Crowtheries

As the title says, recently we went too deep into the Google spiral. That’s the big picture of my case:

• Mail + Mail Client (POP) => Gmail
• Agenda => Google Calendar
• Search Engine => Google
• Fast Note => Google Notes with the FF add-on
• Todo-List => Gmail labs
• Document sharing => Google Docs
• Mobile OS => Android
• Contacts Informations => On Gmail (all my phone contacts are on Gmail of-course )
• GPS => Google Maps + Geo localisation ( I’ll never use it again, I got lost cause of it while going to the Cinema)
• Translator => Google Translator
• etc.

The big advantage of using Google’s products is that everything is linked, you can access your docs from your phone, gmail, share stuffs. But… and that’s the big BUT, aren’t going against the main principle of the Internet? How? That’s what we are gonna talk about in the next posts.

You may ask yourself “What’s the principle you’re talking about?”. Well it’s simple, Internet shouldn’t have a normal network topology, it’s far more complicated from a snowflake one, and too random.

You’ll tell me then, that’s it’s actually the case… Yes, physically speaking it is, but the logical topology is changing fast…. really fast.

To be continued…

knuthy General

Hi, It has been a long time since I didn’t post… a relevent post, but I’ll restart posting soon.

See you soon

knuthy General

It’s true, I’m kinda lazy… and I love VIM (especially for Rails/Python and C). So while I was configuring my new install, and pumping up VIM, I decided to get ride of the <ESC> .

Yes, the <ESC> is way too far, the first thing I thought about was the Caps-Lock, it’s close to the left little finger. I googled it up, and came across this solution :

#In ~/.xinitrc file
# -----------start------------
# Swap caps lock and escape
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
add Lock = Caps_Lock
# ------------end-------------

At first look, it’s nice… but it may disturb my work on other applications.

After that I thought about the USELESS windows key. Close to the <C> , it may be a good use… but found no solution for that. If anyone finds it, plz comment.

Last try was the best, I’d never thought about it, it’s using the ;; ,and that key is right under the little finger.
To use it just add in your .vimrc file
imap ;; <ESC>
Next thing I’m thinking about is the useless Numpad keys.

knuthy Linux vim

knuthy General ssd

The Reasonably Smart Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service based on JavaScript and Git, allowing for computing-in-the-cloud for the web that works the way web-developers work.

Bought by Joyent few weeks ago, we hope that it’ll be a viable alternative to Google AppEngine, which will lead us to a better service on both sides

Links: Reasonably Smart , Joyent , Reasonably Smart Blog , Google App Engine

knuthy General cloud computing

Recently I got into the Google App Engine world, and I decided to link one of my domain names to it. I got some problems setting it up, as the http://www.domain.com was giving a 404 error, and http://domain.com gave a dns error.

After a while reading the Google help I found this :

I’d like to map my app to http://myurl.com (also known as a naked domain).

Due to recent changes, Google App Engine no longer supports mapping your app to a naked domain. If your domain registrar supports URL redirects, you can redirect from http://yourdomain.com to your app, which can be served from domains like http://www.yourdomain.com or http://appid.yourdomain.com.

So, the solution was a little hack :

1. Set “www” as your Application subdomain
2. Go to your registar configuration (I use BookMyName), add a CNAME record of “www” to “ghs.google.com” (www CNAME ghs.google.com. ) , and a redirection from “http://domaine.com” to “http://www.domaine.com”

Links: Google Help

knuthy General google

The KDE latest desktop 4.x version is out, with many improvements (stability, and a nicer desing ^^). ArchLinux team have put the stable version on their repo the night before the official release, that was a really amazing move, and most of the ArchLinux KDE users (including me) were amazed by it.

KDE 4.2 official announcement : http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/index.php
Here’s the forum post : http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=63925
And the announcement : http://www.archlinux.org/news/431/ (they say “today” but the post was in the 26th )

knuthy General archlinux, kde, Linux

It’s with this slogan that the first stable version of the Bee Linux Distribution came to life. Based on Fedora 8, it can be compared with Sabayon Linux for the number of proposed packages, except that it uses XFCE by default.

