assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

Safari hangs / locked PubSub sqlite3 database

Ralf — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:53:17 +0000

I just spent 15 minutes of my limited life chasing a frigging Safari bug. Apparently on my last logout, Safari didn’t close the PubSub [that’s Apple’s framework for dealing with RSS feeds] sqlite3 database properly. This led to a hang upon the next startup, and every subsequent startup. After a little bit of fun with gdb and lsof, I figured out that it was lock that was held on the PubSub database (located in ~/Library/PubSub/Database). I simply moved that heap of bitrot away and everything is dandy again. As expected, Safari recreated it.

Power outlets at airports

Ralf — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:03:46 +0000

I just ran across the following gem [via BoingBoing, yeah I know it’s old, I just saw it now though]: AirPower, a wiki dedicated to documenting power outlets at airports all around the world. I usually start scouring the airport for power outlets on multi-leg flights once I’ve completed a leg. The scariest story happening to me was circa 1998, travelling back from Melbourne through Hong Kong. Guards/military armed with submachine guns scared me away from the power outlet I was using. I don’t actually know what they said to me as they didn’t speak English, I just unplugged and got the fuck away from the outlet. Maybe it was just a friendly question, I don’t feel like taking chances in the presence of guns though.

Recently acquired accessories starting with the letters ‘BR’.

Ralf — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:04:14 +0000

Two accessories I recently bought which I can heartily recommend:

Bräda, a laptop support cushion which makes having your laptop sitting on your lap really comfortable. No more frying my balls!

Also, after having dropped my iPhone two times in the first two days already, I went to Media Markt in Berlin and bought a crystal hard case as well as a rubberized soft case. I didn’t like both very much. I’ve now settled on a Brando aluminium (aluminum, for our Amerikkkkkan readers) case. Tough, sturdy, flippable cover. Yeah, you can’t use the touch screen through the plastic protective screen, that bugged me at first. There’s a model without the protective cover as well, but buying that wasn’t an option since the screen will be the first thing my phone drops on if I decide not to protect it.

DNS tunneling on the iPhone

Ralf — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:45:43 +0000

I just set up a cross-compiling environment for the iPhone and compiled dns2tcp for the iPhone. Dns2tcp is a DNS tunnel written in C that I can heartily recommend, it however could be a little bit more stealthy. Using DNSSEC KEY RRs clearly is NOT stealthy. If you trust me somewhat, you can download the iPhone binary for dns2tcpc. I should roll that in a package, but I’m too lazy to do that at the moment.

iPhone

Administrator — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:04:16 +0000

I really have to say: from a usability perspective, this baby rocks. Putting my security researcher hat on, I however have to say: Shame on you, Apple! I’m taking bets as to how long it takes till we see the first worm for the iPhone. What’s interesting is that the baseband firmware of this phone is one of the few that I’m aware of that is ARM-based and which largely seems to be written in C. In my opinion this phone is an ideal platform for the A5/1 cracking project.

As for MobileScrobbler: yes, it really rocks. It actually far exceeds my expectations! Overall, I fear a decline of software quality with the release of the iPhone SDK. Thus far, every piece of third party software I tried simply was a pleasant experience…

MobileScrobbler

Administrator — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:06:11 +0000

Fuck. I so want this! And I don’t even have an iPhone yet. last.fm on your MP3 player! And I want that A2DP profile to work, dammit! Apple, hear me?

New toy arrived: Sony Ericsson HBH-DS980

Ralf — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 02:14:02 +0000

My new A2DP headset/headphones arrived today and I have to say: I’m stoked! Although the headphones part is not quite as good as the AKG headphones I own, they sound alright.

Pairing with my Nokia E61 with the HBH-DS980 worked almost flawlessly (the first pairing attempt failed, but after I reset the phone everything was alright). Since OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) now supports A2DP devices as sound devices globally, I can use them both for listening to Last.FM and (as a headset) in Skype.

Apple releases 10.5 source tree

Ralf — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:00:21 +0000

Apple just released the Darwin 9.0 source tree!

Mail-Act-On and GPGMail under Leopard

Ralf — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:47:58 +0000

So I was quite heartbroken about my favourite Mail plug-ins, GPGMail and Mail-Act-On being disabled after the Leopard upgrade. Turns out there’s a very easy way to fix this (found in the MAO forum). Simply move the bundles back from the Bundles (Disabled) directory to the Bundles directory (in $HOME/Library/Mail, I had to create the Bundles directory first) and change the following defaults:

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

Great. The world is in order again

Update: Not quite. GPGMail is still broken (no content is shown for PGP encrypted and/or signed mails), but apparently the author is already working on an update. Mail-Act-On is working fine thus far.

Converting FileVault images for OS X 10.5.

Ralf — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:33:33 +0000

Just upgraded to Leopard doing a clean reinstall. Before I copied my sparseimage FileVault container (/Users/$USER/$USER.sparseimage) to an external USB drive, after the reinstall I copied it back. Then I remembered that FileVault in OS X 10.5 uses a new format (as reported in FileVault doesn’t use Sparse-Images anymore) and thought better of it. The new format apparently splits the image into 8MB big chunks, called bands which should make deallocation of free space much easier.

After a look into the man page of hdiutil(1) I had located the name for the new SPARSEBUNDLE format and converted the container into the new format using the following command:

hdiutil convert /mnt/$USER.sparseimage -encryption CEncryptedEncoding -format UDSB -o /Users/$USER/$USER.sparsebundle

Note well: your data no longer is accessible with the system-wide FileVault recovery certificate/private key. If this feature is of importance to you (it is to me, in the opposite way: I’m glad that the recovery key now is invalid), look into the -recover and -certificate options of hdiutil(1).

Upon the next login I realized that my UID had changed, meaning I could no longer access the data contained in the FileVault. Argh! Turns out that there’s no more messing around with niutil(1) under Leopard. NetInfo is gone, replaced by Directory Services. The command line utility for Directory Services is surprisingly pleasant: As simple as 1,2,3, I changed my uid…

dscl -change . /Users/$USER UniqueID