Hacking amazon kindle

"Kindle" is Amazon's e-book reader. Its making lot of news these days. Amazon recently slashed the price of the device to $259. e-books can be downloaded over GPRS/3G/wi-fi networks and cost of each e-books is fairly valued. Users need not pay for the wireless charges, they only pay for the downloaded books. The latest version of kindle is supported in many countries. The features supported in countries other than US are a bit limited. It seems that there are some charges for wireless connectivity in other countries. Wireless transfer of e-books is not mandatory as they can be transfered from USB also.

The content in the kindle is believed to have strong DRM protection. In other words, its belived that the content downloaded by paying the price once, cannot be shared with other people. Amazon distributes the e-books in its proprietry format wth .azw extention. It has DRM protection which is tied to security key of the kindle hardware.

But this is not deterring the hackers. Two independent hackers are able to crack the code. So, one can convert the content of the e-book into a PDF file and can share it. Please be warned that its illegal and will be considered piracy. Converting to a PDF and keeping it for your own use should be OK, but I am not 100% sure. These two hackers go with the screen names "Labba" and "I [heart] cabbages".

"Unswindle" is a program developed by "I [heart] cabbages" which can convert the contents of the ebook into different movable format. Here is the link to his blog wich talks about this tool.

Sources:
http://www.crn.com/security/222100097;jsessionid=KC1EOI3I43IM1QE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62060167,00.htm?scid=rss_z_nw

ikee: First worm on jail-broken iphones

BBC is running an article which is reporting a first ever worm on iphone. It is important to note that this worm does not effect all iphones. Only the jail-broken iphones are vulnerable to this problem. Moreover, not all jail-broken iphones are vulnerable. Only the jail-broken iphones, whose root password is left as the default password ('alpine') after installing SSH, are vulnerable. This worm will not spread to phones where the default password is changed to something else.

So, in a way this is a dumb virus which relies on a known root password. But the reality is that many people do not change(or do not know how to change) their default password. The current form of the worm is not harmful. It just changes the wallpaper. But the author has released the source code of the worm. This can lead to harmful virus in the future using the same technique.

Update: There is already a second worm named "iPhone/Privacy" which uses the same technique as the above. This worm is a harmful one. Its steals personal data, like e-mails and contacts etc, without the knowledge of the user. See this article.

Tutorial to unlock iphone 3G/3GS using Blacksnow (link)

Geohot, the first hacker to find an unlock solution for the iphone(2G), just released a tool to unlock 3G & 3GS phones. This tool can unlock the phones running the latest firmware (3.1.2). This is supposed to the fastest unlock solution which does things in a snap. Please note that this tool is not meant for unlocking 2G phones.

Iphone hacks is running an article which mentions that this application is available over cydia also. You can use this approach if your 3G/3GS iphone is already jailbroken.

As usual, iclarified is ready with a pictorial tutorial explaining each step of the unlock process using blacksn0w. Happy unlocking!

Hard disk usage visualization tool

Ever wondered how you are running out of disk space even when you have a large capacity hard disk. Its very likely that you have bunch of large files that you do not need anymore. Actually, I faced this problem even more because I have a small capacity hard disk. I am almost perpetually short of disk space. So, I have to be very optimal in its usage. Sometimes, I store large files somewhere and forget that they ever existed after the use. One of the things that I keep doing is to use disk cleanup tool in windows and remove temporary files. But that does not reclaim much space beyond few MBs.

One day I was very frustrated that I have to continuously hunt for unwanted files on my machine. When I turned to the net for a tool that helps me in this, I found this nice tool called "WinDirStat" which stands for "Windows directory statistics". Its is a nice tool that quickly gives a map of all the files in the disk. Its visual presentation is very good with color-coding and size-coding. It visually shows the file sizes occupied by files and the directories.

The files will be shown as rectangular boxes and the size of the box represents the relative size of the file. All the files in a directory will be given same color. If you put the cursor on the blocks, it shows the filename etc. With this tool, you can quickly identify the large files/directories in your disk and delete them if they are not needed. Or you can backup the large files and delete them from your disk. You can do some basic operations like opening, deleting, seeing properties etc directly from the tool. I feel that this is a very convenient feature.

Here is the list of other tools that are available in case you want to explore more.

Motion-Activated Headphones

Wow! it feels very nice to blog after a long time. I had been busy the last 1.5 months both at work and off work. At work, its the usual boring stuff. Off work, I had a wonderful vacation for 2 weeks roaming all over(not really) the country. I had visited some places which I always yearned to go. And...Even more wonderful thing is hapenning in my life. I am getting married!. So, busy for obvious reasons. Just wanted to share this with the world :). Lets come to the topic...