We’ll try to publish a review of the distribution soon, meanwhile enjoy the folowing video :

knuthy General bee linux, Linux

Here’s was a user said on Zune.net forums:

From what I can tell it looks like every Zune 30 on the planet has suddenly crashed. Is this a virus? A glitch? A time bomb? A disgruntled Microsoft employee? Planned obsolescence to make us buy a new one? Or just a terrorist plot to drive the free world crazy?

You got it, all the Zune 30GB crashed at the same time… well we know that the 2K bug was just a “conspiracy” ( for the French guys, just take a look at “Les Guignols”, they described it quite well ) but here comes the really bug not on PCs but on Zunes, and here’s a funny pic of a crashed one :

And here’s the response from Microsoft :

“Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device” Matt Akers, Zune product team, Microsoft

knuthy General bug, zune

That’s what I’ve read few moments ago on a french blog : here, I was surprised when I’ve read it, so here’s a little translation of the post:

Arrigo Triulzi made a presentation of his work called « A backdoor in the firmware », Arrigo created a “hacked” firmware for a Broadcom network card which gives him the right to make it run some actions when it (the card) receives a “magic packet” containing 0xbeef ( Hexspeak fan? ^^), as the card is connected on the PCI of the victim machine, it can access directly to the memory or communicate with other peripherals without going through the OS, so software could intercept that action.

As you know a network card has limited processing and memory capacities, so it won’t be able to do any harm; well Arrigo went a bit further in his researches and thanks to Vista (what a funny surprise) and it’s Aero which requires a good graphic card accelerator with a nice GPU, he found a nice way to make the work done, he used the power of the GPU for that, so he hacked a firmware of a graphic card, and used its power (processing/memory) for his needs.

To make the things clear, it’d be like that :

1. the attacker sends a “magic packet” to the network card of the infected machine
2. when this card receives the packet it communicates with the graphic card via PCI
3. the graphic card launch a mini SSH server which will communicate with the infected network
4. the attacker will by this way get control of the box

The mini SSH server is “nicssh”, it gives some features like reboot of the machine, read directly from the memory (where your passwords ), without going through the CPU, so fully undetectable. A bit scary , that’s true…

Now how to get that machine infected? To do that we must be able to update the firmware of that card, knowing the current users that click on everything they receive by email, it shouldn’t be a problem. However, with he new Operating Systems which reduce the rights of the users which makes the installation of the firmware an administrator job, it shouldn’t be a problem to worry about, isn’t it?

Well, the worst is coming, Arrigo did all his best to find an other way to get in, and guess what? He found it. Some companies to reduce the time of production in large scale of component, they added to their chipsets an interesting function. When an update of the chipset is announced, the constructors and PC assemblers have to update their products, so to avoid to update the machines one by one, they (chipset constructors) offer the possibility to do it via Ethernet. To update the card it’ll be as easy as sending a particular UDP packet (which is routable ) which make it a spread attack.

That’s it, now we have an “ultimate rootkit” which can install it self on a machine and run on it without using the CPU so avoiding all the possibilities of detection by the OS, scary…

Arrigo went a bit further (again), and he imagined an other attack which is quite nice, recently, in the security field we use PCs as IDS/IPS or even as firewalls, knowing that, a possible attack would be to send an update packet for the first eth card, update its firmware, that card sends via PCI the packet to update the seconds eth card’s firmware, and then control both sides, now the attacker is able to send data between the two cards via PCI without any filtering software do its work (Firewall/IPS). Again… it’s like a nightmare.

The good news is that: this proof of concept is hardware dependent, but as u know we don’t have that many chipset constructors, do we?

Extra links:
PCI keylogger, an existing solution
Automatic remote firmware upgrade

knuthy General firmware, rootkit, security