But over the past few months, Google has also been secretly testing a new UI and look for the Google Search engine, which has essentially not changed much since its inception. Do you want to be one among the secret testers, to have a sneak peak of the new design?

To get this Hack Attack to work for you, you need to be using the international version of Google i.e. http://google.com/ncr and not the localized version that you are redirected to usually.

Once you are at the Google Homepage, copy the following text and paste it in the address bar as it is…

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Once you are done, press enter and reload the Google Homepage. You Should now be looking at an all new design for the homepage. Perform a search and you’ll see a new search results page with an always visible Sidebar.

So Do you like the new look? I do quite like it, at least the sidebar is useful to perform searches more rapidly. But I’m not quite sure if it will be well received by all the people because it is quite a departure from the Google we are all used. However they could tone down the Blue a bit because at times I feel am at the MSN of yesteryears rather than Google.

Or you never know Google may never release it in the wild…

However if you aren’t a fan of the new design, you can remove the corresponding cookie from your browser. Here’s how its done in Chrome

Leave your comments, as to what you feel about the new Design?

Via Google Blogoscoped | Google Caffeine Update | Image Credit : ientu

Well it goes after the personal data stored on your iPhone which includes email, contacts, SMS, Calendars, Photos etc. So if you have Jailbreak’ed your iPhone, you have to be concerned now.

Also the worm doesn’t need to be running on an infected device, the attacker could instead load it onto a Computer in a public network and scan for iPhone’s connected to the same network that are deemed to be vulnerable.

The attack vector is simply the Jailbroken iPhone, which is what you need to secure if you are running a Jailbroken iPhone. Since the iPhone runs on the trusted Unix Based Filesystem the fix is actually easier than it seems and you lose out on nothing with regards to the Jailbreak functionality.

So how do we do it? We just change the root password of iPhone to prevent hackers from getting access to the precious personal data on your iPhone. It’ll hard take you a couple of minutes but will save you a lot of trouble later.

• First up you need to Install the MobileTerminal application from Cydia.

  

• After it is installed, you’ll need to reboot your iPhone.
• Launch MobileTerminal from the springboard and type in the command: passwd
• When it asks you for the “Old Password,” type in: alpine
• At the new password prompt, type in a new password of your choice, but make sure its strong and secure enough
• Re-enter the password to confirm.
• You’ll now be returned to the Mobile$ prompt which means the change was successful.
• Now you’ll need to change the password for the root account. Type in the command login root.
• Once again, you’re prompted for the old password. Type in alpine.
• Now type in the command passwd
• You’ll then go through the change password routine a second time, entering in alpine as the old password, creating a new password and then re-entering it to confirm.
• Yup, that’s it. Once done, Close MobileTerminal and uninstall it from Cydia if you feel so.

P.S. I’ve personally tested this on my iPhone running iPhone OS. 3.1.2 Jailbroken using BlackRa1n. But I am pretty sure this should work other iPhones as well.

Let us know in the comments to explain how the process went for you. You really have to thank Dev Team and other teams working on the iPhone platform, with the increased power, they also make it relatively easy for us to secure our iPhones.

But the one thing that I didn’t like about Connectify is its interface. It just doesn’t blend with the interface of Windows7. Have a look at the screenshot below that shows Connectify in action :

What Connectify does is create a Virtual WiFi connection that anyone can connect to, just as it were a access point. Today I came across another app called Virtual Router that does the same job, but albeit in a much more intuitive way.

To start just install the app and fire it up. Enter the name for the network, a password and choose the connection you want to share and just hit start Virtual Router. And moments later you should have an active Wireless network you can share.

Virtual Router is Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 only, because only they have the new built in Wireless Hosted Network(a.k.a Virtual WiFi) technology. It uses WPA2 Encryption for ensuring security and this encryption cannot be turned off.

How is Virtual WiFi different from Ad-Hoc? Ad-Hoc is best suitable if you are connecting two computers and can be used to share files, while tools such as Connectify and Virtual Router allow you to share the internet connection with multiple number of computers.

