IMPORTANT! Flashing your ROM is a potentially dangerous activity and I take NO responsibility for you messing up your device or anything else.

Please read this post on TiltMobility for important information about the video prior to flashing your ROM.

I’m currently working on a few projects, including Arduino stuff.  I’ll keep you all posted for further information

Well the way this systematic attack is approached is via an arbitrary browser exploit.  But what if browser exploits were cut off from the main machine?

Meet ZoneAlarm’s new security tool that’s been a bit long in coming in my opinion.  It’s called ForceField (and with good reason).

What the product does is put your browser inside of a virtual environment that’s totally cut off from the underlying OS.  It also cuts off the OS from the browser (helping negate the effects of keystroke loggers and such).

Now earlier they were giving away free CD keys for ForceField and I registered for a copy (1 year subscription).  It doesn’t have Vista 64-bit support unfortunately but it is on my laptop (32-bit Windows XP) and I’d say that it runs rather well.  My laptop is a machine that’s gaining a little age (although it’s far from old) and typically has some trouble running Firefox 3.0 with all my normal extensions.  However even running virtually, it still runs rather fast (negligible performance decreases).

So aside from negating this proposed attack, it can also protect against a wide variety of other problems, and it’s existence (albeit probably inevitable) is certainly welcome.  It will certainly be nice to be even less concerned about visited websites leaving cookies, ads containing exploits, and the like.

Kind of ignorant to think about something as simple as that as secure.

The Public Key Directory sounds like a decent way to make it more secure.

Personally my idea is that every e-passport needs more hardware.  Hardware that stores data, preferably in a rotating array like RSA SecurIDs, and would better yet have another mechanism which would never transmit the internal rotating IDs but rather would transmit a hashed ID, which would furthermore be salted with an ID that is unique to the scanning station, so every single scanning station would have a unique salt ID, or better yet a group of salt IDs that change depending on several factors, that would be added to the internal ID upon hashing and would produce the more secure resultant ID.

With how cheap FlashROM is now, it’d be great if they had an updatable internal mechanism for rotating keys for your personal ID (such as updating internal IDs whenever you renew your passport), as well as keeping an internal database of the salt IDs for all the stations so the salt ID wouldn’t have to be transmitted anywhere near as often, thus reducing risk of an attack on the hashing algorithm.

Also, since all of this hardware is going into these things, might as well build in an authentication mechanism so the e-passport doesn’t arbitrarily send out IDs where a differential attack may be observed, similar to how WEP was cracked.

But like I said, this would require a lot more hardware.  However, RFIDs are not really a good idea for important information.  Security, especially like this, needs to be taken seriously in this day and age and even if it’s not "cost effective", then don’t bother giving out a far less secure system that can endanger the privacy and identities of people.

Lest we all forget the NBC "shock" reporter…

Explanation:
Reporters are welcomed at hacker conventions like Black Hat and Defcon, but they are also required to declare themselves as reporters and wear a press badge.  This woman was hiding a camera in her purse and recording the events.  Unsurprisingly she was caught very early in the con.  She was attempting to do a shock piece for NBC Dateline on hackers and federal agents.  Unfortunately, aside from the usual fun of "spot the fed" (where the people try and point out who they think are federal agents in good fun but no real seriousness), this woman would have revealed the identities of many agents and otherwise.  Hence it’s a big deal.

But even so with this cool concept, I can’t help but keep thinking back to Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile.  Windows Mobile is a platform people have really been neglecting and it’s really a highly advanced, and easy to use, mobile OS, which I happen to greatly prefer to the iPhone OS.  More after the break.

The Windows Mobile platform pushes down far fewer restrictions (in fact there really aren’t any restrictions on what programs you can make and such) to programmers and actually provides an EXCELLENT SDK, over several programming languages, including C++, C#, and Java (with a MIDlet engine).

So this brings me back to my original point, Windows Live Search.  I use it on my phone and it has a lot of these cross referencing tools and location aware tools.  One really nice features about Live Search is the gas prices checker.  It’s able to integrate with my GPS and give me the closest gas station, with the best price.

And that’s not a limit to it’s capabilities, it can do so much more.  So if you have a Windows Mobile based device, or even a Blackberry or WAP-browser compatible phone, check out Windows Live Search, I think you’ll like where it takes you.

So bravo Mozilla and Adaptive Path for integrating everything into a nice seamless interface, but really, us with Windows Mobile, already have some of those features, and light years ahead of the iPhone.

Anyways the idea is that they’ll be able to recreate the big bang, but (hopefully) on a much smaller scale.  The internet is having a field day because the thing is so powerful it can create micro-black holes as well as other space-time anomalies, and the natural assumption is that we’re all going to die.  This suspicion of impending doom is further exaggerated by CERN (the orchestrating body) publishing reports stating that they "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet"[src] (Murphy’s Law….) as well as the facility looking like the Black Mesa Research Facility from Half-Life.  More after the break.

Also the big search is for the Higgs boson, which would help solidify the Standard Model (I think) which is known to break down at high energy.  I’m not a particle physicist, I’m an engineer, so much of this deals outside of my realm but apparently confirming the existence of a Higgs boson would also help researchers in developing a Grand Unification Theory in Particle Physics.  Seems like an awfully expensive endeavor (at around 3.2 <-> 6.4 billion Euros, or $5 <-> $10 billion US), but maybe I’m missing something critically important, I’d be willing to compromise there.

If you do know something about particle physics, for all 3 of you who read my blog, care to elaborate a bit?

