2. Cell phone holder out of a CD:


3. Unlock your car with a tennis ball:

4. Make a bump key that opens A LOT of doors:

5. Win every coin toss:

6. Escape handcuffs:

7. Double your gas mileage:

8. Free Wifi booster:

9. Remove your own car dents:

10. Open beer with your ring:

Hope you enjoyed and make use of the videos. If you have any you want to add, just let us know in the comments.

In any case you should find The Hacker FAQ an interesting read. Have a look for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.

Disabling atime and diratime on your Linux ext3 file systems can improve disk performance up to 40%!

WARNING: If you are using programs such as tmpwatch, mutt, or mail-notify this configuration change could cause those programs that make specific use of atime not to work.

1. Start a terminal.
2. Switch to root using the “su -” command.
3. Backup your fstab - “cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old”.
4. Open your /etc/fstab in the editor of your choice (nano, kate or gedit recommended). This can be done by issuing the command “nano /etc/fstab”, “kate /etc/fstab”, or “gedit /etc/fstab”.
5. Locate the partitions that contain your / and /home file systems, as well as any other file system you want to optimize. Examples include /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3, or /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3.
6. In the fourth section (just before the two numbers at the end of the line) you will see the options section of the fstab.
7. Enter “,noatime,nodiratime” after the existing options for each partition you wish to optimize.
8. Save the fstab file.
9. Reboot.

Enjoy your newly optimized Linux ext3 file system. And if you don’t believe it is 40% see this post at kerneltrap.org.

The script now checks to make sure you enter numbers and if not, strips non-numbers. It also limits the length of each category to 2 characters and a total length of password to 50 characters (I don’t think many people have a password over 50 characters).

The script also now multiplies the times 8 to account for growth of technology.

N E ways - Download Brute Force Calculator 1.1 here. It is released under the GNU GPL.

See old posts, here, here, and here.

Build your own web spider (then all you have left is the search engine):

Build a Web spider on Linux by IBM DeveloperWorks.

You are thinking,”Wow! But it must be a pain to run and configure.”. Nope!

Run Logstalgia and point it to your Apache log file:

Read the README.txt file included in the downloads for more command line options.

Know of any other ways to visualize network traffic? Let us know in the comments.

[via Debian Package of the Day]

This did not affect my game play or score in any way:

I bought my foam at Wal-Mart. Just tell them in the crafts department that you want 2mm ‘Foamies’. Foamies do not have an adhesive already on them so I used Elmer’s Spray adhesive (it is removable with a bit of rubbing alcohol).

UPDATE: I did find that after a certain amount of play the foamies start to form a bubble in the center and slowly come unglued. I would assume it is from the impact of the drum stick slowly making the glue ineffective. Let me know if you have a better solution.

I also stuck a layer of felt over the top of the foam and it seemed to improve the noise even more.

I bought the sheet metal at the hardware store for about $20. There was a thicker version for $40.

I didn’t use a dremel, I used a jig saw with a metal saw and it worked just fine. Just be sure to cut SLOW.

I used a cobalt drill bit. Also, self tapping screws and self drilling screws ARE the same thing. I also did not have a grinder, so I used the cement on the road to smooth the edges out.

Let us know about ways to improve this process or ways that you have modded your original Rock Band drums in the comments.

SMTP Brute Force Block Rule:

The above rule will block hosts with packets destined with the content of “Authentication failed”.

This may vary based on your mail server software. You can test this by doing a telnet to your mail server:

The last line - “500 5.7.0 Authentication Failed” - will tell you what you need to specify for the content rule option based on your server response to the failed login. You may also need to modify other parts of the rules based on your environment, e.x. sid to avoid conflicts with other rules.

NOTE: Snort will not block the offending host unless you have the SnortSam plugin installed.

This rule has been tried and tested by THC Hydra.

So I did a port scan and found that TCP port 3389 (RDP) was open on the offending machine. I was too curious at this point not to indulge.

I hit the IP with RDP session and it shot me right into the server without authentication. Whoo!

SO I RAN A FORK BOMB:

:s
START %0
GOTO :s

That was all she wrote….

