Kali Linux 1.0 Released

Offensive Security has just released a new Linux distribution called Kali. This distribution is now based on Debian instead of Ubuntu and targeting for enterprise users who wanted to perform pentest.

This distribution is compliance to Debian and FSH, so there is no need to switch to /pentest directory when you want to run any pentest-related applications. You might want to read Kali What's New.

Kali is also available for ARM platform and as usual, they provided ISO and VMWare image in their download page. The default window manager available is only GNOME for now (XFCE for armel platform). Perhaps they will add another flavour in the future. For armhf platform, they provided custom image for Chromebook, SS808, and ODroid U2.

New Pope Elected

After two days, finally new pope which will lead 1.2 billion Catholics around the world has been elected. The new pope is a cardinal from Argentina: Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He will be the 266th pope and replacing Pope Benediktus XVI whom resigned due to health problem. For his name, he will be known as Pope Francis.

Congratulations for him and for Catholics around the world

Ubuntu Spirit is Fading

Ubuntu (or should i say Canonical) is now under criticism from many developers after they tried to create another project which is called mir and also other things that iritated the Open Source developers. It seems like they wanted to create their own world without considering what others have been doing and instead of contributing to that project instead, they wanted to make something that is based on their own assumptions. It's more like what Microsoft had been doing in the past. They created their own spesifications, standards, and forced others to follow them.

Somehow, they failed to realize that Ubuntu is failing since few last releases. Their user base has dropped since then and many of them migrated to LinuxMint. I think they need to think about that issue instead of creating another project which will confuse most of their users in the future.

I must say that the spirit of Ubuntu is fading on each release and if they don't do anything right on 13.04, more users will leave Ubuntu in the future. I can guarantee that.

VMWare Workstation 9.0.2

A new release of VMWare Workstation is now available. This version fixed some problems mentioned here:

• On a Windows 7 host, when you plug and unplug a headset several times, the audio card of the guest would not work. This has been fixed in Workstation 9.0.2.
• When installing VMware Tools in Linux virtual machines, the The default screen resolution options have been standardized to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or 1280x800 for the initial login. After login, resolution can be set to any value the user desires or Autofit can be used.
• You can now create full clones from a snapshot of a Windows XP Mode virtual machine.
• Image copy/paste now correctly function with Solaris 10 and 11 guests.
• In VMware Player, the list of available NICs in the Automatic Bridging Settings dialog window is now refreshed without restarting Player.
• A virtual machine created using Use a physical disk (For advanced users) from the new virtual machine wizard may display the following error when powering on: A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter the shutdown state... The cause of this issue has been fixed.
• More detailed PCI information has been added and a potential problem that resulted in risk of rebooting the host when selecting Collect Support Data has been fixed.
• Previously, when you manually disabled networking in the Network Manager and then attempted to suspend the virtual machine, the operation would fail and Workstation would show thean error The request to suspend this virtual machine failed because the corresponding VMware Tools Script did not run successfully.... This has been fixed.
• A memory leak that impacted Windows hosts and guests has been fixed.
• When running in a Linux distribution using the GNOME 3 desktop environment, Desktop folders now open as expected.
• The OVFTool has been updated to version 3.0.2.
• Disk cleanup for encrypted virtual machines has been disabled until VMware can further investigate reports of encrypted disks being damaged by this operation.
• Autostart virtual machines now power on automatically after upgrading Windows hosts to Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012.
• VMware Tools no longer crashes on Windows 2008 Server Core x64 SP2 operating system, with the following error:
  VMware Tools unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)
  Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) has occurred.
  However, Windows 2008 Server Core x64 SP2 is not a supported operating system for VMware Workstation.
• Scrolling with a Lenovo ThinkPad UltraNav scroll button no longer requires excessive force.
• From the Linux version of Workstation, the Description field for a remote virtual machine now captures all characters entered.
• When editing Workstation preferences on Windows hosts, occasionally a permissions error would be displayed. This issue has been resolved.
• It is now possible to create a linked clone from a read-only template virtual machine.

For Linux version, this should remove all the patches that was previously needed in order to work with VMWare Workstation. No more patches ladies and gentlemen.... just install and start your machines :)

LibreOffice 4.0.1

Announcements from The Document Foundation:

Berlin, March 6, 2013 - The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.1, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, the first release after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.0 in early February, which has yielded rates of entirely new client IP addresses requesting updates each day over the 100,000 mark (they were just 25,000 one year ago).

LibreOffice Impress Remote is now available for all platforms - Linux, MacOS and Windows - from Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.libreoffice.impressremote&hl=en. How to instructions are available on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Impress/RemoteHowTo.

The new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. For enterprise adoptions, though, The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5, backed by certified level 3 support engineers.

The Documentation team has also released the guide "Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0", which is available in PDF and ODF formats from the website (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/) and as a printed book from Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/shop/libreoffice-documentation-team/libreoffice-40-getting-started-guide/paperback/product-20725693.html).

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation - infrastructure, marketing, community development - with a donation. There is a donation page - with many options including PayPal and credit cards - at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 4.0.1 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

The change logs are available from https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.1/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.1.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.1/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.1.2).

