Fabrice Bellard –of QEMU fame– has implemented a PC-emulator in JavaScript. So now you can boot Linux in your browser. How geeky is that? Enjoy the show… Here are some technical details.
There is a small C-compiler available. It is ‘tcc’ (also from Bellard). You can use it to compile the sample (hello.c) 
Oh whow this is really nice… The iPhone uses its front-facing camera to track the head of the viewer. Since it knows where the head of the viewer is it can actually simulate a 3D display as can be seen in the video below… is that a cool piece of software or what?
Also on the iPad:
Helaas. Elf jaar te laat maar liever laat dan nooit zullen we maar denken. Een website als deze had nooit nodig hoeven zijn maar nu die er toch is… Ik doe dit niet vaak maar ik zou graag willen oproepen om dit prachtige initiatief van Microsoft® van harte te steunen. Microsoft® wil graag het marktaandeel van IE6 naar minder dan 1% terug brengen. Op de website IE6 countdown geven ze onomwonden toe hoe slecht IE6 eigenlijk is… Webdevelopers wisten dat al 10 jaar geleden. Een stukje zelfreflectie-gebeuren naar de webdeveloper toe… 10 jaar te laat.
Maar goed: steun dit initiatief! Sterker nog: laten we de lat nog net iets hoger leggen. Streef naar een Microsoft®-vrij internet! Op technologisch inferieure producten zit niemand te wachten. Dus als je toch van IE6 wilt afstappen: overweeg eens een echte browser! Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera of één van de andere gratis webbrowsers… Ook een raadzaam advies om op te volgen als je een nieuwere versie van IE gebruikt. Dumpen die handel!
Bedankt Microsoft®! En voortaan met je smerige poten van open standaarden afblijven. Schorem!
Microsoft is once again back at its core business: stealing from others. Here’s a remarkable writeup on a analysis of search results from Google and Bing (Microsoft search engine). Google was suspecting that Bing was somehow copying its searchresults… So they set a trap and guess what they caught (red handed)? Read it here.
My girlfriend –by accident– removed photo’s from her SD-memory-card while trying to make a backup of the photo’s. Yup, a simple case of pressing ‘Yes’ one time too much in a wizard-like windows-GUI-thingy that came along with her digital camera. Luckily she didn’t do any further tampering or run any tools to try to retrieve data from the SD-card. Now I can first put the ‘lock’ on the SD-card and dump an image of the entire card on my linux laptop. Once I had an image of the SD-card I could make copies and tamper with those all I want. If I could not restore files in one way I can just make a fresh copy and try another way… lovely.
Sure I could try to manually traverse the FAT-32 structures on the filesystem but that would take a lot of time. There must be some –free– tool out there to do this for me right? So a little googling pointed me to a tool called PhotoRec which is actually part of TestDisk. TestDisk can be used to recover lost partitions, filesystems and can even undelete files from many types of filesystems. PhotoRec can be used to scan raw data on (even) corrupt filesystems based on known fileheaders (the files should not be fragmented though). Very useful if you’ve had a disk crash and can’t recover the filesystem altogether. Now luckily the SD-card contained a consistent filesystems (although the meta-data was missing). So trying TestDisk first would definitely be the better option. And BINGO! Everything could be recovered: 1.8GB of photos and one happy girlfriend.
Of course –being the nerd I am– I also tried the PhotoRec tool to see what that would yield. In this case the same files were recovered by doing the raw scan of PhotoRec as well. So I would like to highly recommend these tools when you get into a similar situation. The tools are written by Christophe Grenier. They are available for many platforms and even a live-rescue-cd is available. My girlfriend immediately made a backup of the recovered files as she intended all along. Now we consider this as a serious warning on the importance of backups… once again… Still: it was a beautiful monday thanks to Christophe Grenier. Thank–a–you!
Now I will be the first to post hilarious screenshots of windows oddities… just because I think that windows sucks. Big time, that is. Now I encountered a funny thing on my Mac as well.. I was updating my OS and it started downloading. When almost done it showed a very funny estimated time of arrival: -2147483648 hours. So basically I got my update 244978 years ago… Now isn’t that amazing?
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress Microsofts Bruce Dang shared the knowledge gained by analyzing the Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet appears to be written to specifically attack Irans nuclear centrifuges. It spreads through windows based systems and is pretty nifty… well the most shocking of all is to see the enormous amount of stupid privilege raises that happen because windows doesn’t have a very secure foundation on which it is built (“a print-spooler flaw that allowed remote guest accounts to write executable files directly to disk”… tsk tsk tsk). This is a nice read-up about the stuxnet worm.
“Ik heb toch niets te verbergen?” is het meest gehoorde argument als je mensen vraagt naar wat zij vinden van de alsmaar toenemende surveillance mogelijkheden die de Nederlandse overheid in probeert te zetten om haar burgers in de gaten te houden. Natuurlijk je hebt ook niets te verbergen… voor de overheid wellicht… maar wat nu als het in handen van derden valt? Dat is het grote probleem: je verwacht dat overheden –maar ook bedrijven– zorgvuldig omgaan met persoonlijke gegevens van burgers. En juist die verwachting blijkt keer op keer niet waargemaakt te worden. Ik schrijf dit naar aanleiding van een groot lek bij NL-energie maar dat is slechts één voorbeeld van de talloze incidenten die er de laatste tijd boven water zijn gekomen… let wel: de incidenten die bekend zijn geworden. Het topje van de ijsberg dus.