Sidenote : Mac OS.X has had this feature built in for many years now.

Download Virtual Router [Microsoft CodePlex] | Image Credit : Roger Bits

There seem to be guides all over the internet, that allow you to create your own Bootable Windows7 Installation on a Pen Drive. Whilst not overly complicated, these methods have enough of nonsense to scare the beginners away.

So read on to find out how you can install Windows7 on your computer using a USB Pen Drive, without all the pain of burning DVD’s etc…

Lets get started then, here are the requirements before we proceed :

• A Windows7 ISO Image (Any Version will do)
• UltraISO (It isn’t free, but the trial version is sufficient for this guide)
• A 4+ GB Pen Drive

Let’s begin then..

1. Download and Install UltraISO (Free Trial)
2. Plug in the pen drive into your PC, and backup everything that you need from the Pen Drive, because all the existing data will be wiped off the pen drive.
3. Start UltraISO, navigate to File->Open and locate the ISO image of Windows 7 and open it.
4. In the local tab located at the bottom left, select your USB Drive. (Double check to make sure this is the drive you want to make bootable)
5. Now click Bootable->Write Disk Image from the Menu
6. In the dialog box that appears, click Write to write the image onto the USB pen drive. (Optionally you can also check Verify, this will check the data written for any errors)
7. Wait it for it to complete, and congratulations you’ve just created a bootable Windows7 Installation using USB Pen Drive.
8. Restart your computer and press F2/F9 while booting up, to boot from the Pen Drive and proceed to install Windows7 just like you’d do otherwise using a DVD.

[Bonus]

Want an even easier solution to install Windows7 using your USB Pen Drive. Go ahead and grab a copy of WinToFlash. Extract the contents of the Zip Archive and open WinToFlash.exe. You should now see a screen as shown..

Click the “Huge” Windows Setup Transfer Wizard and you should now see something like this. Enter the appropriate details and bang you can create the bootable disk in less than a couple of simple steps.

Yes it really was that simple to create your own Windows7 Installation Pen Drive! Drop in your comments and let us know if this Hack Attack worked for you

Photo Credit : Molotalk & bfishadow | Downloads :  WinToFlash & UltraISO

Via DotNetWizard & Raymond CC

Perfect gift for the new years from Dev Team Here are the prerequisites before you can proceed with the unlock of the phone..

• You Must Have Jailbroken iPhone 3G Running Firmware 2.2 with the baseband modem firmware as 02.28.00
• To find the version of your baseband firmware, go to Settings->General->About and scroll down to find the version of your modem firmware..
• If you are not on Firmware 2.2 with baseband firmware at 02.28.00 you will need to restore your iPhone to 2.2 and rejailbreak/pwn using QuickPwn.

Alright now that you guys, lets proceed with juicy stuff of unlocking your iPhone..

Okay here we go….

• Fire up Cydia from your SpringBoard.

• Select the Manage Tab at the bottom of Cydia.

• Select the Sources Button.

• Press the Edit Button at the top of the screen.

• Now Press the Add Button at the top of the screen.

• Enter http://apt9.yellowsn0w.com/ as the source url and press the Add Source button.

• Return to Cydia once the source has been added, and press the Done button at the top of the screen.

• Tap on the just added repo apt9.yellowsn0w.com .

• Select yellowsn0w from the list of available packages.

• Press the Install button at the top of the screen.

• Press the Confirm button at the top of the screen.

• After the installation has been successfully completed, press the Return to Cydia button.

• Now Restart your iPhone, and pop in your third party SIM into the iPhone.. The Phone should now be unlocked and running on the carrier of your choice..

That was simple ain’t it? The Dev Team has really done brilliant job here, in making the process of unlocking the iPhone so darn easy! If you run into problems during this, read the following suggestions..

