Are you based in the U.S.A, Austria, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands or Switzerland and is your iPhone upgraded to Firmware version 3.0? Then all you need to do is visit this URL to enable Tethering on your iPhone. No hacking, jailbreaking or any of that scary stuff. Just visit this url, on your iPhone!
Then carefully read the instructions, click a few magic buttons and restart your iPhone. You will be able to surf the web on your Mac via the 3G connection of your iPhone. The speed will be limited to the Bluetooth connection between your iPhone and your Mac AND you should go easy on those downloads so you don’t wake up your Mobile Provider. (more…)
Written on 22nd June 2009
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
New Facebook discussion blog FBHive has announced their arrival to the blogosphere with a post describing a serious vulnerability within the worlds largest social network, Facebook.
The site claims to have found a hack which exposes the entire “basic information” section within anyones Facebook profile. This section includes location, gender, relationship status, relatioships, political views, religions views, birthday and hometown. Clearly enough for sly marketers and identity thieves to play with.
TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters contacted the blog to challenge them to exposing his basic profile information:
“I asked them to tell me some things about me that they could only find on my Facebook account, which is protected from public viewing and should only be accessible to my networks and friends. Almost immediately, they replied with my birth date, the name of my hometown, the name of my fiancé and my political views. That’s scary (and more proof is available if you click the link below).”
Rightfuly, the site doesn’t explain exactly where/how the leak is hacked, but does refer to a Register article that gives details of how Facebook Search can expose many of these details.
FBHive says they have contacted Facebook via a number of channels but have received no response.
Written on 12th March 2009
12 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
To prove the power of ‘Botnets’, the BBC News Technology program ‘Click‘ deliberately hacked into 22,000 PC’s. With the help of security firm Prevx, they took over thousands the computers in an effort to highlight the increasingly serious security vulnerabilities of standard computers.
What are Botnets?
Botnets are compromised computers with parasites that lie dormant awaiting on commands to reproduce themselves, send get-rich-quick spam to the gullible, and launch DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.
The tv program managed to prove their point by accessing the computers via users in chat rooms.
The BBC have said,
“the programme did not access any personal information on the infected PCs and its botnet was destroyed after finishing the experiment”
A Fix?
Unfortunately, though there are tools out there to detect botnet attacks and can shut them down – it really isn’t straight forward. The ideal long term solution would be to remove the money companies can earn from the business. Fine anyone who advertises their products in spam, malware, emails etc..Make them pay extortionate amounts for it, lose any profits they could have made or potentially make and eventually the problem will go away.
The news du jour is that some people have managed to install and run Linux on an iPhone. I’m not sure what the benefit is but I’m sure someone will be able to tell me that in the comments here. Check out the video for proof:
We all know the hype of Applications moving online with Gmail, Google Docs and other popular webaps as examples. But a drum machine? That works? In Javascript???
Yep, that is what the people at TheManInBlue have built as a demonstration. All without libraries and without Flash. The developer published as a demo of what is possible with Javascript and hasn’t tested it on all browsers. But he does offer this:
“I do guarantee that if I’m running it on my computer, on a stage, through a loud speaker system with plenty of bass, in front of a couple hundred people, it kinda makes me feel like a rockstar.”
It is supposed to work in IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 as long as you have the Quicktime Plug-in installed. Sounds like it will work on all Macs and some Windows machines to me. Check it out, and pump up the bass!
Written on 25th August 2008
1 COMMENT Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
According to the Sunday Herald, an international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-heists ever by stealing the identities of an estimated 8 million people – who have all been guests in at least one of the 1300 existing Best Western Hotels in the past 12 months – in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than 3.5 billion euro in illegal funds.
A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.
It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007.
Update:Neville Hobson was kind enough to Twitter-point me to a statement issued by Best Western (PDF), wherein they claim the newspaper is being sensationalist, and that most of the facts presented in the article are inaccurate, exaggerated, unsubstantiated or false, although they fail to provide more insight as to what the extent of the damage really is.
Update 2: Best Western provided more feedback on the issue:
“We can confirm that on August 21, 2008, three separate attempts were made via a single log-on ID to access the same data from a single hotel. The hotel in question is the 107-room Best Western Hotel am Schloss Kopenick in Berlin, Germany, where a Trojan horse virus was detected by the hotel’s anti-virus software. The compromised log-in ID permitted access to reservations data for that property only. The log-in ID was immediately terminated, and the computer in question has been removed from use. “
The Sunday Herald alerted Best Western, who promptly closed the security breach on Friday afternoon, but experts fear that information seized in the raid is already being used to pursue a range of criminal strategies. Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx, has even been quoted saying “In the wrong hands, there’s enough data there to spark a major European crime wave.”
The stolen data included private information like home addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.
The initial hacker succeeded in bypassing the system’s security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations. The next tume a member of staff logged in, her username and password were collected and stored.
If you’ve stayed in a Best Western hotel at some point during the past year, you might want to consider hooking up with their customer service department to see what’s up. Use the number 0800 528-1238.
Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.
Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.
For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.
Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers, some sites manipulate the counter.
Every once and a while co-editor Patrick and I stumble on a shady looking website with a ton of readers. That made us wonder whether Feedburner is hackable. I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!
We found an easy way to hack Feedburner (Not the obvious hack that simply steals a chicklet from a popular site). Looking at the subscriber count at some sites, we’re not the first ones who found out, but we are the first ones to write it down. All it takes is an OPML file, a Netvibes Universe, and a good night’s sleep.
EDIT: While the hack still works, I am happy to tell you that Google and Netvibes are working on a solution to the problem. Steve Olechowski, co-founder Feedburner mailed me and said: “These things happen occasionally and are usually fixed in a couple of days”, he added that the feedburner counts do not influence advertisement measurement. Franck Mahon from Netvibes said: “We are working on a fix to filter out in the reporting the duplicates while still allowing people to add several instances of the widget to their startpage.” When things get fixed, it would be interesting to see the differences on some sites.
How to manipulate your Feedburner subscribers in two minutes
Moral of the story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things up.
Once they do this, it will be very interesting to see which blogs suddenly lose a bunch of subscribers…
Written on 22nd June 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Are you based in the U.S.A, Austria, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands or Switzerland and is your iPhone upgraded to Firmware version 3.0? Then all you need to do is visit this URL to enable Tethering on your iPhone. No hacking, jailbreaking or any of that scary stuff. Just visit this url, on your iPhone!
Written on 22nd June 2009
The site claims to have found a hack which exposes the entire “basic information” section within anyones Facebook profile. This section includes location, gender, relationship status, relatioships, political views, religions views, birthday and hometown. Clearly enough for sly marketers and identity thieves to play with.
To prove the power of ‘Botnets’, the BBC News Technology program ‘
Written on 25th August 2008
Last week 
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is 
Written on 4th August 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
