Mark Dalby

We all get sick to death of Spam email, I personally tend to switch my personal email address once a year. thankfully though there are groups of people who dedicate their free time to helping us.

One of these groups is “Project Honeypot” and i mention this group specifically as they just stopped their BILLIONTH spam email. and have published quite an in depth report here…

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

Highlights include…

• Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the
  quietest.
• 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the
  quietest
• Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
  378% since Project Honey Pot started
• Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a
  phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is
  rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
• Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some
  of the worst
• It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first
  harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message,
  but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago
• Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect
  to receive more than 850 spam messages
• Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day
  and 32% on New Year’s Day

So on behalf of the entire interweb..

Thanks Guys! Its people like you who make my day that little bit easier.

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

Lets face it unless you want the Italian operator logo’s there isn’t really much of value to the average joe on Cydia or ICY, The games are about as appealing as susan boyle and a jar of nutella and about as plentyfull as common sense at Microsoft!

Enter Installous, The App store for Cracked IPA’s (iPhone Apps).

Installous takes all the effort out of sourcing, downloading and syncing apps and you can even download apps over EDGE or 3G (Yeah.. even ones over 10mb!!).

Anyway, If you want to install it (strictly for research purposes) follow the following instructions…

1. Open Cydia.
2. Go to Manage.
3. Click Sources.
4. Click “Edit” in the top right hand corner.
5. Click “Add” in the top left hand corner.
6. Enter the following URL  http://cydia.hackulo.us
7. Click “Add Source”.
8. Come out of Cydia and go back in (to refresh source list)
9. Click “Search”
10. Type in installous
11. Click install

IMPORTANT: You must uninstall Safari DL Plugin first, otherwise you will get a source error while trying to install this application!

Happy App’ing,

Mark

I seem to do this quite a lot for people,  So I’m thinking it’s time to write some instructions.

Take the following scenario….

I’ve forgotten the Wireless password for my router (WEP / WPA Key).

Ok first up, if your on Sky or O2 broadband there is a sticker under your router so stop being a *#!@$ and do a little manual investigation before googling.

If the sticker is non-existent then follow the below…

1. Plug your computer into your router via a cable (of get on a computer that already has the WEP key installed and is connected)
2. Open your browser of choice (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). If this happens to be Internet Explorer…
   • STOP!
   • Turn off your device.
   • Run a nice cold bath.
   • Chuck it in

   You don’t deserve to use a computer!!!

3. Type the following into your web browser… http://192.168.1.1 or if that doesn’t work try http://192.168.1.254
4. A pop up box should come up asking for a username and password.. this is normally username: admin password: password.  If for some reason this doesn’t work go to http://www.routerpasswords.com/ to get your password.
5. Now once you have logged in you should see a category that says something along the lines of.. “Wireless Security” or sometimes just “Wireless” click on that and voila! there is your WEP Key.

note: there are occasions where the above addresses don’t work, if this is the case please add a comment and i’ll get you the relevant address.

Happy Hacking,

Mark

According to out-law.com the music streaming platform Spotify has now reached in excess 300,000 premium users and has already turned over thier first million squid.

As an avid user (and premium subscriber) to the service I can see exactly why it is fast becoming one of the “big guns” in it’s arena.

The shocking figure to me is that the advertising income on the free accounts has only pulled in a around £60,000.

For those that have not tried spotify, the free service is now invite only again, but luckily for you I have 3 invites remaining. All you have to do is comment on this post and I’ll email you the code.

These invites are strictly on a first come first serve basis.

Cheers,

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.

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.