I have used Kayako’s products commercially for years both at Dark Horse Networks and Hydra Labs, so it seems a excellent extension to our open source project as well.

Our new support desk is located at: http://support.dtella.org

Thanks Kayako!

Fortunately, I have a small break in the form of Christmas coming up. This will allow me to catch up on some much needed maintenance as well as possibly get into some new projects as well.

A list of potential areas to go into soon (to remind me when I forget) ((and in no particular order)):

• Buildbot
• Flickr
• Projects at Work (the unclassified ones, of course)
• Dynamic DNS
• Kindle
• Integration
• Anything else?

Should be some interesting things coming soon…

RIM has the keygen published on their website but you need a password to get to it (Perhaps it is for partners only?) You can see the site here: https://www.blackberry.com/EngineeringScreens/

Earlier this year a few websites published their own keygen to compute the unlock code. Much to my dismay, however, none of them decided to share exactly how they did this. With that, I decided to discover the unlock code myself and publish the results.

The unlock code is actually a simple HMAC digest with a SHA1 variant. The trick is knowing what data to throw at the algorithm to produce the proper unlock code. The data used includes:

1. The BlackBerry device PIN
2. The application version (including parentheses if provided)
3. The current uptime of the device in seconds
4. The unlock duration
5. The secret sauce

The relevant data needed was found by inspecting “net.rim.device.internal.EScreens.EngScreenSecurity”, however, I will not go into the details of that here. Once I found the unlock duration codes and the secret key, it was just a matter of putting them into a standard HMAC hash function and out came the unlock code.

In order to use an unlock code, you simply visit the “Help Me!” screen by pressing alt+shift+H on your BlackBerry device to get the necessary information, generate a code, and then type it directly into the Help Me screen. No characters will be echoed, but if you enter it correctly, the screen with change over to the “Engineering Screen” main page. Do note it is possible to make some changes in the “eScreen” that could cause your phone to operate improperly or even break completely so do proceed with changing values at your own risk.

Now I wont point fingers at the various people that have already discovered how this is done but refused to share the code or details with anyone. They are what prompted me to undertake this project in the first place. With that, I give you the Python source code to my basic unlock code keygen:

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import hmac
import hashlib
 
pin = 'ffaa0000'            # Device PIN                [XXXXXXXX]
app = '4.6.0.100 (233)'     # OS Application version    [n.n.n.n (n)]
uptime = '12345'            # Uptime in seconds             
duration = 30               # Duration for key to last  [1, 3, 6, 15, or 30]
 
lifetime = {
 1: "",
 3: "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my rag time gal",
 7: "He was a boy, and she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious?",
 15: "So am I, still waiting, for this world to stop hating?",
 30: "I love myself today, not like yesterday. I'm cool, I'm calm, I'm gonna be okay"
}
 
secret = 'Up the time stream without a TARDIS'
 
data = pin + app + uptime + lifetime[duration]
hash = hmac.new(secret, data, digestmod = hashlib.sha1)
key = hash.hexdigest()[:8]
 
print key

Weighing in at only 25 lines, this shows how simple the algorithm actually is if one only knows how to put it together. If you want a packaged online tool, then by all means check out the other published keygens, but if you are curious how the codes actually are generated (like I was) feel free to take, use, and share this code at your will.

I am usually one of the first to try out the latest and greatest software, however, Windows 7 has seemed to be the exception. I have had little contact with it until recently. I missed out on the beta, and skipped the RC, and just recently was delivered a license through MSDN. After playing with the OS for only a week, I can say that this will most certainly be replacing Vista as my primary OS.

I have been using Vista mainly for its 64-bit support which XP lacks. (Yes, I know there is XP 64, however, there are no drivers to speak of for it and thus it was mostly worthless to me) With the release of Windows 7 it seemed logical to continue the trend with the 64-bit edition of it as well.

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Performance is leaps and bounds ahead of Vista and the interface is much more polished. It features numerous new features and fixes many of the complaints and quirks that plagued Vista.

Here are just a few of my favorite things about Windows 7:

1. Overall faster operating system
2. Networking has been vastly improved (especially wireless)
3. New taskbar
4. UAC can be made less annoying
5. For anyone that uses remote assistance to help friends, this version is worth checking out.
6. Remote desktop enhancements

Overall this is a huge step forward over Vista and I recommend upgrading as soon as you can get your hands on a copy!

At this point I have not had much time to tinker with the internals so for now I will simply post my pictures of the internals and leave digging for another day…

]]> http://feisley.com/2009/08/12/broken-lcd/feed/ 0 http://feisley.com/2009/08/04/add-a-little-privacy-to-google-latitude/ http://feisley.com/2009/08/04/add-a-little-privacy-to-google-latitude/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:52:32 +0000 Jacob Feisley http://feisley.com/?p=3496 This title must sound very ironic given that the whole purpose of Google Latitude is to reduce privacy. I am not saying this is a bad thing, just that telling people where you are right now is less private than not telling them.

Recently, Google took the reduction of privacy a little further by allowing you to setup a web site badge for Latitude. Up until this point, you could only share your location with select friends, however, now you can share it with the whole world via your website, blog, etc. I do use this, so you can spy on my location if you wish.

But to the privacy elements shall we… When you generate a badge, Google gives you a snippet of HTML code that looks like this:

<!-- Google Public Location Badge -->
<iframe src="http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=1234567890&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap" width="180" frameborder="0" height="300"></iframe>
<!-- To disable location sharing, you *must* visit http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge and disable the Google Public Location badge. Removing this code snippet is not enough! -->

This works fine as is if you place it on your site, however, that number there (1234567890) is actually your API “username” and given inspecting this from your site, any user could simply place your position on their site or access the API by other programmatic methods. Notice Google’s warning that to disable it, you have to disable the badge globally via their site, but what if you just don’t want some people using your badge or plan to put it on a password protected area of your site… This is where a little privacy can help.

What I did for my site is use some PHP code to add a layer of abstraction to the Google Latitude API. It requests the content server side and displays it without ever revealing my Latitude user id. I then include my own PHP page within an iframe just as i would have the Google snippet and that’s it. Here is the simple PHP code to do this:

location.php

<?php
 
$url = "http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=1234567890&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap";
 
$content = file_get_contents($url);
print $content;
?>

The resulting PHP page will generate a map that fills the entire browser. Then simply add an iframe that references that PHP script and your desired width and height and boom, no one can inspect your user id and you have added a little privacy back to Google Latitude.

<iframe src="location.php" width="650" frameborder="0" height="480"></iframe>

P.S. For the advanced users out there you can also do some creative things with the “$content” object within PHP such as inject your own CSS or even remove elements of the badge that you don’t want on your site since Google gives very limited customization to this.