The Technology blog and podcast

Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered — Krebs on Security

Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered — Krebs on Security.

Wow, this is just strange. Finally justice is done, but it takes awhile. It does take time. YOu’ll eventually get caught. Have fun.

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Technology podcast 183: Area code discussions

This may be more interesting to U.S. subscribers, but this area code discussion came up based on an E-mail I got the other day. The RSS feed has the podcast.

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Welcome to podcast 183 of the technology blog and podcast. On this edition, U.S. area codes will be the discussion. One web site gives you the area code listing by number which is pretty accurate, although 855 still shows that it is not active which it is. This web site

is dealing with a complete guide of area codes and is very extensive. It covers all of the possible cities that one area code covers. It even has more resources. Both lead to the NAMPA data, so we’ll pass these two websites to you and decide what you want to use. Want to comment? Upload your audio and send it to me, or send me an E-mail or give me a call. Enjoy the cast.

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Feds Charge Cybercriminals as 21st Century Racketeers | Threat Level | Wired.com

Feds Charge Cybercriminals as 21st Century Racketeers | Threat Level | Wired.com.

I haven’t read all of this, and its almost time for me to go. Before I do, I want to post this. I think its a good read, and I hope to come back to this.

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winamp is closing

Hi.
This is a short posting it may make it to the personal blog.
According to several sites or at least enough sites online, winamp
the player that a lot of us use is dead.
Nullsoft is shutting down because of streaming and other cloud
services taking all its thunder.
And after 15 years winamp is due to shutdown next month.
The last fully free version is out for the next month from well today
till 20 december next month.
For those of us with large winamp collections and plugins its
probably going to be business as usual.
I know a portable winamp can be got at andrelouis.com/programs but
well that may be it.
there is also oldversion.
However without all its extentions etc winamp may become useless
anyway for any new users.
Not to mention internet radio has been controled from winamp.
aparently rumors are that vlc or fubar may take over.
Still it was bound to happen, winamp was free and did everything for
free, and well there are a lot of payed and free companies round.
the news was posted yesterday on enough sites to make it at least
plausable that winamp is shutting down.
thats all

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Hmm interesting cast

Hi jared.
I was going to privately comment but fuck it its about time I commented on things here as it is I have not posted here for a while though I’ll try to keep it friendly.
If you are on some lists I have been moderated on and a few other things you will know that I blow my top over such as officiency, copywrite and the like.
We are getting to officient, everything is a number.
Technoogy is like that.
Firstly the government is supported by the businesses.
Its not for the people but for the interests of proffit.
Sadly capatalism is here to stay for now at least.
Some studdy was done on weather we could have a change and aparently this system corrupt and bad that it is is the only viable system now.
At least for now nothing comes close.
First and foremost.
At least from what I got from my intro to business law class 4 years back.
The government is all powerfull and can do whatever it wants to do.
Thats the law of the land.
Next terms of service.
To be honest who actually reads any of those or can even understand them.
And does it matter.
In most cases, a user or company will never have to, will never breach the terms.
Most of it is coman sence.
If you don’t break the law or do anything to well damage yourself or the company or use the software where its not supposed to then its ok.
Saying that you would probably have to do this on a big scale like sharing it over a network or having it publically posted by someone so about 99% of the time you can basically get away with just about anything.
Do we need to be survailed.
We do and we don’t.
Do we need to be spied on.
Again we do and we don’t.
We do because security though not 100% proof is needed.
There are enough bad guys and terrorists and such that there are good guys.
We don’t because often even the best security can be abbused by those that create it.
This is not because they are evil but its a natural progression of power.
The saying absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Firstly its human nature to be greedy.
And the same applies for power.
That has not changed since the universe came online.
We want power.
We are greedy and if it gets down to it we don’t give a fuck what our fellow man thinks or anything if it got down to survival we are just as bad as the apes are or were depending on the way you look at history which I am not to much of a fan of.
So in a sence we are just doing what we have done since the beginning of time.
We can fake it and try to be nice but we are animals.
Not as wild as other animals but animals none the less.

