Programmer James Laird wanted to help his girlfriend stream her iTunes music in her new house, so he hacked away at Apple’s private key for streaming music, reverse-engineered the script, and made it available to the public.
Laird calls his open source Perl script Shairport, which lets hardware and software receive AirTunes music from iTunes.
Apple uses a public-key encryption scheme for AirTunes streaming. This lets anyone encrypt and stream audio to the AirPort Express (or other compatible device), but iTunes would only stream to Apple devices. Now, with Shairport, iTunes can be tricked into streaming audio to anything at all.
WASHINGTON — A deadline looming, the Congress’ top Democrat accused Republicans on Friday of risking a government shutdown because they want to make it harder “for women to get cancer screenings.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unleashed his attack as his main antagonist in long-running negotiations, Speaker John Boehner, said spending cuts — not social issues– were blocking agreement to prevent a shutdown at midnight.
In July 1999 Vice President Al Gore paddled down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire to spread what then–Rolling Stone reporter Eric Boehlert termed “his green theme of protecting the environment” while posing for the obvious photo-op. His hopes for making this message heard, however, went over the side when Bill Sammon, a reporter for the then-Moonie-owned Washington Times, wrote that local authorities had granted Gore a special favor when they released nearly 4 billion gallons of water from a nearby dam, at a cost of $7 million, in order to (literally) float Gore’s boat. As Boehlert noted in his masterful forensic audit of the story, Sammon’s point was clear: “In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage-manage a political event.”
A few simple steps can put you on the path to creditworthiness — or prevent you from falling off.
A few simple steps can put you on the path to creditworthiness — or prevent you from falling off.
Five years ago Mikaal Bates was about to pool his money with some friends and make his first real estate investment. He didn’t expect any trouble on the credit score front, as he’d always paid all his bills in full and on time. But when Bates received the credit report he needed to get the loan and seal the deal, he found a nasty surprise: Thousands of dollars in unpaid phone bills racked up by someone who’d stolen his identity.
Millions of consumers have fallen out of favor with the credit scoring gods.
Some lost their jobs or were just overwhelmed by mounting debt. Others got caught up in the real estate bubble or had major medical bills. Whatever the reason, the rising number of foreclosures, short sales, late credit card payments and the ultimate credit sin — bankruptcies — have left black marks on credit reports most everywhere.
So what can these people do to repair their credit?
The simple answer is to focus on the information that is used to generate the all-powerful FICO score — the measure used most frequently by traditional lenders to determine creditworthiness. Its scale runs from 300 points to 850 points; the higher the score, the better your credit standing. “FICO is still the 500-pound gorilla,” said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com. “In 2011, the best way to get credit from the mainstream lenders is to have a good FICO score.”
Consumers can hope that the banks will eventually consider alternatives to the traditional FICO score, which was developed by Fair Isaac Corporation and has been in wide use for about two decades. After all, as banks regain their appetite for lending, they will be looking for ways to differentiate between borrowers with the same scores, some of whom are temporarily struggling and others who chronically have trouble with money.
For now, though, the FICO score reigns. The best antidote to a poor score is time. Still, there are a half dozen ways to speed the process, or, at the least, avoid even more credit trouble.
Worries about marine life in the Pacific Ocean outside of Japan’s failing Fukushima nuclear plant are escalating. Water samples taken 1,080 feet away from the plant show radioactive iodine-131 levels that are 4,000 times higher than normal and cesium-137 levels that are 527 times higher than normal. The ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima took another turn for the worse this past weekend. A crack was discovered next to seawater intake pipes at the plant’s No. 2 reactor that is causing approximately 1,800 gallons of water with 10,000 times the normal levels of radioactive iodine to gush into the Pacific Ocean per hour. After engineers attempted and failed to bond the crack with concrete, they are now trying to seal the leak using a mixture of 120 pounds of sawdust, three garbage bags of shredded newspaper and nine pounds of absorbent powder. So far, the mixture hasn’t worked. “There is still a steady stream of water from the pit,” said Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama.
Sony is accusing alleged PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz of surrendering two “non-functional” hard drives in violation of a court order, and then taking off to South America.
But Hotz’s lawyer said Wednesday that Sony is “crying alligator tears” over the issue.
Sony is suing the 21-year-old Glen Rock, New Jersey, man on charges he violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by publishing an encryption key and software tools in January that allow PlayStation 3 owners to gain complete control of their consoles. As part of the litigation, a San Francisco federal magistrate ordered Hotz to surrender his hard drives to Sony, so files connected to the hack can be extracted and used as evidence in the case.
But Sony notified the judge that, when it got the drives from Hotz, they were no longer working. “Hotz had removed integral components from his impounded hard drives, rendering them completely non-functional.” (.pdf), the company claimed in a filing.
Stewart Kellar, Hotz’s attorney, said the issue is overblown.
Net neutrality is in the headlines again, but what does it mean for you? Is this just some wonky, inside-the-Beltway chatter that won’t have an impact on our daily lives or an issue that will affect how we access the Web in the future? The short answer is: both.
The basic news is that the Federal Communications Commission approved net neutrality rules yesterday and those rules give the commission the authority to step into disputes about how Internet service providers are managing their networks or initiate their own investigations if they think ISPs are violating its rules.
BURLINGTON, Vt., While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.
With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.
The lunatics are running the asylum that is Congress
At a moment when nearly two-thirds of US corporations don’t pay any federal income taxes, and companies are sitting on trillions in cash while refusing to hire new workers, the only thing we hear when it comes to tax reform is that we need to cut the corporate tax rate.
