Tech Suki

Very interesting and informative articles about common myths about optimizing windows:

http://lifehacker.com/5033518/debunking-common-windows-performance-tweaking-myths

http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html

DailyTech - Microsoft Tricks Diehard XP Users Into Liking Vista with “Mojave” Ruse

Inspired by an employee email from Microsoft’s David Webster, the Vista team gathered over 120 XP users in San Francisco who were critical of Windows Vista.  After being questioned on video about their Vista impressions, Microsoft told them it was giving them a stunning opportunity — the chance to view their secret operating system they had been cooking up, codenamed “Mojave”.  The excited users showed great enthusiasm for the new operating system, with over 90 percent giving positive feedback of the 10 minute demo of the system.

The comic twist is that there is no “Mojave” and it wasn’t a pre-release version of Windows 7.  “Mojave” was simply a fictitious title applied to a standard Windows Vista install.  Interestingly, the XP users seemed utterly unable to recognize Vista or its features, despite criticizing it.  Remarked one user on the new features, “Oh wow!”

http://www.cuil.com/

Researcher to demonstrate attack code for Intel chips | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-14 | By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service.

Security researcher and author Kris Kaspersky plans to demonstrate how an attacker can target flaws in Intel’s microprocessors to remotely attack a computer using JavaScript or TCP/IP packets, regardless of what operating system the computer is running.

Kaspersky will demonstrate how such an attack can be made in a presentation at the upcoming Hack In The Box (HITB) Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during October. The proof-of-concept attacks will show how processor bugs, called errata, can be exploited using certain instruction sequences and a knowledge of how Java compilers work, allowing an attacker to take control of the compiler.

“I’m going to show real working code…and make it publicly available,” Kaspersky said, adding that CPU bugs are a growing threat and malware is being written that targets these vulnerabilities.

Different bugs will allow hackers to do different things on the attacked computers. “Some bugs just crash the system, some allow a hacker to gain full control on the kernel level. Some just help to attack Vista, disabling security protections,” he said.

The demonstrated attack will be made against fully patched computers running a range of operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Linux and BSD, Kaspersky said, adding that the demonstration of an attack against a Mac is also a possibility.

Processors contain hundreds of millions of transistors and errata in these chips are relatively common. While some errata can affect a chip’s ability to function properly — such as the errata that last year forced Advanced Micro Devices to push back volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors — many others exist unnoticed by users.

For example, the Silverthorne version of Intel’s Atom processor, which lies at the heart of the Centrino Atom chip platform, contains 35 errata, according to a June specification update released by Intel.

“It’s possible to fix most of the bugs, and Intel provides workarounds to the major BIOS vendors,” Kaspersky said, referring to the code that controls the most basic functions of a PC. “However, not every vendor uses it and some bugs have no workarounds.”

Source: http://www.tofugu.com/2007/08/02/studying-japanese-with-a-nintendo-ds/

Nintendo DS Kanji Dictionary:
???????????????? (sono mama raku hiku jiten / Kanji Sonomama). How many times have you looked at a kanji and had no idea what it was? More than you can count, most likely. Once you stop reading children’s books, you’ll probably start to notice that there is less and less furigana going on (that’s the hiragana next to the kanji telling you how to pronounce it). Furigana will only stick around for very difficult kanji, and that’s why you need this software. All you need to do is write your kanji into the box (as ugly and as poorly as you want to) and it will decipher it and give you its meaning. What makes this “game” so invaluable, however, is that it will translate it for you into English. You can also translate the other way around (English -> Japanese). Here is what happens when you look up a word:

Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

This is pretty cool, *when it works. It lets you easily install Fedora in a usb pendrive as a live system.

Get it here: https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator

However, as it’s Linux, there’s of course trouble and problems. If you can’t get it to boot, here’s the fix:

http://forums.blagblagblag.org/viewtopic.php?t=4365

cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdc

(Change sdc to your drive letter)

If that doesn’t work, try here:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=104367

If those solutions still don’t work, just give up, this is trash Linux after all and is bound to fail.

Source: CNET

http://85.150.216.22/blog/NDS/ProjectJDS.asp

Nice freeware homebrew application for DS

Source: Dailytech

Click on the source for the entire article.

Another reason not to use and trust this failure of an OS.
If you are interested, here’s information and tools to exploit this bug: http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl/

A simple programming error reduced the entropy in the generated program keys created by the OpenSSL library.

Just two lines of code created crippling security holes in four different open source operating systems, 25 application programs, and millions of internet-attached computer systems.  The vulnerability was publicly discovered for the first time May 13, after having left the door open nearly two years.

The error reduced the number of keys that Linux can generate from 2^128 to approximately 2^15. Fixing the key problem is not as simple as fixing a buffer overflow vulnerability, another typical security flaw. As the keys generated our actual files, merely patching the system will not change these files. Every single key will need to be replaced in a difficult and time consuming process. Further keys need to be certified and distributed, which takes more time and is error prone.

The Valgrind code caused errors, so the programmers simply commented out all the code, including the other methods of generating randomness on accident. Only the code which utilized the process ID, an integer ranging from 0 to 32,767, remained to provide randomness.

One developer more alarmingly points out that the vulnerability has showed a perhaps fatal flaw in the state of the open source industry and in the computer security in general. One programmer can make a major change which can be blindly accepted by other developers with little understanding of the implications.

Source: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Use_memory_on_video_card_as_swap

Article explaining how to use videocard memory for swap in Linux.

Someone pasted this funny log in irc:

[dm] I discovered that you’d never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
[dm] For example, I didn’t know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I’d be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.
[dm] Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.
[dm] So if you’re starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with “Linux is gay because it can’t do XXX like Windows can”. You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.

Source:

http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php?busy=1&ip=81.36.249.60&measure=yes&port=6881&down=yes&up=yes&port2=4711&tcp=yes&duration=20&

Source: http://florchakh.com/2007/07/16/firefox-girl-the-riddle-has-been-solved.html

Her REAL name is Francesca Lee, she is based on the south coast of the United Kingdom