• It seems that getting your iPhone to pick up your new carrier can be helped by turning off 3G and perhaps toggling the Airplane Mode switch on and off.
• If you are still having problems try removing and reinserting the SIM or booting with the new SIM already inside.
• If none of these seem to work, wait for a couple of days since yellowsn0w is still beta, so there might be bugs the Dev Team will squash out in the coming few days.

The Beauty of yellowsn0w is that it makes no changes to anything on your iPhone.. Yes you heard it right, yellowsn0w will in no way modify the contents of your iPhone Baseband.. Here’s what MuscleNerd of the Dev Team said :

it doesn’t touch a bit of the baseband NOR…all the patches are injected on the fly in RAM…they go away with poweroff

So you can uninstall yellowsn0w anytime you wish, and still leave your iPhone in a pristine state..

A Big thanks to the Dev Team for the wonderful effort, and I am sure this is the perfect gift for new years for many many iPhone users all over the world…

Please post in your questions in the comments, I’ll try to help you as much as possible.. Happy new year to all of you

Photo credit: bwana

Getting custom ringtones on the iPhone has always been a process that requires some amount of hardwork. Sure there are jailbreak and third party apps that will you help get custom ringtones on the iPhone for free rather than buying from iTunes.

But the catch is that these softwares either cost a bit or require a jailbreak which can be risky for your precious iPhone.

There has to be a easier way right? Thankfully there is a easy, fast and most importantly legal way to get custom ringtones on your iPhone in less than a minute.

Well am referring to a service called Audiko, that allows you to put ringtones on any mobile device and not only the iPhone.

Audiko is a simple service which helps you to make a ringtone of your favorite song! Audiko is an amazing service. It allows you to upload any song, cut up to 40 seconds of it, and put it right into your iTunes Ringtones folder for quick and easy syncing.

Best of all Audiko is a free service and doesn’t require any registration..

Let’s get started with the process..

• To start off visit Audiko.net and search for the song whose ringtone you are looking for.

• And choose an appropriate search result…
• Click "Download Ringtone for iPhone"

• Once you’ve saved the ringtone to a folder on your computer, double click the file to add the file to your iTunes Ringtones library.

• Now whenever you sync your iPhone next you will find the ringtone in your iPhone’s Settings >> Sounds >> Ringtones menu.

What’s more Audiko even allows you to upload a song and cut any part of it (up to 40 seconds).

You can also enter the URL for any YouTube video and Audiko automatically extracts the sound. Just like when uploading a song, you can cut any part of the audio.

Adding custom ringtones on your iPhone could’ve never been easier. No more SSH, no more jailbreaking, and no more useless utilities.

photo credit: ryoichitanaka’s

DVD movies are the best way to pass time while you are at home and have nothing else to do. There are times though when the DVD you rented at the local DVD store has to be returned within 24 hours and you want to watch the movie again and again. In such situations ripping the DVD’s is the best way to go.

If you have been a P2P torrents user for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard of aXXo. A lot of people are in love with him and his releases on the internet (including me as well). The quality of his rips are always spot on, and many people have asked me to how he creates such wonderful rips at 700mb which is insanely small.

Sometime in the past aXXo had stopped releasing new movies, and many users were angry. Well you can’t blame him, because he had his own reasons. The purpose of this Hack Attack though is to reduce your dependency on guys like aXXo.

Its as simple as going to a DVD rental store or site, getting the DVD and creating a perfect 700mb DVD rip for the rest of us to enjoy. You don’t need to depend on guys like aXXo anymore.

Without further delay, lets get started with the process, of creating your super small high quality DVD Rip. Here are the tools you will require to get started…

• DVD Decrypter
• Auto GK
• K-lite Codec Pack (if you already have a codec pack installed you can leave this one out)

Install the above softwares, just like you would install any other software, and then grab yourself a cup of caffeine before you proceed. I am going to split this guide into two parts. Lets get started with the first part.

PART 1 : Ripping the DVD to your Hard Disk

Step 1

Fire up DVD Decrypter. It should like the screenshot above. Insert your DVD in your DVD drive and select the appropriate drive as Source, and a folder on your hard disk as the destination with atleast 3-4GB of free space.

