Clazh » General

Cupertino, We’ve Got a Problem – Security Exploit in Safari

Arpit Jacob — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:46:08 +0000

Hi this is Kyle here I’ll be guest-bloggin(in a sense) for Clazh until Arpit is finished with his Wordpress Sandbox Theme.

Well, Apple, you should’ve seen it coming. With the tremendous amount of hype that the iPhone received, you should’ve expected hackers to go full throttle on exploiting their $600 toys. Thankfully, for now, it’s only researchers that are pumping out the exploits.

Everyone always gets flustered when they get hear that the “Feds” might be spying on them via their cellular communication devices. But how would you feel if you knew that some guy who lives in Nigeria was listening to your phone calls, reading your email, viewing your SMS logs, and looking over the phone numbers of your friends(if you have any, of course). I don’t know about you, but those thoughts aren’t very comforting. But if Apple doesn’t hurry up, it could become a reality. Via an exploit in the Safari browser(used on the iPhone, and available to PC and Mac owners), researchers at Independent Security Evaluators have been able to do all of those wonderful invasions of privacy.

This exploit can be taken advantage of with malicious code (which obviously has not been released) in web pages that you may be visiting. Thus, for the time being, it would be a good idea to only visit sites that you trust(like Clazh), unless you want your own miniature Paris Hilton scandal. Thankfully, you won’t have to wait TOO long for a patch, because Apple has proposed a fix that will be coming at the BlackHat conference on August 2nd. Only 10 more days until the Apple-faithful can go back to touting the complete safety that is provided from their true love.

A video of the exploit can be found here.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Apple, General Tags: General, Safari, Security

Fake Steve Job Revealed, Harry Potter Ebook Pirate Caught?

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:47:20 +0000

Update: Corrected Typo thanks to Small Potato
In Two separate news articles.

Looks Like The Harry Potter Pirate Might be Caught.

The guy who took pictures of the stolen harry potter book and put them on the net forgot to remove the EXIF data which contains the serial number of his Canon camera which means he can be traced back.

deepjiveinterests Thinks he might have found the Fake Steve Jobs Identity.

When You Play With Fake, Expect To Be Found

Those as-yet-unnamed individuals are the gents at Sitening, a web design and search marketing company in Nashville.
The exact details are featured on Sitening’s blog, where they executed a pretty slick trick to nail his IP address (involving a unique URL and the knowledge that Steve uses Yahoo mail).
From that point they were able to pinpoint what part of the world the FSJ was writing from, and lo and behold, its from Boston.
Who is the leading FSJ candidate from Boston? Andy Ihnatko, whose blog is over here.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Apple, Blogging, General, Internet Tags: General

A Terrorist’s Profile On Orkut

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:04:05 +0000

Orkut is extremely popular in India. Its the MySpace for Indians. Sabeel Ahmed a terrorist (and I am ashamed to say an Indian National) who was arrested by the Australian police recently has a profile on Orkut, I was curious so I went to his profile to have a glance, his ScrapBook (Comments Section) is filled with scraps from people(Indians) heaping abuse on him. According to the mutiny the authorities are looking into his friends list and Orkut activity. I don’t use Orkut much, its more like I am forced to use it since a huge number of my friends are there on it. I suddenly realized that Orkut is much bigger than what I had thought it to be. I used to think of it as a silly social networks for Indians. According to Alexa orkut is the second most popular site for Indians beating even Google Search WOW.

Microsoft and Facebook Announce Partnership

Arpit Jacob — Sat, 26 May 2007 02:25:04 +0000

Microsoft and Facebook have announced a partnership deal. This comes right after Facebook opened up its API to third party developers. The Facebook platform is already available in the new mashup tool Popfly that Microsoft announced a week back. Microsoft has also released some walkthrough videos and a Developer Toolkit for Facebook on its site. Dan Fernandez and Sean Alexander have a rundown on what has been announced so far.