Its a natural progression.
the bigger the companies and or whatever get, the smaller everyyone gets till there is little left bar ants and giants.
Standard people are fine till they become big.
once that happens well the small ones are weaker so they die.
Its natural.
Sad but true.
Anyway, I can’t answer for either side on the issue.
Our country my country new zealand is a small country.
We try the best we can but we are small.
Yes, if all the ants became one we would be big.
But if progression and history are to tell us we will crush other ants there is no winning way.
They kill us, we get big then kill them.
Then some others will kill us and so on and on.
I don’t think there is much of a way out of this.
We do need to survive its just we don’t live in natural jungles thats all.
We have done a vary good job of faking the world we live in but the truth is that you don’t know what is under you if you get big enough.
I once watched the series undercover boss.
Those big ceos are standard people.
But they got so big and had layers of others handling various things, suddenly they didn’t have to deal with the small weeklings below them.
And as with most of the strong they forgot what it was like before.
I should point out at this moment that getting bigger doesn’t mean you will be always evil or always good.
Some actually do try for a while.
Its just those people are few and far between for now at least.
One day we may muster enough of us in one place, but it will not hold, its just the way of things.
And I’d probably have it no other way.
After all who wants full peace.
It would make the world a boring place and after all I am not a robot.
We try to make things more robotic eventually there will be a war.
This war will be between the robotic types and the normals.
We have 2 choices.
1. we return to the roots we came from and continue the cycle.
2. We end the cycle.
3. we stop the cycle and become something new.
3 would be the best option but I don’t see us doing that soon.
Option1 well to be honest we have been doing that since day 0.
Option 2.
We have avoided actually doing a total on ourselves by small margins but that won’t last.
At some point, we may do it then some may realise.
Maybe we start again with the cycle or do we progress?
This question is probably not going to be answered at least for a few more years.
If we are lucky our generation won’t have to bother with it.
Its for the future though who knows.
With my country, the government is weak.
Most of them spend the time fighting openly among themselves.
Not much seems to get done and if you vote one lot in they fuck it up and if you do the other they break what the rest have done and fuck it up even more.
There is no answer.
After all the stuff taht has been going down, I trust the government and the law less.
It seems that people can be bought.
Its a small joke.
My family came from a country where stuff was not packaged.
In the west we like to package what we want in nice packages.
We do a good job of faking it to.
In the east and some other places its raw, unpackaged and you sertainly know what people want.
You accept it or you die.
In some way I feel those under dictators are better off.
At least they know where they stand in the pecking order.
At least they know what they want.
And thats the other thing about human nature.
We want something we don’t have.
Once we have it we suddenly don’t want it and want something else.
Satisfaction is not part of our programming.
We are constantly searching for ourselves and our tails.
When we are not going at eachother that is for someone others bit of our tail that is.
Eventually we end in a not and either restart or have a fight over the last piece.
I can’t answer any of this stuff.
I guess I should have been supprised but I am not.
For ages I have been reading about the end.
True its not the true end but the end is almost on us if not already.
And for some strange reason I am glad it is.
I am tired of going round and round.
Ofcause I am not normal.
If I was normal and not blind I’d probably go round with the rest of them but I am not.
I can’t go round the circle and so I can see outside of it.
When will it end.
Unknown but the way things seem to be going its not far off.
True we have slowed it down a lot but the end is soon.
And when it comes we will need to make the choice.
However thats unlikely to happen.
The most we can hope for is that we restart and delay it again.
Or we end.
If we make it to the next phase it may be the same or not.
To be honest I think I am ready for the change to the next phase.
At least I think I am.
Though I wouldn’t just end myself, thats not the way to go to the next phase in any case.
And well there needs to be many ending and going to get there at least.
Musing over.
This does lead into another bit of sad news at least for those that have listened to tbrn when it was round for ages.
its been quiet of late and I think the show I do with another one on the days I can have the access time still exists but anyway.
For those that needs to know, pdaudio and all other sites associated with patrick p are appearing to have stoped existing not that they have been updated for ages.
If you know how the past streams are still active and online.
But thats it.
With that musing over, I will go and finnish up the remainder of my tasks and continue the cycle of existing.
laters

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Terms and conditions may apply

I just watched a film entitled Terms and conditions may apply which Demand Progess screened on November 17, 2013. I am releasing my thoughts on podcast 182 which is now available on the RSS feed for your perusal. Feel free to submit your own comments via E-mail or audio to be included in a future podcast. Looking forward to your comments.

