Monthly Archives: June 2009

[News] iPredator allows anonymous Internet Surfing

The cat and mouse game goes into its next round. After the media companies have fought a quite successful lobby war against basic liberties, the operators of the PirateBay are now testing a service that anonymizes your traces as internet user.

The Business Model

3,000 internet users are right now in beta testing. 180,000 people world wide have registered. This is a solid business model as this service will cost €5 per month. With an conservatively estimated amount of users of 200,000 this is €12 million per year.

The Technology

The technology is well known as VPN (virtual private network). It means you connect to a specific network (this is called tunneling). From this network you then access the internet. Every website you access is thus being accessed through this network. Inside this VPN you get a new IP address and this is where iPredator becomes interesting for say civil rights activists in coutries that heavily censor internet pages – like iranian, chinese, and soon german activists and journalists aswell. In case you are using Peer2Peer networks to download media files there is a good chance, your IP has already been logged by one of the firms persecuting copyright infringement worldwide.

Persecution

Through your IP address you can be traced and for example ripped-off sued for copyright infringement – in Germany for example by a company called ProMedia (watch german Spiegel-TV article about ProMedia here). We will not delve into the doubtful business model of dinosaurs among the media companies, but all this comes to an end soon. All those persecuting companies will have to find a new business model as they will not be able to go after people loving music in the future anymore. And chinese, iranian, and german censorship will be able to be circumvented with just a click.

Addendum

Please pay attention to the legal situation in your country, living in countries with censorship: be extremely cautious. If you are living in the western consumption penetrated countries: consider going to the concerts and buying music. Otherwise your artist will not be able to make music in the future. You’d better listen to more intelligent independent music anyway, instead of those distributed by slowly dieing dinosaur media companies.

In the end remember one thing: using VPN technology to camouflage your traces does not make downloading music from illegal sources legal. Don’t do that.

[iPhone] Firmware 3.0 Unlock Release Date

Muscle Nerd of the iPhone Dev Team revealed some more infos about the forthcoming iPhone OS 3.0 unlock. It will be called “Ultrasn0w” and will be available on this week’s friday.

Muscle Nerd expects the unlock to be also applicable to the iPhone 3Gs, since it uses the same baseband version . But as the unlock requires jailbreaking it is currently not sure if a jailbreak can be easily performed on the 3Gs aswell.

The video is courtesy of the iPhone Dev Team, please forward to 2:00 to see the procedure to unlock…

[MacOS] Codeweavers Crossover 8.0 Released

Crossover allows installing Microsoft Windows based software on MacOS X or on Linux. In contrast to virtualization techniques like VMWare or Parallels, Crossover hooks API calls and redirects them to their MacOS or Linux equipollent.

As of version 8.0 these new applications are supported:

  • Quicken 2009
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
  • Adobe Photoshop CS2

Crossover also improved Copy and Paste functionality to and from the host operating system and improved integration with the upcoming Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

» Find Crossover’s complete change log here

[iPhone] Firmware 3.0 Sim-Unlocked

The iPhone Dev Team has admitted they got iPhone OS 3.0 hacked with jailbreak and unlock via yellowsn0w. They will perform a live demo on tuesday evening (US time – means in the middle of the night in europe). They are currently testing updated versions of PwnageTool and QuickPwn to fully work with iTunes 8.2.

Find more information here.

[MacOS] System Freeze with 10.5.7 and VMware Fusion

Abstract

You are running the latest version of “VMware Fusion” (get trial version here) on an original Apple Mac or on a HackMac. During installation of Windows XP or Vista (32 bit) the system crashs with a kernel panic or a complete freeze.

Workaround

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5.7 update causes some irritation to the 3D acceleration engine VMware Fusion uses. Before installing Windows disable Accelerate 3D Graphics:

Applies to

macosxhints.com report this bug applies to AMD ATI based graphic adapters only.

However in our lab a HackMac with a Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 7600 GT (using NetkasNatit.kext) also crashed again and again during an installation of a german Windows XP Professional with a complete freeze.

Console.app reports:

  • kernel[0]: vmnet: VNetUserIfFree: freeing userIf at 0x7507300.

The memory position may differ to yours.

[MacOS] Yet another Still Waiting for Root Device

Long time no see to this old friend called “Still waiting for root device”. But with 10.5.7 the time had come again. As some of the tipps we compiled below helped us there is no warranty that it will help you. As the reasons for this funky brother are too indifferent.

Used Hardware

  • Gigabyte GA EP35 DS3
  • Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256MB (Device ID 0x0391)
  • HP w2207 TFT (w/ integrated USB hub)
  • Buffalo AirStation WLI2-PCI-G54S (recognized as Third Party Wireless Card)

What you may try

  • Unplug external USB drives and devices
  • Unplug other internal drives
  • Instead of Rebooting: Shutdown and wait a couple of secs before manually turning your HackMac on again
  • Enable AHCI in BIOS for your drives (in case you see drive icons in orange, apply kexts included with the binaries’ release of Chameleon 2)
  • Try to boot into Safe Mode with -x (see more Darwin flags here) and
    Repair Permissions from within the Disk Utility.app
  • Remove the Extensions.mkext and rebuild it (cf. OSX86Project)
    myMek: rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
    myMek: kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions/
    myMek: kextcache -L -N -e

About our test environment

This is based on the approach to install from the original unmodified retail DVD. Buy it, please. And also go and buy a MacBook (Pro) aswell, you will need it anyway as your HackMac will need special treatments once in a while. A HackMac can never be intended for productive environment. Don’t forget this. No matter what a clone manufacturer or a USB dongle merchant says.

Anyway as we are quite conservative with running systems we don’t feel we need to change to often ways. That’s why we’re still using our own EPOS I. (download here) approach, which is based on Munky’s (more info here) findings.

Good Luck! And don’t forget to buy a Mac :-)