...stuff I do and things I like...

right now I'm heavily working on my InfoPanel project every night and weekend. So I decided to share one piece of software (or actually only some fotos of the software) with you. This part is the Squid Cage a Chumby emulator. Like a real Chumby Squid Cage plays back the channel of my Chumby account. Since my InfoPanel has a touchscreen the Chumby widgets are fully usable (besides the ones that use the motion sensor of the Chumby). The video below shows some minutes of playing with my Squid Cage. This is a 17" display by the way. More fotos are available on my project page.

Hopefully the Chumby people don't get this wrong. I really like their idea but until now you can't buy a Chumby anyway.

here is a patch for Dnsmasq (the very popular DHCP server and DNS forwarder and cache) that will prevent DNS rebinding attacks against private networks (192.168,10.,...). The patch basically adds a filter to the forward resolver of Dnsmasq. The filter will basically drop all private IP addresses contained in answers. Of course this will not prevent a rebinding attack against other IP ranges like if your local network uses some public IP range. But since Dnsmasq is mainly used for home Cable/DSL routers (like the OpenWRT-based routers) this patch should offer sufficient protection.

dnsmasq_stopdnsrebind.patch (for dnsmasq 2.40)

To activate the DNS rebinding protection add --stop-dns-rebinding to the dnsmasq command line. I made it a command line option since dnsmasq is also used as a DNS cache on clients (e.g. Nokia N800) and you still want to be able to resolve local IP addresses.


Feedback is welcome!

Links

DNS rebinding
DNS rebinding (wikipedia)
DNS rebinding talk (by Dan Kaminsky)
Dns-wall
Dnsmasq
OpenWRT.org
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New hardware features: GPS, sliding keyboard and a 400MHz CPU (specs. from Engadget). The device is a little smaller then the N800 (which I think is nice). The software is called OS2008 (who would have guessed?). They finally kicked out Opera and use a Gecko-based browser (see my older blog entry).


Another interesting thing for N800 owners is the fact the Nokia announced a OS2008 version for the N800. This means people who don't like to buy a new device will be able to get all the new eye candy for free. This basically is possible because the N800 and N810 hardware is very similar.

I'm really looking forward to the N810. For me as a Linux (shell) hacker a hardware keyboard will be extremely interesting. The N810 is supposed to by sold starting mid November.

Links

Nokia N810 specs.
N810 at LinuxDevices
N810 NSeries site
Nokia N810 -- announced!
Nokia Press Pictures
heise.de
N810 box
N800 and N810
Engadget - hands on N810

Today I got my Dual-SIM adapter I bought for my Simyo UMTS card (very cheap UMTS service in Germany). The Dual-SIM adapter is one of the NoCut kind (see image) since I don't want to cut my SIM cards. It was a real tough fight to get the adapter in my Nokia 6233 while being able to close the battery cover. I managed it by fixating the 2nd SIM card in the middle of the battery with a small piece of sticky tape and using some force to push the cover onto the phone. It took me about 10 minutes before I had it done but the whole point of a Dual-SIM adapter is that you don't need to disassemble your phone every time you need to switch the card.



The bad part is that the adapter I bought only works in GSM mode. UMTS cards work but only in GSM mode. So now I'm searching for a adapter that works in UMTS mode. at least I know that this kind of adapter will fit.

here is a version of xkbd-bthid (my Bluetooth HID-Keyboard software) that works on the Nokia N800 (Maemo 3.2). I've finally found the time to fix it, also the number of users writing me emails to report that it doesn't work grew quite large in the last weeks.

xkbd-bthid still only supports the BOOT protocol which basically means no Windows and no MacOS X support. Linux is supported if you add -B to the hidd command line. Ubuntu users can do this in /etc/default/bluetooth.

Support for the REPORT protocol will defently come to xkbd-bthid.

Also please read the the package information before installing. Since you have to perform one small step manually before xkbd-bthid works. This is setting setuid to the wrapper executable. This is because dpkg on Maemo still doesn't do setuid.

Download/Install it using my Bora repository

I have this nice script running every night to collect all unique User-Agent (aka. the name of the web browser) strings that contain interesting keywords one of them is arm. So today I checked the output of this script and I found the new Nokia tablet. The thing to look for is RX-44 since this is the new device code (see full analysis of ljprx 44).

So is this the new Nokia tablet?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070926 Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet browser 0.1.22 RX-34+RX-44_OSSO1.1_0.2007.39-13

Also this seems to be some kind of transition firmware since it says RX-34 and R-X44. Also the OSSO part is newly added part of the User-Agent string. I have 3 different User-Agent strings containing OSSO.

Of course this could also be the new Maemo 4.0 build running on a N800.

Update:

Just right now I found this: RX-44_2008SE

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-GB; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20071003 Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet browser 0.1.23 RX-34+RX-44_2008SE_1.2007.40-8

I finally managed to update and upload sobexsrv. The new version is 1.0.1.

This version doesn't contain any new features but finally integrates some of the patches I got from various people. Thanks a lot! Besides these patches I just fixed a bunch of things. For a full list see the changelog.

In the next days I will make new .deb packages for various distributions.

Feedback is welcome as always.

So Nokia filed a new device with the FCC. The device seems to be the next generation internet tablet in the line of the 770 and the N800. The new device seems to have Wireless Lan (802.11), Bluetooth, buildin GPS, a sliding keyboard and a buildin camera (my guess from the picture below). The device doesn't seem to have WiMAX (at least the FCC tests don't list anything in this direction). Right now WiMAX is not needed on a mobile device anyway.



Links:

Third internet tablet slider confirmed
Full analysis of the ljprx 44