On March 2010, Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) launched its High Speed Broadband (HSBB) service, called ‘UniFi‘. TM’s UniFi high speed broadband packages comprises services of high speed Internet, video (IPTV), and phone, with speeds of 5 Mbps, 10Mbps and 20Mbps.

Upon sign up, the customer will receive 4 pieces of equipment:

• Fiber Broadband Termination Unit (BTU), ie. where you connect the fiber optic cable into.
• WiFi router (D-Link, D-615 with custom firmware), which is plugged into the fiber BTU.
• Set-Top box for IPTV and VoD, which will plug into the WiFi router.
• DECT phone plugged into the Fiber BTU.

I’m not going to rant about the UniFi or TMNet’s services, nor speed, nor the much debated bandwith cap that TM said they’re going to impose.

I’m going to talk about the security (or the lack thereof) of the default WiFi router setup.

Once the customer signed-up for UniFi services, the TM’s technician will do all the equipment installations in your premises/homes for you. Nice, BUT, the default WiFi router setup done by the technicians has very low security features:

• The router is not configured to drop ICMP packet, making an attacker able to ping those unprotected routers, telling him it’s alive and connected to the internet.
• The firewall is disabled.
• The router has remote access enabled. Making it worse, it has no authorised IP filter (has default config of 0.0.0.0, meaning anybody, anywhere, can log in to your router web interface). The web interface port number are also set to default.
• And the BIGGEST, BADDEST flaw: The router’s Administrator password is still the default ones!!

With the default configurations as above, even a child with a web browser sitting miles away could go into your routers!! I’ve done this personally, where I can easily scan a range of UniFi’s IP addresses, and log on to their routers.

I understood if the above setup is to ease TM’s effort to do some troubleshooting/support remotely for their customers. However, The least they can do is change the default administrators password for the WiFi routers! Change the password to something unique for each customer. They still can keep records of the users router’s password if they need to do troubleshooting/support purposes remotely.

Not all TM’s customers are technically savvy to secure their own home networking. So, the purpose of this article is to share/educate/guide some basic protection for your home network.

Secure your home network:

Login in to your router’s web interface. Open a web browser, go to http://192.168.0.1 . You will be prompt for admin username and password. Open your D-Link Router manual for more info.

1. Change your Router’s Administrator password.

• Go to ‘Maintenance’ tab, under ‘Admin Password’ section. Rename your password there.

2. Rename your Wireless Network Name/ SSID.
The default SSID has the customer’s name, i.e.: myfirstname@unifi. This possible could leads to privacy issues, as outsiders knows who’s using what ISP services (UniFi, Streamyx, etc).

• Go to ‘Setup’ tab, click ‘Wireless Setup’ menu on the left.
• Under ‘Multiple Wireless Network Name (SSIDS)’ section, click ‘Multiple Wireless Network Name Setup’ button.
• You will be taken to a page with ‘Wireless Network Name’ section. Rename your existing Wireless Network Name/SSID there.

3. Disable Remote Access to your router.

• Go to ‘Maintenance’ tab, under ‘Remote Management’ section. Un-check ‘Enable Remote Management:’ check box.

4. Enable Firewall

• Go to ‘Advanced’ tab, click ‘Firewall & DMZ’ menu on the left.
• Under ‘Outside Firewall Setting’ section, checked the ‘Enable WAN to LAN Firewall :’ check box.
• Then, checked all the check box inside the rows of ‘DOS ATTACK’, ‘POST SCAN ATTACK’ and ‘SERVICE FILTER’.
• To find out what all these settings do, feel free to Google each of the check box descriptions.

Few suggestions to TM, I strongly recommends that the technicians doing the UniFi’s installation, increase some level of customers home networking security. The very basic they can do is to change the WiFi routers default administrator’s password upon installation, and keep that password if they need to do troubleshooting/support purposes remotely.

Be safe.

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A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

More info on:
Google Wave
Google Wave “Is What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today”
Google Wave Video Demo Makes a Little More Sense of Wave

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Need to view Microsoft Silverlight enabled sites, but you’re on Linux, and running Firefox as the web browser? Have no fear, Moonlight is here.

Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix or Linux platform.

The current release version is 1.0. All you have to do is, just go to their site, and install the plugin/add-on from your Firefox.

Enjoy!

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Announcement were made from the Official Google Blog, introducing the measurement utility.

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. By enhancing Internet transparency, we aim to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.

Google has been very vocal about Net neutrality, and now Google is helping us determine if ISPs are blocking or throttling applications, by using traffic shaping and network prioritize practices.

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.

Among the facility provided:
Network Diagnostic Tool
Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.

Glasnost
Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.

Network Path and Application Diagnosis
Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.

DiffProbe (coming soon)
Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.

NANO (coming soon)
Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Resource:
Best effort? Let’s bust Streamyx speed promise with Google tools.
Google Launches ISP Throttling Detector

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What is Twitter?
From Twitter.com:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.
With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.
Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

From wiki:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through an application.

