Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here are some interesting links from today:

• E-Passports Can Be Hacked and Cloned in Minutes
  Tests have concluded that new e-passports can be hacked within minutes. A researcher cloned the chips in 2 passports and then implanted images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. Both passports passed as genuine by UN approved passport readers.
• Google Search Provides Olympic Event Schedules Inline
  Find out when events in your favorite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
• SlingPlayer 2.0 beta goes public | Crave, the gadget blog – CNET
  The beta version of the SlingPlayer 2.0 software is now available for Windows users as a free download from Sling Media’s Web site. The software, which allows owners Slingbox products to access their TV programming via any broadband-connected PC…
• Watch the Olympics Online
  The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won’t miss any action is to take advantage of the many video outlets online.

Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new Wordpress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on Wordpress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.
Read the rest of this entry »

With this simple “hack” anyone can go from zero to 500, 5000, 50,000 subscribers in a single day!  Well, at least that’s what your Feedburner badge will say.  It’s quite obvious that you would be able to subscribe to your own feed and inflate your numbers but who’d have thought it could be this easy?

I may have a couple thousand subscribers by tomorrow .

Here’s the original article on TechCrunch.

Tuesday, June 17th is Download Day 2008 as proclaimed by Mozilla. They are trying to set a new World Record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period with their release of Firefox 3.

All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

Do your part, click the logo below.

It’s long been the belief that broadcasting your wireless SSID is horribly unsecure. However, with Vista, people are noticing that maybe that doesn’t work so well anymore. This is mostly due to Microsoft’s belief that NOT broadcasting your SSID is actually less secure.

A non-broadcast network is not undetectable. Non-broadcast networks are advertised in the probe requests sent out by wireless clients and in the responses to the probe requests sent by wireless APs. Unlike broadcast networks, wireless clients running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Server® 2003 with Service Pack 1 that are configured to connect to non-broadcast networks are constantly disclosing the SSID of those networks, even when those networks are not in range.

Therefore, using non-broadcast networks compromises the privacy of the wireless network configuration of a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003-based wireless client because it is periodically disclosing its set of preferred non-broadcast wireless networks.

Microsoft has reflected this in the way Vista connects to non-broadcast wireless network by making it harder for you to do so.

When you run through the wireless network connection wizard and setup you can fill in all the appropriate information correctly and it still won’t work. Why? Well, because it didn’t ask you if you want to allow the connection even if the network is not broadcasting. You have to go back into the connection and check the appropriate check box.

I’m not sure why Microsoft wouldn’t just ask you that question during the setup. It’s either an oversight by Microsoft or they’re trying to help us figure out that non-broadcast is actually less secure. So to fix the issue users just start broadcasting their wireless SSID again and voila! It works!

I’m not a security expert so I don’t really know if it’s more or less secure but Microsoft obviously feels it is and their pushing that with Vista by making it harder to connect to a non-broadcast wireless access point.

Non-broadcast Wireless Networks with Microsoft Windows