Before you go out and scream out of panic, let me first tell you there are different types of hackers. In general a hacker is simply someone who likes to diddle with things he is interested in. Say you have a program that works a specific way, the way it was designed to work by the developer. However, there are people who are not happy with the way the program works, so they try to change the code of the program in a way that the program works the way they want. This creative way to change a program so it works the way a user wants it to work, is hacking. Another example, there is a program on a server you desperately need, however you cannot get to it because of many reasons. One of these reasons may be that you don’t have the access rights to that program. A hacker would do everything to gain those rights and get this program.

There are two main types of hackers, the black hats and the white hats. The black hats are the “bad” hackers. Those hackers will hack because they can, they will destroy systems, steal data, or even commit identity fraud to get a certain good or service. The white hats on the other side are the “save the world” type of hacker, they hack to test security loop holes and then report this to the owner of the website or program.

Under those groups there are sub-groups, and one most common these days are “Hacktivists”. This type of hacker combines hacking and activism. Activism is all about protesting against some governmental action like the protest against the data retention law or the federal trojan program (I will discuss this later). One major player in those activists are called Anonymous.

It all started with those masked activists who were protesting against the Scientology sect. Those activists where crowded together infront of the Scientology church. Those original Scientology activists protested mainly with their mask and plakards standing outside the church, even though some also shut down the Scientology servers.

Now, the hacktivism part of Anonymous actually started with the hack against credit card companies, such as Visa and Mastercard. Those credit card companies funded the famous Wikileaks website. Because those companies, after a controversial video got leaked, stopped the funding, the hackers crashed the servers of those credit card companies by a method called Denial of Service Attack or DoS for short. DoS is a popular method where by attackers send so much traffic to a webserver that it cannot handle it anymore and rejects usefull access to the websites.

In Austria the Anonymous group AnonAustria has hacked and leaked many information of Austrian goverments and federal institutions. The local newspapers like Kurier, Der Standard, Heute and News, all reported about the attacks. Most recent news was about the information leakage of the federal police. But more crutial was the attack against the “Fees Information Service” or GIS (Gebühren Info Service) which was shut down and took several weeks until it got up again. Other websites that where shut down were the ones from political parties such as the SPÖ (socialists party) and the FPÖ (freedom party).

What does this show us? That austria doesn’t take computer security serious. For some information you do not even need to be a hacker to gain it, all you need is Google! Methods used, such as cross side scripting or SQL injection can be learned easily. However it is also easy to protect from those loop holes. If companies have decent website developers who actually care about security as well as the look of the website, this may not have happend. But like always, something must happen first before people get active.

Now to other news. Recent news from the ORF website showed that the german CCC (Chaos Computer Club) got a copy of the feared Bundestrojaner (Federal trojan program) and found that this software does more than it should. It was said that the government can secretly install a trojan program from the government on suspicious computers and watch their traffic, this can be telephone and internet traffic. However as the CCC revealed the program does more. It also takes screenshots of your desktop, a builtin keylogger records the keystrokes of the user and sends it to the author of the trojan and takes webcam pictures and sends those to the author. In addition to that, the trojan can even load a program to the victim’s computer and actually execute that! Now this actually threatens the privacy of the computer user and is against the German Privacy Act.

If you understand German, please watch the following youtube video and see for your self what the Bundestrojaner can do:

After reading all those information about cybercrime activities and spying from the government, I will ask you, what will come next? will the next world war be fought online? or will the internet be controlled and nobody can do anything anymore?

Please make your own views on the topic, and feel free and post a comment after reading my blog.

And as always, stay crispy in milk

Now, see those products all have the soul of Steve Jobs in them. He revolutionized the computer industry. Without Steve we would not have those wonderfull products. Think about it, when you use your iPhone or Macbook or whatever Apple product you are using, you are using a piece of his soul.

For those of you who are not using Apple products most other products are “copies” of Steve’s ideas. Apple invented the graphical user interface, and what do we have from it? Microsoft Windows, the graphical interfaces for Linux distributions, and of course Mac OS X’s interface. Then, Apple reinvented the way we listen to music, iTunes, the most popular music player out there. iPod, the most popular music player which advanced to the iPhone, which revolutionized the mobile (smart) phone, and finally the iPad, which revolutionized the tablet PC. Now those inventions wouldnt have appeared without the vision of one Man, Steve Jobs. All products have his soul in them.

After all this product talk lets consider one thing, it is not a product that has gone away, it is a frikken HUMAN BEING. I don’t care if you like or hate Apple or Apple products, see this death of Steve Jobs like as if a good friend or a family member had passed away, they are not products, they are HUMAN BEINGS so please show some respect!

