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Affordable Bluetooth 4.0 USB Dongle For Raspberry Pi

While Raspberry Pi certainly is a cheap mini-computer, adding accessories to it blows up ownership costs a lot. While adding WiFi is relatively cheap, finding a compatible Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 (BLE) for a bargain is hard. Luckily, I found the Orico BTA-403 Mini Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter Dongle which comes with CSR8510 Low Energy Chip and is compatible with Linux and Raspberry Pi despite being not listed as such in the description, this is certainly a must-have deal for $8 including worldwide shipping. Instructions for setup are as shared below.

ORICO BTA-4 BLE USB

Fixing "The program can't start because the detoured.dll is missing from your computer." Error On Windows

Majority of Windows users face missing .dll file errors every now and then, but missing detoured.dll takes the prize for being the most annoying of them all. Unlike other missing .dll errors this will popup with message "The program can't start because the detoured.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem." everytime an .exe file is launched on your computer either manually by the user or via autostart.

On the computer I diagnosed this, the error was being flashed 7-10 times on every boot and one needs to close each prompt, on further digging I found detoured.dll is infact part of an Microsoft Research technology named "Detours" which allowed hooks into every application launched on Windows OS (scary!!!). Having such a dll on a computer without any specific use-case was not acceptable so I devoted time to get rid of this error without the need to re-install this dll in my System folder.

detoured.dll

Lantern : An app to end censorship

Proxies, VPN and Tor Network have been the most popular tools in hands of users wanting to bypass internet censorship in countries like China, Iran, Syria and North Korea. Lantern a free utility for Windows, Mac and Linux which allows users to bypass internet censorship by routing internet connections via "trusted" friends located in non-restrictive countries. Unlike Tor, Lantern is a tool having the priority to provide access via trusted computers and is not designed to prevent monitoring or anonymize a user's connection. Lantern also makes use of it's cloud-servers acting as proxy to provide access if no trusted peer-to-peer connection via a friend is available, these connections are also faster then other similar tools like GoAgent, Freegate, Ultrasurf, Psiphon and Autoproxy as it focuses to utilize it's proxy-resources in providing access to only "a list of known blocked sites" instead of all websites wasting resources.

Lantern

[Video] Fixing iPhone, iPad And iPod Charging Issues

Forums are filled with issues from iPhone and iPad owners who are reporting problems charging their device. The issue could be as simple as lint clogged into your charging port, the video below shows how to clean it carefully. A similar issue also got me puzzled almost a year ago, when my iPhone suddenly got stuck in dock mode leaving the phone muted without any clues.

Chinese Android Phone Comes Pre-loaded With Spyware As Fake Google AppStore

More and more cases on spying using electronic devices are coming into light, few days ago it was reported that NSA of USA is doing targeted spying by intercepting and bugging electronic devices with backdoors to users in their surveillance list. Many countries including USA and India have already banned Chinese technology in sensitive departments after fearing hidden backdoors which can be used for spying, we have also shared the news of Spyware Electric Kettles and Hidden Backdoor in Routers earlier on this blog.

This time the experts at the German security vendor GDATA have discovered dangerous computer malware in firmware of an Android device, the "N9500" model of Android smartphone which is produced by the Chinese manufacturer Star comes per-loaded with Spyware straight from the factory disguised as Google Play Store app giving it full access on the device.

China Android Spyware

It is also not possible to remove the manipulated app and the spyware as they are integrated deep into the firmware preventing removal. Large online retailers are still selling the Android device at prices ranging from 130 to 165 euros and distributing it across Europe.

Bypassing Youtube Age Restricted Videos Without Signing In

Since Youtube caters to a wide-variety of users groups all around the globe, it imposes several types of restrictions to filter out non-suitable content citing various criteria like users Geographical location and age. We have already shared tricks to bypass Youtube country specific geographic censorship and even how to watch videos deleted from Youtube (providing they are still on Youtube cache servers distributed across the globe).

Today we will show a trick on how to bypass the "Youtube Content Warning : This video may be inappropriate for some users." without signing-in or need to have a Youtube/Google account (which also avoids tracking and prevents similar type of videos being shown on Youtube front-page when signed-in).

Bypassing Youtube Age Restricted Videos

Configuring Network Folder Sharing On Radxa Rock

Radxa Rock - the cheap and powerful quad-core mini-computer has already receiving great success with majority of stock vanishing across all major online distributors. Luckily, I had received my Radxa Rock a while back and has now successfully taken over the job of my Wireless Network Attached Storage (NAS) from Raspberry Pi.

The process of setting up NAS on Radxa Rock is much more easier then Raspberry Pi as the external disk is automatically detected and mounted on every boot (Thanks to Ubuntu Desktop based Linaro image), but when using the folder sharing via Samba Share we need to add an extra line to smb.conf to make the data accessible over network.

Network Folder Sharing Over Samba

Hacking VLC To Run As Root On Linux

If you try to run VLC under root user on Linux, you will be blocked with message : "VLC is not supposed to be run as root. Sorry. If you need to use real-time priorities and/or privileged TCP ports you can use vlc-wrapper (make sure it is Set-UID root and cannot be run by non-trusted users first).". While it is a good security practice to not run non-system executables under root privileges, but at times you might need the exception. Here's a solution to allow VLC and cvlc (command-line version of vlc) run under the root user-account.

VLC no root allowed error

Asus Leaves Router Users Wide Open For Anybody To Access Their Disks

We have already seen how vulnerable routers can be a security threat, but ASUSTeK Computer Inc (ASUS) made everything feel small by leaving two critical flaws allowing anybody in the world to simply open a web-browser and access any Asus routers data with full read-write permission by simply typing a URL. This is not all, when notified about the severe design flaw, the company did nothing and ignored emails and phonecalls by researcher Kyle Lovetts who discovered the flaw.

To make their point and expose the vulnerability, a group did some guerrilla styled attack hacking into 13,000+ IP addresses using vulnerable Asus routers and left a text-file explaining the hack into user's router attached media disks. The text file informed users : "This is an automated message being sent out to everyone effected [sic]," the message, uploaded to his device without any login credentials, read. "Your Asus router (and your documents) can be accessed by anyone in the world with an Internet connection. You need to protect yourself and learn more by reading the following news article: http//nullfluid.com/asusgate.txt."

Visiting the mentioned url (as shown below), shows details about the exploit and how Asus has left users with an wide-open ftp server allowing anonymous login with full read-write privilege and AiCloud usernames and passwords stored in a plaintext file which is available for download without logging in. The group also made public a torrent link containing 10,000+ list of files stored on the Asus-connected hard drives for anybody to access.

Asusgate
This is just one of the many helpful tips we have posted, You can find more stories here,
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