HiWEB-Interactive Show Log – 006 – 041008

-----Intro with Music, Show Info                                                                                                                                                                0:00

-Opening Comments                                                                                                                                    1:00

“Welcome to HiWEB-Interactive, bringing you information from the edge of technology”

*This is a summary of recent news and technology highlights.

HiWEB-Interactive – Show #6 – From April 10th 2008

Airing weekly Thursdays at 8p (PST) – And available on LIVE.HIWEB.NET as well as archived

-Hot News Topics this week       (*Prepped 24 Hours Prior)                                                                                                                                                                1:30

1- Adobe shoots an AIR ball with new Media Player

2- Researcher creates malicious, router-controlling website

3- iPhone 3G's baseband chip revealed?

4- Windows 7 still slated for 2010…

5- An Open Source Class-Five Switch – FreeSwitch

6- Flawed Security Lets Sprint Accounts Get Easily Hijacked

*Youtube viewers make sure to see HiWEB.NET for the live streaming, also this entire show and other past shows.

See http://live.hiweb.net 

<<<CUT FOR YOUTUBE POSTS>>> IE: Stop Recording/Start Recording

-Review of Hot Topics       (*Elaborate on Hot Topics)                                                                                                                       6:30

*SEE PRINTED NOTES…..

1 -  Adobe shoots an AIR ball with new Media Player - Adobe announced this morning the immediate availability of its new Media Player in conjunction with the launch of Adobe TV, "a free online video resource for expert instruction and inspiration about Adobe products." Adobe Media Player 1.0 is an AIR-based application (Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), codenamed Apollo,[1] is a cross-operating system runtime environment for building rich Internet applications, using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application), making it a cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. With Adobe Media Player, Adobe hopes to offer people a more user-friendly way to interact with Flash content on the desktop and to offer publishers a way to reach a new audience and monetize their media. This Media Player will let users watch their own content stored on their desktops, like QuickTime or Windows Media Player. However, Adobe Media Player is quite limited in the types of media it can actually play—downloaded FLV files (encoded with Spark or VP6) or MPEG-4 (encoded with H.264), and that's it. Adobe Media Player also serves as a media streaming service, complete with "channels" with different content. A number of networks have made their content available through Adobe Media Player, such as Blip.tv, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Food Network, and MTV. Adobe Media Player has some potential to at least be on par with other, similar services, but does it want to just be the same as others? Adobe may have to work a little harder if it wants to stand out.  http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/

<Change Slide>

2 -  Researcher creates malicious, router-controlling website – a researcher has developed a method of DNS attack utilizing typical D-Link or Linksys routers that can allow hackers to gain command of your gear. The winner-takes-all maneuver, which is called a "DNS rebinding attack," functions by putting JavaScript into play that fools your browser into altering your router's configuration, thus letting the operator remotely administer the device. The concept isn't water-tight, as it takes advantage of easily-guessable router admin passwords, though this researcher says the enabling bug exists as a "core issue" for browsers. The attack will be showcased at the RSA security conference, where it's hoped the demonstration will raise awareness about router security vulnerability. In the meantime, we suggest you change that default password.

<Change Slide>

3 -  iPhone 3G's baseband chip revealed - The folks at ZiPhone spotted some code in the brand new 2.0 beta iPhone firmware that could point to the chip to be used in the upcoming 3G iPhone. The code makes mention of "SGOLD3," which could very well refer to Infineon's followup chip to the S-GOLD2 which powers the current iPhone. Infineon's less fancy name for the S-GOLD3H chip is the PMB8878, a 7.2Mbps HSDPA chip with all the video acceleration and media playback features iPhone users have come to expect. Advantages over its predecessor include higher resolution camera support (5 megapixels instead of 2), a 2x speed MMC / SD interface and DVB-H module support, but that doesn't necessarily mean any of those specs will end up in the ensuing iPhone 3G -- S-GOLD2 has plenty of features the current iPhone doesn't take advantage of. The processor speed, however, remains the same.  3G will still be 8GB and 16GB Models, although will be a little thinner.

