Day: February 10, 2009

BackTrack 4 Beta Released

February 10, 2009 by 101 Comments

backtrack

The Remote Exploit Development Team has just announced BackTrack 4 Beta. BackTrack is a Linux based LiveCD intended for security testing and we’ve been watching the project since the very early days. They say this new beta is both stable and usable. They’ve moved towards behaving like an actual distribution: it’s based on Debian core, they use Ubuntu software, and they’re running their own BackTrack repositories for future updates. There are a lot of new features, but the one we’re most interested in is the built in Pico card support. You can use the FPGAs to generate rainbow tables and do lookups for things like WPA, GSM, and Bluetooth cracking. BackTrack ISO and VMWare images are available here.

WiFi And Bluetooth Tethering On Android

February 10, 2009 by 11 Comments

tmobileg1

Many G1/ADP1 owners have been using the app Tetherbot to get internet access on their laptop via USB to the phone’s data connection. The app relied on the Android Debug Bridge to forward ports. It worked, but people wanted a solution better than a SOCKS proxy. The community figured out a way to create a properly NAT’d connection using iptables and then [moussam] rolled them up into easy to use applications. There’s one for setting up a PAN device on Bluetooth and another for adhoc WiFi networking. It requires you to have root on your phone, but hopefully you’ve achieved that and are already running the latest community firmware.

[photo: tnkgrl]

Brain Controlled Fluid Simulation

February 10, 2009 by 18 Comments

[vimeo 3157584]

Here’s another video demo of [Eric]’s Besmoke interactive fluid simulation that we covered earlier. It was put together for the BIL Conference last weekend. This time around he’s strapped the iPhone to his head (complying with California’s handsfree laws). To make things interesting, he’s also added OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator to provide brainwave input.

Accelerometer Controlled Pong

February 10, 2009 by 6 Comments

pong

[Adam] sent us this cool game he made. It is accelerometer controlled pong (translated). The screen is a Nokia 3310 LCD, tied to an ATmega8 for the brains. He’s using an MMA7260 accelerometer for the controls. The whole thing is encased in an iPod nano box. this looks like a pretty fun little game, though we’d like to see someone attempt a two player match with it.

The Ponginator

February 10, 2009 by 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfybYkB2io]
All bow your heads in reverence to the Ponginator. This bad boy is a performance robot, mounted to the end of a 3 story tall crane. He makes all kinds of noises, flashes all kinds of lights, and shoots ping pong balls at 170 miles an hour. This thing looks like it would be so much fun to play with. listen to it as he’s talking and you’ll pick out all kinds of Sci Fi sound effects, from Portal sounds to Star Trek sounds. Check out the second video on the site to actually see the Ponginator shooting.

VAIO P XP Install

February 10, 2009 by 31 Comments

vaio_p

Sony recently started to shipping the VAIO P don’t-call-it-a-netbook netbook. It comes stock with 2GB of RAM, which means it’s not eligible for Microsoft’s XP ultra low cost pc licensing. Hackers wanting to exorcise Vista have run into a few issues. After doing her unboxing photoshoot, [tnkgrl] wrote a guide for replacing Vista with XP on the Vaio P. She used the Universal Extractor to pop open the driver downloads and remove the Vista check. This got the WWAN radio and GPS working in XP. The only casualty was the volume and mute buttons are no longer working. You can see an annotated image verifying all the components here.