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badbios and other comments

Hi jared and all.
Well the bad bios is interesting.
However to get a bios infected there are only a couple ways practically that can happen.
1. bad device, the device was infected before you got it.
This has happened as one manufacturer of an mp3 player got a virus that infected their systems normally.
This virus did then infect the firmware files for the mp3 player which were then uploaded to the bios of the mp3 player and the mp3 player got infected, the virus then could infect other systems once the mp3 player was plugged in.
That at least does give us some protection in this example.
To infect the system from the net without all the device crap one would have to get a file virus infecting a firmware file on the system.
that may happen but a file os virus is easier to handle than a normal one.
guess it could infect drivers and stuff to.
2. bad usb key.
You hope that any new usb key is not infected that you buy.
However if you use other’s usb keys they could be infected.
most do have antivirus software, and your friends shouldn’t have an infected usb key anyway.
Picking up an infected usb.
For starters you shouldn’t pick up other’s usb keys.
However a security test based on badbios and other stuff was picked up by security company locally that had dropped usb keys all over the place.
They were able to infect and gain control of several hundred systems because people got the drives and plugged them in.
Buying dodgy devices is another thing which is a bit hard to avoid.
most devices are made in china and most quite cheap.
stock cards in laptops and desktops are standardised to one manufacturer or so, and are almost never updated unless needed.
So, yeah I guess that could happen.
It does sound like though you do actually have to know a load and do a load to infect the protected flash space of the bios.
I guess you could use a third party updater to do it, but users should get their manufacturers bios and not third party anyway, though with thirdparty generics coming out that is I guess possible.
However, how quick would people notice it I wander.
this article is out, there may be others.
And at any rate to replace your bios is simple as replacing your main board and maybe your hard drive or replacing the computer and getting rid of the bung usb key.
I have had usb keys fail on me on various systems due to poor design and bad connections though.
I have never picked up or purchaced an infected device.
I have not downloaded lately in the last 10 years anything that could be infected.
occasionally I may pick up an infection via a website but clearing out temp caches which I do after every session does the trick.
In short I don’t think users need to worry about this, it seems that it would have to be an internal job for short range coms and would be quite hard to actually do.
Now if someone was able to penitrate on a physical level, the factory of some of these things without detection, infect or leave infected stuff round then maybe that would be noticed.
The scandle would be quite huge and the infections would be found out in the end.
Pluss the persons that did that would really be asking for it.
and well.
To be honest I think we need to watch out for the load of hoaks criptolocker emails claming to be previding protection from badbios by incripting your bios.
Every time any security article is released like this, it promotes spam and loads of it.
On another note, ms has decidedd to go through the first motions of depricating the skype desktop client.
That means in the first instance that next month no third party apps will work.
bar recording apps and wireless devices.
but soon that will go to.
After which I fully expect skype to die.
with only the ms cloud and inaccessable skype clients, pluss win 8 and 8.1 which are cloud base, I fully expect the isolation of the blind from mainstream windows tech at some point in the next 5 years.
If I had known I would have got another blind spaciffic device rather than my new laptop.
they cost far to much but we don’t rely on ms.
and that doesn’t help people I talk with that use skype desktop on their win7 boxes.
some still like desktop clients on win8.

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badBIOS analysis of Weapons grade Malware

badBIOS analysis of Weapons grade Malware.

This is an interesting read. Might want to give this one a look.

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another script

Hi.
This script was uploaded to one of my dropbox folders.
Its basic function.
delete defined temperary files in dropbox, then list what it has done
in a text file called tempfiles.
all deletions are silent
tFor refference to any coders.
run cmd
in command prompt
del /? should get you a help screen
@echo off
rem put this in the root of your dropbox folder and run it when you see issues.
echo The names of deleted temp files that can clutter up your dropbox
are stored here when you run the bat file. If there is nothing after
this line, you have none. >tempfiles.txt
del /s “*conflicted copy*” >>tempfiles.txt
del /s *.reapeaks >>tempfiles.txt
del /s *.sfk >>tempfiles.txt
del /s *.sfap0 >>tempfiles.txt
del /s .ds_store >>tempfiles.txt
del /s .trashes >>tempfiles.txt

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How far we have come

Hi all.
I was just routing through my old backup disks that were used at one
time as primary backup to the main systems before I got the hard
drive solutions and larger filesizes.
The rreader outspoken is gone now, but at the time I was doing it as
evaluation for my local blind school.
Said school is part of a large education net with a lot of changes
now, and at any rate though it was an in house report, and a lot of
the sites and info is invalid, also the spelling is crappy, for those
that want to know what I was like back in 2001 here is a sneak peak.
The report was done on a system origional meant for windows95 but
modded for 98 which hastened the departure of its hard drive and power pack.
Late 2002 it happily smoked its way off the plannet though to be
honest it was to slow.
Its still being used by someone at least I think it is unless its
finally exploded.
I traided it for about 4gb music on 2 dvd disks.
I still have the disks but the music is on 2 backup drives so.
My style has not changed from now till kingdom come and I think you
should get a good idea of what happened during the time.
A few things I never mentioned in the origional report.
the system specs read as follows.
toshiba sattelite 310cds pentium first generation, 300mhz p1 300 mmx mobile.
single core with 32mb ram, a 5 speed cdrom drive no write, a 2gb hard drive.
running win98 second addition.
internet explorer 5.5 and later 6.0.
outspoken 3.0 demo.
My reader at the time was hal 4.0 or was it 4.5 I have forgotten, I
know it was not 2 though.
Microsoft office 97 service release 2 with as many updates as I could
find, even though I hacked the school network to get some of the updates.
Current connection at the time was a dule band single isdn gateway
running off 3 servers on unix I think not sure, 64kbps 7.5k download.
The system was better than my dialup but still not as stable as I
would have liked.
I also ran an xircom smart ethanet card pcmcia with a cat5 hub connection.
At the time of writing I was going through a boring indipendance
course which was quite dull and had its own set of issues.
This report was done when multichannel emulation was only on some
cards and not emulated by the os as it is now.
All security had to be done serverside or through various modules
which often bloated and slowed down the system.
anyway here is the article.
note henrichsen is no longer with us, a pitty because it was good.

