Tag Archive for: Breaks

Getting Your iPhone Near This Cursed Network Breaks Its Wifi

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Illustration for article titled Don’t Let Your iPhone Even Get Near This Cursed Wifi Network

Photo: Noah Berger / AFP (Getty Images)

A security researcher and his iPhone’s wifi have gotten strangely familiar with Murphy’s law in the past few weeks. Based on his experience, we now know about yet another cursed wifi network that we must avoid. But this time, your iPhone doesn’t even have to connect to the network to mess up.

Back in June, security researcher Carl Schou found that when he joined the network “%p%s%s%s%s%n”, his iPhone permanently disabled its wifi functionality. Luckily, this was fixed by resetting all network settings, which erased the villainous wifi name from his phone’s memory. You would think that would have been the end of connecting to networks with weird and fishy sounding names, but you are not Schou.

On Sunday, he decided to try his luck again by investigating a public wifi network named “%secretclub%power”. According to Schou, just having an iOS device in the vicinity of a wifi network with this name can permanently disable its wifi functionality.

“You can permanently disable any iOS device’s WiFI by hosting a public WiFi named %secretclub%power,” he wrote on Twitter. “Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality.”

G/O Media may get a commission

Schou apparently struggled to find his way out of this one and get his wifi functionality back. He said he reset network settings multiple times, forced restarted his iPhone, and even contacted Apple’s device security team. The researcher eventually got some help from Twitter, which advised him to manually edit an iPhone backup to remove malicious entries from the known networks plist files.

Gizmodo hasn’t tried this fix, so if you happen to find yourself in this situation, proceed with caution. It’s not clear what exactly is causing this bug, but some believe the percent sign and the characters following it could be mistaken for a string format specifier, or a variable or command used in coding languages. When processed by the phone, it apparently leads to problems.

We’ve all had a hard couple of months (and then some) and the last thing we need is trolls setting up public wifi networks with “%secretclub%power” to make our wifi go away. Until Apple…

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Watch Hacker Breaks Down Hacking Scenes From Movies & TV | Technique Critique

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[piano music]

Keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands.

This has something to do with computers.

Hack ’em all.

Hi, I’m Samy Kamkar.

[Narrator] Samy is the co-founder of OpenPath Security

and a computer hacker.

I’m back to talk about more hacking scenes

in TV shows and movies.

Breaking into a government system, The X-Files.

This has something to do with computers, the internet.

Actually the ARPANET.

You can access it through the internet.

I want to believe, but this clip isn’t too realistic.

ARPANET is essentially what the internet came from.

DARPA, the U.S. government agency created ARPANET

and that bubbled into the internet

and became publicly available.

When the X-Files came out,

ARPANET was no longer in existence.

Isn’t there something you could-

I mean how do you say it, hack into?

I’m sorry, I think this is the end of the line.

How you say, that’s what she says.

She says, How you say, hack.

[Samy laughs]

How do you say it, hack into.

But How you say is what you say in other languages

when you don’t know.

Right?

[computer beeps]

What did you do?

Oh, it’s a government system,

I know a couple of logging out tricks with VMS version five.

If you’re using a password that you know,

then I don’t really consider that hacking.

[tense music]

[Woman] What is that?

It’s an encrypted file.

[computer beeps]

Why would your three year old have an encrypted file

in a secret defense department database?

Can you decode it?

There’s another issue here

in that they find a file that’s encrypted,

that by itself is not too unrealistic.

They’re showing the file in ASCII format.

Can you print it out for me?

But when you print it out,

that’s going to be useless information.

And that’s because many of the characters

that would be in an encrypted file

are not visible in an ASCII format.

So you end up with things like periods,

which may or may not be a period

or it could be a totally different character or byte.

So your ex-boyfriend is into computers.

I would totally say that.

Wait, your boyfriend’s into computers?

I should meet him.

[Samy laughs]

Locking down a system, Jurassic Park.

[computer beeps]

[tense music]

[computer beeps]

Five, four.

[door hisses]

In this clip, it looks like Newman,

you know who I mean.