Sometimes things are better explained in sight and sound media. So, here’s a video on Twitter in Plain English, from CommonCraft.

Twitter in Plain English

I’m very new in Twitter. It would be great if you guys could share your experience. Any tips? Any cool Twitter client apps (Windows, Mac, Linux, Firefox, etc)? Any good interesting tweets to follow? Please, do let us know.

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For Windows: We have Google Reader Notifier for Windows.

For Mac: There’s a desktop application by the same name, for Mac users.

Firefox Extension: There’s even a extension for it.

But what about Linux users?

Enter GrNotify

GrNotify is a simple Python written tray application that will allow you to know when there are new items in the Google Reader.

Here’s a screenshot:

GrNotify Screenshot

Installation from source:
Go to the download page and download the latest .tar.gz source install package. Extract the package using the gui or by using the command line:
tar -xzvf PACKAGE_NAME.tar.gz
where PACKAGE_NAME is the name of the file.

Change the current directory to the extracted directory and install GrNotify by executing the following command:
sudo python ./install.py

The program will then install itself into the right directories.

Running the app:
You can then execute the program by entering
grnotify
in a terminal or program executer. I put the command on my startup session, so it will automatically started when I’m starting my Gnome.
Enjoy!!

1. How to Check for Open Ports in Ubuntu There are various ways to view for open ports on...

Dropbox is a free, multi-platform, online backup and synchronization application. My first attraction to Dropbox is because the client tools supports Linux. It also suports Mac OSX, and oh yeah, Windows too. Installation on my Ubuntu Hardy laptop is a breeze. Just download the debian package, and the rest of the installation is pretty straight forward. No extra tricky setup, configuration or anything. Upon the completion of the installation, just point your Dropbox location to a folder path on your machine, and you ready to go.
  An icon installed on the taskbar for easy access.

Online Backup
Dropbox currently provides 2GB of storage, which is sufficient for me at this time to backup all of my important files. Backing up files is very easy. Just open your Dropbox folder, and copy-paste the file(s) that you wish to backup to that folder.
Dropbox location on your folder.

Seamless sync
I have a couple of computers at home, which is running Ubuntu 8.04, and also a Windows 2003 machine running at my office. Installing Dropbox client on all of these boxes enabling me to sync all my files between those boxes, seamless, and without much effort at all. Just make sure Dropbox client is running, and those files will be sync automatically.

Dropbox website
Just in case you want to grab or upload your files, but Dropbox client are not installed, you can always go to Dropbox site.
Dropbox web interface

Another cool feature is, the files you stored has “Revisions”. Meaning, you don’t have to worry if any of our files get accidentally deleted or overwritten, since you can always retrieve deleted or the previous version of your files.
Dropbox revision feature

Feel free to watch Dropbox screencast for more info on their features and functions. Have you tried Dropbox or any equivalent online backup application? Feel free to share your experiences.

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The firmware upgrade process is very simple.

1. Download the latest firmware from Linksys website. For my case it’s here. Make sure you’re downloading the correct version for your router.

2. Go to the router’s GUI. It’s usually by opening http://192.168.1.1 with your web browser.

3. At the GUI, go to “Administration”, the to “Firmware Upgrade”.

4. Browse for the firmware file that you have downloaded, and then click “Upgrade”.

5. That’s it. Easy as pie. After the upgrade process completed, the router will reboots itself, and enjoy your new upgraded firmware.

Here’s the release note for version 7.00.6. It’s already been 1 hour since my upgrade process, the BitTorrent is running, and there’s no intermittent reboot or connection drops. Cool.

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cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax. It is free and open source software. One of the use for cURL is to automate unattended file transfers. For example, automating file downloads or getting html output from sites, via a command prompt, a batch file or scheduled job. It is also a good tool for simulating a user’s actions at a web browser, thus a very good tool to perform web application tests.

How to use cURL:

1. Download cURL. Select appropriate version based on your OS.
2. Extract the zip file.
3. Place the “curl.exe” under your C:\WINDOWS directory.
4. Execute it directly from your command prompt:

C:\>curl http://www.wordpress.org

You will see a bunch of http response coming out of your command prompt.

Output http response and save the page locally :
C:\>curl http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.php > mypage.html


Downloading using cURL:
C:\>curl http://www.mydomain.com/downloads/myfile.zip

HTTP Post using cURL:
C:\>curl -d "string_to_post" http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.aspx

There’s a lot more features for cURL, and the manual usage available here.

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Here’s the link to the whole comic book explaining Google Chrome.

Taken from the official Google Blog.

UPDATE: Google Chrome site just launched.

UPDATE 2: I’ve just installed Google Chrome on my Windows 2003 (this post is edited using Chrome). I have to admit, the features and stability really impresses me. There’s an import feature to migrate all your bookmarks, form fields and saved passwords from Firefox or IE. Bookmarking a page is as easy as a single click.

All the tabs are detachable to create a new window by simply dragging the tab, and much more. I just can’t wait for them to release a Linux version of Chrome.

Few screenshot is available after the jump.

[Show as slideshow]

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