a technical blog with some other crap thrown in for good measure
[APK] Seeder entropy generator to provide significant... I found this on the XDA website. It works amazingly well for all rooted Android phones. It will speed up your phone and prevent lagging. Made my HTC Sensation feel a lot more responsive. Hey everyone, So, I was experiencing significant lag as we all do from time to time, and decided I was going to get to the bottom of it. After tracing and debugging for hours, I...
Sky Go Android App released It certainly has been a long time coming and even though it comes with strings, Sky's "Sky Go" app has finally been released for Android. Don't get too excited just yet though. Sky Go will only work on supported Android devices running 2.2x and 2.3x. Not only that but to "ensure that our rights contracts are fully upheld we are also unable to support any Android devices...
Fixing the issue of the Asus Transformer TF101 not... I purchased an ASUS Transformer TF101 a few months ago and I have been very happy with it. That was until recently. When I plugged it in it would no longer charge. I read on multiple forums that this was a common issue for Transformer owners and some fixes included putting the transformer plug into the freezer to cool it down and also to bend the pins slightly to try to...
Google’s response to Siri is codenamed Majel, could... Interesting. I've not tried Siri nor do I know anyone that has an iPhone 4GS that can give me reports on it. By all accounts it's the dogs nutsack so hopefully this app will be just as good. Google’s response to Siri is codenamed Majel, could be released by end of year | Android and Me.
Carrier IQ: How the Widespread Rootkit Can Track Everything... This post is especially for the paranoid amongst us. Recently an Android Developer discovered a rootkit called Carrier IQ that is capable of logging everything you do and worst of all it comes pre-installed on almost all smartphones, including Android, iPhone and Blackberry. Click on the link below for more information
Carrier IQ: How the Widespread Rootkit Can Track...
No matter how savvy you think you’re being when downloading torrents there is always someone watching. This site records the IP addresses of torrent users and saves them to a database. It can tell you the name of the files that you have downloaded as well as your location and the dates that the files were downloaded. Check the link to see if you’ve been caught
This Web Sites Been Watching Your BitTorrent Habits and Can Show What Youve Been Downloading.
Category : Internet, Search Engine
Searching Google for relevant results can be somewhat of a mixed bag. Try to make the most of your searches with the tips shown in the link below.
Improve Your Google Search Skills [Infographic] – How-To Geek.
I own a HTC Desire HD and I find it extremely handy when it comes to banking online or checking out my social networks.
With the emergence of software such as Firesheep and Faceniff I feel that mobile security is more paramount than ever.
This is where SSH Tunnel comes in. SSH Tunnel allows you to connect to a secure SSH (secure shell) server and pipe all your internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel. Some of the main downfalls of SSH Tunnel are that you need a rooted Android phone, access to a SSH server and a little bit of technical knowledge.
If you are interested in more leave a comment and I can discuss it in more detail.
If you are at work or school and you are trapped behind a strict firewall then why not create a tunnel to your home computer and route all the traffic through that tunnel giving you unrestricted internet access.
All these directions are based on using a Linux based computer. I’m sure it can be done in Windows too I just haven’t tried it.
This post describes how to ssh to a personal server using authenticated proxy. SSH (Secure Shell) is typically used to log into a remote machine and execute commands, but it also supports tunneling, forwarding TCP ports and X11 connections; it can transfer files using the associated SFTP or SCP protocols.
Normally we use NetCat to ssh outside using proxy server but if its not support proxy user / pass to authenticate by proxy server and then ssh outside. Here we will use a package called connect.c.
connect.c is the simple relaying command to make network connection via SOCKS and https proxy. It is mainly intended to be used as proxy command of OpenSSH. You can make SSH session beyond the firewall with this command.
This can be achieved by other methods too but this works for me.
wget http://www.meadowy.org/~gotoh/ssh/connect.c
gcc connect.c -o connect
and then copy to directory in your PATH i.e /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin
cp connect /usr/bin
append following line
ProxyCommand /usr/bin/connect -H proxy.yourserver.com:8080 %h %p
It is insecure but we have to used it. If your proxy doesnt use user/pass for authenticatio, you can skip this.
export HTTP_PROXY_USER=your_username
export HTTP_PROXY_PASSWORD=your_password
Thats it now you can ssh outside without any restriction 
The link below shows why you should always keep your security patches up-to-date and also not click on any attachment regardless of whether it is a PDF file, a Word document or anything else from someone that you don’t know.