Sony Ericsson launched earphones with an interesting feature. To stop/pause the music you do not need to press any buttons. The control is done based on some gestures. To start playing the music, just put both the earphone in the ear. To stop playing the music, just remove them from the ear. To pause the music, just remove one of the earphones. This earphones are meant for mobile phones. So, one can attend a phone call by removing one of the earphone. This particular gesture might not be good because you will not get to put both the earphones while talking on phone. Hopefully, this is configurable. See this link and/or the following video.

Iphone OS 3.0 issues

I wanted to update my 2g iphone from OS 2.2.1 to OS 3.0. I am a little bit apprehensive about upgrading because of the fears that it might have drawbacks or other problems. When I searched the net, I am a bit relieved because I did not find too many complaints. For the time being, I will wait and watch. The most common problem reported is the poor battery performance. See the following snippet from an article in pcmag summarizing the problems.

We received a number of reports from users point to issues with their phones' battery life, slowed speeds, and crashing or a generally inability to run certain apps. A reader named Gary reported that, "[i]t drains my battery in a few hours even if I am not using it." Tom had slightly better luck, writing, "my battery also drains in one day. It used to last three days."

A number of speed issues were reported amongst users, many of whom have considered reverting the software back to its 2.2 iteration. Meanwhile, reader Dave tells us, "most of my iphone apps stopped working after downloading the new 3.0 software on my iPhone 3G." Jason added, "Also Facebook always locks up and won't allow me to move to the desired tab."

Unlock/Jailbreak 2G & 3G iphones with OS 3.0 on windows (link)

First of all thanks to iphone dev team to come up with unlock almost in parallel to the official release of iphone OS 3.0 launch. The tool name is "redsnow". And, thanks to people from iclarified for coming up with such a nice tutorial.

For 2G phones, you can jailbreak and unlock the iphone having OS 3.0 firmware. Here is the link to tutorial for windows users.

For 3G phones, for now, you can only jailbreak the iphone having OS 3.0 firmware. Here is the link to tutorial for windows users. The iphone dev team will be releasing shortly the tool to unlock the OS 3.0 which they are calling it "ultrasnow". Follow thier blog for updates on this.

Update(june-24th): The iphone dev team has released their "ultrasnow" to unlock 3G phone running OS 3.0. And, here is the tutorial from iclarified. Plese note that none of the above unlock solutions work for iphone 3GS, which is the latest phone.

How to fix 169.x.x.x IP problem in windows vista

The other day me and my friend were struggling to fix this funny problem in windows vista where it always gets 169.x.x.x IP address. And because of this the PC is not able to connect to the internet. When we searched that net I am surprised to see the number of people facing this problem. But unfortunately, the solutions offered in those forums did not work for us. We tried many things like disabling the DHCP and assigning a static IP address, editing some settings in registery entry for the network connection, remvoing and adding the connection again etc.

At the end of an hour or so, when we found the fix for the problem we felt like slapping our face because the problem is such a stupid problem. Ok, the problem is that the mcafee is installed on the machine and the firewall is enabled thereby forming a proxy network which is not allowing us to directly connect to the internet. We simply disabled the firewall in mcafee and voila!, we are able to connect to the internet.

It may not be such a good idea to completely disable the firewall as the machine is directly exposed to the internet. There should be some solution to connect to the internet while the firewall is enabled. But, we will worry about it for some other day.

Standalone torrent downloader

For a long time I was wondering why can't there be a standalone torrent client. When I say a standalone client, I mean a device which can download torrents without the need of a PC. Recently, I got my answer from twitter feed of one of my friends. Here is the link to the product. It can download torrents to external hard disk, usb flash drive. It has an inbuilt SAMBA file server and FTP server. It has web server allowing connections over internet for administration. It seems to have decent security features allowing to created different users with different privileges. As I do not own this product, I cannot share personal experiences. But the link has reviews from users who own the product.


On a related note, when I was searching the web, I found that utorrent software has a standalone mode which is different from what I am expecting. It basically means that utorrent can run without installation. This gives it an advantage that it becomes very easy to move partially downloaded files from one PC to another. If you have a pendrive, have both the utorrent client and the download target on the pendrive and you are good to go. You can continue the download from any machine without needing to install. This is also a pretty good use case.

