Jul 24, 2012 | General, networking, News
If you go to a hotel with keycard locks make sure to run your fingers under the keycard lock outside your door. If you find a DC power port there, take note: With a few hacker tricks and a handful of cheap hardware, that tiny round hole might offer access to your room just as completely as your keycard. Scary right? Well a hacker has proven that this is truly the case.
At the Black Hat security conference Tuesday evening, a Mozilla software developer and 24-year old security researcher named Cody Brocious plans to present a pair of vulnerabilities he?s discovered in hotel room locks from the manufacturer Onity, whose devices are installed on the doors of between four and five million hotel rooms around the world according to the company?s figures. Using an open-source hardware gadget Brocious built for less than $50, he can insert a plug into that DC port and sometimes, albeit unreliably, open the lock in a matter of seconds. ?I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,? he says simply.
Think about that for a moment, in seconds someone could break into your hotel room. Granted you have to be very smart to create such a device but if he teaches to others it can be very dangerous also now what will happen with all of these locks? Wil hotels laugh at this and pay no attention or will the hotels decide to change their lock. I am sure they will not, looking at the cost of changing all locks in say a 500 room hotel vs. a slim chance that someone could hack the door locks. Plus the insurance will cover the break in and costs much less then changing the locks. Most likely a few hundred breakins would need to occur before they make the change.
Jul 23, 2012 | Uncategorized
For years if you had an ipod or iphone you.could use the same type of power connectors and put it on any docking station you wanted. Well that is all about to change. The next iPhone will have a smaller dock. The pin will go from 30 pins to 19 pins. Now the reason for this reduction is due to the headphone jack being moved to the bottom of the phone. Many speculated this reduction was due to the nature of the size of the 4g receiver and this could still be true. There has to be a reason the headphone jack is being moved down to the bottom which means there will be more room on the top. Now the most interesting part of all of this that there is a company in China that is already making cases for the new iphone and the jack is set at the bottom of the case and not the top and the company says that the space on this case is correct. The biggest question to.me is when will they unveil this phone? The launch is set for October and we haven’t even seen the phone yet. Makes me wonder if it will be ready for October with just about two months away really. So what are your thoughts on the phone changes?
Jul 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
Last week there was a launch of a hack that allowed users to obtain In App Purchase content free of charge by routing their purchase requests through a server run by a Russian hacker, Apple began taking steps to stop this method. The hacker has still continued to develop his method to get around Apple’s protection. One major suggestion for a method by which Apple could improve the security of In App Purchasing was to include a unique identifier in validation receipts, and it has been reported developers are now seeing something along those lines coming from receipts issued by Apple since late yesterday. The receipts carry a new field called “unique_identifer” that appears to include the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) for the device making the In App Purchase. Such as your your iphone, ipad or ipod. The true question now is will these steps apple is taking will the hacker be able to keep up? Or will the titan known as apple find a way to stop this hacker? Time will tell on this issue however if a hacker puts their mind to it they can accomplish a lot.
Jul 18, 2012 | Uncategorized
Microsoft is making gradual steps to have a mobile presences on all platforms for mobile devices for my Box Live. This app which has previously been available as a remote control perk for the Windows Phone, iPhone and Android users has just seen a nice update to 1.6 which fixes bugs for the iOS and now will support the iPad. This live app is available now for you iPad and gives you the ability to navigate through your console?s media, monitor activity and search new content just like you can do on your phone.
Jul 17, 2012 | Uncategorized
The ios 6 beta 3 is being rolled out and the biggest thing is that Apple is starting the transition from mobile me to icloud. For those who don’t know you can get get email address from apple @me.com but with the new transition you are going to receive a @icloud address. Don’t fret you will be able to make a perfect transition of your email address. So if you have jr@me.com you will be able to get jr@icloud.com. Apple had this to say on the subject : icloud.com email addresses are now available for iCloud mail users. Users signing up for new Apple IDs, or enabling Mail on their iCloud account for the first time, will automatically receive an @icloud.com email address instead of a me.com email address. iCloud users with @me.com addresses that have been used with iOS 6 beta 3 will receive an @icloud.com email address that matches their @me.com address.
Jul 16, 2012 | Uncategorized
So I as I said last week Microsoft will be going through sending out the office consumer preview well Microsoft is showing it off finally and broke out all of its fine nice features.
Office at Its Best on Windows 8
? Touch everywhere. Office responds to touch as naturally as it does to keyboard and mouse. Swipe your finger across the screen or pinch and zoom to read your documents and presentations. Author new content and access features with the touch of a finger.
? Inking. Use a stylus to create content, take notes and access features. Handwrite email responses and convert them automatically to text. Use your stylus as a laser pointer when presenting. Color your content and erase your mistakes with ease.
