IN WHAT appears to be an anti-US and Israel protest, hackers managed to bring down the official website of the United Nations over the weekend.
A section of the site reserved for statements by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon showed a message “Hacked By kerem125 M0sted and Gsy That is CyberProtest Hey Ysrail and Usa dont kill children and other people Peace for ever No war.”
The three hacker names appear on the the www.m0sted.org website which claims the three are part of CyberProtest whose objective is to repeat the message that “the powerful have no right to oppress the powerless.”
The three claim to have hacked Harvard University, the UN Environment Programme and industrial giants Toyota and Nestle. We would have thought that bringing down the UN in a protest against Israel and US aggression is a bit like taking out Mother Theresa’s site in a protest against Indian poverty.
More information [SMH]
“Ubuntu had to shutdown 5 of 8 production servers that are sponsored by Canonical, when they started attacking other systems. Canonical blames the community, saying they were community hosted, and were poorly maintained. However, kernel upgrades couldn’t be done because of poor backwards compatibility with the very hardware that Canonical had sponsored! While people point fingers at each other it is pretty clear that both sides are equally to blame, the community administrators for practicing bad security practices, such as using unencrypted FTP transfers with accounts, not properly maintaining the system. However Canonical should have been well aware of what they are hosting. The question remains, if any of the files distributed to users have been compromised. A major blow for Canonical though who are attempting to enter the business market with Ubuntu Server.”
More information [Slashdot]
“Valleywag.com is reporting on a case of a hacker not covering his tracks. It seems that, via a targeted email, an admin at Fark.com downloaded a trojan, which was used to steal passwords for Fark servers. Notably, these activities were traced to an IP address in Memphis Tennessee, and to a Fox News new-media reporter. As to the veracity of the story, that is bolstered by the fact that the story was greenlit for the front page of Fark. Motive? That could range from Fark being a rumored Fox takeover target, to stealing source code for a competing Fox social networking site. If the story is true, laws have been broken, but perhaps not by the Fox News reporter: it’s possible his computer was hacked as well. Whatever the truth, it’s a very entertaining read, as it pushes a number of hot buttons.”
More information [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader sends us to the www.xakep.ru forum where a poster claims that the worldwide Skype crash was caused by Russian hackers (in Russian). The claim is that they found a local buffer overflow vulnerability caused by sending a long string to the Skype authorization server. You can try Google’s beta Russian-to-English translation, but the interesting part is the exploit code, and that’s more readable in the original. The Washington Post reports that Skype has denied this rumor.
More information [Slashdot]
My alma mater, CodeJacked.com, explains how you can shave 30 seconds off of each reboot by holding the shift key while restarting Windows XP or Vista.
Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That’s called doing a “cold boot,” rather than a “warm boot.”) There’s a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.
As a heads-up, if you’ve got a complex hardware setup you could possibly run into some trouble with a warm boot. If any BIOS experts out there can shed some light on when you would (and would not) want to use a warm boot, let’s hear it in the comments.
Restarting Windows Without Restarting Your PC (Vista or XP) [CodeJacked.com]
Para ello sólo se necesita: tarjeta SIM (tiene que ser SuperSIM, de los tipos V1 o U), lector/grabador SIM, tarjeta SilverCard y algunos archivos de descarga. Funciona con ordenadores tanto Mac (distinto procedimiento) como Windows.
Una vez activado, el iPhone se conecta a la red móvil a través de GSM o EDGE, y también a un punto de conexión Wifi.
Lo más divertido es que para activar la conexión es necesario entrar a través de iTunes, cuando este servicio no está disponible en Croacia. Esto se debe a que aquí en Europa las restricciones sobre interoperabilidad son más estrictas y a que Apple debe tener otra cosa en mente este mes de agosto.
Más información [The Inquirer]