Mouse customizations not working after standby

I was using Logitech marble mouse(trackball mouse) for a quite some time. BTW, it is a very nice alternative for the regular mouse especially for people who get pain in the wrist. I closed down on this item mainly because of its cost effectiveness and good set of features. First of all its ergonomic. It fits well for both left-handed and right-handed people. In general, trackball mouses causes less strain on the muscles because you need not hold the mouse and move it. It stays in a place and we only have to move the ball on top with our fingers. I read on the internet that gripping the mouse contributes to most of the strain caused by mouse usage. Though its very less strain to do it once, we catch the mouse a few hundred times in a day and it causes RSI(Repetetive Stress Injury). I used to get pain in my wrist earlier because of my typing and mouse usage. Now, my pain reduced a lot after using this trackball and a softkey keyboard.

Coming back to the main topic of my post, recently, I started getting one strange problem with my mouse. I customized the mouse buttons to do page up and page down when I press the small buttons on the mouse. (By default they are assigned to previous and next for the browser). When I boot my machine from scratch I do not have any problem and my customizations work fine. There is a mouse icon in the system tray which can be used to customize the button assignments. The problem starts when I put the machine and standby mode and come out of it. The mouse icon in the system tray is missing and my customizations do not work any more. Everything goes to default. Rebooting the system is not an acceptable solution for me.

Finally, I found a solution to the problem where I need not reboot the machine. The trick is to get back the mouse icon in the system tray, i.e. get back the necessary daemon/service working. From the list of applications that run during the startup, I figured that LOGI_MWX.EXE is the one that corresponds to the mouse service. It is located in c:\windows\logi_mwx.exe. The solution is to run this application after coming out of standby mode. You will get back your customizations. You can create a shortcut to this application on the desktop for easy access.

Twitting just by thinking

For the un-initiated folks in twitter(I am one of you until few weeks back), you should first ask "what is twitter ?". Twitter is a kind of social networking tool where you post small messages(max 140 chars). Its like micro blogging and is a new fad of the world. People follow you to know your latest updates. It is a nice way to keep your friends and family updated. The small messages that you post are called twits. My loginid on twitter is 'sunilvirus'. So, you know where to follow me.

Engadget is running this article about a new human computer interface(HCI) where the user can type anything just by thinking about the alpahbet. The computer system will analyze your brain patterns and does the job of typing for you. Ofcourse, this technology can be used in many applications, but it seems the inventors of this gadget are obsessed with twitter. They developed an application to send twitter messages. See the below video for this technology in action. Do not have high expections thinking that you can type at the speed of thought. This is still in very nacent stages and is slow. Damn slow actually!




update: A related article from washingtonpost about a mindcontrol gadget.

Confiker is paging home...

In case you do not know about confiker(a.k.a downup/downadup), it is the most widespread virus till date. It propagates by exploiting a vulnerability in windows. The estimated number of computers that this virus has affected range from 9million to 15million (by different security teams). Microsoft announced $25,000 reward for any information that will lead to finding the creators of this virus but none was successful till now because the code is very obfuscated. See the wikipage for more information on this.

The interesting part is that the malicious action to be performed by this virus is not hardwired into it. First it just spreads and form a big botnet(a network of affected machines). It has the capability to download a payload(action to be performed) later and execute it. It has an interesting way of dowloading the payload. The 'D' variant of this virus generates a pool of 50000 domains everyday and randomly pick 500 of them and look for payload. Many experts believed that this virus will download the payload on 1st of April signifying the April Fools Day, but nothing happened on that day. It really made a fool out of the experts :)

A week after the April Fools Day, this virus seems to be actively downloading payload. It is downloading payload from the Waledac botnet, which is a botnet known for data-theft and spamming. Slashdot is running an article on this which points to this article. Here is one more article about this activity from Trendmicro and one more article from Zdnet.

Update: Cnet has an article where it mentions that this virus installs fake antivirus software which actually installs a trojan downloader. It fakes as if the system is effected with a virus and offers to clean it for $49.99. Funny, isn't it ?

iphone music over bluetooth headset

In my previous blog post when I wrote about bluetooth file transfer in iphone using iBluetooth, I mentioned that we cannot listen to the music or video in the bluetooth headset. I explored more about this topic and am happy to find that I am wrong. There are couple of tricks to workaround this limitation. It is possible to listen to the iphone music or video in the bluetooth headset. The trick here is to exploit the capability of iphone to transfer audio during calls over bluetooth. The beauty is that these tricks does not need any hardware or software changes. The following tricks assumes that you have already coupled your bluetooth headset to your iphone.

