Marcelo Toledo

Lately a number of blogs posted comments on a very old post, dated 2006 about how to hack a commercial wireless, goes like this:

“I continued to try a couple other things, like checking if they eventually forgot some ports like 21 (ftp) or 110 (pop3). But no, all of them were properly blocked. After a lot of unsuccesfull attempts, I had some intuition telling me to check how they handle pictures. Without any hope of success I typed http://www.google.com/.jpg into my browser’s adress bar, and to my big surprise I saw the page you see when you follow the link right now. The next thing I typed in was: http://www.google.com/?.jpg but that didn’t work. But I went on, and found that url’s like http://www.google.com/search?.jpg worked like a charm. I found that I could easily visit sites like slashdot, google, or even this weblog, when adding a ?.jpg at the end of the url. The next logical step was to automate that. I downloaded greasemonkey.xpi?.jpg (*g*) and wrote a 4 line js script that would add ?.jpg to every link in a document. That way I was able to browse most sites without a hassle. Unfortunatly, I didn’t get to explore this vulnerbility much more, because I had to board the airplane, were I waited another 3 hours due to a mechanical failure - without wlan : /.”

What normally happens in a router with captive portal is, you have a firewall rule that redirects you to a local http server, this server gets a bunch of information about you, like ip address, mac address, url you tried to access and so on, then it displays a website so you can log in.

If this local web server or called application that redirects you is bugged, might help you get free access, but I really doubt this will work on any network, but I can’t talk about others, in Vex, this by far will not work.

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Few weeks ago I was in Vancouver for a few meetings, while in this company that produces routers, they told me that they also offer a mail service that can come within the router, making absolute non-sense for me, I asked:

Q: “why?”

A: “Most ISPs in Canada blocks port 25″

*sigh*

Q: “Why?”

A: “They think this way they will block spam”

*sigh*

It’s incredible how from time to time you can hear incredible ideas like this, how come no one ever realized that blocking port 25 would reduce spam, uh? Because of this fantastic solution this company has to provide an alternative way for their clients email to be delivered successfully, then I ask you:

How complicated is for a spammer to do the same?

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And suddenly after upgrading to 2.0, iPhone got boring. Almost all my applications came from installer which is now cydia and is basically empty. So why did I upgrade then? Well, I really wanted to have mobileme working, actually, I wanted to have wireless syncing of contacts and schedule, but apple is smart and didn’t add this resource to charge you with mobile me.

Fortunately it is free for the first 60 days, so I didn’t spend any money at all, and it is working well for me, differently from what people is saying, but if you have push enabled, it will eat your baterry live, so I had to turn it off and set it to fetch hourly or manual. If you really don’t care about using mobile me, don’t upgrade yet.

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McDonald’s POS system are pretty simple, they have in their database all products, numbers, sides, with all possible configurations. When you start asking, the gentleman or lady in the cashier start hitting the right spot for what you ask in a touchscreen lcd monitor, whenever they choose something with multiple choice, a sub list appears, for example, when they hit number one, they have to choose the drink you want, and it can be sprite, coke, guaraná, juice, whatever, pretty simple and easy.

Some times I like to ask their top sunday with caramel and since it’s pretty big I like to balance it with extra caramel, the only problem is that the system is not configured with extra caramel, only chocolate and strawberry, but they do have caramel.

Guess what? Every time since the last few years they get stuck with this, either the product comes with the wrong flavor and they need to throw it in the trash or the cashier screams to the other side of the store:

“This extra chocolate is caramel!”

Said that, I have two questions:

1. How complicated is for someone to add this variable to the system?
2. We have around 600 stores in the country, how come no one realized this yet?

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If you can understand portuguese, there is this new podcast TickTack about technology, it still in beta, but it’s worth it.

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“Lately it’s hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks — the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10″, 1024×600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The innovative G-Key system stores the Mandriva operating system and all the user data on a USB key — nothing is permanently stored inside the GDium. You can use your own desktop and data by plugging the G-Key into any GDium.”