WaSP Project Closing Down

In the past, browsers vendors tends to make up their own standards, creating differentiation among implementations of web standards, such as HTML, CSS, and many others. Web Standards Projects (WaSP) was formed to fix this problem by mitigating an imminent risk of fragmentation that was caused by browser incompatibilities. Later on, its focus shifted to working with the developers of browsers and editors, and to educating web developers.

Since then, this organization has growth and many new members joining this project thus creating a better environments for all of the browsers vendors. The results are clear: less differentiation of browser implementation of the web standards. Modern browsers has now supported most of the basic standards such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, SVG, and many web standards that were standarized by W3C.

They feel that their work is now done and Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality today. Therefore, they are shutting down the project and they recommend people to follow more modern projects.

Thank you for your hard work and making the web is more accessible, open, and universal in this browser wars era.

ECCouncil Secure Programmer .NET

ECCouncil has just released a new certification specializing in .NET technology aimed for developers. It's basically the same with the original ECSP certification that they had in years, but now, they wanted to focus on one single domain and that is .NET. You can get more information by visiting their certification page.

I'm not surprised to see more specialized certification for secure programmers in the future, probably PHP, Java, Perl, Python, or C?

You can also see the first look of this certification by registering the webcast here.

Installing Old Counter Strike

I just got bored today and i decided to install the old Counter Strike game from Valve using Wine and it worked out-of-the-box. Amazing. In the past, CS was considered one of the best FPS game in their era and few years later, Valve has released the sequel of this famous game.


Wine has been maturing lately and every two weeks, they released a snapshot which is getting better and better. Even though they are considered developer snapshot, they are quite stable for daily use. I have been following their work and so far, it has been a good cycle.

evasi0n No Longer Works for iOS 6.1.3

After analysing iOS 6.1.3 Beta 2, David Wang aka PlanetBeing, one of the core members of the Evad3rs who provided untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.x devices said that it has fixed one (and probably more) vulnerabilities used in evasi0n tool.

He is still analysing whether more vulnerabilities are fixed in the latest beta and it's not impossible for Apple to release another beta which will fix more vulnerabilities in the future.

For the time being, stay away from iOS 6.1.3 if you want to keep your device untethered jailbroken using evasi0n.

Time to Rest

In the last few days, i was working hard to complete my deadline for my project and today, i have submitted the latest code which is ready to be tested and it has been deployed on the customer's system.

It's time to get some rest since i didn't have enough sleep at night since i had to take care of my baby girl as well, so i'm using this chance to take some rest at weekend.

I may not be able to post daily anymore due to my tight schedule, so probably it will be once in two days for now. I will try to maintain daily post if i had the time to post something interesting.

IRIS II

Finally after waiting for some time, IRIS II has finally airing. This is one of the KDrama that i have been waiting for since the first season's ending was stalling and it blew up my dream of watching a good ending.

It's now on their second week and their ratings is high as predicted. It's already on my watchlist and i'm going to watch it later when i have completed watching Ghost, another KDrama that was already completed since last year, but i didn't notice it, so i started downloading it few weeks ago and i'm in the last episode right now.

New Adobe Reader

Adobe has released updates to their Adobe Reader application which should fix security vulnerabilities which affecting Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5 and 11.0.1. Their PSIRT team has confirmed this bug and they acted fast by releasing new version which hopefully fixed this problem.

You can get the Windows version here and Linux version here

IRIS II is Airing

For KDrama lovers who enjoyed watching IRIS, be happy as now IRIS II is airing since yesterday and it will be another 20 episodes of full intrique, plot, actions, bombing, martial arts, and of course romance.

The filming process has been started since some time ago, but the air time has been announced on early this month. This week, they started their premiere and they got the highest rank for this week and probably every week. We will have to wait and see to confirm that achievement.

Happy Watching :)

TeamViewer 8 No Longer Beta in Linux

TeamViewer has decided to remove beta label on Linux Platform and this makes it a general release like in Windows and Mac platform. The latest version contains more improvements and fixes as well:

Version 8.0.17147
Enabled Basic Authentication for proxies
Webcams are now supported for video-streaming during meetings
Instead of four different RPM-packages one single package for all RPM-based distributions (RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE)
TeamViewer can now be installed on Multiarch systems (Debian 7, 64-bit)
Fixed issues during the installation of TeamViewer
Fixed some issues where the TeamViewer daemon did not start automatically after system bootup
Fixed issues with incoming and LAN connections
Various other minor fixes and improvements

I will update my SlackBuild script to match this version and then pushed it on my SlackHacks for more review later on

MySQL 5.6.10 Build Attempt

Oracle has announced the availability of MySQL 5.6.10 as a GA (General Availability), a status which declares that this release is intended for public consumption and safe to be used for production machines.

Today, i tried to compile MySQL 5.6.10 using Slackware's SlackBuild script, but then i got a lot of failures during compilation. Searching for bug reports in MySQL's bug tracker doesn't really help as the patches that were posted were no help in my case.

I think i will have to wait for the next release to come out to fix most of the problems with the current version. It seems that GA is not always buildable at the first attempt :)