Hackszine.com: June 2007 Archive

« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »

Archives: June 2007

Page 2 of 3 << 1 2 3 >>

June 23, 2007

The Hacker Crackdown: now in podcast form

For those who haven't yet read, Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown is an account of the FBI raids on phreakers and crackers during the early 90s, as well as the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. More importantly, though, the book is a snapshot of internet culture, influencers and influences as the network was beginning to explode into a mainstream platform for communication.

I spent a weekend printing out and reading The Hacker Crackdown on my dot matrix printer when it was released in free, downloadable form in 1994. This sat in a binder on my bookshelf next to a dot-matrix copy of the Linux Network Administrator's Guide. Popular culture was freaked out about "hackers". Digital rights and the protection of intellectual property in the online domain were suddenly hot topics. Meanwhile, real hackers were sitting in front of their computers trying to wrap their heads around free books, open source operating systems, a new platform for global communication, and the text editor and phone jack that could make it all happen for anyone, everywhere.

13 years after it's release as a freely downloadable book, Cory Doctorow is distributing The Hacker Crackdown in podcast format, with Sterling's blessing. So, grab your iPod, download volume 1, and enjoy a seminal piece of internet history.

The Hacker Crackdown Podcast: Part 001 - Link
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier - Link

June 22, 2007

HOWTO: disk encryption in Linux

It's pretty easy to make encrypted disk images and partitions in Linux using the loop-aes-utils (cryptoloop kernel module). This can really come in handy for backing up or storing sensitive content such as your email archive or tax records.

Read full story

June 21, 2007

Whistle to control your computer

R2D2 was on to something. Think easier speech recognition with reduced error rates:

Use Linux® or Microsoft® Windows®, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events -- literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer -- and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Whistle while you work for higher efficiency.

This ought to be nostalgic for all of you who remember trying to whistle a successful modem handshake sequence. (Someone please tell me I'm not the only nerd in the room who did this for kicks.)

Whistle while you work to run commands on your computer - Link

June 20, 2007

HOWTO use the Wiimote buttons in Flash

A while back, WiiNintendo posted the keycodes that are detectable by Javascript when the Wii's buttons are pressed. With this ability, you can create Javascript games that will play on your Wii. Unfortunately, even though the Wii browser ships with the Flash plugin, those keycodes cannot be detected natively in the Flash environment.

Quasimondo came up with a really clever hack that solves the problem. You can create a second flash movie and use Javascript to resize it to specific widths for particular keycodes. Even though Flash cannot detect the keycodes, it does receive an onResize event. When it receives this event, it then retrieves its current width, which was set to the value of the keycode. This second swf file can then use Flash's LocalConnection to communicate that value to the primary swf.

How to Make the Wiimote Work in Flash - Link
Aral Balkan's discussion on using the Wiimote in Flash - Link
Wiimote Key Codes @ WiiNintendo - Link

June 19, 2007

Dynamic Abstraction: computer generated art with Actionscript

Understatement: Joshua Davis creates some really incredible artwork in Flash.

By combining vector primitives, a carefully chosen color pallete, some deterministic rules, and pinch of random(), the images are generated in Actionscript at runtime. Each time the software is executed, a unique image is created, though it maintains the same guiding principles of other iterations of the same series.

You can download the source for a number of very discrete examples. Tweak and experiment with his code. It's a nice set of building blocks for creating your own dynamic artwork.

Dynamic Abstraction: examples and source code - Link
Joshua Davis' blog - Link

June 18, 2007

DSL for $10

It only applies to folks in the 22 states that AT&T serves, and you need to sign a 1 year contract, but check out what The Consumerist found:

As part of a concession made to the FCC in order to get its mitts on BellSouth, AT&T is required to offer basic DSL for $10 a month to its entire 22 state coverage area for a period of 2 years.
If you can't find the plan listed on the website, don't worry. AT&T wants it that way. They've hidden it, according to the AP.

Cory Doctorow makes a good point, though:

But even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find "copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine -- a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn't piss on AT&T is if they were on fire.

But, if you're the type that can stomache the death star's policies, $10/mo is a darn good deal. Just inquire about the secret FastAccess DSL Lite plan.

AT&T's Secret $10 DSL - [via] Link

June 17, 2007

Removing yourself from Street View

Threat Level recently ran a story about Kevin Bankston, the EFF attorney who decided to test the take-down procedure for privacy-infringing photos within Google's Street View. Initially, Google required a wealth of information before removing the photo, but they changed their policy, requiring only your name and the location the image was taken. Kevin submitted the information, and the photo was promptly taken down.

