Study Shows "Secret Questions" Are Too Easily Guessed

Several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret questions (the hijacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was one). This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, will show how woefully insecure secret questions actually are. As reported in Technology Review: 'In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.
Schneier pointed out years ago how weird it is to have a password-recovery mechanism that is less secure than the password.

via Slashdot

Fighting with Sony Corp.

Yesterday I had a chance to meet with a Sony VAIO vgn-cs110e laptop. OS on this laptop was killed either by a virus or poor windows update, however the solution was to do a fresh install of Vista Home Premium. But after installation the other problem appears: after downloading all the drivers, I installed the Sony Notebook Utilities. Then ever since that, this pop up would keep showing up and force me to hibernate.

No matter if it's a kind of collusion between Sony and Microsoft to prevent installation of any non-OEM copies of Windows or just a bug, but the only way to fix this problem was to uninstall Sony Notebook Utilities. This is a really bad idea as it disable laptop's web-camera...
So, after the long googling and exploring system processes I found out that you need to disable "ISB Utility" service (using Starter software or msconfig) to prevent that noisy popup to appear.

My desktop's look and feel

HOW-TO: install and use ZTE626 3G modem on Ubuntu 9.04

A few days ago my boss has stopped using ZTE626 3G modem (which is sold by Beeline – Russian mobile provider). The reason why he's made this decision is that the amount of data traffic, his specific software produce, increased dramatically, so it's a bad idea to use such an expansive 3G internet for his applications.

BUT.... For my daily use (e-mail, IM, facebook, etc.) it's good enough. As I have wireless internet connection at home and office the only device to add internet is my laptop running on Ubuntu 9.04 :)

Well, lets start:
our modem has some freaken habits – it launchs virtual CD with windows' drivers and software just after USB connect, preventing it from working properly on any operation system except Windows. And it CAN'T work with any other ISP except Beeline.
To fix both these problems we should upgrade modem's firmware:
1)download this stuff http://www.zte.com.au/downloads/software/MF626_M02_Uptool.zip from Australian ZTE website;
2)backup windows software in case you want to use the modem on windows systems;
3)run it ON WINDOWS, remove SIM-card beforehand
4)click YES on all requests and DON'T remove modem from USB slot
5)now get SIM back
After all these operations you can use your modem with any ISP, not only Beeline. The blue light should indicate EDGE\GPRS signal, the green light for 3G and the red one for unreachable signal instead of original green\red beeline's combination.
To prevent virtual CD start we need QPST software:
1)download it http://forum.allsiemens.com/viewtopic.php?p=539784
2)run Beeline's software on Windows;
3)run Device Manager (My Computer->Properties) and look for modem's COM-port number there;
4)install QPST and configure port number in QPST Configuration;
5)run QPST->EFS explorer and delete CD_STARTUP_FLAG file from modem's filesystem
Actually now your Ubuntu 9.04 is able to find and automatically configure ZTE modem. To ensure you did all these things right type ls /dev/ttyUSB* in terminal, it should list one to three devices.

This how-to should works on all linux distributions with 2.6.27.9 or later kernel. If your kernel is older you may try to add ONDA module, download it here http://narod.ru/disk/5376885000/linuxdriveronda.tar.gz.html, compile and install it... should work.

I hope it's helpful for anybody.