Automated Scanning on Android Market

Android team has added a new security layer to help their users to get the best experience of using Android products. Posted by Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of Engineering, Android is the Bouncer which is an automated scanning tool that scans all new uploaded application on the Android Market for any kinds of malware.

The new tool only help users to prevent unwanted situation, but please remember that the safety of your devices lies within your hands, so always stay tune with security updates and be more proactive towards security awareness.

Weird Bugs

Another strange thing happend on my wife's laptop. After her ethernet card disappeared from her laptop, i unplug the cable from her laptop and leave the laptop turned off.

When i turned it on today, i checked the system hardware and the Ethernet is now back and listed as one of the default hardware detected by the system. I plugged the cable and it's now connected again to the Internet. What a weird bug by Windows (or Dell as the vendor)

Ethernet Card is Gone

My wife's laptop had a serious problem right after upgrading to Firefox 10. I don't think it's related as Firefox is an application and the problem itself is hardware-related, which is the broken ethernet.

She told me that after upgrading to Firefox 10, the ethernet icon on her laptop was missing and i checked using ipconfig and it's really gone. I restarted the laptop with some hope that it might just a glitch, but unfortunately it's not. It happened some time ago, and i hope by restarting, all will be fixed, but i was wrong. It's really gone and since it's wireless chipset is also having some problems, the laptop is connectionless for now.

I will bring it to the computer store to be repaired by tomorrow and hopefully it can be fixed, since ethernet port in a laptop is not the same as in PC/desktop in which you can just simply replace the card by another one. For now, i will just ask her to simply backup all her data just in case we had to reinstall the Windows again (it hasn't been reinstalled since 2008 since there was no problem with the system).

Firefox 10 Released

It's February 1 and a new major release of Firefox has just been released. Firefox has now reached version 10. It's now available from auto-update mechanism that was built in into the product itself. If you happened to use a package from your Linux distribution, an update will come out soon enough since many packager disabled the auto update feature.

What's new on this release? According to the release notes, this version brings several new features such as:

• CSS 3D Transforms
• Anti-Aliasing for WebGL
• Invisible Forward button (will be visible when you press the Back button)
• Full Screen API
• IndexedDB API
• Inspect tool with content highlighting

Go get the new features and enjoy the new CSS 3D transformations (see some examples here)

New Lossless Color Image Compression: ImageZero

A new lossless color image compression algorithm called ImageZero is being developed after the author has been dissapointed with the current algorithm available on the market.

By simply looking at the benchmarks results, it is quite remarkable:

Method	File Size	Compression	Decompression
uncompressed	46380 KB	-	-
JLS	14984 KB	6.6 s	7.3 s
PNG	16256 KB	42.4 s	2.4 s
IZ	15496 KB	1.2 s	1.3 s

I think this algorithm has a good chance to be further developed as it's now released as an open source project on gitorious.

Wasitup is Down

Was It Up, an online server status checker is now taken offline due to increased burden of keeping it to stay online. It was a good service and i believe everyone who uses this service will also think the same way.

It's a shame that this great service has to go offline until there's a new investor who can fund this project in the future. As for now, i'm using SiteUptime to monitor my server. It's not a real time though since it's a free service. If i choose the pro version, they will have a shorter time interval between each check.

Another service that i use is Pingdom Panel which is more customizable than SiteUptime. It also offers free service where users may add 1 domain and free 20 sms alerts.

Leap Year

Time does flies so fast. It's like that i have just started this semester and suddenly, i have come to third week out of 14 weeks for this semester. And it is the end of January. In the next two days, we will be coming to February.

What interesting thing in February? Well, we have Valentine days and there's a special event that happened generally once in four years, which is the Leap Year.

According to this article, women can propose to men. It was considered that as the day also had no legal status, it was reasonable to assume that tradition had no status, so women took advantage of this and proposed to the man they wanted to marry. This tradition is applicable for countries who forbids women to propose man during normal days, such as in Scotland

DNSCrypt to from OpenDNS

OpenDNS has been known for years due to their service the public by giving a safe DNS service. So far, they have done a great job of protecting the DNS service and also ease parent's job to protect their children by avoiding unappropriate content to be seen by children under age.

They are now working to further enhance their service by introducing DNSCrypt, a new service which will solve the last mile problem that exists between user's computer and the ISP. Somewhere between this line, there can be a man-in-the-middle and DNS Spoofing attack. DNSCrypt solve this problem by securing your DNS request using cryptography so that it's secured by these kind of attack.

They have release the project's source on GitHub and you can start downloading it (only for Mac at the moment).

Have a look on the project's announcement to find out more about this project

Wine 1.4 is Near

Wine, the project that enables users to run Windows application on Linux platform is now reaching a big milestone with 1.4 is getting frozen and the first RC version is out for public. The last major release was 1.2 and it was more than one year ago and since then, the developer has released a developer snapshot every two weeks and the last snapshot was 1.3.37 and now it has been replaced by 1.4-RC1.

