"hacks" entries
GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service
A new web service, based on specialized hardware, will make cracking the GSM A5/1 protocol fast and cheap.
Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running
Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement: Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and…
Paging systems and Conference Bridges for startups & small teams
Early registration for the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference has opened. To help spread the word, I’ve written this “simplest thing that will work” hack to a common Operations need: Paging systems and Conference Bridges. Step 1: Establish a team contact list with SMS email addresses Create a Google Spreadsheet to create a team roster like this one. My…
Why I Love Hackers
TechWeb TV posted a short video from my opening keynote at ETech. Nominally this year's version of my O'Reilly Radar talk, which focuses on emerging trends that we're watching, the talk was wrapped in a larger theme, namely, why I love hackers, the edges they explore, and why hackers and alpha geeks, not entrepreneurs, are the first step in technology…
DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote
If you will be missing Jeff Hahn's presentation at Etech next week, you can still make your own multitouch display thanks to Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote. Johnny has a number of sensor hacks on his blog, and just announced that EA Games has incorporated his Wii head tracking hack into an upcoming release….
Continuous context off the Shelf
Tom Insam has posted news of Shelf, a Mac program that queries your currently running applications in order to provide you with supplementary information about the people related to the data you're currently interacting with. A revival of the GNOME Dashboard concept, Shelf uses Apple's Open Scripting Architecture to query your applications, looking for matches in your address book. If…
iPhone Accelerometer Hack
Check out this video. Cool! (thanks, Waxy for the pointer) This guy had to drop into assembly language to figure out how to read the accelerometer in his iPhone. These people are SMART. If I were Steve Jobs (real, not fake) I'd be wishing they were working to make distributable legal third party apps and thus helping my business, rather…
Wikipedia is only as anonymous as your IP
Virgil Griffith, a good friend and fellow hacker, reminds us today that anonymity on the internet does not really exist. With his newly released search tool Wikiscanner, you can search an index of 35 million Wikipedia edits by IP, allowing you to find edits coming from within organizations like the CIA or the EFF (bonus if you can find something…
reCaptcha – Stop Spam. Read Books.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn's latest creation reCaptcha is yet another great example of bionic software on steroids. You'll remember Luis von Ahn as the creator of ESP Game (licensed to Google as their Image Labeler) and derivative works Phetch and Peekaboom, but what is less known is that von Ahn is the person behind captchas, version 1.0….
Synergy: Share Your Keyboard and Mouse Across Multiple Platforms
With the news that even Microsoft is supporting cross-platform development more people are going to have multiple systems at their desks. That's where Synergy comes in. It's a small piece of open-source software that allows you to share one keyboard and mouse across multiple screens hooked up to different computers. The computers can be running Windows, Mac, or Linux….