Robert Moore tells the press in the US how easy it was to hack into VoIP services and routers with usually little more than the default passwords that come shipped with the devices.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people still don’t get the importance of security within their devices - and this case plainly shows what can happen if you leave it to chance. Robert Moore worked as the technical lead in a scheme to rip off VoIP providers in an effort to get largely discounted rates and services. While he did the hacking, Edwin Pena did the selling. Mr Pena is reported to have made off with a million dollars of sold discounted services - illegally obtained - and has fled the US as a fugitive. It makes you wonder when people are going to wake up to the really basic security threat that everyone is under on the internet. All it takes is a well thought password and most of this stuff would never happen. [SHOW ME]

YouConvert is the name of the website that lets you convert your files between all the well known file formats. You can convert audio files, documents, videos and images. It’s really simple and do you know the best thing? It’s all for free! Firstly you select the type of media you want to convert, find the file on your PC, enter your email address and away it goes into the youconvert servers for conversion. When the conversion is complete, you are sent an email (it took about a minute after I uploaded a wav for conversion to mp3) and this gives you a link to download your new file from the website. All in all, very painless and smooth. I wonder what the business model is?? [SHOW ME]

This is an amazing promotional video from APT, a company specialising in automated carparking systems, that really shows how well it can be done. I watched another video only yesterday from a company in Portugal that was similar, but didn’t have the same level of slickness that you see here. I’m sure it’s been nicely edited to make sure it runs quickly and according to plan, but still very impressive stuff. I wonder how long would it take for your car to arrive if they were almost full? That would be interesting to see.

Just a quick post, for a bit of Friday humour. Here are the things we, as gamers, have learnt from our years of late nights and bruised thumbs. [SHOW ME]

I know, I don’t blog for ages, then all these great stories appear when I (finally) get a few minutes to write. And I know the title is a bit strong, but it’s damn interesting and makes for a great anti-microsoft story..

It appears that Cuba wants to get rid of all of it’s Windows software and replace it with an open source alternative - Linux. And the reason? To remove an American dependency. They no longer want the country’s IT infrastructure powered by microsoft and programs running on it written by American companies. Nearly 4,000 technicians have already been trained in the black-art of linux, whilst there are currently another 600 or so doing training in another province within the country. Does that mean Mark Shuttleworth will be pushing a Cubuntu distro? =) [SHOW ME]

This is what happens when you take bored people, a bit of time, and someone on holiday.. We did something similar to this, but built a colleague an office out of mobile phone boxes - it even had windows!! (Hi Matt.) The idea of actually building things out of cardboard though really does show the depths some people will go. [SHOW ME]

At the start of 2008, the powers that be (Intel, Microsoft, HP & Texas amongst others) will be revealing the new specification for USB 3.0. One of the most interesting things about this new spec is the inclusion of an optical fibre in the spec for higher data transfer rates.

Along with the traditional metal wire connection (for compatibility reasons) the optical line for transferring data at speeds of 10 times more than the current USB 2.0 specs - according to the article - which would be around about the 600Mb per second mark. That works out about 2 times faster than current hard disk transfer speeds. And about 6 times faster than the fastest flash memory currently available. I guess you could argue, is it future proof enough? [SHOW ME]

I’ve had a need for this for a while, but just haven’t had the time to do a bit of research - I wish I had sooner, because it’s really easy! The problem I had (and you might have too) is that you have multiple users on the same PC, who all want to listen to the same things - essentially all needing the same library.

By default, iTunes creates a file called “iTunes Library.itl” in the My Documents\My Music\iTunes folder. This is very useful, prevents the casual user from having to set anything up, and keeps everything organised for them. However, if you have multiple users it seems a bit of a waste, as each user has a copy of their library, which doesn’t reflect any changes other people make. So what to do?

1) Locate your music somewhere everyone can access it.

I know it sounds obvious, but most people leave their music in the default location, which is in that iTunes folder again, in your My Documents. Thankfully iTunes makes it pretty simple to change where it looks for music. Within iTunes, go to the edit menu, select the preferences entry and in the resulting box that appears, go to the Advanced tab. Replace the My Documents version with something else.. For instance I’ve got a separate HD for all of my music, which I’ve mounted as a folder in Windows on the C drive. So all of my music is available to everyone from C:\Music. I would also suggest you let iTunes manage your music, and make sure Copy Files to iTunes folder is ticked too, again just to keep everything central (by default iTunes will leave the music where it is and only add an entry to it in the Library - We obviously don’t want this.) And remember you need to go into every user and change this location setting within iTunes, and make sure the correct boxes are ticked underneath!

2) Centralise your iTunes Library.itl file.

This bit again is quite simple, but requires a little thought. Pick the user who has the most “complete” library, that is the person that’s spent the most time fiddling with the track names, or making sure the track numbers all line up. Once that’s been worked out, log in as that person, navigate to their My Documents folder, into My Music and the iTunes folder. You should notice quite a few things here and various folders. It’s just the .itl file we’re really interested in. Take a copy and place it somewhere central where everyone has access (mine is in C:\Music - to prevent me getting confused!) Now we need to let iTunes know what we’ve done, and the easiest way is to open iTunes whilst holding down the shift key. This will pop a little box open allowing you to choose where your library file is. Simply point it to your centrally located one, hit OK and you’re done!

Be aware (or beware) that this new Library file is accessible by everyone - if they make changes in their login in iTunes, you’ll see them in yours (which is kind of the point to this article) - so as long as you trust them you’re OK. Also as a bonus, if one user buys a new CD and rips the music into iTunes, everyone else can listen to the new tracks too. If other people that log into your machine are prone to screwing things up, I would probably suggest keeping their Library separate from everyone else’s (plus it makes them feel persecuted, so maybe they’ll change their meddling ways..) =)