From: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/19/1750243&from=rss

It’s really sad for me to read this, Mandriva few years ago changed it’s name from Mandrake after buying the leader in Brazil, Conectiva, a company that made an impossible mission in an environment with deep complexities, showing strenght, leadership, innovation and positive will.

Mandriva is doing totally the opposite, clearly lost, nobody really knows what it’s doing and not even them when I read news like this, it should be working hard to do what they proposed, Linux. There are so many points to be improved that could make their market share increase, how it’s possible to see RedHat, OpenSuse far away and they doing nothing about it?

They have been still for a long time now and when you think they will do something innovative to shake the market, they present an OEM machine from Taiwan/China/Whatever and expect what? To be another Sun? valinux?

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Businesses should hold off on investing in WiMAX until the technology is more widely deployed across the United States and until vendors produce more dual-mode cellular/WiMAX handsets, says a new report from Gartner Research.

Overall, Gartner projects that while WiMAX networks in the United States will start operating commercially over the next two years, WiMAX itself will remain a “niche technology” that will best serve emerging or rural markets that don’t already have access to broadband services. One of the big factors that WiMAX has going against it, says Gartner, is that WiMAX networks won’t be able to provide nationwide coverage for quite some time, as Sprint and its Clearwire partners will only begin launching commercial WiMAX services for the first time this September. Thus, says Gartner analyst Phillip Redman, businesses will have to wait until coverage extends to many more cities than the ones that will be covered by the end of the year.

Additionally, Redman says that enterprises that want both WiMAX data and cellular voice capabilities will have to wait at least a couple of years until more dual-mode handsets are produced. Since WiMAX is starting out as a data-only service, Redman says that unless businesses want to rely on VoIP for their mobile voice needs, they should look elsewhere until WiMAX devices are upgraded to include cellular coverage.

“In competitive markets, WiMAX is going to have a very tough row since it’s starting from scratch,” he says. “But WiMAX still has great opportunities in different markets. I think it makes sense in developing markets and developing economies that don’t have broadband comp from wireline carriers.”

Sprint currently plans to offer its first commercial WiMAX services in September in Baltimore, with launches in Washington, D.C., and Chicago scheduled for later in the fourth quarter. The company says other major metropolitan areas shouldn’t expect WiMAX to come to their cities until at least next year.

From: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071808-wimax.html?fsrc=rss-wireless

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“Jaiku is now a part of Google. For more details about Jaiku and Google, see the Q&A about the acquisition.

Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.”

Anyways, it’s a micro blogging tool I’ve been trying lately, it’s still closed and I have a few invites, if anyone is interested, mail me.

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I remember the first time I wanted to install Linux, 15 years ago, I had a Compaq laptop where Linux would never work, but I didn’t know that, so I tried over and over again, I knew so much the slackware installer steps that I could do it without looking at the screen.

One day I got tired and changed the approach, sold my laptop and built my desktop computer with the pieces I knew would work, it was the fastest computer I ever saw with Linux working like a charm. After this day, I never stopped using Linux.

And that’s how the market share for Linux started growing. Prior this I used windows and it was funny how people made fun of it, everybody used, but looked like everybody hated, something was wrong.

We all hoped with the time Microsoft fixed all those problems and worked on making our life easier and not boring, but for some reason it simply didn’t, they committed serious mistakes year after year, and this ain’t new, read this email sent by Bill Gates, what they did after 2003?

Now Apple is being recognized for it’s operating system and graphical interface that just works, makes our life much easier then anything available in the market, any person that try it, will be happier.

Being in the market committing mistakes after mistakes without a competitor to take advantage of it was easy, now we’ll see some action!

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This is one of the tours I did, could see the coast and also visited this village created in the early days, people lived by the mountains and worked in the city, now it’s a famous and busy market as you can see:

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