Outspoken Version 3.0 Paper
By Shaun Everiss

This report covers the outspoken ensemble package. It covers issues
like internet access, shortcuts, accessability, speech and response times.

Before I start I will give the test conditions for this project.

Computer: toshiba Satelite 310cds laptop
Processer: Intel Pentium 200 Mmx
Os: win98
Internet broughsers, internet explorer 5.0 and 6.0
Word Processers: word97 version 8 with Service release 2
Computer memmory: 32mb

For my tests I used outspoken Ensemble 3.0 demo.

Conventions

For the rest of this report I will refer to Outspoken as Osw. I will
also refer to the numeric pad as the numpad. Windows is refered to
as win. Internet explorer 5 or 6 unless otherwize stated will be
refered to as ie.

Synthesisers
Note: I havn’t been able to test the hardware synthesisers that are
supported by the software. I have tested the two software
synthesisers. They are msspeech with Sapi (speech access programming
interface) and lspeech.
I have compared this screenreader to hal95 for responcetimes.
Here are the times for the synthesisers.
Mssapi speech, Text To Speech (tts) engine 4.0 2 Seconds behine hal
synthesisor. Although its slightly slower then hal but fast
enough. There is a small delay but not much. The voice is nice too,
I recommend this synth.
Lspeech is at least 10 seconds slower. The voice is terible, you
will get significent delays but its smaller and loads faster, and
takes up les diskspace.

Internet test: I used ie 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 for this test.
Osw will read pages in dessending order, allright if you just want to
view links. I don’t seem to be able to read the actual page. It
also doesn’t read the text of a page. This is quite anoying! I
tried withie6 but it still didn’t work.

Word:
I could use osw in word, it reads documents quite nicely. It tels
you exactly where you are in a document. In fact it tels you what
everything is, windows, diologs, messages. However you must use the
numpad to read things like the whole document.
Osw is not good with graphics. It tells you exactly what things are
if it knows them but will go technical onyou if it doesn’t know what
an icon, function or graphic is. Eg, Symbol25 my-Computer. Or in the
other case, symbol 22 symbol 19. At first I didn’t know what that
meant. It will also read descriptions of what things are so it is
easy to find text icons. It also reminds you of what things are on
the desktop.

Other features that intrest me

Osw is in the mid range of screenreaders. It isn’t at the top or the
bottem some of it is terible, like the symbols,, however there aree
other features I like. Here is a short list of features with good
and bad points.

1. To read links on web pages from bottem to top – it’s a good
orderly way to read web pages but then where is the actual info on the page?
2. Ability to start when you log on to the network. – If anything
else this is the best feature in this reader. You can put all the
information in the fields and away you go. But why do you need
that? You can just go and get ms tweakui to auto logon for you.
Configuration file. I havn’t found a control panel for this
reader. The configuration file is called osw.ini
Its in the c:\osw folder, edit it with notepad. Only advanced users
can use this feature as you must know the right thing on the .ini
file or you could crash the reader.
Other things to watch out for

I recommend you use a multichannel soundcard or multichannel drivers
for your soundcard. If you don’t forget about playing anythingthing
other than your reader. Although the reader is quite stable it does
ocasionally crash on some tasks, most which are the fault of windows.

Other notes and contact information.

I don’t make promises for the information in this report to be
acriate, its just my opinion. I incourige you give me any feedback
you wish. This is not an extensive report and I may have overlooked
some things about the reader. My email addresses are bellow.
For fast response email to
This address is checked daily
Or
I check this address every two weeks.
If you want the configuration script I have modified you may email me.
I will be posting this report and others on the net on the following addresses.
www.henrichsen.org or www.blindcommunity.com
Shaun everiss

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