If you've found an image of yourself cruising around town when you were supposed to be at home with a fever, here's what you do:

View the privacy-infringing image in Street View
Click the "Street View Help" link
Click the "report inappropriate image" link and fill out the details

Presumably, once you've done this, Google will contact you via email and you'll have to reply with your name and a confirmation that you're the person in the image.

Here's the rub, though: if someone else already caught you playing hooky, there's no point in removing the image anymore. Effectively, you'll need to find any compromising images before anyone else does.

There's also a second problem. You may need to report more than one image. Kevin may have had his reported image removed from the database, but I found him again just up the street.

Want Off Street View? Details and discussion at Threat Level - Link

Upgrading the 13" MacBook hard drive: the hard part is the soft part

The great thing about the MacBook is that it's one of the first Apple notebooks in a long time that includes a user-replaceable hard drive. And it's incredibly easy: remove three screws, pull the drive out, put the new drive in the old drive's caddy, and plug it back in. That part takes about five minutes. The hard part is preserving your old data, especially if you have a Boot Camp partition.

Fortunately, there are some software tools out there that can make the upgrade painless. First of all, make good backups:

You'll need WinClone for your Boot Camp partition, and SuperDuper! for the Mac partition.
Use SuperDuper to clone your Mac partition to a bootable FireWire drive. SuperDuper allows you to perform live clones (cloning the running system), but it's best to be careful and not run any applications while it's doing its thing.
Use WinClone to create a restore image of your Boot Camp partition. Be sure to select "Prepare for restoring on a different partition", and if you're backing up a Vista partition, check "Add generic BCD".

With your Macintosh hard drive mirrored to a bootable FireWire drive, and a restore image of your Boot Camp partition stored somewhere safe, you're now ready to perform the hard drive upgrade. After that's done, you need to boot your Mac from the FireWire drive (the cloned image). It's almost time to reverse the steps you took, but first you need to partition the new drive:

This is the command I used to partition my 250GB drive. I've got three partitions: one big one for Mac OS X, a small one for sharing data between Mac OS X and Vista, and one big one:
sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk0 3 GPTFormat "JHFS+" "Macintosh HD" 140G "MS-DOS" "SHARED" 12.9G "MS-DOS" "Vista" 89G
Don't create more than three partitions. Mac OS X reserves a small (200MB) partition for some kind of housekeeping, and that + three puts you up to Window's limit for partitions. I originally tried creating four partitions on my disk, and I could not get Vista to install on it with that configuration.

It will take a little while for the drive to partition and format to complete, and then you're ready for the next step; restoring the data:

Now you need to run SuperDuper and restore Mac OS X to the internal hard drive's first partition. You'll be cloning the system you're running (the Mac OS X clone you made to the FireWire drive), so avoid running unnecessary software that might interfere with SuperDuper.
Use Winclone's Restore tab to restore the image you made of your Boot Camp partition to the third partition.

Once these two steps are done, you are ready to shut down, disconnect the FireWire drive, and see if you can boot from your new internal drive! If something goes wrong, remember that you've got the old drive kicking around. All you need to do is find a Serial ATA-to-USB enclosure for it, and you'll be able to retrieve data from it.

June 16, 2007

HOWTO - Read/Write to NTFS drives in OS X

If you want to share an external drive between a Mac and a Windows machine, you typically format the drive with a FAT32 partition. One problem you'll run into, however, is that you can run into a file size limit if you're dealing with really large files. NTFS gets around this limitation, but unfortunately the OS X NTFS driver only supports reading from NTFS partitions.

Thankfully, there's a NTFS Fuse driver which you can use with the MacFUSE userspace filesystem driver. It supports full read/write capability, so you can use an external disk to swap large files between your Windows and Mac machines.

It's a bit of a pain to install, but here's the quick rundown:

Download and install MacFUSE - Link
Just get the DMG file and run the contained installer.

Download and install Fink. You need this for obtaining and building the NTFS Fuse driver - Link
- run the installer within the DMG file
- drag the FinkCommander application to your Applications folder
Get NTFS Fuse driver. You need to configure Fink to use unstable packages and then install the ntfs-3g Fuse driver. Open a terminal and run the following commands.
- /sw/bin/fink configure
Use defaults, except answer YES to use the unstable tree
- /sw/bin/fink selfupdate
- /sw/bin/fink index
- /sw/bin/fink scanpackages
- /sw/bin/fink install ntfs-3g
Reboot
Mount your drive
- First, make sure it's unmounted in disk utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility - select drive - click unmount)
- Make a mount point: mkdir /Volumes/ntfsdrive
- Mount the drive: /sw/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/ntfsdrive
Replace /dev/disk2s1 with your external drive's device. You can find this in Disk Utility.

