Sunday, July 19, 2009
Free Firefox plugin allows torrents hidden inside PNG image files
A website called Hid.im posted a Firefox plugin that makes sending torrents to people a simple matter of accessing an image, right-clicking and choosing “Save Torrent As…”. The Hidim Firefox plugin uses the open-source portable network graphics (PNG) file format to encode it data through an image which appears like this:
This JPG image displays graphically what three separate PNG files would look like, as they were created on Hid.im to demonstrate the image. These files are (top) sameer verma - olpc photo dvd.torrent, (middle) legaltorrents collections - web development icons superset.torrent and (bottom) politics apocalypse - oppressed by the authorities remix sources.torrent. They will not work with the Firefox plugin. Visit the Hid.im site to right-click on the original PNG images there on the front page to test the application.
Internally within the 2 pixel tall PNG file the data is arranged in reverse vertical columns, proceeding from left to right as in the following layout:
The torrent data is stored in place of what would otherwise be valid 24-bit red,green,blue (RGB) pixel values, which is what the internal PNG file format uses to determine each pixel’s color value. By having a value from 0-255 each for red, green and blue, a single pixel’s color within an image can be determined. In the Hid.im implementation, the RGB color data is replaced with bytes from the torrent data, thereby making the image appear like static or snow on the screen, while actually conveying real data underneath.
In order for the plugin to determine whether or not a particular PNG file is an actual Hid.im image, and not just one which looks like it, it looks for this embedded sequence of characters, which appears at the beginning of the file: [104, 105, 100, 105, 109, 32, 105, 115, 32, 116, 111, 114, 114, 101, 110, 116, 115, 33]. These characters correspond to the following ASCII sequence: “hidim is torrents!” (in lower-case).
If that character sequence is found, then the following data within the PNG file is used to extract a torrent, which according to the website’s example, appears in the following format, with each section separated by colons:
- Line length (bencoded integer)
- Filename (bencoded string)
- sha1 hash of the .torrent file (bencoded string)
- data (bencoded string)
The bencode (pronounced Bee-encode) structure is the encoding format used for P2P BitTorrent applications, and is native to their internal structure. Bencoding supports integers, strings, lists and dictionaries (which are a list of associative arrays). There is some sample source code on the Hid.im website showing how the Bookmarklet (the encoded torrent data file) can be converted, and saved to disk.
Right now the application is open source. It’s limited in size to a 250KB PNG file, but is governed by the extremely loose MIT License, which would allow for greater length PNG files to be created quite easily. The MIT License states:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The extremely free nature of the MIT License was chosen because the application’s creator, Michael Nutt, desires it to be made into a wide web standard. Right now there is only the Firefox/Safari plugin, but he hopes that since it is open source with such a free license structure, it won’t be long until other browsers are supported.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Download Firefox 3.5 Final
The wait is over! Firefox 3.5 has reached the end of its development process. The gold build of the open-source browser from Mozilla, formerly codenamed Shiretoko, was finalized on June 29, 2009, and is now available for download (links are live at the bottom of this article). Mozilla is planning to ship Firefox 3.5 today, June 30, but at the time of this article the availability of Firefox 3.0's successor hasn't yet been announced officially. Still, the final development milestone of Firefox 3.5 has already been wrapped up and the bits went live on Mozilla's FTP servers. It is only a matter of Firefox 3.5 being released to web, but you needn't wait, just grab Firefox 3.5 from the links below for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.“The team here at Mozilla has been working hard on creating features, enhancing performance and adding other awesomeness to Firefox 3.5, and we’re very excited about sharing it with the world,” revealed Mozilla's John Slater on June 29.
Firefox 3.5 has been launched over a year after the release to web of its precursor, Firefox 3.0. Version 3.0 shipped in mid-June 2008 and went on to set a world record for the most downloads of a newly available browser, in excess of eight million in just the first 24 hours. Subsequently Mozilla announced that it was starting development of codename Shiretoko, a browser referred to well until the first half of 2009 as Firefox 3.1. Version 3.1 was rebranded 3.5 to show that the latest iteration of the open-source browser was indeed a major version.
Firefox 3.5 will be available in “more than 70 languages – get your local version. [The browser will come with] improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode. Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript
Firefox 3.5 Final
Enlarge picture
engine. The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation. Support for native JSON, and web worker threads. Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5
Friday, June 19, 2009
Google Phone,Gphone Vs Apple Iphone
Now,we are in market of these competitive products and we need to choose which it is Best.here are the attractive features…
1.Google Phone,Gphone is tagged at $179 which is nearly $20 less than cheapest Apple iPhone available in the market.
2.Apple took just 74 days to sell 1 million first-generation iPhones and only a weekend to sell 1 million 3G iPhones. Google and T-Mobile obviously can’t expect that type of reception, but 500,000 to 700,00 units shipped before 2009 is not a Big deal.
3.Google has laid out for devices suggest that manufacturers include cameras for photo and video, and built-in Wi-Fi technology to access the Web at hot spots such as airports, coffee shops and hotels.
4.Google always had strong advertising plans ans strategies,which can be thought like,this will be another great means to provide and publicize their ads.
5.Google softwares will be freely available in the Google phone,which will provide access to all sectors of our work field.
6.Google phones be designed to work on carriers’ fastest networks, known as 3G, to ensure that Web pages can be downloaded quickly. Google suggests the phones could include Global Positioning System technology that identifies where people are.
8.Google does not deny or admit to existence of Google phone prototypes being floated around to wireless operators such as T-Mobile USA, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
9.another cool feature would be USB connection, that offers up the phone as a USB drive and as a phone, with the USB drive part offering up PC launchable apps.
but on the other hand,
10.iPhone software and user experiece cannot be topped in a low cost phone. Apple iPhone is so well designed and easy to use … offers much more than any phone on the market - full Internet experience and rich video/music experience to name just a few. And it’s integrated with Leopard OSX.5 and will evolve via firmware upgrades. iPhone is great now and will only get better.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Mozilla, Opera upset over IE8 as default browser in Windows 7 RC
Mozilla and Opera may be jumping the gun a little here, but both companies have already spoken out about IE8 in Windows 7 RC. The reason being it is automatically selected as the default browser when upgrading your machine – even if you previously had another browser set as default. Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of Mozilla said:
Our initial review suggests this is a blatant use of the Windows operating system to change the market dynamics of browser usage … What we’ve seen so far is a clear example of why and how Microsoft’s Windows monopoly damages competition in related products.
Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer at Opera added:
This issue highlights the problem with the browser market. It’s certainly something we would want to discuss
Microsoft is trying to calm their fears stating that the Windows 7 release candidate is just a test version of the operating system and not the final version. Presumably they intend to ensure users can set (or keep) their preferred browser as default in the final release of the OS.
Mozilla aims for stability with Firefox multi-processor project
Mozilla has started a new project called Content Processes that will see a version of Firefox developed that takes advantage of multi-processors and splits the content displayed in each tab and the UI between different processes on your PC.The project, which will see Firefox start to work in the same way as Google Chrome, has several advantages over the current Firefox implementation. The main one is a much higher level of stability and a crash in one browser tab not meaning an end to your entire Firefox session. The responsiveness of the UI is also expected to be improved and overall performance on a multi-core machine will be noticeably better.
The first deadline for this new version is July 15th, but it won’t be a fully featured version. On the project page Mozilla’s goal for that deadline is as follows:
Get something hacked together as quickly as possible. This is probably not the Firefox chrome, but a really simplistic page with a URL bar.
Realistically we can’t expect to see a usable version with multi-processor support until sometime next year, but it’s good to see Mozilla working on such an enhancement. Read more at Mozilla Links