The first trick is simple but not practical to use. As the phone can export audio over bluetooth during active call, the trick is to play the music while you are active on the call. While you are on the call if you press home button, it will give access to the main screen when you can select ipod and play the music. But the problem is that the music will stop if the call ends. So, this is not practical as you do not want to burn out the phone minutes.

The second trick is to exploit voice mail. You do not need to be on active call to use this. Go the voicemail tab in the phone menu. If you have voice mail enabled and configured, you will see a button for audio source. Tap it and select your bluetooth headset as the source. Then open the ipod and start playing your music. You will hear it in your headset.

The third trick is the geeky way. It reminds me of the days we used to jailbreak by making a fake call. As an active call is needed to have voice over bluetooth, we make a fake call. If you dail *#301#, the iphone will call itself. You can answer the call and it will be active till you end it. As you are calling yourself, you do not pay for the minutes. But there is a catch. You cannot get calls while you are on this unless you have call waiting enabled. See this video which explains the procedure.

Full list of new features in iphone 3.0 firmware

When apple released iphone 3.0 firmware(unofficial youtube version), it claimed that it has about 100 new features and 1000 new APIs but listed them nowhere. I was hunting on the web to get a list of new features. This link is the best so far that I found. It has about 81 items. I hope that the list is accurate. I do not think that I understand all of them. You can see this video that demos some of the features.


I am an iphone 2G (first generation) user. I am a bit unhappy that some of the new features are not being offered for 2G phones citing hardware limitations. The following list of features in 3.0 firmware are not available for 2G phones. i.e the limitations for 2g phones in 3.0 firmware.
- No MMS (says radio is not capable)
- No A2DP. i.e stereo audio over bluetooth.
I am very unhappy about A2DP limitation for 2G phones. Atleast they should have supported normal audio, if not stereo audio, over bluetooth. I am sure normal audio is possible as we can use bluetooth headset to receive calls.

By the way, you might have heard that iphonedev team already did jailbreak the 3.0 beta firmware. These guys are amazing. I hope unlock is not far way.

SixthSense: Wearable Gadget

Its truly amazing what this gadget can do. This what the author wants to define it as... "SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information". I am not sure if you guessed it right what this gadget can do. Here is the deal.

The gadget is worn on the body. It has a built-in camera and projector. With the camera it can detect the motions or gestures done by the person wearing it. Depending on the gesture it performs appropriate action. The gesture interface is more or less like the one in the minority report movie, where the users makes gestures with fingers. But what puts this device much ahead of minority report is its ability to project on any surface using the built-in projector. And what puts this far ahead, is its ability to get information from the web about the object being seen and project that information back on the object in appropriate manner.

If you are in a bookstore and if you have the cover page of the book in front of you, this gadgets detects the book title, get the rating and reviews of this book from amazon, and project this information back on the book. It provides menus to get more information. Isnt that amazing ? Not impressed ? I am sure you will be thrown off your seat if you see this video. I just talked about one of the innumerable possibilities. The following video lists a bunch of them.



The genius behind this masterpiece is "Pranav Mistry". Here is his personal website and his description about the project. Here is an interview with him about the project. He is currently doing PhD from MIT. He had done his masters from IIT Bombay, intrestingly not in computer science but in design. The prototype costed them only $350. Once this goes to commercial production, I am sure this can cost much lesser. I guess that this will be a revolutionary product given it potential. Great job dude !

Bluetooth file transfer from iphone: iBluetooth

One of the biggest things that I hate about iphone is its inability to transfer files to other devices over bluetooth. See my earlier post expression my anguish. I feel that this is a serious limitation given the fact that this is a basic functionality. By default, iphone bluetooth capability is only limited to the headset. i.e You can take calls on a bluetooth headset. There is some more stupidity in this. Even though iphone supports bluetooth headset, you cannot listen to the songs or video using the headset. Nonsense !! Anyway, lets get back to the topic of this post.

Few days back an application called 'iBluetooth' is released via the cyida installer for jailbroken phones. The provides the functionality to transfer files over bluetooth to any other bluetooth enabled device like another mobile or PC. It has an in-built file browser which will allow you to browse through the OS filesystem. Moreover, it has a image viewer also which can be used to browse the photo folder. i.e You can visually browse the pictures taken with your camera, and send them over bluetooth. However, I found that the pictures sent in this method are having less resolution than the actual images. It seems this method sends only the thumbnails and not the actual images. Actual images are located in the folder "/private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM". Here you can get the full resolution images taken with the iphone camera. I cannot give technical details like data transfer speed and all but the performance is quite good according to my experience.

