe I am more sensitive to this topic because my daughter is the same age, and it is easier to put myself in this family’s shoes. But I really suggest that you take some time and read through their story @ http://kyriethome.blogspot.com/index.html

Kyrie (19m) was diagnosed 9 weeks ago with a rare primitive neuroectodermal tumor. Today she arrives home to spend the last couple days in a comfortable place. This blog tells the story of what this young family has been through. This family could really use our moral support.

read more | digg story

from arstechnica.com

Your home or office WiFi network may be even less secure than you think. Researchers have now shown that they can break 104-bit WEP, a common 802.11b/g/n security mechanism, in as little as one or two minutes. A team at the Technische Universität Darmstadt said that they can grab the key with a 95 percent probability of success in as little as two minutes using a 1.7GHz Pentium-M machine to do the calculations.

Here’s how the attack works: in order to find the key, a would-be attacker has to have enough traffic to analyze. Therefore, the researchers forced the protected network to start generating packets. Once they have 40,000 packets to analyze, they have a 50 percent success rate in grabbing the key; an additional 20,000 packets nudges the success rate up to 80 percent. Reaching the 95 percent threshold requires 85,000 data packets. As they were able to generate 764 packets per second, they were able to hit the 85,000 mark in 1:51. At this time, the researchers’ tool, aircrack-ptw (source code)—which they say is similar to aircrack-ng—does not work on 256-bit WPA.

from ShmooCon

Software that could be used to turn a Web browser into an unwitting hacker’s tool has been posted to the Internet, after it was downloaded by a quick-thinking attendee at last month’s Shmoocon hacker conference.

The software, called Jikto, was written by Billy Hoffman, lead researcher at Spy Dynamics Inc. Hoffman demonstrated the code on March 24 as part of a presentation on the dangers of JavaScript malware.

Hoffman had discovered a way to write a Web vulnerability scanner in JavaScript, a Web language that can run in any browser. This technique circumvents JavaScript’s security restrictions and, concerned that his Jikto code could be misused, Hoffman says he took extra steps to prevent the code from getting out.

However, in order for his demonstration to work, he had to post the Jikto code somewhere on the Internet. “Very briefly you could see the original URL of where the Jikto code got fetched,” Hoffman said.

That was enough for show attendee Mike Schroll to snag a copy.

“I was sitting pretty close to the front and had my laptop out already,” said Schroll, an information security consultant at Security Management Partners Inc. “The second I saw it i just started typing away.”

Schroll posted the code on his Web site March 25, and submitted a link to the code on Digg.com. He removed the software several hours later at Hoffman’s request.

Sorry for the downtime yesterday, we had a hard drive crash in our Solder server.

We are back up, and hopefully running strong.

from aprilfools.urgo.org

Ah, April Fools Day — The day that you simply cannot trust ANYTHING on the web. Check this site for some of the best April fools day jokes going around. Got to tell you, I actually fell for a couple of them this morning.

customsoftwareconsult.com Too good to be true Firefox extension
lotro.com Turbine Unveils 1st Update for The Lord of the Rings Online?
thinkgeek.com Multiple fake ‘Geek Toys’ Including Wii Helmet and 8-bit tie
mail.google.com Gmail Paper
woot.com Random Crap for $1,000,001.00 (see front page for full details)
tattooyourtoddler.com tattoos for toddlers