Group items tagged

linux is getting its big break. many big name companies in the entertainment industry are starting to take notice. samsung is going towards realeasing a linux based phone platform which will be called tizen. tizen will be made for smartphones, notebooks, netbooks, smart tv's and last but not least tablets. as for the smart tv's, fujitsu, and panasonic are looking towards investing into linux.

This new tab syncing feature that google provides, allows the user coordinate the tabs between their mobile device and home laptop/desktop. This relates to Portable Computing because you are able to access tabs on your home computer through a mobile device while outside. This could also connect to the Privacy and Security tag because if someone has access your devices they are able to change your info or documents. This is extremely helpful during your day to day lifestyle since a large portion of the population uses mobile devices. The positive aspect would be that you're able to  continue work. The negative aspect could be that an outside source could access your info. With an Android phone with the new Chrome beta installed, you have the power of  being able to access any open tab any on your desktop from any location.

This post is on cracking Wi-Fi WPA passwords with "Reaver." Many people know that cracking a WEP password is fairly easy, so they use the more bulletproof WPA security protocol. Reaver is a program that exploits a security hole in wireless routers and can crack most routers' passwords with relative ease. First off, you will need the BackTrack 5 Live DVD. Download the Live DVD from BackTrack's download page and burn it to a DVD. Next, you need a computer with Wi-Fi and a DVD drive. Lastly, you need a nearby WPA-secured Wi-Fi Network. Using four steps you can hack into a WPA Wi-Fi Network. Step 1: Boot into BackTrack, Step 2: Install Reaver, Step 3: Gather the Router's information, and Step 4: Crack the WPA password to the Wi-Fi Network. Now I will explain how you can protect against Reaver attacks. Since the vulnerability lies in the implementation of WPS, your network should be safe if you can simply turn off WPS (or, even better, if your router doesn't support it in the first place), however Reaver may still be able to crack your password, even with WPS manually turned off. You could also set up MAC address filtering on your router (which only allows specifically whitelisted devices to connect to your network), but a sufficiently savvy hacker could detect the MAC address of a whitelisted device and use MAC address spoofing to imitate that computer. The good news is that there is a way to surely protect against Reaver. You can get the open-source router firmware DD-WRT installed on your router. Reaver has been tested on routers with this firmware and it was not able to crack the password. As it turns out, DD-WRT does not support WPS, so there's yet another reason to love the free router-booster.

Brendan Eich, the chief executive of open-source software company that makes the Mozilla Firefox web browser resigned - the reason seemingly to befall on his beliefs of gay marriage. As a company, Mozilla's goal was not to make a ton of money and call for fame. Instead, the Firefox team aimed to be an activist organization in promoting the Internet as a public resource (but who honestly still uses Mozilla???) . When you think about it, how does a man's beliefs on the gay rights affect and even begin to relate to his line of work and leadership in an internet company? Apparently ,because of Eich's opinion towards homosexuality, his affiliates and colleagues were uncomfortable and unsure whether their new boss could lead the company in the right direction as an activist organization when his moral story tells otherwise. Maybe this is karma for being not so accepting and acknowledging equality towards other people.

Pidgin is a open source messaging program that allows your to use many messenger services at once just with this one program. The program is free and all your have to do it download it. it supports 17 networks with favourites such as AOL MSN and many more.  Other chat clients such as skype and facebook can be used if you have the plugin.

PhoneGap released its next iteration last week and it has a variety of changes for developers to take advantage of. PhoneGap has also been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation and, as we have reported before, will be called Apache Callback when it is a full-fledged member of the open source foundation.