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Packet Trace Anonymization With PktAnon

July 11, 2008 by 5 Comments


If you’re a network researcher or systems administrator, you know that network traces are often necessary, but not easy to share with colleagues and other researchers. To help with both ease of use and handling of sensitive information, the Institute of Telematics has developed PktAnon, a framework that anonymizes network traffic.

It works by using a profile-based scheme that supports various anonymization primitives, making it easy to switch between different network protocols and anonymization methods. New primitives can easily be added, and several pre-defined profiles are bundled into the distro. The profiles are all XML-based.

Essentially, there are two major uses for network traces: anonymizing user traffic in order to research it, and anonymizing in-house usage, thus preventing the leakage of sensitive information. It’s a rather rigid scheme, but using profiles for this was a stroke of genius that made it a lot easier, more flexible, and as a result, more useful and powerful.

[via TaoSecurity]
[photo: mlpoulter]

NVIDIA’s Problems Worse Than Expected?

July 11, 2008 by 7 Comments

According to the an article in the INQUIRER, it is very possible that all chips with the G84 and G86 architecture are faulty. The problem is said to be excessive heat cycling and when NVIDIA was questioned, they blamed their suppliers for the issue. Although NVIDIA is claiming that only a few chips that went to HP were affected, the INQUIRER points out that all the chips use the same ASIC across the board, which has not changed in the architecture’s lifetime. They also point out that Dell and ASUS are having the same issues.

The article then goes on to theorize why we have not seen more complaints. They say that failures of these type usually follow a bell curve distributed over the time domain and we are only on the initial up-slope. This is probably due to the different use patterns of the users. For example, people with laptops are turning their computers on and off more than desktop users, thus facilitating the heat cycling’s effect. They suggest the quick fix as more fanning, but eventually NVIDIA will have to do something about this.

[via Engadget]

Radiohead Makes Entire Video With Friggin’ Lasers

July 11, 2008 by 3 Comments


[Radiohead], being no strangers to out of the box delivery ideas, are preparing to release a new video that was created without the use of cameras. The entire video for the song House of Cards was “filmed” using lasers.

The system, known as Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar, scanned the entire environment 900 times a minute to capture an entire party in real time.

The video was originally set to be released in mid July, but appears to have been moved back.

IPhone Dev Team Releases Jailbreak Video

July 11, 2008 by 2 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63lKICiWfg&hl=en&fs=1]
The iPhone dev team, notorious for jailbreaking the iPhone has just released a video of the iPhone 3G hacked. Keep up to date with it and watch for a release on their blog. This is a major update to the PwnageTool which is already available for previous versions of the iPhone.

They have added a lot of new features such as: canned web searches, custom installer configuration, and custom root partitions. They promise to release it soon, but state that it will not be this weekend. You can get a the high resolution version of the video from our mirror.

Engadget Goes In Depth With The IPhone 3G

July 11, 2008 by 7 Comments


Over at Engadget, they’ve taken some time to completely review the iPhone 3G. Take a few moments to stop reading about all the trouble activating them and read about the phone itself.

In short, they hit the following points:

  • The case feels thinner than it is.
  • The shape of the case makes it wobble on a hard surface.
  • Call quality is greatly improved.
  • Speeds are greatly increased.
  • Battery life is underwhelming.

They seem positive in their conclusion, we’ll have to wait and see how they feel after a little more time with it.

Hacker Sentenced For Stalking Internet Celebrity

July 11, 2008 by 19 Comments


[Jeffrey Robert Weinberg] has been sentenced to 2 years in state prison for a single act of computer intrusion. He had already served time in federal prison for hacking into Lexis-Nexis. Weinberg was caught through his cyberstalking – he went after an Internet celebrity. [Amor Hilton] was a MySpace user with a popular show on Stickam. Hilton found herself locked out of her MySpace account, and her cellphone account disconnected. She alleged that he demanded phone sex and nude photos of her. [Hilton] worked with the police to identify the hacker using a photo that he sent. After [Weinberg] completes his sentence in state prison, he will have to face repercussions for violation of his federal probation, which came with severe restrictions on his computer usage.

Pirate Bay Hits The Road, Angles For Encryption

July 10, 2008 by 4 Comments


Piratbyrån and their hearties from The Pirate Bay are on a pan-European summer journey that will end at the Manifesta art biennial in Italy, but in the meantime they’ve been hard at work lobbying for total network encryption, a system that would protect users of a network (say, a P2P network) from deep packet inspection and other forms of activity analysis.

The system by which this will be achieved is called IPETEE, and it works by replacing the basic operating system network stack and doing all encryption and decryption itself. More details can be found in the IPETEE technical proposal.

Ars Technica pointed out numerous holes in the scheme, noting that most torrent apps already have encryption options. IPETEE applies to more than just torrents, though, so the larger problem is that encrypted packet still need source and destination IP addresses, meaning that one of the most crucial things you’d want to keep private (your destination site) is still accessible.