Tag Archives: Technology

Gangnam Style Has Been Viewed So Many Times It Broke YouTube’s Code | TechCrunch

Gangnam Style Has Been Viewed So Many Times It Broke YouTube’s Code | TechCrunch.

Music Advances

Ludovico Einaudi using two iPads to play I Giorni.

Hello Bank advert, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra play the Overture from Carmen using only mobile phones and tablets.

How Splitting A Computer Into Multiple Realities Can Protect You From Hackers

Virtualisation, Sandboxes, Containers. All terms and technologies used for various reasons. Security is not always the main reason, but considering the details in this article, it is a valid point. It is simple enough to setup a container in your machine. LXC/Linux Containers for example, don’t have as much overhead as a VirtualBox or VMWare virtual machine and can run almost, if not just as fast as a native installation (I’m using LXC for my Docker.io build script), but conceptually, if you use a container, and it is infected with malware, you can drop and rebuild the container, or roll back to a snapshot much more easily than reimaging your machine.

Right now I run three different containers — one is my main Ubuntu Studio, which is not a container, but my core OS. the second is my Docker.io build LXC, which I rebuild everytime I compile (and I now have that tied into Jenkins, so I might put up regular builds somehow), and the final one is a VirtualBox virtual machine that runs Windows 7 so I don’t have to dual boot.

How Splitting A Computer Into Multiple Realities Can Protect You From Hackers | WIRED.

Apple Hit With Federal Lawsuit Over iMessage Delivery Issues | WIRED

This was going to happen at some point, wasn’t it?

When someone switches to a new phone, they have a reasonable expectation that all the network functionality that worked on their old device—things like messages and phone calls—will continue to work on their new device. Unfortunately for some iOS users who switched to Android devices, Apple’s iMessage blocked them from receiving any more messages from iOS users. The Cupertino company will be heading to federal court over the issue.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh decided that Apple will have to face former iPhone owner Adrienne Moore, who’s seeking judgement in a class-action lawsuit against Apple for interfering with her Verizon service after switching to an Android phone. Moore claims that Apple failed to reveal iOS 5 could interrupt the delivery of messages from other iOS users if she switched to a non-Apple device. Numerous people on Apple’s support forums share similar woes.

via Apple Hit With Federal Lawsuit Over iMessage Delivery Issues | WIRED.

Google Music

English: Google Logo officially released on Ma...

I am getting pretty peeved with Google recently. I have a huge amount of music on my Google Music library, so much in fact, that I hit Google’s track limit for uploads. Now, I’m trying to download my purchased music back to my machine, but their MusicManager is winding me up no end. It downloads for a while, then stops, thinking it has finished, with several tracks not downloaded. I restart the download, and it goes on a bit more then stop again.

Google suggested a few things, eventually ending up blaming my ISP. But there isn’t much alternative for me. Other than my current ISP, I can only use my corporate connection, but that requires a proxy – something Google do not support on MusicManager, or using Tor, which also doesn’t work properly. They suggested using the Google Music app, but that only works (if it ever does) on a single album.

I even tried using AWS and Google Cloud, but the app ties to MAC and refuses to identify my machine (which is a virtual machine). I also tried using an LXC contain, and that worked for a bit longer, but also died. So now, I’m trying using a Docker image. Slightly different concept, but lets see if it works.

If that doesn’t work, I’m going to try using TAILS.

EDIT: Docker image didn’t work. So anything with a “true” virtual environment such as AWS, GC, and Docker don’t seem to work (VirtualBox will probably be in this list too), anything else (LXC, e.g.) will work, but fail later.

How To Check If Your Mac or Linux Machine Is Vulnerable to Shellshock

Copy-paste this line of text into a bash window

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c 'echo hello'

If the reply comes back as:

vulnerable hello

or

vulnerable
hello

Then your version of bash is vulnerable to shellshock. Most distributions have already pushed out a new version of bash. My Ubuntu machines updated yesterday.

If you use Cygwin, then you need to check there to. Cygwin bash 4.1.10 is definitely vulnerable, but 4.1.11 is not.

If your version of bash is not vulnerable the output will be:

bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt
bash: error importing function definition for `x'
hello

How To Check If Your Mac or Linux Machine Is Vulnerable to Shellshock.

Sear-ed

This person got pissed with Sears. And then got Sear-ed in return (although, to be fair, it’s not clear whether the person who replied was a Sears employee, or just some passer-by who got pissed off with the post)

sears

School dropout creates messaging app that foils NSA spying

jamesgoode98's avatarLinux News

The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropout in his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.

Prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the government’s intrusive surveillance activities, loosely knit citizen militias of technologists and security professionals have cropped up around the world to develop systems to protect us from government agencies out to identify us online and grab our communications.

John Brooks is now among them.

Brooks, who is just 22 and a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, was always concerned about privacy and civil liberties. Four years ago he began work on a program for encrypted instant messaging that uses Tor hidden services for the protected transmission of communications. The program, which…

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