Author Archives: alexander

[Win] Oracle VirtualBox: Workaround For Initialization Issue

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“and first for something complete different”: Muzaq… coding or administrating system can’t do without gooood muzaq. Check our latest tunes here :-)

History

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization software. Originally it has been developed by a german company named Innotek, which has been acquired by SUN Microsystems in 2008. SUN Microsystems in turn has been acquired by ORACLE in 2010.

Innotek originally collaborated with Connectix on Virtual PC – a virtualization software targeting the Mac OS platform. Connectix has been bought by Microsoft in 2003. Innotek then decided to develop VirtualBox.

Status Quo

VirtualBox is used by many companies for virtualization and thus developing. Palm for example uses VirtualBox for WebOS development in an emulated environment. Thus allowing either Linux, Mac OS or Windows host systems for development.

CPU VT-X/AMD-V Issue

After configuring a dual core virtual machine and trying to start you may encounter a message box indicating:

VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED

This issue may occur no matter which host operating system you’re using. The reason for this might be:

  • you’re not using a CPU that supports hardware virtualization
  • your BIOS does not support hardware virtualization properly
  • hardware virtualization is disabled in your BIOS settings (check it!)
  • there is a bug in your current BIOS version regarding

Known Workarounds

  • Disable USB for the virtual machine
  • Reduce the amount of CPU cores to 1
  • upgrade your BIOS to the latest version (this might be dangerous)
  • Disable VT-X/AMD-V
  • Disable 3D acceleration
  • Shutdown your host machine, unplug (!) from electricity for say 30 secs, reboot then

As we’re currently using VirtualBox only on the Windows XP platform we categorized this article under Win, anyway it is very likely that the same issue also occurs under Linux or Mac OS, as VirtualBox on all platforms derives from the same source code.

Any suggestions, hints or things need to be added? Don’t hesitate to tell us below…

[misc] Web Empfang von MMS mit Alice / Hansenet

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Wir alle kennen die Situation. Ein Freund sendet uns eine MMS und wir erhalten eine SMS stattdessen, obgleich unser Telefon MMS fähig ist. Warum eigentlich?

Nun das ist sehr einfach: sofern man selbst keine MMS bislang versendet hat, geht der Provider davon aus, dass man kein MMS fähiges Mobiltelefon besitzt. Das ist einerseits ein guter Ansatz, andererseits jedoch auch eine nette Art, 60 Millionen deutschen Mobilfunkkunden zu zwingen, zumindest eine einzige MMS zu versenden – nämlich damit sie imstande sind, MMS zu empfangen.

60 Millionen MMS x 0,29€ pro MMS, bei jedem Wechsel des Mobiltelefons… Hmmm, nette Summe für die Portokasse der lieben Telefonkonzerne, aber lassen wir das lieber. Heute ist ja dritter Advent.

Blöd wird es nur, wenn einzelne Provider, die die Netze anderer verwenden, die SMS Benachrichtigungsoption für eingegangene MMS’ nur unzureichende implementieren. So isses beispielsweise bei dem deutschen Anbieter Alice / Hansenet. Hier erhält man folgende Nachricht:

Sie haben eine MMS von +491231234567 erhalten. Sie können diese im Web unter lesen. Ihr PIN lautet aB3D5F.

Tja. Äh wo soll ich die abrufen? Genau, nirgendwo. Der Link ist irgendwie nicht in der SMS enthalten. Einige Tests zeigen, dass in allen SMS Benachrichtigungen über eine vorliegende MMS, die von Alice derzeit versendet werden, die Webadresse fehlt. Macht ja nichts, wenn wenigstens Google etwas Hilfreiches zu Tage fördern würde … Hmm… Google hilft leider nicht… Also Gehirn anstrengen.

Alice ist im Mobilfunkbereich Reseller von O2 Produkten. Also mal bei o2 schauen, wo man die MMS online abrufen kann… Hmm… Google vermeldet (nicht ganz auf Anhieb): http://o2online.de/goto/o2mms

Und tadadada… Alles wunderbar. Meine MMS kann ich nun hervorragend bei O2 im Web abrufen. Oder sollte ich vielleicht doch mal die MMS senden, damit mein Provider merkt, dass ich MMS direkt auf dem Mobiltelefon empfangen kann?

