What’s a good way of catching the attention of someone who is advocating the use of biometrics? German interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble is pushing biometrics and data collection in Germany all for the sake of security and the fight against terrorism.

The Chaos Computer Club, a renowned and popular club of hackers and privacy advocates, decided to let the minister taste some of his own medicine by replicating the fingerprint of the minister and publishing that fingerprint in their magazine.

The fingerprint was available as a print in the magazine and on transparency slide ready to be put on the fingers of the readers of it. The sample was apparently taken from a glass that Schäuble was drinking at a panel discussion in Berlin.

continue reading "German interior minister’s fingerprint replicated"

If you are the proud owner of an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you know by now that you are subject to a lot of limitations such as being restricted to the AT & T Network. In addition, you will be unable to install or run any third party applications on your device.

With all these restrictions, it’s no wonder that most people who own an iPhone are frustrated and are always on the lookout for ways to run applications on their devices. After all, you would not want to pay so much money for something that has hardly any functions. However, it’s understandable to also be reluctant. These devices are expensive and if something goes wrong, it’s a lot of money down the drain.

continue reading "Hack Your iPhone or iPod Touch in Under One Minute"

The Beta version of Firefox 3 is already out and it has a whole bunch of new and improved features for you to play with. However, as of now, most Firefox extensions have not been updated by their developers. This means you cannot take your favorite add-ons for a spin in the Beta version.

I was checking out Lifehacker and a user called Bugmenot21 has posted a way to use your old extensions in Firefox 3. Now, I’m not a fan of this method since I prefer to wait till the developers themselves release compatible versions. Still, if you’re interested, you can give this a shot. I’m not guaranteeing anything though.

continue reading "Force Extensions to Work in Firefox 3 Beta"

If you would use an image host, put up some of your images and set them to private, would you expect them to be still accessible by anyone ? This is apparently the case over at Smugmug where a private setting simply means that the pictures and image galleries are not directly linked from the homepage anymore but can still be accessed by simply entering the url directly in the browser address bar or download manager.

The real problem arises because files are named sequentially at Smugmug which means that anyone with just a little bit of technical knowledge will be able to download all images from all galleries set to public and private. The only galleries that are not accessible are the password protected ones obviously.

The urls for the galleries can be accessed by opening a url starting with http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/*, for example http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1000, http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1001 in your browser. Pictures can be accessed directly by loading http://www.smugmug.com/photos/*-M.jpg in your browser where * is a number between 1 and x. So, everyone can access pictures like http://www.smugmug.com/photos/1000-M.jpg, http://www.smugmug.com/photos/10001-M.jpg and so on.

continue reading "Private Galleries can be accessed at Smugmug"

I think we all have faced a situation before where we wanted to know if an email was read by a recipient. Did he / she receive the mail, was the email read ? You can’t know for sure even if you added read / write notifications to the email because most email programs ask the user about those. There is no sure way to notification at all if the recipient is cautious, most are not on the other hand and these tricks will work most of the time.

This only works with HTML emails and not with basic plain TXT emails. The recipient has to be able to receive and display html emails. Html emails can contain elements besides text, graphics for example. Graphics are hosted on websites who track access to these elements.

So, the trick is to add a graphic to the html email and check the stats to see if the graphic has been accessed from the server. If it was accessed the email was read. If it was not it either means that the email was not read or that the recipient reads only the text and has html disabled.

continue reading "Find out if someone read your email"