There is one catch though. This is a paid app and charges $3.99. I feel its totally worth it as gives a jump to the iphones functionality. In the future there are plans to support the itunes music library also. So, instead of hunting down the OS filesystem, there should be and easy access. The developer behind this awesome utility is MeDevil. In his blog he explains why he is charging money for the application. He has plans to buy a commercial ready-made full bluetooth stack implemented for generic devices and its quite expensive. Once he gets a hand on that he want to put that into a daemon and provide much more functionality using this software. So, we can expect things like ablity to send contacts, bluetooth serial port etc.

Enjoy bluetooth on iphone.

Hate iTunes ? Use sharepod

I am a first time user of the 'i' family {ipod, iphone, itunes}. I own an iphone. Before iphone, I used other phones like Sony Erricson W800 and Nokia N80. One of the most common requirement is to store music on the phone. In those phones, it used to be straight forward. You just create folders/sub-folders and dump the music files there. The phone also carries the same concept of folder that we have on the PC. Once I add music to phone I can delete from my PC. I can delete music from my mobile whenever I wanted to do it.

When I came to iphone+itunes, its a new world for me. First of all there is no concept of folder in iphone and for that matter an ipod also. Apple might have thought that all its users are dumb asses who do not understand the concept of a folder. Next thing is the synching part. First you have to add it into itunes, organize in it and then sync it to the iphone/ipod. If there are music files in iphone and they are not present in itunes list, they will get deleted from iphone on sync. All the music files should have proper ID3 tags to be arranged according to albums. I can keep talking about many such nuances. In short, I hate itunes.

While I was looking for alternatives, I came across Sharepod. It is an alternative to the iTunes to load music files into iphone/ipod. Yes, you can put music into iphone also. Though it does not solve all the problems that I was talking about, it alleviates some of the problems. It has some nice features like dragging files from explorer and put in iphone, add and remove music from iphone etc.

But do not jump out of your chair yet. It has some problems too. First of all it does not have all the functionality of itunes. Say for e.g. podcast synching. So, if you are the type of person who want both music and podcasts, I guess sharepod is not for you. The problem is that if you add music with sharepod and try to synch podcasts with itunes, itunes will delete the files added from sharepod because the music is not in itunes list. I am a victim to this problem myself. I do not know a solution to this. Any help is appreciated.

Step-by-step guide to iphone 3G unlocking (link)

iphonehacks is running a nice tutorial on step-by-step guide to unlock 3G iphones. I find it very neat and elaborate. It explains the known conditions under which the unlock does not work. It also has the precautions to be taken before unlocking.

One more nice tutorial from iclarified.

[Off Topic]
There are some requests for link to unlocking 2G phones having 2.2 firmware. Here it is.

Installing Windows XP on Acer Aspire 4530

We recently bought a Acer aspire 4530 without any pre-installed OS. On top of linux, we decided to go for Windows XP as it is fairly stable and less resource hungry compared to Vista. When we tried to install Windows XP, we consistently encountered a failure with the fatal blue screen. Before the blue screen, the installation complains that it couldnt find disk drives. After googling around a bit, I realized that this is a standard problem. The main reason is that the Windows XP installation CD does not have native support for SATA hard disks with AHCI interface. So, the same problem can happen on any machine which has SATA hard disk. The following is the solution for the above problem...

There are two options.
1. Simplest method: Changing the BIOS setting
2. Advanced method: Adding SATA drivers to Windows XP installation CD.

Option 1:
In case of Acer, the BIOS settings allow you to change the SATA mode. It can be found in the "Main" section. By default it will be in AHCI mode. Change it to IDE mode. This makes your SATA disk behave like an IDE disk. Once you change to IDE mode, you are ready to go ahead with the installation of Windows XP as usual. This is the simplest solution.

There are couple of reasons why you might not prefer this solution over the next one. First, your BIOS settings might not allow you to change the SATA mode. In that case, you do not have an alternative other than to go for the next option. Secondly, you will not reap the full benefit of your SATA harddrive. SATA's AHCI interface gives better throughput compared to IDE in most of the situations. If you are more interested in this topic search for "Native Comamnd Queuing(NCQ)". This is a very nice article comparing AHCI vs IDE.

There is a way to change the mode to AHCI after installing the XP in IDE mode. I personally did not try this method but this article explains how to do this on machines with intel chipsets. Note that this method should not be followed if your chipset is AMD. I will update this article If I find a way to do this for AMD platforms.

Option 2:
This is a little complicated option in the sense that you have to create a new XP installation CD with SATA AHCI drivers included in it. This technique is called "Slipstreaming". Follow the "Internet and CD burner method" section in this article.