[EM2008] Italy’s Roberto Donadoni on the ropes

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During the last few minutes of the desastrous game against the Netherlands, Donadoni is at the end of his tether. Find the whole playlist here…

See for yourself:

[MacOS] Mac OS X 10.6 Codename Snow Leopard

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Besides yet expected news about the new 3G iPhone (we reported here), Apple’s chief of software development Bertrand Serlet also announced details of the upcoming operating system OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”). Snow Leopard will feature:

  • support for 16TByte RAM
  • introduction of QuickTime X (already included on iPhones)
  • support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in Mail, iCal and Addressbook
  • integration of OpenCL (Open Computing Language), that can make use of modern GPUs for accelerated computations
  • new and easier-to-use APIs for applications using multiple core CPUs (“Grand Central”)

All in all Apple said they wanted to improve quality of their product. We feel integration of MS Exchange is good step into that direction. But we still hope for working IMAP integration, aswell. Snow Leopard will be released in June 2009. We estimate that developers can expect first beta versions at latest in january.

[iPhone] The new iPhone revealed II

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Ok here we go with the details about the new 3G iPhone. Steve Jobs revealed it about one hours ago on the Apple WWDC in San Francisco.

Technical details

  • 3G iPhone (means UMTS for us europeans)
  • 8GB modell with black backside or 16GB modell with white backside
  • case is completely in plastic now :-(
  • real GPS integrated
  • headphone jack won’t need adapters anymore
  • improved battery life:
  • up to 300 hours standby
  • up to 10 hours of 2G talking time, 5 hours of 3G talking time
  • up to 6 hours of internet browsing
  • up to 7 hours of watching video
  • up to 24 hours of listening audio
  • advanced Microsoft Exchange Support
  • Cisco VPN
  • Access to App Store (Apps will be DRM protected to prevent copying)
  • Viewing of Apple iWord documents, MS Word and MS Excel (no editing, though)

Introduction to the markets begin with July 11th and will be rolled out in more than 70 countries (see complete list here). The prices for the US market will be 199$ for the 8GB modell and 299$ for the 16GB modell. We suspect the low prices result from cheaper manufacturing costs for the plastic backside and from higher amounts of produced devices. The new iPhone 2.0 firmware will be available to customers of the old iPhone and iPod touch at the same time.

We will come back to this new iPhone once we got hold of one. Anyway, although in many countries the iPhone will be offered by more then just one carrier, we suspect it still to be SIM locked. So don’t buy it until we tell you how to SIM free and jailbreak ;-)

Update

It’s been reported, Apple’s plans to apply a new strategy against unlocking and jailbreaking. AT&T in the US and O2 in the UK will force consumers to sign the contract first before they get their hands on one of those new 3G iPhones. We expect this activation strategy to be implemented worldwide, although it has not been confirmed in other countries, yet. If this is true the grey market of iPhones would most likely be destroyed. But let’s see what really happens on july, 11th.

[iPhone] The new iPhone revealed

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Yes, Steve really gave us what we wanted to have so desperately. See the video of a pre-presentation here:

;-)

[Virus] Virus.Win32.Gpcode.ak reported in the wild

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Abstract

Yes viruses are spread around the world every day. There is nothing new to this. But the GPCODE virus that now has been reported in the wild is different. It encrypts files on your harddisk and permanently deletes the old files. In the end you would need to contact the virus author to be the decryption key to gain to your files access.

