GeekTank

Daniel J. Bernstein has stated he is releasing his future and previous work under the public domain. You can watch the video of his announcement here.

This is a good idea, however maybe a little too late? Qmail was a popular MTA that required many patches and lots of configuration and general fiddling to get working. Not to mention how it general handles mail the wrong way, unlike Exim or Sendmail which have been around for some time. In general I feel that Qmail is not mature, not regularly maintaned and doesn’t handle mail in a proper fashion. If he came to this conclusion when he first released Qmail, then maybe it would be more than a hassle to work with.

Daemon Tools on the other hand is a great piece of software! Although you want to make sure that you’re using the init system that comes with your distrobution. Daemon Tools does work well with DJB’s other software he has released.

Read the article at Slashdot

A New Zealand teenager was arrested and then freed of charges today for allegedly being the Leader of a Bot/Spybot network. The New Zealand E-crime unit arrested the teenager on suspicion of stealing over 9.7 Million Pounds from bank accounts around the world and breaking into an estimated 1.3 Million computers. The full quote from the Guardian..

The 18-year-old, from Hamilton, North Island, was taken into custody and several computers were seized, said the head of the country’s police e-crime unit, Martin Kleintjes. The teenager cannot be named for legal reasons, but uses the online identity "Akill". He was later released without charge, but police said they expected to interview him again.

He is suspected of being the ringleader of an international network of hackers who allegedly assumed control of thousands of computers and amassed them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets. The hackers could then use the computers to steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry computers, authorities alleged. The teenager was the "head of an international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers around the world with their malicious software", Kleintjes told New Zealand national radio. Eight people have been charged, pleaded guilty or have been convicted since the investigation started in June. Thirteen arrest warrants have also been served in the US and overseas in the investigation. The FBI estimates that more than 1m computers have been infected, and puts the combined economic losses at more than $20m (£9.7m).

Spybot and botnet are jargon for infiltrating a group of computers and infecting them with malicious software that allows them to be used to collect information – mainly credit card and bank account details. Kleintjes said the teenager had written software that evaded normal computer spyware systems, then sold his skills to hackers. "He is very bright and very skilled in what he’s doing," Kleintjes said. "He hires his services out to others." Authorities allege that the New Zealand suspect and Ryan Goldstein, a 21-year-old who was charged earlier this month in the US, were involved in crashing a University of Pennsylvania engineering school server in February last year. Officials said the server, which typically handles about 450 daily requests for internet downloads, instead got 70,000 requests from the account of an unsuspecting Penn student over four days.

The FBI followed an electronic trail from that student’s account which allegedly led to Goldstein’s screen name, "Digerati", and the New Zealand hacker. Goldstein denies the charge and is due to go on trial in March.

Original article at guardian.co.uk

The many governments around the world are facing a growing concern as the internet gains more popularity and becomes more accessible. You need to provide information or access to services or devices to many different locations across your country or the world, and the only way to do this is through private networks and the internet.

Recently a report by McAfee has been released called the "Virtual Criminology Report" which is a report on Organized Crime on the Internet. Its a nice little read, and has some graphs showing some information about countries and their operations.

The internet is a huge threat to any Government agency, since its open for anyone to access. In recent news you might have seen some articles about how the US Government thinks that the internet is a terrorist tool, and that it should be monitored and controlled. Anything can be a terrorist tool if used properly, its not the medium that is the problem its what travels through it. If you’re not well enough equipped to stop people from gaining access to your network, don’t take the internet down with you.

Read the NetworkWorld Article
Read the Slashdot Article

There is an interesting article posted on downloadsquad.com titled "Google removes thousands of malware sites". Google has purged its index of suspected sites that propagate malware to anyone that unsuspectingly visits one of the sites in question.

Good job Google, and another hats off for also providing a nice little warning about the sites that you suspect of containing malware with a nice little notification. I recently noticed this visiting a site, but it was only once. I appreciate a company that can do this. Average unsuspecting users sometimes don’t really care that much about what they do with their computer, or if they even have the latest updates for their Operating System or Applications . But that’s human nature, and only until something is taken away from these types of users, will it even start to matter to them.But this is just the tip of the ice-burg.

Most of these "malware infested" sites are hosted by hosting companies or Residential/Business ISP’s. These companies don’t always take down these sites or the computers hosting them. The communication between the abuse community and ISP’s is
terrible, and continues to be terrible. Not only are they not taking computers and systems offline that are infected and propagating their infectious parts on the Internet. Companies are standing up for the rights of their users, by asking for court documents instead of seeing the problem and effectively removing it. Sometimes the lack of knowledge by staff will lead to a site staying up for months.

Something needs to be done with regards to the actual hosting of this malware, actively seeking out sites that are carry the malware and then having it removed or the entire site shutdown.

I know everyone is loving the new Asus Eee PC and they should, its a wonderful device. But if you want to go even smaller you can take a look at Aleutia E1 it only takes 8 watts of power and can be charged using solar power. Definitely for the out and out and about type traveler that needs a small computer that can be charged easily, combined with a sattlite phone for data and you have all that you need in a remote location.

And now for some pictures of the device!

