Author Archives: mea

Trade group exposes 100,000 passwords for Google, Apple engineers

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“It is certainly unfortunate this information was leaked out, and who knows who got it before it got fixed,” Dragusin wrote. Elsewhere in the post he said: “If leaving an FTP directory containing 100GB worth of logs publicly open could be a simple mistake in setting access permissions, keeping both usernames and passwords in plaintext is much more troublesome.”

via Trade group exposes 100,000 passwords for Google, Apple engineers | Ars Technica.

Update: An IEEE spokeswoman emailed the following statement: “IEEE has become aware of an incident regarding inadvertent access to unencrypted log files containing user IDs and passwords. We have conducted a thorough investigation and the issue has been addressed and resolved.

Of all groups that have membership websites which store passwords, IEEE would be the last on a list I would suspect to have something like this happen.

phpMyAdmin Back Door

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On September 25th, SourceForge became aware of a corrupted copy of phpMyAdmin being served from the ‘cdnetworks-kr-1′ mirror in Korea. This mirror was immediately removed from rotation.

The mirror provider has confirmed the attack vector has been identified and is limited to their mirror; with exploit having occurred on or around September 22nd.

via phpMyAdmin Back Door | SourceForge Community Blog.

This corrupted copy of phpMyAdmin included a backdoor which permitted execution of arbitrary commands by the web server user. The notice from phpMyAdmin may be seen at:
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/PMASA-2012-5.php

Simplify the Home, Protect Fiber’s Value

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“We need to collaborate as a group to help create a simple and seamless experience in the home,” Mudge said. In a conversation after the presentation, he added that this could include routers or residential gateways that enable a consistent experience and stability for the home technology user over a period of years, not months.

via Light Reading – Cable – Verizon: Simplify the Home, Protect Fiber’s Value – Telecom News Analysis.

A failure to continue to deliver on integration of in-home devices and technologies into the broadband service will cause customers to “lose faith” in their service providers, Mudge said

These service providers will hold a monopoly over FTTH so why would they care about a customer’s “faith?”

ARM Information Center

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Welcome to the ARM Infocenter. The Infocenter contains all ARM non-confidential† Technical Publications, including:

Via ARM Information Center.

Huawei’s High Hopes for Handsets

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Wan Biao, CEO of Huawei Device, has told Reuters he expects the company’s consumer device business to achieve revenue growth of 30 percent next year, while smartphone revenues are expected to grow by at least 40 percent.

That would put the Huawei Device unit’s 2013 revenue target at about US$11.7 billion, as the Chinese vendor has forecast its device sales to hit $9 billion this year. In 2011, Huawei’s device unit generated $6.9 billion in sales, about 22 percent of the company’s total revenues. (See Huawei, ZTE Look to Handsets for Growth.)

via Light Reading Mobile – Wireless Bits – Huawei’s High Hopes for Handsets.

Trace the Process and See What It is Doing with strace

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strace is a useful diagnostic, instructional, and debugging tool. It can save lots of headache. System administrators, diagnosticians and trouble-shooters will find it invaluable for solving problems with programs for which the source is not readily available since they do not need to be recompiled in order to trace them. This is also useful to submit bug reports to open source developers.

via Debugging Tip: Trace the Process and See What It is Doing with strace.

Run strace against /bin/foo and capture its output to a text file in output.txt:
$ strace -o output.txt /bin/foo

Connect Two Wireless Router Wirelessly

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You can setup a wireless connection between two routers only so that it will link a wireless network to a wired network allowing you to bridge two networks with different infrastructure. You can find wireless access points products that offer either a “bridge” mode or a “repeater” mode. In this post I’m going to explain three popular open source choices that can be used for setting up a wireless bridge.

via HowTo: Connect Two Wireless Router Wirelessly ( Bridge ).

Quantum cryptography: yesterday, today, and tomorrow

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Imagine you have a product of two prime numbers, say, 221. Now, we set that number to be an endpoint—for the purposes of our game, there are no higher integers. If we multiply two numbers together and get a number larger than 221, it wraps around, so 15 times 15 results in 225-221 = 4. If we multiply two by itself, we only get four, which doesn’t wrap, and we can do that 7 times before it wraps. But 28 results in 35. Got that? Great.

via Quantum cryptography: yesterday, today, and tomorrow | Ars Technica.

Let’s consider a consequence of using phase to calculate prime factors: 221 has prime factors 17 and 13, and factors 1 and 221. We can eliminate the latter in the classical part of our algorithm. But, what about two and 111? “Wait,” you say. “That is not a factor. The product is 222.” Nevertheless, we need to think about it, because quantum algorithms are probabilistic. 17 and 13 have the highest probabilities, but two and 111 only have a phase error of 0.5 percent. The probability of Shor’s algorithm returning the incorrect result is rather high. Unfortunately, a near miss (though easy to spot, since it is very quick to calculate that 2×111=222 not 221). This is likely not very useful in terms of decrypting a message, so we need to do something to increase the chance of getting the correct answer.