Newman!

Is kind of running around,

activating or…

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Watch Technique Critique | Hacker Breaks Down Hacking Scenes From Movies & TV | Wired Video | CNE | Wired.com

/in


[piano music]

Keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands.

This has something to do with computers.

Hack ’em all.

Hi, I’m Samy Kamkar.

[Narrator] Samy is the co-founder of OpenPath Security

and a computer hacker.

I’m back to talk about more hacking scenes

in TV shows and movies.

Breaking into a government system, The X-Files.

This has something to do with computers, the internet.

Actually the ARPANET.

You can access it through the internet.

I want to believe, but this clip isn’t too realistic.

ARPANET is essentially what the internet came from.

DARPA, the U.S. government agency created ARPANET

and that bubbled into the internet

and became publicly available.

When the X-Files came out,

ARPANET was no longer in existence.

Isn’t there something you could-

I mean how do you say it, hack into?

I’m sorry, I think this is the end of the line.

How you say, that’s what she says.

She says, How you say, hack.

[Samy laughs]

How do you say it, hack into.

But How you say is what you say in other languages

when you don’t know.

Right?

[computer beeps]

What did you do?

Oh, it’s a government system,

I know a couple of logging out tricks with VMS version five.

If you’re using a password that you know,

then I don’t really consider that hacking.

[tense music]

[Woman] What is that?

It’s an encrypted file.

[computer beeps]

Why would your three year old have an encrypted file

in a secret defense department database?

Can you decode it?

There’s another issue here

in that they find a file that’s encrypted,

that by itself is not too unrealistic.

They’re showing the file in ASCII format.

Can you print it out for me?

But when you print it out,

that’s going to be useless information.

And that’s because many of the characters

that would be in an encrypted file

are not visible in an ASCII format.

So you end up with things like periods,

which may or may not be a period

or it could be a totally different character or byte.

So your ex-boyfriend is into computers.

I would totally say that.

Wait, your boyfriend’s into computers?

I should meet him.

[Samy laughs]

Locking down a system, Jurassic Park.

[computer beeps]

[tense music]

[computer beeps]

Five, four.

[door hisses]

In this clip, it looks like Newman,

you know who I mean.

Newman!

Is kind of running around,

activating or…

Source…

Logitek launches new digital desk that breaks the $10K price barrier

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At this week’s SMPTE09 Exhibition there were a few new radio products on show along with plenty of television and web broadcast technology. One interesting new product was a mini Logitek studio panel that is aimed at small stations and community radio stations which want to move to digital. Steve Ahern reports from SMPTE for radioinfo about this new digital desk that breaks a significant price barrier.

Logitek Australia’s Managing Director Paul Dengate says his company’s new Jetstream Mini desk and Jetstream router (pictured) will offer community broadcasters a digital studio solution for under $10,000, pitching this desk much below Logitek’s larger products and those of other competing brands.

These days, any digital studio desk is really a control surface, more like a mouse, than the old analog desks we used to know.

Analog desks do all the work inside them, switching and amplifying signals through circuitry in each fader.

Digital surfaces tell a computer how and where to switch the audio, with the work being done inside a computer server, usually located in the rack room. Some other brands do have models that integrate the computer functions inside the one box (see other story).

There are many advantages, and some disadvantages, with digital desks. The two most significant advantages are: the ease of installation, in this case basically plugging in one computer cable; and the fact that the signal is already digital and can be sent to digital transmitters or audio streamers more easily than an analog desk’s signal.

The Jetstream equipment consists of an IP based Router box with a built-in computer inside it, a panel and a control screen (all pictured below right).

The router sits in the rack room and does all the work, providing audio I/O (inputs/outputs), mixing, processing and other functions. It can be paired with any of the Logitek range of control surfaces (Artisan, Mosaic, etc), but the model on show at SMPTE paired it with the cost effective JetStream Mini model.

IP based desks and router engines have been around for a while, but this new generaton of the technology is designed to take advantage of new network protocols that make the system easy to set up,…

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