1. Remove Instant Personalization [link]

Instant personalization gives your information to 3rd party websites such as Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp. Uncheck this box to prevent these sites from accessing your information.

2. Remove Unused (and sketchy) Applications [link]

Chances are you’ve added some application at some point, and although you deleted it off your profile, it probably still has access to your profile. Remove any unwanted applications by going to the link above and deleting those apps which shouldn’t be there. You might be surprised how many pages can see your information!

3. Remove Your Public Profile [link]

Data mining will largely rely on your public profile as a starting point for gathering your information. Remove that ability by going to the link above. Change your Facebook Search Results to Friends and Networks, and then Uncheck the option to have a public profile.

4. Lock Down Your Contact Information [link]

On this page, you can find all of the contact methods that are available to you. Unless you really want anybody to contact you, it is best to set almost all of these to “Friends” and nothing else. The only exceptions are the option to add you as a friend, and to send you messages. Both are worthwhile to leave open to everybody unless you happen to get spam from them.

5. Lock Down Your Profile Information [link]

Finally, there’s your actual profile information that should be locked down. Setting all of these to “Only Friends” is the best course of action.

—

If you haven’t done so, lock down your information soon. I can guarantee that the automated data mining services are working full-tilt in case Facebook reverts its privacy settings. It’s time to take control of your profile settings.

Lately I wanted to backup some of my text messages from my iPhone 3GS onto my desktop, but couldn’t figure out how to do that. After some quick research and some poking around, I was able to figure out how to view them quickly and easily.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible if you screw something up on your computer. It’s not my problem if something breaks. Do this at your own risk (which should be pretty low, unless you’re one of those people that shouldn’t be allowed near a computer).

What you’ll need

• SQLite Database Browser (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/files/)

Let’s Get Started

In a nutshell, the SMS system on the iPhone is just a carefully hidden SQLite database. All we have to do is find the file and open it up in the SQLite Browser.

1. First, we need to locate the file that contains the SMS messages, which will be either:
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdbackup
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

   This will be in one of the following locations:

   • Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Windows XP or lower: C:\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name\Application Data\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Mac OS X: User > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup >[iPhone ID]
2. Copy this file to a new location to protect the file in case you accidentally screw something up (your Desktop, for example).
3. Open up the new copy of the file in SQlite Browser, then select the “Browse Data” tab. Finally, select the “message” table from the “Table:” dropdown box

And that’s all it takes! From here, you can export this as a CSV via File -> Export -> Table as CSV so you can import it into Excel, or manipulate it however else you wish. If I get the time, I’m going to write a quick tool to nicely export the messages to PDF so that they look good instead of being in a table. But, it’s a nice fix for wanting to go through them on a computer, or do fulltext searches with the content.

A bit of background knowledge before I go any further: the most common style of computer keyboard is the QWERTY keyboard, named such because of the first six letters in the top row of the keyboard. It was initially designed during the typewriter days not to improve typing efficiency, but to prevent the keys from jamming up. DVORAK, on the other hand, was designed with computer keyboards in mind, focusing on efficiency and ergonomics. As a result, those who are comfortable with DVORAK typically type faster and cause themselves less repetitive stress injuries.

Now, I think that those are both two very good reasons to make the switch to this different style. There is, though, the obvious drawback of having to learn a new keyboard layout. Thankfully, I don’t need to buy anything to get started; any newer operating system has the ability to remap a keyboard to a new layout. The problem with this is that the writing on the keyboard doesn’t match what I want to type, so I can’t look at the keys to help me learn.

So the goal at this point is to work on my typing speed and hopefully get it to a speed that is reasonable. On a regular QWERTY keyboard, I can type at about 75 wpm (words per minute), but on a DVORAK keyboard I’m at a lowly 20 wpm. In order to help improve my speed, I’ve decided that I will type all of my blog posts on my DVORAK layout. After all, they say practice makes perfect, and if I plan to keep up with my blog posts on a regular basis, I should get better pretty quickly.

So, if anyone else out there is on their computer a lot, I challenge you to try out DVORAK some time and give it an honest shot at becoming comfortable at it. It’s certainly a challenge to pick up, but would be beneficial to preserving the life of your fingers, and when you’re in the Computer Science industry like myself, it’s game over if I can’t use my fingers. So to make things a little easier, instructions are below to enable the DVORAK layout on both Linux (Gnome) and Windows:

Linux (Gnome): System –> Preferences –> Keyboard, then go to the Layouts tab.