The last step is all that you'll need to repeat in the future to connect to your NTFS drive. After executing the mount command, the drive will appear on your desktop and you should be able to write files to it!

June 15, 2007

DIY orb warden for software builds

If a lot of your day is spent building and rebuilding software, you want to know at a glance how things are going. You could walk over to the monitor and look at the text symbols that humans use to communicate, or you could glance at a softly glowing orb that lets you know what's going on. devon.jones has posted an Instructable that shows you how to do it using Arduino, and even shows you how to build the orb. Link

June 14, 2007

Graph your Flickr pageviews with Statr

Ever want to track how many folks are viewing your photos on Flickr? Just give Statr access to pull your pageviews and it will collect and graph your Flickr statistics for you.

Statr for Flickr allows you to track and plot page views statistics for your Flickr account. Graphs are automatically updated on a daily basis and can be linked from external websites.

Statr for Flickr: tracking page views for your Flickr account - [via] Link

June 13, 2007

Use a Google Spreadsheet as a simple CMS

Using Google's Spreadsheet API, you can create a simple CMS for your website extremely easily. It's as simple as making a new sheet with key/value pairs for any fields you want dynamically populated. You can then access the data from javascript via the JSON API. Any updates to the spreadsheet will be immediately reflected in your page.

The only downside to this approach is that the content of your page is populated by Javascript on the client side, so search engines won't see the content of your pages during a crawl. You could overcome this obstacle by using the PHP API to pull the spreadsheet data and render the HTML on the server side.

Simple CMS using Google Spreadsheet API - Link
Google Spreadsheets Data API - Link

June 12, 2007

Surf privately and anonymously with JanusVM

JanusVM is an open source VMware image that combines Ubuntu, Tor, dns-proxy-tor, Squid, Privoxy, and openvpn all into a convenient little package. Just load up the appliance in VMware and make a VPN connection to the virtual machine's IP. Once you've connected, all of your traffic (including DNS) will be localy encrypted and anonymized over Tor. This is incredibly useful for you road warriors and coffee shop surfers who don't trust the security of a public wifi network.

For windows machines, setup is incredibly easy. The JanusVM server has a network share with a .bat file on it that will automatically configure your VPN for you. Linux users have to set up the VPN connection manually but it's a fairly simple process. I've been trying to get this to work under the new VMware OS X client, but for some reason the network completely conks out as soon as I activate the VPN. If you get this working, let me know. I'll keep monkeying with it myself and let you know what I come up with.

JanusVM network security appliance for VMware - [via] Link

June 11, 2007

Crreate a Wii media server

Wii Media Center X is a Java-based web media server that you can have up and running in about 15 minutes. After downloading and unzipping the application, just run the following command (from the mediacenter folder) to start it up:

java -jar MediaCenter.jar

Run this on any machine that your Wii can see and you can use the Internet Channel web browser to access your media center at http://x.x.x.x:8192/.

I've noticed a few problems with playing audio files and the video isn't sized optimally (you can zoom to adjust for this), but this shows a lot of promise. With this running on my primary desktop machine, I can encode/download FLV files that I want to watch and MP3s that I want to listen to. You just drag them to the Video/videos and Music/music folders. You can do this during the day as you come across things, and then you can view and listen to media in your living room whenever you like.

With a little spit and polish, this could be like having all the AppleTV or Windows Media Center functionality right on your game console.

Red Kawa Wii Media Center X - [via] Link

HOWTO download and watch YouTube videos on Windows Mobile

youtube_windows_mobile_500

The web browser on Windows Mobile devices won't play YouTube videos, but you can still enjoy them on the go with the instructions on Pocket PC Thoughts:

Anyone into watching YouTube videos knows it has always been pretty problematic to play YouTube videos on Windows Mobile. This has also been explained in my related article Playing Flash Video (FLV) files on the Pocket PC - is it possible? .

The built-in PIE / IEM, because of the very bad JavaScript support, has always been unable to play them back and it was only lately that Opera Mobile (as of the first beta of 8.65) and NetFront (as of TP 3.4 007 released early June, 2007 ) received YouTube support.

...

TCPMP Plugin for Flash Video on PPC for the rescue!

This solution is a little tricky on my Windows Mobile 6 smartphone because the downloader doesn't work well without a touch screen. On the other hand, once you've downloaded the file, TCPMP is fairly easy to control using the softkeys. Read the complete article for suggestions, tips, and of course, the complete HOWTO [via] Link

Page 2 of 3 << 1 2 3 >>