Brudvik.org » computer

Eavesdrop a Skype conversation

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:17:23 +0000

I stumbled over this earlier today and thought it could be interresting to share. The idea itself is rather easy – get a trojan into someones computer and take eavesdropping to a new level. While earlier trojans mostly registered all your keyboard activity and logged everything you did, this trojan goes to the next step. It gives you the ability to eavesdrop on a skype conversation. This trojan also comes with complete source-code so you can easily check it yourself and compile it, in case you – as me – won’t trust a 3rd party executable which is, indeed, a trojan.

External resource

Megapanzer Skype Trojan

NimBuzz – Mobility is the answer So I stumbled upon a article in TechCrunch covering imo.im,...
GMail’s new Clothes Those of you whom uses GMail probably noticed the GUI...

WIMP – Spotify, watch out

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:17:53 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was given an invitation token to a new streaming service much similar to Spotify. This new service with the project name WIMP is also based on the same technical setup as Spotify, coded in AIR. The main difference however is that where Spotify will remain free, you need to pay to use WIMP. Why? They do not believe in a comercial based income model. Fair enough. My first impression when loading the client is that it’s far better looking and more organized than Spotify.

The client is easy to use, intuitive and the learning curve is pretty easy. You have a easy and quick-to-access search field to the upper-right, you have navigation buttons to the upper-left. The image above show how the welcome screen is setup and is the first thing you see when you log on. Here you find latest additions, both albums and songs. You have recommendations, playlists – and of course the top 10 albums/songs. Not to mention the player. Player itself is located to the bottom of the client, with album art, song information and of course a complete list of your current song queue. The search results is nicely organized into albums and songs, and you can quickly browse down to what you want to listen to.

One of the features I do like a lot, is the integration to Last.fm, as well as the quick and easy option to buy any song or album and have it directly delivered to your computer as a MP3 file. A service that works very good. You have a easy way to share playlists on facebook, and I suspect that by the time they open for the public, you will have even more sharing options. The client also show artist information, and together with intuitive functions like drag-and-drop functionality for creating playlists, this is starting to become quite a competor for Spotify. One thing that really makes this the best client for me, is their toll on artists that aren’t on Spotify – like Metallica. All in all, a great client, a great project – and I can’t wait for it to come out of beta stage. Oh, and if you read this Aspiro, feel free to expand my trial period.

Screenshots from WIMP:

Sources:

http://wimp.aspiro.com/

Free Spotify Invites Invite codes – be quick (2010-05-07) Thanks to Brynjar you...
NimBuzz – Mobility is the answer So I stumbled upon a article in TechCrunch covering imo.im,...
Create your own social network With the rise of Facebook and similar social networks the...

Computer animated band

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:00:17 +0000

Seeing I am in the musical mood tonight, I might as well include another find I had the other day. Animusic – a completely computer animated band. It’s impressive what they have been able to come up with using nothing but computer animations together with their music. Below you can watch one of their songs “Pipe Dreams”. You can find more songs from them on Youtube, though I would strongly encourage you to buy their DVDs as they are really worth the money.

Super Mario on Drums Having been a passionate drummer for 20 years now, I...
WIMP – Spotify, watch out A couple of weeks ago I was given an invitation...
GMail’s new Clothes Those of you whom uses GMail probably noticed the GUI...

Captcha – are you smart enough?

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:02:10 +0000

I read a Norwegian news article earlier today regarding that spammers had overcome the current version of CAPTCHA that Microsoft uses at their services. And I can’t but help thinking that why are we fooling ourself? If it can be programmed then it can be reversed – end of discussion. Does it help? Not really, it only slow down the spammers, and make life miserable for the end-user of your webpage. Soon you need a doctor degree in typography in order to actually understand what the CAPTCHA is trying to tell you. Sure, it’s impressive to see what new ways they are coming up with to try to keep the robots out; but when I need to take out a dictionary to form words or look up on Wikipedia to figure out what kind of animal they just asked me to describe – then in my eyes its gone way too far.

It gets even worse, as I were browsing around the internet following various newspapers that had picked up this so-called-story; I found numerous services where they claim that they can beat quite a few of the CAPTCHAs out there; though there is one that really stood out; an Ukranian company – OCR Research Team. These guys have broken services like:

Friendster
MySpace
Rapidshare
Paypal

And thats just a few of the services where they have automated the CAPTCHA responses. We can only hope that someone soon finds a better way to tell man from computer; since CAPTCHAs really have outlived their role.

The OCR Research Team

Spokeo – End of privacy While researching a bit about Pipl.com I stumbled upon a...
BluePont – When privacy means nothing Most of you already know that I’ve critizised several online...