The following are the specifications of this little 8 watts Linux PC:

• Processor: 200MHz x86 CPU, Memory: 128MB SDRAM, Storage: 2GB (included Compact Flash card), Power Supply (US, UK, or EU).
• 3 x USB 2.0 ports (12Mbps transfer rate), 1 x 10/100 Ethernet port,
  VGA port to connect LCD display (supports resolutions up to 1280×1024).
• Power consumption of 8W with CPU and SDRAM running at full speed.
  With external devices (USB 2.0 CD Rewriter, USB-powered hard drive)
  power consumption rises to 11W.
• Dimensions: 11.5cm (Width) x 11.5cm (Lenght) x 3.5cm (Height).
• Puppy Linux Operating System (version 2.14) – similar in appearance to MS Windows, stable, and pre-installed.
• Excel-compatible spreadsheet software (Gnumeric), Word-compatible word processor (Abiword)

You can view the manufacturers site Aleutia
The full specs of the device are here.
Read the Gadgettastic article here.

Those pesky little compatible stickers on all of the machines at work and your laptop can finally be removed. Coming to a install Linux Distribution PC near you, Vista Incapable stickers!

I am definitely going to to print these out and paste them all over the PC’s I own and even the ones I don’t

See the original site with stickers!

The popular site Digg is know all over the globe, a site that allows user submissions of articles on the web. Once "Dugg" other users can vote for the articles they like, as the amount of votes rise the articles are put onto the front page of digg. Lots of sites have followed took this idea and based the their site on specific content as well as media.
Google is now providing the same type of idea, allow you to add, move or remove search results.

At the moment, the modifications made by the users to search results is only seen by them. It’s possible that Google can start removing pages from their index if enough requests are submitted on a single article.

Read the TechCrunch Article
Read the Google Labs details

As the title states, a Senior Security Consultant by the name of Nick Breese is using a PS3 to crack MD5 hashes. Aside from this article incorrectly stating that the security expert is stealing passwords, as of now he has only shown how fast the machines can process MD5 hashes. This is just a small glimpse of what the software and hardware can do, the article compares how many cycles can be completed using Vector Computing:

By implementing common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing, Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10–15 million cycles per second — in Intel-based architecture — up to 1.4 billion cycles per second.

The project that Nick Breese is working on is called Crackstation, which he has been developing for a better part of 6 months. A lot of writers are saying that this is a “Hacking” tool and saying that its down right malicious. But they fail to realize that the PS3 hardware, combined with the software that is being developed by Nick Breese will in fact allow for some of the most commonly used encryption methods to be tested and seen for what they’re. Strong or weak.

But the biggest thing that erks me, is the phrases these technology writers use at the various new sites. They seem to love to use the word “hacker” even though it is the most mis-understood word you could use in the security and technology industry. But the amount of attention the word gets from the mass audiences is astounding, anything on the front page of any article that states “HACKER” will have people reading. But why? Is it because our entire day to day life revolves around technology?

Good job Nick Breese, if we didn’t have people like you, then we would still be using cryptography from the 70’s.

Read the PCWorld article.
Read the Gizmodo article.
Article about Crackstation Software for the PS3

An article written by Richard Koman from newsfactor.com talks about the performance increases that everyone will see once SP3 for Windows XP is released. The company Devil Mountain Software, has recently done tests on Windows Vista in regards to the up-coming release of SP1. The testing concluded:

“The hoped-for performance fixes that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized,” the testers reported. “Vista + SP1 is no faster” than out-of-the-box Vista, they said.

“If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista to date, get used to it. SP1 is simply not the panacea that many predicted. In the end, it’s Vista’s architecture — not a lack of tuning or bug fixes — that makes it perform so poorly on systems that were ‘barn-burners’ under Windows XP,” the research staff said.

This isn’t the only testing Devil Mountain Software has done, they have also tested SP3 for Windows XP. And have found that there is a 10% performance boost when running their Office Productivity Test Suite:

Running an Office productivity test suite on a preview version of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, Devil Mountain discovered a 10 percent performance boost over the current version of Windows XP, the company reported on its blog.

In comparable tests of Office tasks, Vista and Vista plus SP1 took approximately 90 seconds to complete the suite, while XP took only about 40 seconds and XP plus SP3 ran about four seconds more quickly than that.

The article concludes that the biggest threat to Vista is Microsofts own OS Windows XP. Personally my preference has always been XP as I would rather be able to complete tasks quickly rather than slowly with lots of nice effects.

Read the full article

Theres a feature on Lifehacker about a free piece of software called DriveImage XML, that provides backups and images of your Windows Based Hard Drive. The software has four different functions that you can use to backup/image your hard drive:

* Raw mode. In “raw mode,” DriveImage XML makes a sector by sector copy of your drive, including unused space. This means your image file will be the same exact size of the drive, and it can only be restored to a drive of that same exact size. For most home use situations, leave this box unchecked. (There’s no sense in backing up blank disk space.)

* Split large files. If you plan to burn your disk image to CDs or DVDs, select “Split large files,” which will break your image file down into smaller chunks. This way you can easily save them to smaller-sized disks later on. If “Split large files” is NOT checked, you’ll get one giant image file, either as large as the disk itself or as large as the used space on the disk (depending on whether “Raw mode” is enabled.)

* Compressed. If space on your destination drive is at a premium, select the “Compressed” option to make your image file up to 40% smaller than in normal mode. Compression will slow down the imaging process, but it will help save on disk space.

* Hot Imaging Strategy. The hot part of DriveImage XML is that it can image your drive while you workbut that means that files you’re using while it does its thing have to be locked to be copied correctly. DiX will try two strategies: locking the drive entirely (if you’re not using the computer and saving files), or using Windows’ built-in Volume Shadow Services to get the last saved state of the drive. Leaving this at the default”Try Volume Locking first”is fine for home use.

Their are also instructions on how to place DriveImage XML on BartPE. Definitely give this application a try, not only is it free but its functional.

Read the full article at lifehacker.com