So you are not actually good at backflips then?

OMFG Somali pirates hacking NZ Pabx's

This is a far out one, My Wife was recently contacted at work by their provider saying they had stacked up 5k worth of toll calls to Somalia in a few days, In the end they were traced to Italy. The way they do this is to exploit default passwords which lazy admins haven't bothered to change. They can tell the model of pabx by the way it deals with the calls, different tones, prompts etc, they press the combination of keys to access voicemail of a DDI number, normally not the main number so it doesn't tie up a line and arouse suspicion. They get in with the default often "1234" password then setup call forwarding from that extension to Somalia, I suspect they do much the same thing to route the calls out of Italy. Then they simply dial in their call would then route directly to the number it has been call forwarded to. Pretty classic stuff really.

Fricken wicked stuff, looks like they are not alone, Here is a story where an Ausi firm got stung 9k

Garmin epic Fail!!

I thought when I had the issue with the iTunes gift card a few weeks ago that it would be the most retarded customer service experience of the year hands down... But no, we have a new winner Ladies and Gents, Garmin. Do not buy ANYTHING from this company if you live in New Zealand. They recently moved their support to ausi, which is cool, but the ability to buy Maps from the garmin website does not exist!

In I.T. you get to work on a wide range of different stuff, sometimes stuff you would not normally work on such as a Garmin GPS for one of my bosses. He is going to the states next week and wants the North American maps installed on the device, Easy job I thought. I left it for the last job of the day and headed up there registered the device, downloaded the browser plugin, updated software on device etc, went into the garmin mapstore and proceeded to find the Map that was needed and added it to cart. Went to the checkout and punched in the Amex details... Checkout fails, problem with the address or something, of course there is no specific error just failed, please check your details. After spelling the address 14 different ways and getting no where we tried a Mastercard, still no luck. 40 mins or so had gone buy so I decided to call Garmin, which transfers to Ausi... phone was answered after about 2 mins, and I explained I was having issues, the CSR on the other end promptly told me you cannot buy maps online for download in NZ, To be clear I explained we wanted North American maps... and she confirmed you cannot buy them in NZ, Even though the website lets you enter NZ as a country and proceed on through to checkout, I said to the CSR are you serious? So if I flew to Ausi, I could buy a map, and she confirmed, that yes with an Ausi credit card I could indeed buy a map and there was basically no other solution other than to buy a navman or tomtom.. What a Failure I told her, I also added they might want to clearly advertise the fact on their site you cannot buy Maps online.. They did direct me to the Auckland map center, who have heard hundreds of the same story's re Garmin and they can order the map from Garmin, but it takes 1.5 weeks, the Boss leaves to the USA next thurs..

Of course there is the option of a hacked map, but not really something I like putting on my customers devices.

Garmin, you Fail at Customer Support!

using an iPad for "Real Work" windows 7 on iPad

Citrix Aims to bring windows 7 to the iPad, so you can multitask and do actual work!!!!Theres actually already a citrix app for the iPhone/iPod touch, it works pretty well at presenting a published desktop, but as you can guess its pointless on such a tiny screen.

To Quote Citrix "If your company has XenDesktop or XenApp you will be happy to know you will be able to use your iPad for real work as well" Haha Not something you hear often "Apple" and "real work" in the same context. Lets face it, iPhones and iPod touches are really just a mildy useful toy. The Antenna on the 3g iPhone is crap, which in turn makes the coverage crap. Thus why im not talking myself into an iPhone, I run a Blackberry Bold 9000 for work and have an iPod touch for play and music.

Time will tell if the iPad does find its way into the enterprise environment.

Link to techworld story

CIA, FBI, Twitter, and Paypal hit by Botnet.

Well what can I say but pwned!!!! The offending nasty or a variation of it is called Pushdo, Pandex or Cutwail. It used to just infect a pc and send out spam, but now it has been updated to also make SSL connections to various websites. At the moment it seems like the botnet attempts a SSL connection then drops it and repeats, this is similar to a DDOS attack, but not on a large enough scale to have a huge impact yet. SSL traffic places a much larger load than HTTP traffic and if the volume it stepped up the effected sites may be even more pwned

isn't it Ironic, Chinese company claims iPad is a copycat

isn't it ironic, from the land that doesn't have any respect for anyone elses intellectual property comes a claim the iPad is a copycat. Sorry China, haven't got any sympathy for you on this one.

The company is based in a southern Chinese city known for producing knock-off phones, which are called "shanzhai", or "bandit" phones, and sometimes take the form of counterfeit iPhones or other popular handsets.

Techworld story here