Download Squad

There has been a lot of attention given to some recent iPhone hacks that potentially affect users of jailbroken iPhones, especially now that a malicious attack has been discovered. If you've jailbroken your phone, and you are worried about whether you are potentially vulnerable, here's a simple answer:

If you have not installed OpenSSH (or any other SSH package), you are not vulnerable to the current attacks.

To check this, go into the Cydia installer app on your jailbroken iPhone, tap the Manage button, tap the Packages button, and scroll alphabetically through the list of installed packages looking for OpenSSH. If it's not there, you're good, you can relax. If you're using an alternative installer like Rock the steps will be much the same.

If OpenSSH is there, you can follow this guide from our friends over at TUAW to change your iPhone's root and mobile passwords.

"Wordoids", which are words that are made-up, but sound right. They follow the rules of phonetics, and if done properly, roll off the tongue. The need to have an online presence has increased the need for unique product and company names and has led to these wordoids. Yet, even with a made-up name, it's important for the name to convey something about what the product or business actually is. Now you can do it very quickly using a website called, appropriately enough, Wordoid.

For example, I gave Wordoid the shortened acronym we use for Download Squad when talking on our internal mailing list, which is DLS. The first option Wordoid presented is dlsident, and it informs me that the related domain dlsident.com is available. While it doesn't look like much, if you spell out the first three letters as we do when using the acronym, this name actually rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It's like a subversive version of the name. Other options it came up with are dlsider, dlsidad, dlsidends, and dlsidanila. Certainly, they're not all winners, but I bet they're better than you expected.

You can tell Wordoid where to place your seed word - at the beginning, end, or anywhere including in the middle of the text string it returns. This gives you a ton of flexibility to guide your wordoid's creation to include useful information, but still come up with something unique, easy to say, and with an available domain name.

This week Cisco released a new iPhone app called Cisco SIO To Go [iTunes link]. The application is primarily focused on delivering security and threat information via a number of freely available online feeds including Cyber Risk Report, Cisco Threat Outbreaks, Cisco Security Blog, and even some of Cisco's Twitter feeds. This information is available on the app's Security Alerts page.

All of this could be done in your favorite feed reader, so it's a little disappointing that this is the focus of Cisco SIO To Go. The application also features a Lookup page, which allows you to look up a domain name to look up its Email or Web Reputation score. This screen has some interesting-looking red, yellow, and green flashing lights with interesting labels like "Virus outbreak in progress", but unfortunately they don't seem to actually mean or do anything. Maybe they relate to the domain lookup, but if they do it certainly isn't clear how. None of the domains I searched seemed to be color-coded in any way.

While it's hard to complain about a free app, at the same time Cisco is in a unique position to offer some unique functionality like maybe push notifications when virus outbreaks or serious security vulnerabilities are discovered. There's nothing inherently wrong with Cisco SIO To Go, but there's also not much right with it. Cisco could do better if they wanted to.

[via InSecurity Complex]

While most touch mobile devices like the iPhone render web pages surprisingly well, sometimes they are slow to load and difficult to read. Blogs, in particular, with their wide text areas tend to become difficult to read on small screens.

If you run a WordPress blog, there's an option available to you called WPTouch. WPTouch is a theme package plugin that allows your blog to render a completely separate and mobile-optimized theme based on the browser user agent provided by the device's browser. The WPTouch theme is much lighter than a typical blog theme, and it provides the option to strip out javascript-heavy elements, making the page load that much faster.

Of course, not all readers will want to view a mobile-optimized version of your site, particularly when their mobile device can handle the page's full functionality. In that case, there is always a link in the footer of the page that allows the user to switch to the full version of the site.

WPTouch is a free WordPress plugin that you can download directly from the Add Now plugin administration screen on recent WordPress installations by searching for WPTouch.

Most statistics packages focus on which pages or content are drawing people to your site. While that's certainly important, sometimes you want to know what's happening right now in terms of traffic on your site.

If you're running a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can install a plugin called WP-UserOnline to find out exactly that. WP-UserOnline gives you a summary of who is currently viewing your blog broken down by Members, Guests, and Bots. It then gives the details for each one below, including the member name, name of the bot, the page the user is on, and the referring page (if available).

It's certainly not as full-featured as a full stats package like Google Analytics, but there's no better way to know what traffic is viewing your WordPress blog at the moment.