We will have a final 1.4 release this year and i hope that it will be another great release as more and more Windows application is running on Linux, makes it easier for user to switch to Linux.

Mempodipper Bug

For those who's using Linux Kernel 3.x, there's a serious bug in the Linux Kernel which can be misued to have a local privilege escalation via suid which is well explained on this site.

The solution is quite easy: all you need is to upgrade to the latest Linux Kernel 3.2.2 and you should be safe.

Here's what you will get when you are running a vulnerable kernel:

bash-4.1$ ./mempodipper
===============================
=          Mempodipper        =
=           by zx2c4          =
=         Jan 21, 2012        =
===============================

[+] Opening socketpair.
[+] Waiting for transferred fd in parent.
[+] Executing child from child fork.
[+] Opening parent mem /proc/3765/mem in child.
[+] Sending fd 5 to parent.
[+] Received fd at 5.
[+] Assigning fd 5 to stderr.
[+] Ptracing su to find next instruction without reading binary.
[+] Resolved exit@plt to 0x80499e8.
[+] Calculating su padding.
[+] Seeking to offset 0x80499dc.
[+] Executing su with shellcode.
sh-4.1# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)

Quite nasty huh? So what are you waiting for? Go to the kernel site and grab the latest version (3.2.2 at minimum)

KDe 4.8.0 is Out

KDE 4.8.0 is now released by the KDE developers and it's dubbed as a major release, no longer a maintenance update like the previous release. This new release brings a major improvements to all components, such as Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and as a Platform.

I have been running KDE 4.8.0 for few hours as i have just upgraded using AlienBOB's package on Slackware-Current and it feels so good. It's faster than previous release and i'm happy with it.

KDE 4.8.0 will shortly be landing in your Linux distribution, so just wait and see to feel it. With this release, KDE 4.8.x branch will start it's monthly-release journey starting on February where they will deliver a maintenance release.

Alsa 1.0.25 is Out

ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has just released a new major version after around one year without any update. This new major release brings a lot of changes to users along with many new drivers to extend support for new hardwares.

This package is also builds against the newer Linux 3.x kernels which is likely to be the default kernel being used in many Linux distributions released this year.

For those who wanted to see more detailed changes, please visit the changelog

Absinthe Updated to Support Linux

Afte releasing Absinthe for Mac and Windows, the developer didn't stop at that point. They released an update for this tool and they even release this version that support Linux platform as well. So, basically from this moment, you can use Linux to jailbreak your A5 devices and no longer dependent on Windows/Mac.

Unfortunately, iTunes for Linux is not going to be available as Apple willy only support Windows and Mac for the time being (and probably forever).

File Hosting Status Updates

After Megaupload is taken down by the FBI, the rest of the file hosting services are just as anxious as the prior because they could be the next victim of this process.

Here's the status updates from the rest of the file hosting i got from Fiohnel Fiver on Google+:

• MegaUpload - Closed.
• FileServe - Closing does not sell premium.
• FileJungle - Deleting files. Locked in the U.S.
• UploadStation - Locked in the U.S.
• FileSonic - The news is arbitrary (under FBI investigation).
• VideoBB - Closed! would disappear soon.
• Uploaded - Banned U.S. and the FBI went after the owners who are gone.
• FilePost - Deleting all material (so will leave executables, pdfs, txts)
• Videoz - closed and locked in the countries affiliated with the USA.
• 4shared - Deleting files with copyright and waits in line at the FBI.
• MediaFire - Called to testify in the next 90 days and it will open doors pro FBI
• Org torrent - could vanish with everything within 30 days "he is under criminal investigation"
• Network Share mIRC - awaiting the decision of the case to continue or terminate Torrent everything.
• Koshiki - operating 100% Japan will not join the SOPA / PIPA.
• Shienko Box - 100% working china / korea will not join the SOPA / PIPA
• ShareX BR - group UOL / BOL / iG say they will join the SOPA / PIPA

Japan, China and Korea have a say NO to the FBI and that even if laws are passed in the USA will not have any value within the sovereignty of their countries!

P/S: mediafire has start deleting copyright protected files. Only left is the personal files.

Back to Normal Activities

It's Tuesday and it's now time to move on to normal activities after a long weekend and of course a Chinese New Year celebration yesterday where i spent the whole day with my wife visiting our relatives to greet them.

As always, Tuesday is one of my two bussiest day in a week, so i should get prepared for anything that could happened today. One positive thought i have is that i will be teaching my favorite courses, so there's nothing to worry about it.

For those who live in the Western area, enjoy your Chinese New Year celebration with your family