HITB News

Well I finally got around to upgrading our system to the latest stable release of Thatware 0.5.3 -- I thought this would perhaps be the best way to squash all the bugs, and close any security holes that were present in the old system. My only concern is that we may have introduced more bugs! *grin*. Anyway, let's hope not eh?

If anyone comes across pages that don't work or links that are dead, please don't hesitate to contact me via e-mail or through the HITB Message Centre. Have a good weekend/week ahead folks.

I got an e-mail from Koen yesterday night alerting me to 2 security vulnerabilities in HITB's code. Much love and respect to Koen for alerting me to the hole and not turning malicious with the information he found. It's certainly nice to know that there are still plenty of white hats out there hacking for hacking sake.

Details:

1.) The first hole is in config.php -- the vulnerability exsists through the use of $root_path. Basically removing $root_path and specifying the complete directory location to the db_settings.php will solve this potential for exploit.

Here is a review of eDigital's 1GB flash MP3 portable the MXP 100 that is as much a review on Lucent's remarkable speech recognition technology VoiceNav as it is on the player. VoiceNav offers speaker-independent recognition, meaning it doesn't have to learn each individual user's particular speech patterns like IBM's ViaVoice. Just say the name of a music track into the player's microphone and VoiceNav pulls up and plays that song.

For Linux users who would like a client for their Creative Nomad Jukebox there is a program called GNOMAD1.0. GNOMAD 1.0 is a GTK+ client program for the NOMAD Jukebox, using libnjb and id3lib to handle the jukebox communications and ID3 tagging procedures.

Kenwood has announced the Excelon Music Keg, a 10GB digital music system for your car that will play digital tunes off its hard drive using any of several digital formats including MP3, Wav, and OGG Vorbis. The Music Keg installs into the vehicle anywhere you would put a CD changer and is designed to work with all 1999 or later Kenwood in-dash receivers offering CD changer control and CD text capability. That's a big plus for Kenwood owners who already have the head unit.

eDonkey2000 has become an unlikely hero in the P2P world. Few anticipated this once humble network would achieve a userbase in excess of 100,000 users. eDonkey has been able to grow at a substantial rate and avoid legal wranglings with the RIAA due to its unique, OpenNap/DirectConnect style network.

Here is an article on Creative's next generation MP3 player, the 20GB Nomad 3. Pluses? It has both FireWire and USB. Minuses? It's too big and heavy to be an iPod killer. You can check out photo's of the unit and specs here.

Source: Linux World

After my less than satisfying visit to the land of Linux streaming media viewers just a few weeks ago, I was a little reluctant to try another, in spite of the readers who suggested I look at Xine. I shouldn't have been. I found the Xine experience satisfying in every aspect.

Here is an interesting new digital music player. Actually it's a player/recorder targeted to professionals or anyone else who wants to record voice and music on the fly digitally. Developed by DIALOG4/ORBAN the unit is called the Sountainer, a fliptop portable about the dimensions of a cell phone. Emphasized as an audio field recorder, the unit was designed for broadcasters, journalists, and artists who wish to record a live feed of their performance off the mixing board. The article includes a photo of the unit.

It looks like the music industry is coming to some kind of agreement with Napster. Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel agreed to a one-month delay last night to allow a settlement to be hammered out.