In the case outlined below the exploit was able to evade anti virus and malware scanners so as you can see the next best form of defense is common sense.
Beware the article is kinda technical so it might be a bit over the head of some non techy folk.
Buffer Overflow Exploit in Action – Imperva Data Security Blog.
Category : Internet, P2P, Search Engine
It’s no secret that I love Open Source. I love the freedom it brings to a user, no licence fees, no pirating software and generally there’s a great community behind Open Source projects that help a user to find their feet. YaCy is no different.
I was reading an article about a guy that was trying to move from Google. He was trying to find an Open Source alternative to all the Google products that he used. While the article was very interesting the main project that stood out for me was his alternative to the Google search engine.
YaCy is a completely Open Source search engine that is based on the P2P model. It’s extremely easy to set up and it runs on your local machine (after installation just point your browser to http://localhost:8090)
The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don’t need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy.
I only installed it last night on my home machine and haven’t had a chance to give it a full workout but when I do I will report my findings back here but on first inspection it is an incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to install personal search engine.
*Edit* Did I mention that it is cross platform and will run on Windows, Linux and OSX?
SMS Backup+
I’m really getting into all this cloud stuff and I’m after finding it very handy to be able to back up all my contacts and images to the cloud. Until now I just figured that SMS messages would have to be backed up manually, maybe that was the case before but not with this app.
SMS Backup+ backs up all your SMS messages to your Gmail account. It creates a label called SMS and stores all your SMS messages under that label.
It can be configured to back up at regular intervals. It can be configured so that it will only backup when it has a WiFi connection.
It’s free from the Android Market
Category : Internet
Here you, yeah you, when is the last time you backed up the personal data on your computer? If your computer went kaput while you were reading this article and there was no way to get back your pictures or your music or your thesis from your hard drive you would just restore them from your backup disk right? RIGHT?
If you don’t have any backup plan in place then you really really need to get one in place sooner rather than later.
Any type of backup is better than none. Copying the contents of your My Documents folder onto a DVD and putting it in your car is one way but it’s a bit tedious. The easiest way to back up is to create a backup that just works. You spend a few minutes configuring the software and then forget about it. Enter Crashplan. Crashplan is a great program that will allow you to back up your files to another computer in your house, to an external drive or even to your friends PC (if they have the space to store your stuff)
Crashplan has a great support forum where almost every scenario is covered. They have great rates for offsite storage and one of the most important parts is that all your backups are encrypted therefore you don’t have to worry about your friend snooping on any data that is backed up to his or her computer.
As it so happens I have terabytes of spare storage and I’m opening it up to readers of this blog to avail of my bandwidth and storage space to use my drives as offsite backup for their data. Just install Crashplan and contact me for the “Backup Key” that you will need to store your data on my disks.
One of my mates converted me from Firefox to Chrome about a year ago and I must admit I was delighted with it’s speed and the multitude of extensions that it offered.
I had Chromium installed on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit and it was working fine. I was connected to the web using a password protected HTTP Proxy server. Now I’m not sure exactly what changed, whether it was an update to Chromium, an update to Ubuntu or some change that I made but one day Chromium would no longer connect through the proxy.
I tried the usual “turn it off turn it back on” and uninstall and reinstall the browser but none of it seemed to work. After spending about an hour trying to get it working I just went back to using Firefox, that was until today. Today I was looking at different browser extensions when I came across one that I wanted to try out. Unfortunately for me it was only available for Chrome. This brought me back to the original problem that I had.
I fired up a terminal and entered chromium-browser into it to launch the browser. I was keeping an eye on the terminal as I changed the proxy settings in Chrome when I spotted this line
Major: (0×00020000) An invalid name was supplied | Minor: (0x96C73AF3) Cannot determine realm for numeric host address