P.S. - Moral of this story is, “Don’t try to hack someone when your machine is 10 times more vulnerable than the victim’s.”

HINT: You may have to adjust the threshold by modifying the ‘count 20, seconds 10′ part to meet your needs. Some brute forcing programs can generate up to 80 logins per second, so it is possible to set the threshold much higher if you are getting false positives.

They got in by brute forcing a log in page for the web mail interface. The intruders also used the compose mail page to send spam after they broke in.

I wrote my own snort rule to detect and block brute forcing and sending spam through the web mail (It will only block if you have snortsam properly setup). This rule blocks anyone that does an HTTP POST more than 20 times within 10 seconds (I believe it is a ratio - average of 2 times per second).

HINT: Replace X.X.X.X with the IP of your web server. Take out the “fwsam: src, 5 minutes;” if you are not using snortsam (you should be ;p). Replace 123456789 with your own custom ID and make it large so it doesn’t conflict with default snort rules.

Have you wrote any custom snort rules or do you have a suggestion to improve this rule? Show us in the comments.

Emerging Threats is funded by National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

You can download the rule sets separately or all at once.

Check out the perl script to automatically update your iptables, Honeywall and Smoothwall configurations, and the inline snort config.

Confused? Read the Emerging Threats documentation site.

What is Snort?

SNORT® is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system utilizing a rule-driven language, which combines the benefits of signature, protocol and anomaly based inspection methods. With millions of downloads to date, Snort is the most widely deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology worldwide and has become the de facto standard for the industry.

If you use snort and don’t already know about Emerging Threats I am sure it will help you out on your intrusion detecting escapade. If you have any tips for using Emerging Threat’s rules let us know in the comments.

The process was created by Phelyx, a supposed street artist and magician.

Phelyx covers the process from start to finish and will have you making your own t-shirt designs in no time. Just be careful with the bleach!

Have you made any t-shirt designs or maybe you have other methods? Show and tell us in the comments.

1. Turn your Xbox 360 into a Laptop - Like soldering? Engadget takes us through the steps of turning your Xbox 360 into a portable laptop. How. Cool. Is. That.
2. Flashing the DVD firmware to play game backups - If you have owned your Xbox 360 for some time it is possible to flash the firmware on the DVD drive to play game backups (your own backups of course ;)). WARNING - This could ban you from Xbox Live!
3. Play online without Xbox Live for Free - By using Xlink Kai you can play multiplayer LAN games online for free! MS has put a 30ms ping limit on the Xbox 360, so be sure to close all other internet apps before playing. Check out the wiki for more details.
4. Use Your Laptop as a free Xbox Wi-Fi Adapter and save $80 - Use internet connection sharing to wire your Xbox 360 to the internet instead of buying the $80 adapter.
5. DIY Xbox 360 Wifi Adapter - If you don’t want a cord from your Xbox 360 hanging out of your laptop all the time you can always follow Geeks Are Sexy’s guide to a DIY Xbox 360 Wifi adapter.
6. Stream Netflix Movies - By using vmcNetFlix you can watch all your favorite movies from your Netflix subscription.
7. Use your own HDMI cable and save $40 - Chad shows us how to fit the A/V adapter into the Xbox 360 while using your own HDMI cable instead of buying the $40 official Microsoft cable.
8. Turn your Xbox A/V cable into a VGA Cable for $7 - Once again, Engadget to the rescue with DIY instructions on how to turn your standard Xbox 360 A/V cable into a VGA cable on the cheap.
9. Mod your Case - There are limitless ways you can customize your Xbox 360 case. To start you off you can paint the face plate and the controller.
10. Surf the web - If you have Windows Media Center Editon you can surf the web from the comfort of your Xbox 360. Note that this is limited functionality only - no typing, no sound, etc. Basically just a screen shot from your PC (Good enough for pr0n).

Hopefully you ran into something new and there is still more to discover with your Xbox 360. With such an interesting machine to tweak, no wonder everyone has out-done themselves on hacking/modding the Xbox 360.