You think we are kidding? Nop. We’re not. Kaspersky – one of the leading companies in the Anti-Virus business filed an appeal to all cryptographers around the world to fight the encryption of this virus. The worst thing is: the virus authors use an RSA 1024bit key to encrypt your data. RSA 1024 bit is still quite secure these days (see Wikipedia for cracked RSA’s here). There have been successful attempts to brute force factors only for RSA 640bits. Kaspersky estimates we need 15million computers in distributed computing to hack that key… erm… yes 15million…

What you can do

Positive news is that this virus seems to appear infrequently. We have not yet found a copy of that virus on our own researches in the underground networks. This means currently the threat probability is medium. Anyway staying clean is not too complicated:

  • have a premium anti-virus scanner installed (see our sponsors)
  • update your virus signatures frequently (means once per day is minimum)
  • backup your data frequently on external devices



Kaspersky

If you are attacked by that virus and already have it on your system, you will see a messagebox saying:

Your files are encrypted with RSA-1024 algorithm.
To recovery your files you need to buy our decryptor.
To buy decrypting tool contact us at: [removed]@yahoo.com

=== BEGIN ===
[key removed]
=== END ===

there is not too much you can do currently. Kaspersky recommends not turning of or rebooting the computer. Instead contact Kaspersky under stopgpcode@kaspersky.com using a second computer. Please provide detailed information how you obtained this virus (means: which torrent site etc.).

Infected file formats

These are the suffixes (extensions) of files that will be affected by GPCODE:

7z abk abd acad
arh arj ace arx
asm bz bz2 bak
bcb c cc cdb
cdw cdr cer cgi
chm cnt cpp css
csv db db1 db2
db3 db4 dba dbb
dbc dbd dbe dbf
dbt dbm dbo dbq
dbt dbx Djvu doc
dok dpr dwg dxf
ebd eml eni ert
fax flb frm frt
frx frg gtd gz
gzip gfa gfr gfd
h inc igs iges
jar jad Java jpg
jpeg Jfif jpe js
jsp hpp htm html
key kwm Ldif lst
lsp lzh lzw ldr
man mdb mht mmf
mns mnb mnu mo
msb msg mxl old
p12 pak pas pdf
pem pfx php php3
php4 pl prf pgp
prx pst pw pwa
pwl pwm pm3 pm4
pm5 pm6 rar rmr
rnd rtf Safe sar
sig sql tar tbb
tbk tdf tgz tbb
txt uue vb vcf
wab xls xml

[Anonymity] Anti Spam Strategy

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As seen in the past, the spammers steal our valuable life time with sending us porn, drugs and software offers, that we would never have dreamed of. The question is: where do those spammers get the email addresses from? And there are two simple answers.

First being the problem that anyone having a website, mostly also has provided a valid email address for contact purposes. Here in germany in most cases we are even legally obliged to provide such an address as imprint (Impressum). So spammers send robots to the net and harvest all those email addresses and write them back into databases and let them grow and grow. And after a while honorable databases have been generated with lots of email addresses.

Second being the problem that many administrators of forums offer their user databases as well to spammers, although they are not allowed to. Anyway it happens much too often.

At least for the second problem a solution has evolved. It is called “one time email addresses” or “trash email addresses”. Those addresses are valid for a particular amount of time and will cease to work after that.

One of those websites offering such services is http://www.guerrillamail.com/. They provide us with an email address that is working at least for 15 minutes. If that is too short you can manually prolong that address for another 15 minutes by simply clicking a button. We did not try to prolong for the maximum possible amount of time – so we don’t know. But we suspect there may be a time limitation.

When will you actively stop distributing your real email address on the net?



Kaspersky

[PS3] Infectus Chip downgrades Playstation 3 Firmware

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The first mod chip has been released a couple of days for the Playstation 3 (PS3). It allows installation of any firmware revision you prefer for your best gaming experience, means you can up- and downgrade to whatever firmware you like (see video below). And no: it does not allow playing backups of your games. Even if you could afford a blu ray burner you cannot backup PS3 games currently.

The interesting point is: this chip is platform independent and can also be installed into Nintendo’s Wii or Microsoft’s XBOX 360. Since we don’t know for sure about the legal situation for such a mod chip in our beloved Germanistan, we will not include any links in this article. You know how to find, otherwise you would not be here ;-) Thanks for your understanding.

[MacOS] HowTo Update to MacOS X 10.5.3

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Update 02.07.2008: MacOS X 10.5.4 is out now. See our notes here.

I. Abstract

Three days ago (May, 28th) Leopard update 10.5.3 has been released. It solves several security issues and application issues (read details here). So sumed up: you should update. Being on a Hackint0sh we need to take some things into consideration because we cannot use the built-in auto update.