<Change Slide>

4 - Windows 7 still slated for 2010 says Microsoft, Bill Gates just crazy-talking - the company was really planning on shipping Windows 7 in 2010, that first date doesn't make a lot of sense unless the plan is to ship Windows 7 much, much earlier. And hey -- what's Bill Gates doing telling investors this afternoon that Windows 7 will come "in the next year" and that he's "super-enthused" about it? As far as we know, the official Windows 7 timeline hasn't changed.  Windows 7 will employ a minimalistic variation of the Windows kernel, known as MinWin, it’s being developed for use in Windows 7. This is a self-contained kernel reducing the disk footprint and memory usage. Also Windows 7 will have new touch features. Lots of Gadget integration, PIN/UNPIN Windows Support, Ability to store Internet Explore settings on your Windows Live account.  And much more…

 <Change Slide>

5 - An Open Source Class-Five Switch – FreeSwitch  - Open source projects have revolutionized operating systems, web servers, web browsers, and so why not carrier switches? The FreeSwitch open source project released its Release Candidate 1 (RC1) yesterday providing and by early accounts the software rocks. “We replaced a cluster of 10 Asterisk servers with a single FreeSwitch server,” The software is a high-speed call switching engine that telcos or businesses can use to switch calls, build a media gateway, or a media server to host IVR application. Commercial softswitches provide those features, but they run tens of thousands of dollars. FreeSwitch is a free download - FreeSWITCH supports many advanced SIP features. FreeSWITCH supports both wide and narrow band codecs making it an ideal solution to bridge legacy devices to the future. FreeSWITCH builds natively and runs standalone on several operating systems including Windows, Max OS X, Linux, BSD and Solaris on both 32 and 64 bit platforms.

http://www.freeswitch.org/ and/or Specs at http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Specsheet

<Change Slide>

6 - Flawed Security Lets Sprint Accounts Get Easily Hijacked -  With a little bit of social engineering, We found you can hijack a Sprint user's account as long as you know their cellphone number, just a smidge about them, and have half a brain. Once inside, you have total access to their account. You could change their billing address, order a whole bunch of cellphones sent to a drop location, and leave the victim paying the bill. There's also the stalker's wet dream: add GPS tracking to their cellphone and secretly watch their every movement from any computer. Reader Jim told Sprint about this 2 months ago but they ignored him, so I tested it out and am publishing the results in the hope of getting Sprint to fix this exploit. I'll show you we cracked into a Sprint account and just how much damage I could have done, inside...   After a few simple questions then, open sesame, I'm in. – Now we can see the billing address, useful for if I wanted to conduct more identity theft. I could add services, take away services. I could order GPS tracking on his account and see exactly where he is in the world from any computer with internet access. Note naking this system even weaker, the questions seem to be based on public records. All a thief has to do is know your name in addition to your phone number and search these publicly accessible records. Also a Sprint Rep says that "none of the above" for "which properties have you owned" was correct 99% of the time. How could anyone design a system so poorly?

<Change Slide>

- Viewer Questions             (*Troubleshooting, New Tech, Etc.)                                                                                                                                                                                10:00

How can I create add text and edit photo’s for free?

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.  (tiff,jpeg,gif,png,psd,tga, bmp,xwd,xpm,pix,cel,mng,ppm,pcx)

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms.

Available on Linux, MS Windows,  Mac OS X, Sun OpenSolaris and FreeBSD

http://www.gimp.org

InkScape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

In contrast to raster (bitmap) graphics editors such as Photoshop or Gimp, Inkscape stores its graphics in a vector format. Vector graphics is a resolution-independent description of the actual shapes and objects that you see in the image. A rasterization engine uses this information to determine how to plot each line and curve at any resolution or zoom level.

Also available for Windows, MAC OS 10 and

http://www.inkscape.org

Note: Adobe also just released Photoshop Express Free Online http://www.photoshop.com/express

Adobe ha launched this basic version there popular photo-editing software Photoshop free online. While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a "beta" test version, is easier to learn.

Email your questions to:  live@hiweb.net with question in subject line

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-New Technology to keep an Eye On                                                                                                                 12:00

1- Watch with Integrated Cellphone

Can it be? Why... why yes, a watch with integrated cellphone we might (might!) actually wear. The Van Der Led WM2 is a quad-band GSM watch with itty bitty 1.3-inch, 260k color touchscreen display, stereo Bluetooth, up to 240-hours of standby or 300-minutes talk, and 1GB of storage for a few of your MP3 or MP4 files. Better yet, from a distance, those uber geeky keys on the numeric pad look just like the glittering wrist studs capable of mesmerizing Death Metal, she-groupies backstage. Yours for about $471 USD starting Monday.

<Change Slide>  

2- Green-tech base stations cut diesel usage by 80 percent

Flexenclosure is trying to wean the cell phone business in Africa off of fossil fuels.

The Swedish start-up has designed a base station for mobile networks that would run on sun and wind power. It all started with a request from telecom company Ericsson three years ago. The company needed an energy source for a potential project in Africa and wanted a more environmentally friendly solution than the conventional diesel generators that usually power base stations out of reach from electricity grids.