Step 2

As you can see in my screenshot, my DVD doesn’t have any region protection, copy protection and RCE protection. It might not be the same with your DVD, and you need to get rid of the protection schemes.

To get rid of the protection schemes, click tools from the menu bar and select settings. The settings dialog should now appear. Now tick the “Remove Macrovision Protection” check box, this will remove the Macrovision flag of the VOB files on the disc. RCE
Protection Region should be set to the region your drive (or standalone DVD player) has.

You can find the regions below :

• Region 1 – 1: U.S., Canada, U.S. Territories
• Region 2 – Japan, Europe, South Africa, and Middle East (including Egypt)
• Region 3 – Southeast Asia and East Asia (including Hong Kong)
• Region 4 – Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean
• Region 5 – Eastern Europe (Former Soviet Union), Indian subcontinent, Africa, North Korea, and Mongolia
• Region 6 – Peoples Republic of China
• Region 7 – Reserved
• Region 8 – Special international venues (airplanes, cruise ships, etc.)

See the following screenshot for a clearer picture of what you are supposed to do.

Step 3

Now that you are done with everything, you are ready to rip the DVD to your disk. Make sure the drive containing your destination folder has enough free space on it. Select all the files on the right column if they aren’t already selected and hit the Start button as highlighted in the screenshot below.

It should complete ripping after a while and you should see something like this…

Yup that is it, you are done with the first part. Now that you have the ripped files on your disk, you can test them on your media player and when you are satisfied you can eject the DVD. Now lets proceed with part 2 of this guide…

Part 2 : Compressing the DVD to AVI format

Open up Auto GK. It should like the one shown above. Basically this is where all the action happens. I’ll guide you through the process of choosing the best settings through to the last step where you can watch your 700MB rip.

Lets continue then…

Step 4

(Click on the screenshots to enlarge)

Locate the input file from the folder you used to store the rips in DVD Decrypter… Here’s how you select the file. In the Open dialog box, select the details view. The input file that we are going to select is an *.IFO file.

As you can see from my screenshot VTS_00_0.IFO has three .VOB files under it with the maximum size, which means this is the movie we’re looking for. Select the IFO to proceed.

Now give the output file, whatever name you need to give by clicking the Output file field.

Step 5

As you can see from the screenshot above, the program lists the available subtitles and Audio tracks. On my DVD there are no subtitles, and there is only one Audio track, so I will select that.

On most DVD’s you have 2 Channel Sound (2ch), Surround Sound (6ch). I’d prefer Surround sound over normal 2 channel if available simply because they sound much better.

Now select the Target (Output) Size. I have selected 700MB here. Generally speaking, higher the size you select, the more clearer the picture is on the DVD will be.

Now click Advanced Settings button to show the Advanced Options window as shown.

Configure the settings as shown in the Screenshot. Choose XviD over DivX because it gives you higher compression for same quality compared to DivX.

Step 6

Now that you have finished configuring everything, just click the Add Job button and the Start button to start the conversion/compression process.

Just grab yourself some coffee, if you have finished the one you took before getting started. The compression process will take quite a while, so you could even have a nice nap meanwhile.

Note : You won’t much activity in Auto GK itself. A lot of programs will load including a couple of command prompt windows, do their jobs and exit. This is completely normal so don’t bother messing around with anything.

That’s it guys! You have made your first aXXo like DVD Rip!

Please share with is in the comments how the process went. I’ll be gald to hear your opinions out.

P.S : I am trying out a variety of settings, so I will write a follow up post sometime in the future detailing them as well.

If you have any ideas or suggestions please share with us in the comments …

Reading through my RSS feeds today, I stumbled upon an interesting post over at Neowin entitled “Vista’s Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit” which reports on a new technique that can “bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista.”

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection schemes that have been built into Windows Vista by Microsoft.  These new methods are basically used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through a web browser.

In a nutshell, this hack is something that many of us weren’t expecting.

While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher told, "the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over."