The following article shows how to upgrade your Intel based Hackintosh to version 10.5.3. The approach is pretty much the same like updating to 10.5.2 and can be applied to both updates.

One limitation: the whole update process is currently only applicable to close-to-original-mac-hardware and is being done manually. Note: we did not test this on AMD based Hackintoshs.

Note to first timers: after having installed the update. The updater asks you to reboot. Do not hit the restart button eventually, instead read on. Some more steps need to be applied before you are allowed to reboot. Don’t say, we didn’t warn you!

II. Enable root user

In case you did not enable root user access to your system yet, this is a good time to do that. This has been described a thousand times elsewhere, so we won’t delve into this too deep:

  • Open Directory Utility.app
  • click the Lock to allow changes (!)
  • then Edit > Enable root user > supply password of your choice

III. Obtain update package

For manual update we need to get the updater.

IV. Back up important data and custom kexts

Backup important data like

  • documents
  • emails
  • muzaq
  • videos
  • downloads etc.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you in case anything goes wrong for whatever reason. After having done the backup of your personal data, do the backup for your system specific kexts.

Most simple way is using a terminal. Do the following:

  • hackint0sh$ su
    (provide root password)
  • hackint0sh$ cp -r /System/Library/Extension/KEXT-I-WANNA-BACKUP /TARGET/FOLDER/KEXT-I-WANNA-BACKUP

That kexts might be:

  • Audio
  • LAN
  • WLAN
  • Graphics Adapter etc.

This highly depends on your hardware. I am running an ASUS P5LD2 VM DH with a Sapphire HD 2600 XT. In my case I only need to backup my Natit.kext device driver and dsmos.kext, because history taught me a strange lesson once.

V. Use monitoring script

Since AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext would simply kill our systems we need to make sure it does not become loaded into the kernel. So netkas supplied a little command line, which monitors the install of that file and if found removes it. You need to be logged in as root:

  • hackint0sh$ while sleep 1 ; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext ; done

This command line must run until the end of the update.

VI. Process the update

Just mount your downloaded MacOSXUpdCombo10.5.3.dmg and begin your update. When the update process is complete

! ! ! ! _ d o n ‘ t _ i n s t a n t l y _ c l i c k _ r e s t a r t _ ! ! ! !

Instead of restarting, stop the while command line from step V. Stop it by hitting CTRL and C and read on, but don’t restart your system, until we say it.

VII. Modify startup script

Sadly, we are not running OS X on original hardware. The consequence is we are missing a chip for the fan control that holds a specific key (Alexander Graf told about the details here – german only). This key is necessary to run the graphical interface Aqua of Mac OS X (in fact: this key decodes the binaries – details about the binary protection are provided by Amit Singh here).

To make a long story short: we don’t want the operating system to look for that specific chip and key, we can supply it easier (via emulator). Netkas provided the emulator called dsmos.kext (kernel extension) for that problem as well.

Simply do the following (I assume you know how to use nano, you can also use vi or whatever you prefer).

  • hackint0sh$ nano /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1

In that 1 file there must be a line of code like this (old)

  • /System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext

This needs to be changed to this (new):

  • /System/Library/Extensions/dsmos.kext

Then save and exit. Using nano simply click CTRL and X, you will be asked if you wanna save before exiting.

VIII. Restoring kexts

We highly recommend you are logged in as root on a command line. In step IV. you saved your specific kexts. Now is the time to recover them to this folder:

  • /System/Library/Extensions

We will not explain how to use the copy command: this is the learning curve for today 8-))

IX. Reboot your machine

After having restored your system specific kexts. You reboot your machine. On first reboot, screen will not show the GUI but will show a black screen for about 3 minutes. It will then reboot again and it will take about 3 minutes again to show you the GUI (in our case the login window).

Shouts fly out to Netkas who’d better call himself +netkas and to Davil Elliott ;-) Live long and prosper, dudes!

And finally a word by our sponsor, who reduces our costs for this project at least a bit. Take them advertisments into consideration, would you? Thanks in advance!