Steve Jobs, I thank you for everything you have done, not only your products are great, no, also the way how you present them on your keynotes. When I do/did presentations in high school and university i always though, i wish i was such a presenter as Steve Jobs.

REST IN PEACE, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED!!

What is a Buffer Overflow?

To put it simple, it is putting too much information into a limited space. For example you declare a buffer with 8 elements in it. Now a buffer overflow would be to fill the 8-byte element buffer with 65 bytes. The problem here is that the rest 57 elements will overwrite the neigbouring memory cells. This comes particularly bad if the neigbouring memory cells are cells reserved by the operating system. If that happens then the Computer either crashes or hackers can gain higher privileges, depending on which memory area is accessed.

The Stack

You can imagine the stack like a pile of dishes in a kitchen. The last plate that is removed is the first to be served. This is the same with stacks in computers. The last thing that is pushed onto the stack will be the first that can be popped off the stack.

A stack is mostly used in programming functions. Here functional parameters and local variables of the function are put on the stack in reverse order. Two other data are pushed to the stack The frame pointer and the return address. Every function is put into a frame on the stack. For example, in most programming languages the program starts with a main function that is returned to the operating system after execution. If the main function calls another function called myFunc for instance, this function needs to know where to go back after it executed. After execution the frame pointer sets the variables back to their original state and returns to the return address. The return address is the address where the flow of code continues after the function has executed.

The Stack and Buffer Overflow

Now you might say, okay i know how the stack works, so whats the buffer overfow deal? Remember where I said that buffer overflow is simply to put more information in a defined space than expected?

Lets take the myFunc function as an example. It has buffer of 65 bytes as its parameter and a buffer of 8 bytes as its local variable. Now myFunc will attempt to fill the 8 byte buffer with the elements of the 65 byte buffer. The result is clear, it will overwrite memory areas after the 8 byte buffer. In the stack however it will overwrite the frame pointer and the return address. If you fill the 65 buffer with A’s the return address will be overwritten with 0×414141… (0×41 is hexadecimal for the ASCII symbol A). This means the function will return at the address 0×414141…. This location could be a read-only operating system area and with that the program will either crash or give the hacker higher privileges.

What can be done against Buffer Overflows?

On the programmers standpoint i would say careful programming especially with C/C++ functions. Especially the function strcpy is tricky since it does not do size checking. The function copies the content of one array into another, no matter what the sizes of both are. If the destination array is smaller than the source array, it will still do the copying.  The advice I can give is, do a lot of testing, and doing error/exception handling.

View the PDF including the code here: Buffer Overflows

The mac app-store is available.

Yes, finally you can buy applications for your Mac for a ridiculous cheap price . With the OS release 10.6.6 Apple has included the Mac App-Store to the applications on your Mac. When you start the App Store you are represented with a window listing the newest apps available. On the top of the window you see buttons or tabs, giving you access to the “In Spotlight”, “Top Hits”, “Categories”, “Purchases” and “Updates”. The top hits represent the newest and current apps available in the app store. Top hits represents the “most bought”, “most loaded(free apps)”, and the “top selling” apps. Categories list the different categories including “Business”, “Games”, “Productivity” and so on apps, easy and organized. The purchased tab is something special. Not only can you purchase apps on one computer, but you can also download the same apps from that tab on other computers too. Say you bought Pages from the app store on one computer. When you want to get Pages on another computer, you don’t have to buy the app again, you can simply download it from the “Purchased” tab for free. Last but not least, Updates from specific programs can be downloaded for free too.

I have the iPhone 4!

Yes, I have finally got it! Here I will give a quick review of it. What I noticed first was that the new iPhone is more edgy, meaning not that smooth as the old one felt on your hand, but the reason for that is that the antenna of the iPhone is the surrounding side. Next is the retina display. This is the best improvement of the iPhone in my opinion. Viewing images and text on that phone is awesome, the fonts appear without any squares, meaning its anti-aliased. They are much easier to read, and also the photos look cleaner. Then you can set an actual background image for the iPhone, meaning not only the lock screen! The best of all is still the HD video camera that is built in. Now you cannot only make brilliant photos with the iPhone but also stunning HD videos. Those are the best improvements i figured out on it.

I have got the new Magic Mouse!

Yes, that is also a sweet new hardware I have got. Finally this little knobby ball disappeared! Instead of that there is a touch sensitive surface where you can do the typical finger gestures you can do with the macbook trackpad too. It is small and easy to navigate on the Mac. The only drawback i saw is, like with all wireless mice, that it is powered with a battery, which decreases over time and you have to renew. But other than that, it is a great mouse in comparison to the old Mighty Mouse.