Windows XP: Add the Language toolbar by right-clicking on the bottom bar, then go into the Settings section under there to add a keyboard.

A lot has happened since I last talked about the IPAM presentation that I took part in. To start with the related topic, I was approached to do the presentation again, this time internally to other departments. Thus, the other co-op student and I set about cleaning up the presentation a bit, fixing some errors, and making it flow smoother. It went much better the second time, thankfully, both from a public speaking perspective and a demonstration perspective. As fun as it was to work on that, I’m glad it’s over and done with right now.

Speaking of work, the number of days that I have left at IPC are dwindling quickly as the new year approaches. I work until December 31st, at which point I’m back in class. It’s been a fun past couple of months, and the paychecks have been very nice, but I’m also looking forward to getting back on campus to get some more studying done. I’ve decided that I won’t get a job during the winter semester so I can concentrate on my studying; I’ll have more than enough money to get through four months, and then I’ll be working in the summer again.

After that presentation was done with at work, I found that I had a fair amount of spare time, as there weren’t too many tasks to work on. I spent that time learning Ruby on Rails, and putting that knowledge towards the new UMSwing site. Although on the outside it will look almost the same as before, this new site will have an extensive backend that will make UMSwing virtually paperless. Although you may not think we use that much paper, think again; I have a full 3″ 3-ring binder in our office that says otherwise. All of our memberships, attendance, and transactions will be tracked on the web application, thus eliminating the need for those pieces of paper to be printed in the first place. Anyways, I’ve been working very hard on the site, and it’s almost ready to be tested by some other people. So, if you’re interested in testing some software for an eco-friendly cause, let me know in the comments section and I’ll keep you informed.

That’s a quick update on what’s happened in the past few weeks at work. I have a few more updates to spew out in the coming days, one of them involving my server upgrade (*cough* RAID *cough*), and some involving some extra-curricular activities (including some new photos to go up soon).

It’s not like me to gush over operating systems. Particularly looking at what we’ve dealt with in the past. If we’re lucky, we got stability in an OS, but usually at the expense of it looking terrible. This year seems to have caused things to change, however. With the release of the Windows 7 RC, Microsoft has restored a good amount of the faith that it lost after churning out the load of crap that it called Vista.

The open source community is never far behind, and Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 operating system is a work of art. Seriously. I would frame it and mount it on my wall if I could. Unfortunately I can’t, so all I can do is gush about it and tell people about all of it’s amazing features. Non-techies: just smile-and-nod your way through this post .

Ubuntu One

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, and Ubuntu has jumped on the bandwagon by presenting One, a personal cloud for the synchronization of files across multiple Ubuntu computers. Set up your account, get your 2 gigs of free space, move files into the Ubuntu One folder, and let them sync. Easy as pie.

ext4 Filesystem

Following in Fedora’s footsteps, Ubuntu has set ext4 as 9.10′s default filesystem. Although you won’t make the switch if you upgrade, fresh installs will feel the warm glow of ext4 during their install.

Uncomplicated Firewall

One of my main complaints with Ubuntu’s previous setups is that it fails to include a firewall by default, and that has been remedied in 9.10, with the introduction of ufw, the uncomplicated firewall. No more sifting through the iptables’s man pages to figure out how to add a simple allow rule; ufw makes firewall management easy.

Faster Load Times with Upstart

Another popular trend recently has been the goal of reducing boot times as much as possible. Fedora Project made waves as they aimed for a 20 second boot time from BIOS to login page. Although they were a little short of their goal, they made some important headway, showing that not every single scrap needs to be loaded and cached on boot. Ubuntu has carried this forward and has made a similar goal. Although they don’t mention any specific time-related goals, they made the switch to Upstart, which makes the loading page look smooth and cuts the boot time significantly.

Thanks for giving this a read, everyone. If you like what you see, or have any suggestions for further writings, drop me a line in the comments section below and give me a vote on Reddit or Digg. I read each and every one of your comments: I promise

After having my iPhone for the past month or so, I’ve found very few problems with it. In fact, I’ve never had a problem  yet.