Right now, there are 40,000 base stations for mobile networks in Africa, most of them running on diesel. Each diesel base station consumes approximately 20,000 liters (5,283 gallons) of diesel per year. Soaring energy prices and falling prices for phone plans put mobile network operators in a difficult position. So the phone companies started looking for ways to reduce the cost of operating their base stations

Called E-site, comes with a wind turbine in the network tower and solar panels on the roof. With a small diesel generator. This will reduce the use of diesel by up to 80 percent, according to manufacture.

A traditional base station costs $120,000 to build. An E-site is slightly more expensive, but the additional cost is won back in operational savings after 15 to 18 months, according to Flexenclosure. And after that, a company can save $120,000 to $150,000 in reduced operating costs over a five-year period. Flexenclosure will start to sell their E-sites by the end of the year

<Change Slide>

3-  Mapping the U.S. carbon footprint The Vulcan project is an interesting project out of Purdue University

Until recently, Total carbon emissions were known, but their distribution remained a mystery.That changed on Monday with the release of the most detailed map to date of U.S. carbon emissions from fossil fuels. From a st

The map, by the Vulcan Project, took more than two years to complete and cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, with backing from NASA and the Department of Energy. The result, named after the Roman god of fire, is 100 times more detailed than earlier imagery, according to its researchers.

The overview map appears at first to correlate emissions with population density. However, upon closer inspection it reveals surprises, such as carbon dioxide clustered in semirural areas of the Southeastern United States, where manufacturing has shifted from the Northeast and Midwest.

Over the long term, this system would ideally take into account other global-warming gases, such as methane, in addition to measuring land use

"We want to make it even finer, to the individual-building level, and put it down to a 3-D, Google Earth kind of system that would allow people to zoom in anywhere".

<Change Slide>

-Tech Tip / Demo

-  SmoothWall Open Source Firewall Project - http://www.smoothwall.org/

The SmoothWall Open Source Project was set up to develop and maintain SmoothWall Express - a Free firewall that includes its own security-hardened GNU/Linux operating system and an easy-to-use web interface.

The SmoothWall GPL project was founded in the summer of 2000 by Lawrence Manning (Principle Code Author) and Richard Morrell (Project Manager). Their goal was to create a Linux distribution that could convert a redundant PC into a hardened internet firewall device. With help from other early contributors; John Faulty and Tom Ellils, the first SmoothWall Firewall was posted to sourceforge.net at the end of August 2000.

The project was immediately popular and grew rapidly. Within weeks, thousand of copies had been downloaded and SmoothWall was appearing regularly on magazine cover CDs in the UK and overseas. Many more developers joined the team and new versions were released almost weekly, incorporating new features based on software contributions from all round the world.

Over the years, the project team has changed and the SmoothWall community has grown to include over 15,000 forum members. The initial design goals are still the foundation of SmoothWall Express today:

  1. Be simple enough to be installed by home users with no knowledge of Linux
  2. Support a wide variety of network cards, modems and other hardware
  3. Work with many different connection methods and ISPs from across the world
  4. Use any web browser to manage and configure the software                                                      

69MB | ISO CD Image | SmoothWall Express 3.0 (i386) »

 

Requirements:

Processor Intel Pentium 200 or compatible processors.

Memory 128 megabytes of RAM. More RAM is required for additional services.

Storage 2 gigabytes hard disk – IDE and SCSI devices supported.

Network interface cards A minimum of one supported network interface card (NIC).

If the connection to the Internet is via a broadband device such as a

cable modem, ethernet-presented ADSL, or another ethernet-presented

connection, you will need a second NIC

 

-General Talk/Discussions                                                                                                  16:00

1- Viewers see giveaway link on HiWEB.NET for more details.  Next Giveaway April 24th – Remember the eligibility requirements.   Sub to Youtube, Register and Comment on Blog - *And then stay Tuned for Hot Giveaways  

2- Future segments will include music production segments, hardware reviews and product demos…

3- We are currently engaging SME to produce custom segments away from live show –  

4- Viewers can send show Tips / Recommendations to live@hiweb.net

5- HiWEB-Interactive Past Shows on http://www.hiweb.net/pastshows.html (past shows)

Other:

Zombie Computer Threat via Homeland Security – Help your friends update there computers.

http://www.engadget.com/official-giveaways-rules/ HTC Shift UMPC Giveaway

New li-Ion Batteries 30% Greater Capacity

-Closing Comments                                                                                                                                                              18:00

This was HiWEB-Interactive – Show #6

Remember tune in anytime at live.hiweb.net and Thursdays at 8p (PST) for HiWEB-Interactive’s Tech Show

“Thank You for participating in HiWEB-Interactive, we look forward to bringing you more information from the edge of technology” Until next time have Fun with your technology – Gotta Jiboo!

 

 

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