Microsoft has yet to post a statement officially, but they are apparently aware of the security issue and are waiting for the exploit to be made public. We can only wait and watch as to what comes up now…

If successful this could be a mess as good as the DNS exploit in the wild these days. This can potentially change the whole view of how the industry thinks about hacks in my opinion. Microsoft will have a quite a lot of work on hands in the coming days, I’m sure. We’ll know more about this in the near future and there even lies possibility of being faced with the prospect of your "secure" server being stripped completely naked of all its protection.

You think its game over for the already struggling Vista?

photo credit: jpctalbot

I’m not a Windows Vista fan, but even then everyone at my home uses Windows Vista, while I dual boot with OSX on my Hackintosh.. I’ve used XP before and for some reason I always felt that Internet speeds on Vista were comparably slower than on OSX, and more so even Windows XP.

Considering it was quite slower than what I used to get on XP, I realized that Vista was doing something extra that made my internet connection slow down. After a bit of investigation and a bit of googling I found the solution.

Before I give the solution, let me explain the problem in a bit more detail… It all comes down to Vista’s “Auto Tuning” feature. Turns out that this feature isn’t compatible with many routers and networking devices(including mine). Means the feature that was supposed to be a boon turned itself into some sort of a bane.

Anyways here’s what you need to do turn off the Auto Tuning feature on Vista..

At the Start menu type command, but don’t launch the command prompt immediately. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Once the prompt is open enter the following command.

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If this doesn’t help, substitute this command and see if it works

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

At this moment, you should notice considerable improvements in your browsing speeds, or rather you should be cruising now. If it works, you should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If it doesn’t work for you, and you feel the need to put things back the way they were, you can type this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Here are screenshots showing the whole process, incase you feel the need for it..

Good luck, hope this works for you.. Please let us know if this worked for you or not..

If you are a Windows user, and your favorite browser happens to have a name Firefox 3, here is neat hack which you can use to tweak your Firefox install for maximum speeds and improved efficiency.. Don’t fret because this hack is really simple and doesn’t involve anything more than a couple of minutes of your time. Well I’m going to discuss about a freeware called FireTune, from Totalidea Software, which can give your Firefox browser some shots of adrenaline.

As you might already know most Firefox hacks involve messy fiddling up with options in about:config and there are a gazillion things than can go wrong and mess up with your Firefox install. Instead of dealing with all that mess, Firetune simply asks you a few questions about your computer and connection speed, then automatically configures Firefox for optimal performance—in seconds (No, Seriously!!).

FireTune does not muck up with Firefox executable file, or any other binary file, so you don’t have to worry that it’s going to turn the browser to a toast.

To get started download Firetune from here. Shut down all instances of Firefox and then fire up Firetune. It would be a good idea to back up your original configuration before you make any changes…

Now that you have backed up the configuration, select whether you have a fast Internet connection and a fast computer, or not. If you have at least a 1.5-GHz processor, 512MB or more of memory, and a reasonably fast broadband connection, select Fast Computer/Fast Connection.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Optimizations”. Check the checkbox that says “Enable some performance tweaks common to all configurations’”.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Useful Settings”. Check the checkbox that says “Optimize Firefox Memory Usage” 

That is it, now click the Tune It! Button and fire up Firefox once the tuning is done.

Browse through pages that usually used to be slow earlier. I’m sure you will see substantial improvements in the speeds. I’m sure you will find the overall experience of using Firefox much better, not that it was bad earlier!..

Now you must be wondering why many browsers are inherently built slow.. My guess is that coders build it for the people using the slowest internet connection, so that Firefox doesn’t render pages partially for the users.

But because you are a Dailyapps reader, I’m sure you want the fastest speed you can possibily get from your Firefox. That makes it exactly right for you to try out Firetune and give your Firefox a Nitro boost!

P.S. I’ve been a long time fan of Fasterfox, but I abandoned it in favor of Firetune because it doesn’t work with Firefox 3 at the moment.

Download Firetune