Er zijn strenge regels waaraan bedrijven en overheden moeten voldoen met betrekking tot het omgaan van persoonsgegevens. Echter keer op keer komen incidenten boven water waaruit blijkt dat die regels op grote schaal geschonden worden. Dat is de reden dat ik me elke keer weer onveiliger voel op het moment dat administraties gekoppeld worden, databases worden aangelegd, dataverkeer gemonitord gaat worden en ga zo maar door. Heb ik iets te verbergen dan? Nee! Of ja, eigenlijk wel… mijn identiteit. Ik wil graag mijn eigen identiteit behouden en vooral voor mezelf houden. Ik heb er geen behoefte aan dat organisaties mijn privé-gegevens naar Jan en Alleman lekt.
Well we’ve all been in a situation where the location you work at allows restricted access to the internet. To an IT-guy restricting access to the internet is like squeezing his throat. We can’t breath without unrestricted access to the internet…
Now I do understand you don’t want to grant any employee unrestricted access to the internet from the corporate network. At least half of them will double-click (execute) files called ‘clickme.exe‘ or ‘funny-picture-of-your-mom.exe‘. So here’s a nice trick to get yourself a little more freedom (and privacy) in the office. I will not explain all details. You already need to understand how to tunnel your SSH through the corporate proxy. If you don’t: you are out of luck… and probably someone who would click on ‘unreleased-justin-bieber-song.bat‘ anyway.
Oh wow, I have a new phone. It’s an android phone. The samsung Galaxy S. I had the phone lying around for a month but now it’s finally activated. Still reachable under the same number though. That’s why I had to wait.
Oh boy what a pleasure to work with. It has swype text input. This allows you to just swipe your finger or in my case my thumb over the keyboard. Single finger and fast text input. Very convenient.
Although I do like apple products and I was definitely considering to go iphone4 I decided to go android. First of all: I already have an ipod touch which is basically an iphone without the ability to make a phone call. So getting the iphone would not really be a new experience. So I go for the both worlds option. iOs and android. Let’s see what will turn out to be the better choice. So far so good: I love the samsung galaxy S.
Oops, if this is true this may be a killing blow to all of you MicroSoft fanboys out there. According to Computer World a tech-worker on the oilrig crashing windows systems may be part of the problem that eventually let to the spilling of oil. And we’re not talking a little Dr.Watson, an occasional “general exception”… we’re talking about a full-blown BSOD (blue screen of death). Well maybe we learn a little lesson here. Never use a computer system for critical mission computing that can’t even keep itself alive for longer than half an hour… If this doesn’t teach us then maybe this will… one day…
Whahahaha… it had to happen one day. A problem with an anti-virus update marks a false positive and puts the file in quarantine. The OS can’t load the file anymore and… oops… reboots… and…. reboots…. and… reboots… This is actually a great feature. Rebooting windows is like 80% of normal usage and it is now fully automated.
Fixing it can be a bit hard… since the computer is rebooting all the time. McAfee could create a bootable windows CD that restores the missing file from the system but.. hey wait.. no they can’t do that. You can’t distribute a proprietary OS like windows for free… Maybe they can create a Linux boot CD to restore the windows file… Something to contemplate: using Linux to revive a windows machine.
Oh whow.. now here’s a very nice report of a recent successful XSS-attack on apache.org. No don’t worry it isn’t a huge hole in the Apache webserver… just a very clever attack. Well.. they did obtain SVN credentials so maybe the attackers could have changed the sources and inject a backdoor…
The attackers were able to penetrate at system level due to usual end-user fuck-ups like using the same account & credentials on the web applications as well as shell access to production systems. One-time passwords did prevent the attackers to gain full access to the entire infrastructure. It’s a nice read.
Oh wow.. many people I’ve spoken about the Oracle/Sun merger didn’t like the idea but also at former Sun not everyone seems to be happy about it. As always with mergers like these the most gifted and talented people are the first ones to leave. Those who actually matter don’t have to put up with management crap. Just pack up your ol’ bags and throw ‘m down at some other company who is delighted with your arrival.
So the latest rumours are now confirmed: James Gosling (father of the programming language Java) is bailing ship… who will be next? Who will stay behind? What will the impact be on Sun’s former assets like Java, Solaris and MySQL?
Oracle has already taken another approach with many of the assets they got from Sun. Former Sun Solaris, now called Oracle Solaris, used to be free (as in free beer) but Oracle Solaris has a 90-day trail period. After the trail period you’ll have to obtain a license from Oracle. Sure, you can still use OpenSolaris but unfortunately all (or most) future development to Oracle Solaris is closed source so these features and fixes will not end up in Open Solaris.
Oh this is very very nice. Google has implemented a feature on gmail to detect suspicious account activity. Suppose you always access your gmail from the Netherlands… and all of a sudden it is accessed from Poland?… Gmail will now warn you about this kind of abnormal behaviour. It’s a good read. Here’s a little teaser…
A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend’s account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend’s whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts.