The Light Blue Touchpaper blog has revealed that Google is a great tool for hackers looking to crack MD5 encrypted passwords. In the article, Stephen explains how he simply “asked google”, what the MD5 encrypted password that a recent attacker had used on the Light Blue Touchpaper website to gain full administration rights.
Google gladly served up a number of results for the “20f1aeb7819d7858684c898d1e98c1bb” search term. It turns out the password the hacker used was “Anthony”.
This just goes to show how important it is to develop a strong password. Typically people would use the name of their dog, wife, husband or even date of birth as their favourite password. But just look how easily it could be compromised by Google:
And that’s just a small selection of passwords that Google reveals! Here’s a nice little tool that will allow you to check your own password and see if Google has a record of it… http://utilitymill.com/utility/Goog_Your_Hash
Well as the saga continues on our latest project, today we finally got FFMPEG functioning correctly. We can now convert 3GP files to FLV files on the fly using FFMPEG and PHP.
No matter what we did, it just wouldn’t convert the sound, it would only convert the video. Although it seemed that the command is simple, e.g. exec("ffmpeg -i yourvideo.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 yourvideo.flv")
But that didn’t work.
So for the last couple of weeks we focused our attention on ensuring FFMPEG was installed PROPERLY on our server.
After a lot of great work by Paul and Niall from Blacknight (thanks guys!) we finally got it working.
For those of you just embarking on this new challenge, I suggest you focus your attention on installing FFMPEG correctly first. The guts of what you need to do is to install and enable the libamr codecs.
I spent days trawling forums and mail lists looking for the solution and a lot of them pointed me towards the command I was using to execute FFMPEG. This was not what I needed.
In one way they helped, because it helped me understand how FFMPEG worked, on the other, it made me expect FFMPEG to work without having to look further into the configuration of FFMPEG.
So to help you out, this is how our FFMPEG installation configuration now looks:
I personally don’t think it’s deranged at all, in fact I think it’s quite clever. It means people like Robert (and now me) will blog and talk about it, hence spreading the word faster than a lot of other marketing mediums. It’s classic example of a viral marketing campaign.
My only complaint about it is that they are not promoting their brand very well. There are no obvious connections to Windows Live Search, apart from a greyed out logo at the bottom of the page. So far for me, the Nokia Great Pockets campaign was a lot better!
I got a letter in the door a couple of weeks ago from The Private Security Authority who were investigating the alarm installed in my home.
In a nutshell, they wanted me to provide them with information on the name and address of the person that installed my alarm, a copy of all invoices and the exact date in which the work took place. The reason for this is that all alarm installers now need to be licensed to do install alarms.
Initially I was quite concerned as good friend of mine had installed the alarm as a favour.
Although he is licensed with his company to install alarms, he is not licensed to do it himself outside of his job (which for me means this is an obvious cause of double taxation). I don’t know why someone can be licensed in their full time job to install alarms, but if they do it in their spare time they’re not, it just doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyway, If I didn’t comply and provide his details, I was liable to a fine of over €3,000.
So I contacted the PSA and told them how a friend had helped me install the alarm as a favour. The very helpful guy at the end of the phone asked told me that because no money had crossed hands, the person installing the alarm was not required to have a license. This made sense since there are so many alarms available online now that would enable someone with no knowledge of alarm systems, to install alarms quite easily. So if you have installed the alarm DIY style, you are fine.
The nice guy at the end of the phone apologised for scaring the living daylights out of me with the letter, but he said the letter was also intended to bring awareness to home owners. But personally I don’t think scaremongering is a good way to get the public to help them in their fight against unlicensed installers. They should be trying to get the consumer to help them tackle this, not frighten them into thinking that they are in serious trouble for getting an alarm installed by a friend of theirs!
So there’s no such thing as the gPhone (http://code.google.com/android/) - ah well it was fun specualting that there was. But it looks like there is something special coming from Google for the mobile phone industry. Google have released a software stack for mobile phones called Android. It includes an operating system, middleware and some basic applications.
In order to entice developers to develop amazing applications - they have created the Android Developer Challenge and are offering up to $10 million in awards for the most promising applications.
“The award money will be distributed equally between two Android Developer Challenges:
Android Developer Challenge I: We will accept submissions from January 2 through March 3, 2008
Android Developer Challenge II: This part will launch after the first handsets built on the platform become available in the second half of 2008
In the Android Developer Challenge I, the 50 most promising entries received by March 3 will each receive a $25,000 award to fund further development. Those selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards.”
Some of the basic applications look impressive already, but I’m not sure why Google are going down the award route? For me it’s a cheap way of buying great ideas, it’s verging on Microsoft mentality!
The great Eoghan McCabe (did you like that Eoghan? ) has given us his A-Z of modern web design on his new site www.azmwd.com
The web page is full of great facts, tips, ideas and best practices for approaching modern web design. It’s quite an interesting read and certainly something I’ll be getting the rest of the team to read.
Amazon have released a new service for it’s associates, Amazon MP3’s. It allows people tobuy and download DRM free MP3z to play on any MP3 device. In addition to this, they are giving associates 20% commision on any sale they generate! So here’s on you can all get started on…
That is of course if you are from th US, if not, forget about it, it’s just not gonna happen yet!
Today I had to install a site on my machine to give the lads a dig out with an issue they were having with one of our projects.
It’s been so long, that I had to basically install everything from IIS to MySQL.
After everything was installed, I just couldn’t get the IIS to start. When trying to start the IIS service, I kept getting this error “Unexpected error 0×8ffe2740″. In the error log, I got another really helpful error… “The service could not bind instance 1. The data is the error code”. Thanks a lot Microsoft engineers, that’s so helpful!
Anyway, I finally got the bottom of it. It turns out that the service won’t start because there is a conflict with some other application running on the same port. After much fishing around on my PC, it turns out that Skype was running on port 80 and IIS was naturally trying to run on that port. Since I knew how to change the port that IIS runs on quite easily, I chose that option, instead of trying to figure out how to change it on Skype.
For those of you who want to do the same, simply go to your IIS manager and on the “Web Site” tab, change the TCP Port to a port of your choice. I changed mine to 8080. So now to view the site I simply type http://localhost:8080/ in my browser!
Great news on the gig front, it’s been a while since we had a decent gig in Ireland. This year we didn’t even have the Download festival in the RDS which was very disappointing.
However, Kerrang are bringing their Kerrang Tour 2008 to Dublin, in January. Headlining act will be the infectious Coheed & Cambria who have just released a new album - No World for Tomorrow (haven’t heard it yet!).
Other bands on the bill include Madina Lake and FightStar (oh my god… ). But it’s the closest thing to a rock gig we’ve had in some time.
As if we didn’t get enought crap through our letterboxes already, another free newspaper has popped up.
But this time, I’m happy to promote it as we are currently working on the website. www.informer.ie - visit the website now! It’s filled (surprisingly) with some great articles and you can even comment on the article on the website (woohooo!).
So far we’ve finished beta version 1.0 of the site, but there’s still a lot to do. At the moment it’s at least functional. We’ll be doing a lot of changes over the coming months as the paper grows.
So go out and find a copy, or just read it online!
) has given us his A-Z of modern web design on his new site 
). But it’s the closest thing to a rock gig we’ve had in some time.