Now there was initially a bigger collider planned in Texas in 1993, at what I’m assuming is a rather massive 30 TeV (30 trillion volts is pretty freaking massive in my mind), but I’m neglecting the electron portion of that unit of measure (TeV = Tera electron Volt), but this project was canceled due to funding.  Would have been nice to see it go through as I’m so close to Texas and would be able to go visit it.  However assuming the LHC does blow up, maybe it’s better that I’m in a completely different hemisphere from it.

Enjoy some of these overly eerie pics from the LHC (sourced via Boston)

Gas in Oklahoma is going down thankfully, but it’s still over $3/gallon, and is gas really that high now that we have to force people to start walking?

Nanci Pelosi and other liberals need to realize that this gas problem can’t be solved by trying to force new technologies that don’t exist yet down people’s throats.  For example, hydrogen?  Yeah it’s refined from methane and currently emits more pollution in the refining process than do petroleum powered vehicles across the board.  Hybrids?  Sure great idea but expensive and the batteries are having issues both on public health/safety and environment empact from what I hear.  Ethanol, sure another great idea, but currently refined from corn and driving prices of corn sky high.  More after the break

I’m not saying that any petroleum fuel replacement is bad, I’m just saying it’s not ready.  Aside from Obama wanting us to believe that properly inflated tires and regularly tuned vehicles can eliminate the need for offshore drilling, these technologies are just not ready.  Give the engineers another 20 years and we’ll have it, I certainly think we can spare the 40ppm for those of you who believe in Global Warming.

All you’re doing by forcing these measures now is hurting us in the long run.  Not everyone is going to get on board, why?  Because not everyone believes in Global Warming and pandemic, myself being one of them.  I do believe in conserving the environment and being cautious but the actual Global Warming "Crisis" is overreactionary.

Sure I’d love to drive around an electric car, or a hydrogen car.  Right now I drive a very fuel efficient vehicle, and I dislike larger cars, finding them unnecessary in my own rationale but that’s mine, people should be free to do what they want.  And hey, if you believe in Global Warming, more power to you, but what is the matter is that fuel is so high that we’re destroying the Lower class and Lower-middle class.

You know, the people that cannot afford the high gas prices, that this country is absolutely dependent on.  These high prices are ruining their lives.  They obviously can’t afford to buy a Prius or three, often time relying on older, far less fuel efficient vehicles.  Yeah, them.

I don’t care what your feelings are on rich people, tax the hell out of them or whatever, in this particular matter, or whatever reason you may think these gas prices are ok.  Maybe you even think that the gas companies are at fault for the high prices.  Read a little into it.  Problem with our system is that the industry gets blamed for a lot of the government’s follies.

Don’t let a bunch of Liberal Elitists sit around and micromanage how you live your own life.  Don’t let Republicans do otherwise.  Yes you do have a voice.

Get on the phone to your Senators and Representatives about the issue.  Any respectable Congressman will listen to his/her Constituents because if not, why did you vote them into office?  They don’t listen?  Maybe it’s time to vote them out of office and put in a good one.

However, something with the UNIX-ness of Symbian made me want to try it out again but, after closer inspection, I remember why, after literally countless hours of studying and deciding, I chose the Tilt.

The big reason was the QWERTY keyboard.  I hate button mashing and lacking a hardware keyboard, I turn to my Tilt.

I also noticed that the Nokia uses a lesser chipset as well.  Only 332Mhz (for the primary processor at least, I couldn’t find details about the secondary processor) as opposed to the Tilt’s 400Mhz dual core processor (one 400Mhz primary ARM11 processor and a secondary ARM9 processor running slower to process radio interactions and such).  Correct me if I’m wrong though.

Another thing I noticed was it’s significantly smaller battery, 950mAH versus the Tilt’s 1350mAH.  Maybe the N95 has better power management than the energy sucking Ford-F450-of-chipsets that is the Qualcomm MSM7200 that the Tilt uses, but it seems as if it would have bad battery life as there really aren’t any 3G chipsets with a good track record.

Don’t get me wrong though, I respect the N95 and pretty much any Nokia smartphone to an infinite degree more than an Apple iPhone, I also find the Nokia fanboys much easier to get along with.  The N95 also has a couple of ups over the Tilt, namely the 5mp digital camera complete with Carl Zeiss optics, and more camera related features.  However it seems as if this (the camera), and possibly media (but the Tilt does a great job with media as well), seem to be the only areas where the N95 stands out above the Tilt.

Either way though, the N95 is an impressive device, but the Tilt is just that much more loaded with features.

p.s. You are banned.

Wow, banning them for having an opinion.  Their comments really weren’t even that bad.  They were at the very least semi-respectful.  Their comments are after the break.

Comparing his Steveness to FDR or JFK?

Okay, I’m never reading Gizmodo ever again.

(well, not really.) But this does prove that this site should be renamed Applemodo.com

 

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@impreza: i second that.

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I totally agree (with imprezza). This company should create an apple-only blog since I, along with the rest of the non-apple products crowd, find myself doing a lot of skipping around to get past all the apple-related content. Gizmodo gets so defensive with apple-bashers. I am not an apple basher, but I read Gizmodo to get gadget news and see what’s cool, not to read about every other post relating to apple products since I couldn’t care less what Apple is up to or what product they are launching next. Yes, apple does have its place in the gadget world since they have been up and coming for the last 6 years or so, but Gizmodo is obsessive to say the least.

I have a tendency to agree with those guys as well.  What a baby (the writer of the article and the person who banned the users).

I do agree that people need to let Steve have his privacy, but I also think Steve is an arrogant and cocky prick, one reason why I dislike Apple (another being Mac Addicts).

Now if you genuinely like Apple, good for you, you’re a fan of a product just like the rest of us, but behaving like this is largely unacceptable.