Computer Setup Changes

There have been some changes to my computer setup I am using. Firstly I am now using my iMac as my main desktop computer, not as before my HP PC. My HP PC however is now a testing machine for Linux (Web) Applications and Linux in general.The Linux i am running there is Ubuntu 10.10 as of today. The only Windows Computer i have right now is my HP Pavilion dv6 notebook running Windows 7 Ultimate. My “on the go” Laptop is still my Macbook Pro.

So those are the news of the beginning of 2011. Have a great Year 2011 and i will try to blog more often when I can. So Happy Hacking and Stay Crispy In Milk!

What does the script do?

It actually doesnt do anything fancy other than killing/stopping a running process. Say there is a program that hanged itself up, like the Internet Explorer. Normally people hit the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] Keys to get to the taskmanager and kill the not responding process. Well this Batch program will ask the user to enter the process name like iexplore.exe and will kill/stop it. After that is done it will ask the user if he/she wants to kill another process. If you enter yes then it will start the program again, if he/she enters no, the program will end.

The Code

I know the Geeks reading the blog will want to see the code so here it is:


:: Disables displaying the command itself
@echo off
:: Puts a Title on the Batch Window
title Kill a Process
:: Makes the background black and the font color green
color 02
:: label
:start
:: Message to tell the user to enter a process (e.g. iTunes.exe)
set /p prozess=Which process do you want to kill?
:: Kills/stops the process provided by the user
taskkill /f /im %prozess%
:: asks the user if he/she wants to do the program again
set /p again=kill another process?
:: if the answer is yes then go back to the label named start and run the program again
if %again% == yes goto start
:: pauses the program and ends it when the user presses any key
pause

You can change the code however you want!

How to use the code to run the Program?

Instead of blah blahing you how to use it, I give you a step-by-step instruction:

1. Copy the code and paste it into a text editor, such as notepad
2. Save the program with a .bat extension (be sure the Filetype is set to All types (*.*))
3. Run the file by either double-clicking on its icon or typing in its name in the Command prompt

Conclusion

I know this code isn’t perfect, i am just a beginner in Batch programming, but you can change the code to however you want. If you have any suggestions on how to change it or what you did, please leave a response to this blog.

Other than that, Happy Hacking!

Lets start with something scientific. As medical science advances we have seen many electrical implants in sensory organs like your ear to enable (better) hearing to deaf people, or in the retina of the eyes to enable blind people see again. I have a two sided opinion about this. For the one hand its a good thing to enable people with a handicap to live their life normally again. Now dont take me wrong, I know many handicaped people who live just fine with their handicap! Anyway, on the otherhand, I think its an interference in God’s invention! When we overdo this, all humans, who want to, will become cyborgs! Thats not what we want or? at least I dont.

In the Hacker magazine “The Hacker Quaterly” summer edition they described what things you can do with implants in your ear. Those implants would make you be able to listen to special frequencies, and in bad hands (in this case ears) this would not be a safe thing to do. Imagine you and your girl/boyfriend talk about something secret in your own appartment. Now if someone would be able to listen, by some way, to your secret information I dont want to know where privacy will end. This is like making a wardrive and listen to WIFI signals and access your private files on a WIFI network.

I know I am going over the top in some ways, but when technology advances and robots are not controllable how will we, as humans still be what we have always been? I mean living beings made up of flesh and bones and with a soul? I certainly hope we will not go over the top with this kind of technology

As an example we will take the number 5, which is represented in binary as: 00000101. This part is easy if you know how decimal and dual number systems work, and I know most geeks know. Now to change this 5 into a -5 there are two steps we need to take and those steps are called One’s Complement and Two’s complement.

With one’s complement we simply need to swap the bits so we get 11111010. This is the first step, but this isn’t efficient enough, so we need to do the two’s complement next, in which we simply add 1 or 00000001 to it, which will give us 11111011 which will be a -5 in a 8 bit storage.

I hope this was helpful for you, and please comment if you want to add something to it.

Happy Hacking, and stay crispy in milk xD

To do so, firstly go to the Preferences of iTunes (iTunes -> Preferences or [cmd]+[,]) and make a tick on where it says “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” and then click on the OK button or simply hit [Enter].

Next go to File -> Add to Library… or hit [cmd]+[O], then choose the file you want to add to the library, the music library is usually under “/Users/<your user name>/Music/” of the other Mac, click on the Choose button and let iTunes add the music library from one Mac to the other.

Now software wise this is straight forward, but not hardware wise. You can, at least with my experience, connect the two computers either via WIFI connection or via Firewire with target mode, by pressing the [T] key while booting up. With WIFI the other computer must simply enable File Sharing in the Sharing preferences.

This is how easy it is to transfare music libraries from one Mac to the other, so have fun, and Happy Hacking

First of all, what is a digital native? A digital native is any person who was born after 1980. Those are people who were born with technology in their blood. The reason why i bring this up is because, last year the topic arrose in a German TV program called “neues” which deals with the newest technology stuff (thats why the name “neues” which means “news”). If you understand German and want to watch the contribution on the topic, check this website out: www.3sat.de/neues.