Well, that’s not completely true. I’ve never had a problem until earlier this week, when the new firmware was released. After about 24 hours of running my phone, I noticed two significant changes. First of all, my battery life was dropping faster than a kid coming off of a caffeine high. Secondly, my phone took a whole 3 seconds (yes, three – I counted) to respond to the “slide to unlock” bar. Those were two things that I was not willing to put up with.

After doing some reading up on the subject, I noticed that I wasn’t alone. Some people blamed the firmware, while others blamed the users. I blame both; clearly the issue wasn’t universal. A hard reset (ie. not using the “slide to power off” slider) seemed to be a temporary fix, but I wanted something more permanent. It seemed the only way to fix this was to do a DFU factory restore. The only catch is that when your phone restarts, you have to create a new phone profile, and NOT restore an existing backup.

The process was relatively painless. I only lost a few photos and my text messages (I’d love to have a way of backing up text messages!), but aside from that I got all of my old data back after loading it on again.  The reset seems to have done the trick; here’s hoping it stays that way.

In the past week, I have gotten a number of experiences that I would not have gotten any other place. My first two days were spent trying to break into a web application on a VM. Although I managed to get access to a few things, I never really got that far.

Today presented a similar scenario. In a virtual network, there were a number of computers: some desktops and some servers. I had to gain access to some “fianancial information” hidden on a server, using exploits in the other machines to gain access. Although I needed a few hints here and there, I managed to get the sensitive information using a variety of tools, including two kernel exploits, sqlmap, Nmap, Metasploit, and RainbowCrack. It was a really fun experience, and I’m glad I got to take it for a test drive.

The icing on the cake for today, however, was using a decompiler to disassemble a fake program requiring activation and bypassing the registration. From the information gathered we made a keygen using 3 different methods. Doing so requires a bit of smarts and a lot of assembly knowledge, which is something I don’t have a lot of. With some help though, I managed to crack the registration, which was an exhilerating experience.

These experiences are pretty much all thanks to Ron Bowes, one of the guys I’m working with. I’d call him an IT Professional (he’s certainly skilled enough), but he might laugh at me for such a remark. The virtual network was all designed by him, and he walked me through the application hacking, showing me every step and how it was done. I certainly have no intentions of using any of that knowledge to break the registration information for any program for any reason other than my own personal development, but it was still a really amazing experience. He keeps a blog on his homepage (I’m mentioned in a recent post), and it’s certainly an interesting read.

A final thing that I’m working on at work is a suitable replacement for Burb Suite, which is an application for attacking web applications. It’s a really powerful program, but there’s three main problems with it: it’s closed source, you have to pay for it, and the Swing interface is god-awful ugly. Other free utilities lack in either power, the user interface, or both. So, upon approval from a supervisor, I might be helping to develop a free open source alternative which would be released into the public domain. We’ve decided to program the backend in Ruby, and so far it’s going really smoothly. In just one day I almost have the proxy designed, and I’m looking forward to getting the backend completed.

All in all, work is great so far. Getting paid to do something you love is amazing.

1. QDB.us
http://qdb.us

We’ve all come to realize that IRC chat rooms are the source of a lot of junk online. It also tends to act as a cesspool of stupidity, amusing stories and typos that end up embarrassing somebody and also providing entertainment for quite a while. QDB is a collection of submitted quotes from IRC. Many are obscene, some are geeky, and most will probably cause you to at least giggle a little. (For more, check out http://bash.org).

2. Lifehacker
http://lifehacker.com

Lifehacker, although one could waste plenty of time on it, will hopefully help you streamline your life. The site provides a number of tips to improve productivity or perform certain tasks by a cheaper alternative means. It’s kept in my daily reading because of some of the ingenious things that they come up with.

3. TED
http://www.ted.com

TED’s slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading”, and that is certainly what they do. The site is filled with over five hundred talks about science, technology, art, psychology, and many other topics. Some of the most amazing ideas have come from TED talks. I guarantee that if you like to be amazed, this site will chew through your bandwidth like a teething puppy.

4. StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com

Create an account, tell it what you’re interested, and click Stumble. StumbleUpon finds a page which matches your interests. That’s what StumbleUpon is all about. For each page you visit, you can tell it if you liked it or not, and it will further refine your Stumbles. I highly recommend the Photography topic.

5. Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org

I shouldn’t need to tell you what Wikipedia is. If I do, you need to educate yourself. Wikipedia is the one big free encyclopedia online. It’s accessible, it’s full of information, and covers every topic imaginable. The best part: it has a Random Page link. Click the link, go to a random page, and repeat.

As many of you may know, I run a site called H2H Security Group, which has been an ethical hacking knowledge base. Over the past few months, there has been little-to-no contributions to it, and it doesn’t seem reasonable to keep the site up and running without any participation from other members. My interests have also shifted (matured, if you will) to encompass development-related topics rather than hacking, and I believe that another style of site would suit my interests more than this one. As such, I have decided to take down H2H. It was a hard decision to make, but I believe that my knowledge and expertise would be more suitable in a development site. Therefore, rather than simply removing a part of myself from the internet, I have decided to replace it with a development site. I realize that there are a lot of them out there, but this is something that I am much more passionate about, and will coincide much more with my interests in web development. Hopefully I will be able to attract more people interested in topics similar to this.

H2H spent a lot of time up and running because of its members. Specifically, I need to personally thank Aaron Goldsmith (aka AltonRashmire) and Sam Jenkins (aka Satal Keto) for their donations, dedication, and hard work. Their support, both technically and monetarily, has meant that H2H has survived for much longer than expected. They have earned both my respect and my friendship, and I will no doubt keep in touch with them, hopefully on my new development site.

One thing that certainly held H2H back was the hosting I went with. I have been with Lunarpages for 2 years now, and I have decided to move on due to lackluster tech support (a phone call I made to them which was not toll-free resulted in me yelling at the person because he was completely unaware of the DNS exploit which resulted around that time which crippled my site) and significant downtime as of late, which has been severe enough to even take down their own site. Add to that the additional costs for simple things like installing SSL certificates, and you have one unhappy customer. I am now starting a web hosting company with a few friends, which will be an eco-friendly web host. If you are looking for a good deal on hosting, contact me; mention this blog post, and I’ll take $1 off per month, which works out to 20% off (this offer good until the end of September 2009). I’ll bring you more information on the new host when it is purchased.

Finally, I start my new job in a week and a half, at the Manitoba Information Protection Centre. I have been looking forward to this for quite a while, and I expect it to be an amazing experience. This will certainly be a great learning experience, and definitely be a great source of income, which will be needed to fund my technology addiction.

That’s all for now. More later. Sorry for not following my schedule. I’ll work on that.

That being said, I’ve done my best to make it my own. Last post I made, I mentioned my sound system, which has received three solid upgrades since I got the car. Although I put a fair amount of money into it, I’m okay with that because everything I put in I can remove in a few hours so that it can be put into my future new car. Next upgrade I did was install some neon lighting inside, which looks amazing, even in my car. I like it so much that I’m going to be putting more inside. Even simple things like getting nice windshield wipers make the car look that little bit better.

I do have some other plans, however, and I’m hopeful that they’ll turn out well. The next thing I’m going to try is painting the car interior.Not all of it, but just the vinyl frame around the interior of the car. As far as customization goes, it’s pretty easy to go. I’ll be using a basic, flat black spray paint, and I’ll do each part one at a time, and hopefully it will make the car look a little sleeker. The entire interior is an off-gray, and I think it needs something to make it look a little sharper. While I’m at that, I’ll also touch up the paint on the outside with one of those touch-up pens. There’s a few nicks in the paint that I’d like to clean up, and it will certainly make the car look cleaner.

The only other thing that I might consider paint-wise is to paint the exterior of my car. My dad actually made the suggestion, which caught me a little off-guard. Regardless, it would be a great learning experience, and could potentially make my car look better. Depending on how creative I felt, I could maybe look into doing a custom design on the side of the car. I think I lack both the creativity and dexterity to pull off something like that, though. I think it would be really fun to learn how to do that, though.

I have a few more things up my sleeve, which I’ll go into next time (I promise next time will be my last car upgrade post for a while). I have a few electrical and fabric things for next time, which I hope to work on this summer.