How They Hacked Paris

paris tmobile

Ugh, I feel dirty just posting a picture of her. The Washington Post has an excellent story about how T-mobile was hacked, which eventually led to Paris Hilton’s account being compromised. I hope you aren’t too surprised when you find out it was just simple social engineering… I mean really simple. No sweet ‘sploits, no DDOS, just an attack at the weakest link of a sprawling corporation: the staff. I hope companies take this article to heart and teach their employees how to be more secure. Of course if your staff hates you you’re still screwed.

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Distributed Bittorrent

azureus start

The RIAA/MPAA empire has been tearing down tracker sites left and right; making tracker operation a risky proposition. Distributed tracking guarantees the torrents on these sites will be available even when the site tracker is down. Distributed tracking also makes publishing content easier. Instead of posting a .torrent file to a tracker site you can publish to a distributed tracker. Then you just post the .torrent file on your blog/fan site/forum. You don’t even have to go that far. Azureus can generate a “magnet:” link for any bittorrent file it is currently tracking. Anybody can open that link in their Azureus client and the .torrent file will be retreived directly from the database. I think this system will be great for people publishing their original works since they won’t have to provide lots of bandwidth or rely on someone’s flakey tracker. Recently support was added to the official client and many more will probably follow. Azureus explains the magic after the jump. Give it a read if you’re not too busy downloading crappy RotS cam movies. (EDIT: I guess there is a workprint out there, so the quality is probably pretty good)

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WRT SD Card Mod

wrtsd
I was mildly interested in the serial port mods (add a gps, lcd, serial console), but this is just awesome. Now you can add as much Secure Digital flash storage as you want to your WRT54G. This requires soldering six wires plus a custom driver. The added space could come in really useful for storing logs or large dump files from kismet. You could just plug the thing into the wall and let it sniff packets all day. It could also be a small file server running bittorrent while you’re out of the house with your laptop. Most important of all: SD support means you’ll be able to share memory cards with your Playstation 3 and that’s a top priority right?

[thanks darkpadden via LinksysInfo.org]

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Synergy KM Switch

synergy

Synergy is a cross-platform keyboard-mouse switch. It’s also one of the most well-named pieces of software out there. Here’s why: I had a laptop running XP with a nice usb keyboard and mouse plugged into it. To the right of that, I had a laptop running Linux. Both computers are on a wireless network. Using synergy I can slide the mouse off of the right edge of the screen and onto the Linux laptop’s XWindows screen with no lag. In the process it transfers  keyboard control over to the other system too. You can even cut and paste between systems. This is a great solution for using your desktop keyboard with your wireless laptop or if your laptop is sitting in the living room you could easily use its mouse and keyboard to control your home theater pc. Set up is simple, scales easily, and works with OSX, too.

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