The contribution of the TV program was actually about how Digital Natives live in the times of Internet, computers and other ways to communicate. A typical day of a digital natives starts by turning on the computer after waking up, checking emails, and reading the news online. Digital natives don’t read real newspapers, okay a few still do, but have their news online. In my perspective I actually simply open up my twitter client, and there I have the news I need. Sometimes I also visit real news sites, like CNN.com or the Austrian news channel ORF.at, but in general I rather visit computer news sites, such as slash dot, or heise.de (German Computer news site). For reading this kind of news I don’t even need a computer, I have an iPhone and a twitter client on it, therefore i can also watch news on the go.

However, reading news is not everything a digital native does, certainly he/she wants to communicate, online of course. There are a bunch of different possibilities of how to communicate with friends, collegues and family. Examples are the typical social networking sites such as Twitter, yes Twitter again, and Facebook. Those are perfect places for people to keep in touch with your friends, collegues and family. To directly talk to the people you also have got different possibilities, such instant messengers, such as MSN or ICQ, and most popular Skype, where you can realy “talk” verbally to the person. Of course there also a bunch of different chat websites that offer you to chat with many people from all over the planet.

Certainly, the internet and technology is’nt used for communication alone. Technology gives you the possibility to easily learn stuff, for school and university. There are plenty of Wikis, tutorials, and other means to study, and help with your career. Those means don’t always have to be online, there are CD-ROMs with learning materials for kids that help then with their school work in an easy manner. Even video portals, like Youtube or Google Video, can be used to see news or learn about stuff, you just need to enter the right search term. Education can also be done over the internet via live webcams. Universities such as the Stanford University are allready providing such webcasts on the internet.

Speaking of kids, people need entertainment! And you can get entertainment online and offline. DVDs, CD-ROMs, etc. are also still used to reach this kind of media, but most digital natives get their entertainment off the internet. Sites such as Youtube and Google Video offer you the possibility to both consume and produce content for the internet, Web 2.0 FTW! Radio stations can also be streamed off the internet, and thats most digital natives, including me, do every day.

All in all, the big deal with the digital natives is that they are connected everywhere and everytime, no matter where they live. In the communication’s perspective, I can, for example, communicate with someone in the US with the snap of a finger with the technology provided. This means that digital natives are online, 24/7. Digital natives also use their own language, called chatterslang or sometimes also called leet-speak. Abbreviations such as LOL or ROFL or LMAO are very common in the digital native’s vocabulary. Those words will make no sense for people who were born before 1980, called digital imigrants. Every language has its own set of words and abbreviations in their leet-speak.

What do you, no matter if you are a digital native or digital imigrant, think about this leading trend of digital natives? To make things clear, digital natives also meet eachother in real life, however they plan their meetings online. Therefore the phenomena of couch potatoe are not realy appearing so much. Digital natives also have jobs, and do stuff off the computer.

Last thing to say is, please leave a comment of what you think about the digital natives. So happy Geekin’

I have been a loyal user of the antivirus program called Avira Antivir, but on the computers of my java course I saw that they have installed this AVG Antivirus program, and i was quiet impressed with it. In this blog i want to compare the two, out of the experiences I have had with them.

There are two things that catched my eyes in AVG Antivirus, one is that you don’t realize that it starts up when Windows starts and secondly the link scanner. But first things first. As an Avira Antivir user I was used that, when Windows starts up, there comes this sort of splash screen from the Antivir program, which can actually slow down the Windows startup time. This however was not the case with AVG! When Windows starts up, nothing happens, only when you click on the Info area at the right of the windows taskbar (superbar with Windows 7) you see the symbol from AVG. I think this is a big plus with AVG (version 9.0), because the OS startup doesnt suffer because of that. This aso can be seen with the updates of the virus signatures. With Avira Antivir there usually comes a window showing the status of the signature download. At the end of the download a big window pops up with an annoying advertisement from Avira. With AVG I don’t even realize that updates are done, but when I click on the information icon, it tells me that I am optimally secured.

Another feature from AVG I figured out is the so-called Link scanner. When I use Firefox or Internet Explorer (which I only rarely use) and do a google search, there are new icons appearing next to the search results, stating if the search results are secure or not. When the icon is a green tick, then it means that the site in the Google search result is secure, however if the icon is orange with three exclamation (!!!) symbols, you rather not click on the link.

So this is a little review on the two anti-virus software programs. Even though those programs are good, you should still be watching what you are doing, meaning don’t click on anything you see!
Other than that, have fun on the web, and be safe!

Resources:
Avira Antivir
AVG Antivirus