Popfly Facebook Block: Available immediately,
we’ve added the Facebook block which prodices access to Facebook data
including the User Profile, Friends, Photos, Photo Albums, and Events.
Leverage Existing Blocks:
You can build Facebook applications using Popfly blocks like Flickr,
Digg, Soapbox, Twitter, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and Virtual Earth.
Silverlight Support:
Another big win here is Facebook has native support for Easily build
next generation applications using Silverlight. With 24 million users
and 40 billion page views a month, this is a huge, huge win for getting
native Silverlight support on Facebook
Visual Studio Support: The Facebook Developer Toolkit enables developers to build applications for Windows, Web, or Microsoft Office.
Distribution of the Facebook Developer Toolkit.
The FDT was developed by Microsoft to wrap the Facebook API into a
managed component. Through this component, developers now will be able
to drag ‘n drop a Facebook component onto the component tray in Visual
C# Express , Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer (for both
Whidbey and Orcas). Users will be provided all the source code, sample
applications including a WPF app and detail documentation.

Co-branded Landing Page
on the Facebook developer website. At this site, visitors will be able
to see Microsoft Visual Studio Express and Microsoft Popfly links.
Additionally, a series of new pages were developed called Showcase on the Visual Studio Express site.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Microsoft, Technology Tags: API, General, Mashup, Microsoft, Programming

PodWorks.in India’s Biggest Event on Audio & Video Podcasting

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:23:10 +0000

PoWorks.in is from the same team of people from the Knowledge Foundation who brought you Blogcamp, Barcamp and Proto.in. I was part of the organizing team for Blogcamp last year, it was a great experience I met a lot of interesting people (heck till that point I never realized how seriously people took blogging). I am not sure if I’ll be able to attend Podworks things have changed a lot since I quit freelancing, nowadays I don’t get to set my own schedules.

India’s Biggest Event on Audio & Video Podcasting

Date: June 9 & 10, 2007 (Saturday & Sunday)

Venue: Tidel Park Auditorium, Chennai.

Cost: Rs.200

Here are some Reasons Why you Should Come To Podworks

If all this still doesn’t convince you then maybe this picture might, its where the PodWorks party is to be held. More than the party its the people you’ll meet that will make the party even more fun. More Pics on the Podworks Blog, Click Here To Register Now on the Podworks Wiki.

What is PodWorks

PodWorks.in is a 2-day workshop styled unconference dedicated to the sharing of knowledge around new / social media (audio and video podcasting, blogging, more. It’s a successor to the extremely successful BlogCamp.in that was held in September 9 & 10.

PodWorks promises to bring the best of the podcasting/blogging/new media community together to learn, share, experience, and grow. How do we know it’ll be the best? Because *YOU* will be there.

No one at PodWorks is simply an attendee; all are participants. Making PodWorks an amazing experience is the responsibility of all of us!

You do NOT need to be a podcaster to attend a PodWorks. If you’re interested in podcasting, if you’re a listener, a blogger, a musician, an internet enthusiast, or just someone curious about podcasting and new media, then please join us — and bring a friend or colleague.

More from some of the organizers blogs.
Bothack and Syed , Ramanujam

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, General Tags: Blogging, General, Unconference

Digg Users Go Nuts and Revolt, Kevin Submits

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 03 May 2007 16:31:46 +0000

I didn’t read my Rss feeds for a day and missed most of the Digg fiasco. Digg as you you is a social news site where use users control the news that is shown on it. Digg has been in a few controversies before but never has it been at this big a scale with its own users revolting. It started off with a user posting the hexadecimal keys to decrypt HD-DVD discs in Linux. Digg was served with a cease and desist letter for violation of intellectual property and the moderators started removing these posts, in fact some users have even been banned from digg for submitting the decryption keys. You can see screenshots of Digg’s homepage during the the whole fiasco on Pronet and Mashable

As labnol points out One of the most Ironic thing about this whole thing is that this is not the first time, that stories regarding hacking and cracking software have appeared on the frontpage of digg. As usual Tony Hung has a well written and insightful post.

Social News has its advantages and disadvantages nothing is perfect. Kevin Rose was forced to admit that Digg is run and controlled by the users and if they feel threaten they would take matters into their own hands.

While Digg aims to have a democratic environment the truth is far from it. One of the main drawbacks is that there is no way to see who is digging down stories. Most of the front page stories are controlled by the top 20% of Digg users. Pete Cashmore has a humorous post on why we might need to start a donation campaign in case Digg gets sued.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Internet, Technology Tags: General, Web 2.0