Have a hack or mod that we didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments.

And it is as easy as — download, extract, run!

From the site:

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser and is self contained. The Tor IM Browser Bundle additionally allows instant messaging and chat. If you would prefer to use your existing web browser, install Tor permanently, or if you don’t use Windows, see the other ways to download Tor.

The bundle includes portable Firefox and also Pidgin IM software with the IM Browser bundle (separate download).

Check out the Tor Browser page for downloads and instructions.

If you like Tor you might want to check out Take Control of Tor With Vidalia, Browse Anonymously with XeroBank, and using Anonym.OS to encrypt and anonymize traffic.

You have multiple computers, and your desk is cluttered with keyboards, mice, and monitors? You desperately need more space, and you are tired of moving your hands the long way from one keyboard to the next? Do not worry any more - rescue is here in form of synergy.

Synergy is a nifty little program which allows you to share your mouse and keyboard with other computers on your network. Just move the mouse out of your screen and it magically appears on the screen of the next computer allowing you to type there. Additionally, you can share cut and paste selections, so you can cut something on one screen/PC, move the mouse to the other screen and paste your selection there . Synergy is available for Windows (XP, NT), GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix. And the best thing is you can even mix different operating systems. Sounds interesting? So let’s see how it works.

Synergy is composed of a server (synergys) and a client part (synergyc) which communicate with each other over a network to exchange keyboard and mouse events. The server is started on the main PC whose keyboard and mouse should be shared, and the client is started on each machine which should use the input devices of the server. In the configuration file, you define which screen is to the left, right, top, or bottom of each monitor. (like in other multi-monitor setups). If the mouse is moved over an edge, the control events are sent over the network to the host which is defined in the configuration.

Get it

There are binary packages available at the synergy sourceforge page, but if you are using a OS with package management system I recommend checking if it is available there first. Install synergy on every machine which should participate in the input sharing.

In GNU/Debian based distros (sid/unstable in my case) type:

Configure it

A sample configuration for three hosts (main, lefty, and righty) is provided below and is stored in your home directory on the server under .synergy.conf in GNU/Linux or provided to synergys with –config <configpath>.

In this configuration “main”, will act as the server, and its keyboard and mouse will be shared with “lefty” and “righty”. In the “screens” section the host names of all participating machines are listed and in the “links” section the layout of the screens is given. For each host, you can define which screen is at the left, right, top, or bottom. You don’t need to be consistent about the layout, and you could even create a wrap-around loop ( lefty <-> main <->righty <-> lefty …).

See the synergy configuration page for more options like shortcuts for screenswitching.

Run it

After you finished the configuration on your main machine, start the server with

Note that you should run the server as a normal user.

On your client machines run:

The synerg client will leave the mouse and keyboard of the client machines fully functional, so you can switch to the other keyboard from time to time or let a second person type while you grab his mouse from time to time.

If you run into troubles, check the hostnames and your firewall settings. Make sure that you are allowing connections to port 24800 (synergy default port).

Secure it

Warning: Keyboard input is sent unencrypted over the network - this is a severe security issue because passwords could be read by anyone on the network. In GNU/Linux there is a simple solution for this dilemma (which is pointed out in at the synergy page) - just use ssh tunneling. You will need an ssh server on the server machine and on the client type:

This will create a forward to the server. You will now be able to connect with synergy to your localhost and the connection will be tunneled to the server. On the client type:

Easy handling with quicksynergy

For fortunate users of GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, there is also a nice simple configuration tool called quicksynergy. Grab it via your favorite package manager or download it from the sourceforge page. Run the tool on the main server and each client.

Related

There are some systems which are related to synergy. One of them is Distributed Multihead X (DMX), which allows the usage of multiple displays of multiple hosts on a single host. It is somewhat complicated to set up, and as far as I know it works only for X Windows systems and not for MS Windows.

Links

• Synergy on sourceforge
• Quicksynergy on sourceforge
• OpenSSH Homepage
• Distributed Multihead X on sourceforge

This article is user submitted by rich0rd. You can also submit articles.

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