Archive for the ‘computers’ Category

Sony is suing George Hotz for hacking HIS OWN PS3

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Just in case you didn’t know already, Sony is suing George Hotz, also known as “geohot“, a talented young guy who among other things helped unlock the iPhone. Sony sued him for violation of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because he hacked HIS OWN PlayStation 3. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise however, as Sony once tried to sue a guy for getting his AIBO to do non-Sony approved tricks.

George even has a page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

I’m tempted to get a PlayStation 3 and hack it just to make a statement. Sony, this is not how you should treat customers. I was considering buying a Vaio because they’re some of the best laptops I’ve seen but I definitely changed my plans!

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Defeating paranoid system administrators

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

If a paranoid system administrator has blocked ssh access from Linux hosts to your office’s network — using the OpenBSD packet filter‘s fingerprinting — and you find yourself without access to the office’s mail server, you might want to make your Linux workstation’s TCP stack look like something else by changing the TTL, for example:

echo 128 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl

The road to this hack is quite easy, anyway:

  1. install OpenBSD in a virtual machine;
  2. look hard at /etc/pf.os and look for possible useful differences;
  3. see that Linux uses a TTL of 64 while Windows XP uses 128;
  4. profit!

Item 1 was needed because I couldn’t find a copy of /etc/pf.os quickly, so I figured that it’d take less to just install an OpenBSD.

Posted in Linux, Unix, computers, hacks | Comments Closed

One more reason to ditch Windows

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

One of our programs wasn’t working when the input file was on a Linux server. You know, I make a living writing software on Windows, but I’m a Linux guy at hearth, so this was a bit disappointing. Initially, I blamed it on a misconfigured Samba, then I looked at the code and saw that it errored out on a call to tmpfile(). OK, let’s look at the documentation for tmpfile() in the Visual Studio help, just in case…

… The temporary file is created in the root directory. …

Say what?

No, really… WHAT?!?!?

Let’s put aside for a second the fact that any sensible administrator will never, ever allow write access to the root directory of a network volume. AFAIK, the root of the C: drive is read-only on Windows XP if you don’t have administrative rights, so this would break.

Posted in Windows, computers, programming | Comments Closed

Users and servers

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

When one of your users complains that your mail server “doesn’t work”, 90% of the times it’s his own fault, and 10% of the times it’s someone else’s fault. You’ll notice that 90% + 10% makes 100% of the cases. Actual problems on the server do happen sometimes, but the chances that your users notice before you do are basically zero.

You guessed it, today I got one too much of such “the server doesn’t work” complaints.

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Xplanet for your desktop

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

desktop backgroundI’ve been using astronomy pictures as my desktop background for years. In a never-ending search for the perfect background, however, I’m now using an Xplanet-generated image of the Earth and the Moon, with the Veil nebula behind them as additional eyecandy. Click on the sample image for a larger version — but I’ll tell you how to generate your own.

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Funny translations

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Yesterday I needed to open a zip file on my mobile phone, so I had my first encounter with ZipMan, which was preinstalled on the phone; I knew it was there, but I never used it in two years with my Nokia 6600. After the program started, I was presented with this cryptic message (in Italian):

“Lime del Zip del socio con ZipMan?”

It’s so completely meaningless that it took me a few seconds to realize what it meant, then I almost fell on the floor laughing. I don’t know if “to file” in English is used in the sense of working on an object with a file (the tool, not the computer abstraction), but if that’s the case, the back-translation to English could be (with some interpretation, as the original is incorrect to start with):

“File the Zip of the associate with ZipMan?”

I’m sure none of my associates would like me to apply a file to their zips.

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Go, TomTom GO

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

My father got a TomTom GO 510 as a gift. Interesting piece of hardware and it runs Linux, so there’s no way I’ll keep my hands off of the internals for long.

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Here comes the Sun

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Yesterday I recovered two nice Sun Ultra 30 workstations (and one big Sun monitor) that were about to be thrown away at my office. They’re in quite good condition, apart from lots of dust and a cut keyboard cable. Apparently some smart guy thought that the quickest way to detach the keyboard was to cut the cable. In case you didn’t know, Sun keyboards have a small connector not unlike a standard PC keyboard or mouse, so just unplugging it certainly takes less effort than finding a cable cutter and applying the necessary force.

Of course I plan to install Debian GNU/Linux on at least one of them. In fact, I think I’ll put all the memory and both hard drives into one workstation and keep the other for parts.

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My first bug

Thursday, April 14th, 2005

Today I found my first computer bug. Real bug, I mean. It was trapped inside a power supply and it didn’t cause any real problems, except for a bit of smell that was interpreted as a dying power supply. It was just a dead bug.

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