? New Windows 8 applications. OneNote and Lync represent the first new Windows 8 style applications for Office. These applications are designed to deliver touch-first experiences on a tablet. A new radial menu in OneNote makes it easy to access features with your finger.
? Included in Windows RT. Office Home and Student 2013 RT, which contains new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, will be included on ARM-based Windows 8 devices, including Microsoft Surface.
Office Is in the Cloud
? SkyDrive. Office saves documents to SkyDrive by default, so your content is always available across your tablet, PC and phone. Your documents are also available offline and sync when you reconnect.
? Roaming. Once signed in to Office, your personalized settings, including your most recently used files, templates and even your custom dictionary, roam with you across virtually all of your devices. Office even remembers where you last left off and brings you right back to that spot in a single click.
? Office on Demand. With a subscription, you can access Office even when you are away from your PC by streaming full-featured applications to an Internet-connected Windows-based PC.
? New subscription services. The new Office is available as a cloud-based subscription service. As subscribers, consumers automatically get future upgrades in addition to exciting cloud services including Skype world minutes and extra SkyDrive storage. Subscribers receive multiple installs for everyone in the family and across their devices.
Office Is Social
? Yammer. Yammer delivers a secure, private social network for businesses. You can sign up for free and begin using social networking instantly. Yammer offers integration with SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics.
? Stay connected. Follow people, teams, documents and sites in SharePoint. View and embed pictures, videos and Office content in your activity feeds to stay current and update your colleagues.
? People Card. Have an integrated view of your contacts everywhere in Office. The People Card includes presence information complete with pictures, status updates, contact information and activity feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
? Skype. The new Office comes with Skype. When you subscribe, you get 60 minutes of Skype world minutes every month. Integrate Skype contacts into Lync and call or instant message anyone on Skype.
Office Unlocks New Scenarios
? Digital note-taking. Keep your notes handy in the cloud and across multiple devices with OneNote. Use what feels most natural to you ? take notes with touch, pen or keyboard, or use them together and switch easily back and forth.
? Reading and markup. The Read Mode in Word provides a modern and easy-to-navigate reading experience that automatically adjusts for large and small screens. Zoom in and out of content, stream videos within documents, view revision marks and use touch to turn pages.
? Meetings. PowerPoint features a new Presenter View that privately shows your current and upcoming slides, presentation time, and speaker notes in a single glance. While presenting, you can zoom, mark up and navigate your slides with touch and stylus. Lync includes multiparty HD video with presentations, shared OneNote notebooks and a virtual whiteboard for collaborative brainstorming.
? Eighty-two-inch touch-enabled displays. Conduct more engaging meetings, presentations and lessons, whether in person or virtually, with these multitouch and stylus-enabled displays from Perceptive Pixel.
With this new office suite it is a no brainier that Microsoft is making a big hit into the cloud and social networking. Let?s hope this products full release will not have as many bugs as seen in many versions of its other products.
Jul 15, 2012 | Uncategorized
Most of the time if not all the time you don?t have the time to watch every single item in your News Feed on a daily basis. Because of that, you may miss out on some pretty awesome events like a wedding or engagement. Luckily, Facebook?s algorithm can pop those status updates up if a bunch of people interact with them, but things can still be missed.
Well facebook has announced a feature called ?Weddings and Celebrations? which will make sure that you don?t miss a wedding or engagement ever again. It works like Facebook?s birthday feature, which shows up in the top right-hand side of page when you log in. This feature will show you when people have changed their relationship status to engaged or even married.
Jul 14, 2012 | Uncategorized
At the beginning month, Apple promised that a new Food and Drink section would be going live in the App Store in the coming weeks. Like clockwork, Apple?s new App Store section has gone live. The new section currently holds about 3000 apps that relate to finding food and drinks, recipies, cooking and more, but does not include food subjects like dieting, shopping, and coupons. It is a surprise it took this long for a section like this in the app store as food is a big part of anyones life and apps like open table and others like are used for most people’s dining and restaurant reservations.
Jul 13, 2012 | Uncategorized
Report from USAToday suggests that Microsoft will finally unveil Office 15, the company’s next generation office productivity suite, to the public. Office 15, or Office 2013, was originally rumored to hit a Consumer Preview stage later this month. This preview will be big for Microsoft. Every time they start a new office suite it is always interesting what they have done to make it worth spending the money on the upgrades. This consumer preview will be launching this month.
Jul 10, 2012 | Uncategorized
Have you ever upgraded your operating system and did not back up your data? Well Microsoft is making a windows 8 to go version that rests on a usb stick. It will be a 32GB stick that let’s you run windows 8 off of the stick as long as you are running windows 7. The best part is that it saves your apps and data so you can take the stick anywhere with your files.
