Mark Dalby

I don’t know how many of you own an iPhone but I’d like to take the oppurtunity to introduce a great little app we have just released to the store.

The name of the app is Numberstore and the sole purpose of it is to save you money when making 0800 or 0500 Freefone calls from your iPhone.

It is really simple to use, you just open the app, enter the 0800 number you want to dial and then click “Dial”. The app then does some sorcery behind the scenes and translates your 0800 to an 01 or 02 local rate call ( which in most cases is included in your monthly minutes.) The app then handles the connection of the call for you.

Simples!

You can view more information on this app here.

Make free 0800 calls from your iPhone with the new Numberstore iPhone App

Back in May Microsoft signed an exclusive deal with television giant Sky which allowed them to stream the “Sky Anytime” content over its networks and straight into your XBOX 360.

Today Microsoft announced that this service will be ready to roll in the XBOX 360 Autumn update which is available on the 27th of October.

Pricing for the above has yet to be announced but Sky has stated that current subscribers will need to purchase a Multiroom package at £10/month to be able to watch both their regular sky box and Xbox360 simultaneously.

Content is to be streamed in standard definition to start but HD may be on the cards as faster connections become available.

The big question on my mind is how this will effect current bandwith charges. IE: will sky cap you with a 40GB download limit per month and then attempt to bill you for using their service when you go over that limit.

All in all though I recon its a good push forward, Nothing like Microsoft to catch the bus late though.. Sony’s Playstation 3 has had BBC iPlayer (and a flash enabled web browser) for months.

Happy Viewing,

Mark

According to our friends over at TheRegister;  Debian 6.0 (codenamed “Squeeze”) is going to be shipped with the option of a FreeBSD Kernel as opposed to the Linux one of distributions past.

This option will be named “KFreeBSD” (Short For KernelFreeBSD??) and will primarily be available on i386 and amd64 architectures (which will cater for most of us).

The use of a FreeBSD kernel will provide features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers and make Debian the only mainstream OS to concurrently support 2 different Kernels.

Over the past few years Debian has gained some serious traction, Its packaging system (aptitude) is by far the easiest to use and one of its derivatives (ubuntu) is the OS of choice for modern netbooks.

It makes me happy to know that there are still some forward thinking people in this world and I see this announcement as a massive plus for the *nix community in general.

Watch this space…

Just a quick heads up for all you firefox users, The next incremental release of Firefox (codenamed namoroka) will be available for beta next week.

It has a few enhancements, most being performance related but there are a few neat features that the guys at mozilla have graced us with…

• “light weight” themes which do not require a restart to install.
• synchronize bookmarks across different computers (Safari already has this if you use MobileMe).
• A few CSS 3.0 additions
• Optimized session restore.
• Dictionary integration with Mac OS X
• Keychain integration with Mac OS X
• A lot of improvements to the Firefox JavaScript engine.
• Windows Aero Glass theme.
• An improved interface for handling SSL certificates (about time really as the current process is rather long winded).
  

This should keep us going until Firefox 4.0,  which is due to be released sometime next year.

Overview

A friend of mine recently went to a computer security event in Amsterdam and while he was there he had the privilege to attend a really eye opening seminar on the subject of A5 encryption (Click here for an overview).

Now from my somewhat basic understanding of this kind of thing, The main point of this seminar was to point out that the A5 encryption we so heavily rely on to encrypt our mobile communications is seriously flawed.   So flawed in fact that it has been broken ( Several times since 1997 ).

How does this affect me?

Do you use any of the below  on a regular basis?

• SMS Banking
• Telephone Banking
• PayPal Mobile
• SMS Virtual cash
• A Mobile Phone
• A 3g USB Modem
  

Of course you do! (unless you live under a rock). A5 Encryption is what stops me from sitting here on my computer listening to your phone calls or reading your emails with you. !OMG!

Yeah that’s right, If this technology ends up in the wrong hands we may as well all pass our cash card and pin number to the the person to our left and tell them to go on a shopping spree.

How can I Help?

Now we come to a crossroads and have 3 options.

Option One: Think its all a bit “Star Trek” and ignore it thinking… “this will never happen”.

Option Two: Go back to the stone age and refuse to use anything that isn’t physically connected.

Option Three: Run the new distributed computing program; which is based on http://reflextor.com/trac/a51 and will help generate the rainbow tables that are needed to be able to create a fully working proof of concept and thus forcing the mobile industry to get off there ass and develop a stronger mobile encryption method.

The technical “Ins” and “outs” of  the aforementioned program are a bit above my pay grade but I know it uses the GPU on your graphics card to achieve far faster results than what could be achieved with a regular CPU.

For more information on the subject and to be one of the few involved in the creation and/or subsequent beta of any A5 cracking software, please head on over to http://www.CyberArmy.net and speak with Enstyne or comment on this post.

The below function will allow you to “Twit” to Twitter from your website. Your server must have CURL support for this to work.

The function also limits the content to 140 chars and appends  “…” to strings that are longer.

<?php

# @purpose                             To post content to twitter

# @param        $content        The content to post to twitter. (140 Chars Maximum)

# @param        $username     Your Twitter username.

# @param        $password      Your Twitter password.

# @returns      True or False

# @changelog    14 / 03 / 2009    Function declared complete.

# @docend

function twit($content, $username, $password)

{

// The message you want to send.

$message = substr($content, 0, strrpos(substr($content, 0, 140), ‘ ‘)) . ‘…’;

// The twitter API address

$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;

// Execute the query.

$curl_handle = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);

$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);

// check for success or failure

if (empty($buffer)) {

return false;

} else {

return true;

}

}

?>

The below function will allow you to send a DM to a Twitter user (assuming you are there friend). There is no success / failure checking with this function (I’m not going to make it too easy for you.)

<?php

# @purpose                                                              To send direct messages on Twitter.

# @param                $to                                           Who you want the message to go to.

# @param                $message                                The content of the message.

# @param                $username                             The username of the twitter user to send the message from.

# @param                $password                               The password of the twitter user to send the message from.

# @returns                                                                Nothing.

# @changelog        15/03/2008                           Mark Dalby              function declare complete.

# @docend

function twitter_send_dm($to, $message, $username, $password)

{

define(’POSTURL’, “http://$username:$password@twitter.com/direct_messages/new.json”);

define(’POSTVARS’, “user=$to&text=$message”);

$ch = curl_init(POSTURL);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, POSTVARS);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_exec($ch);

exit;

}

?>

Okay I’m going to break these instructions down really easily…

1) Download Redsnow from here… [mac] – [windows] – [linux]

2) Click the correct link from here to download your phones firmware… [3G Firmware] [3GS Firmware]

3) Open redsn0w and click browse.

4) Select the firmware you downloaded above.

5) Follow the instructions on Screen

6) Congratulations you have a Jailbroken iPhone and you can now use Cydia to install some apps. I recommend Backgrounder as your first

See, I told you it was easy.