Tag Archives: OTA

SIM card vulnerabilities easy to fix, researcher says

A pair of severe security problems in millions of SIM cards should be easy for operators to fix, according to the German security researcher who found the issues.

Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs in Berlin previewed research earlier this week that millions of SIM cards are likely still using an outdated, 1970s-era form of encryption to authenticate over-the-air (OTA) software updates.

Nohl found it was possible to trick some kinds of SIM cards into divulging an encrypted 56-bit DES (Data Encryption Standard) key, which can be decrypted using a regular computer. He discovered that by sending a bogus OTA update to a phone, some SIMs returned an error code containing the weak key.

A device could then be sent spyware which accesses critical phone data through the card’s Java Virtual Machine, a software framework present on almost every SIM sold worldwide.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

By Putting Over-the-Air Online Legally, Aereo Clears The Way For ALL TV Everywhere

By Anthony Wing Kosner, Contributor

This week is the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, with the attendent announcements relating to television distribution. Adobe and Brightcove are both introducing products to facilitate the concept of Television Everywhere, or TVE. But what the broadcast industry considers TV does not include all of the video that is already accessible everywhere through the web. It is the amount and availability of that internet video that is driving the immediacy of broadcasters to embrace TVE. And I think there is a good case to be made that Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed startup that lets people watch live broadcast  TV channels (over-the-air or OTA) on internet-connected devices, is about to push Television Everywhere definitively towards ALL Television Everywhere (ATVE!)

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

By Putting Over-the-Air Online Legally, Aereo's Clears The Way For ALL TV Everywhere

By Anthony Wing Kosner, Contributor

This week is the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, with the attendent announcements relating to television distribution. Adobe and Brightcove are both introducing products to facilitate the concept of Television Everywhere, or TVE. But what the broadcast industry considers TV does not include all of the video that is already accessible everywhere through the web. It is the amount and availability of that internet video that is driving the immediacy of broadcasters to embrace TVE. And I think there is a good case to be made that Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed startup that lets people watch live broadcast  TV channels (over-the-air or OTA) on internet-connected devices, is about to push Television Everywhere definitively towards ALL Television Everywhere (ATVE!)

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

TRADE NEWS: Agilent Technologies' PXT Wireless Communications Test Set Selected by Tri-L Solutions f

By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

TRADE NEWS: Agilent Technologies’ PXT Wireless Communications Test Set Selected by Tri-L Solutions for LTE Over-the-Air Test

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYS: A) today announced that Tri-L Solutions Inc. has selected Agilent’s PXT wireless communications test set and integrated it with Tri-L Solutions SmarTest measurement software for testing LTE over the air.

LTE OTA test is a mandatory certification test to ensure that radiation from wireless devices meets required standards and that customers experience satisfactory performance,” said David Wei, general manager of Agilent’s China Communication Operation. “We are delighted that Tri-L Solutions chose to integrate our PXT wireless communications test set for LTE OTA with its SmarTest software. The active antenna pattern measurement delivered by this integration is crucial for research and development to optimize antenna performance.”

“The combination of the test chamber’s performance and the measurement instrument’s performance are critical to achieve optimal performance on the overall requirements for the complete OTA test system,” said Yangguang Xu,CEO of Tri-L Solutions. “Closely working with Agilent, we found a win-win solution to maximize the performance of the entire system. We are pleased to announce that Tri-L Solutions now offers the LTE OTA test solution to our customers by integrating Agilent PXT with our OTA test chambers.”

The Tri-L anechoic chamber-based OTA test system provides an accurate, fast and cost-effective way to verify wireless devices and antennas over the air. Tri-L Solutions offers multiple product lines with different sizes, portability and cost to address testing needs in R&D, parts evaluation, certification and manufacturing. Tri-L’s patented technologies and SmarTest software enable customers to quickly and accurately test 2G/3G TRP/TIS OTA in the anechoic chamber. The integration of Agilent PXT extends Tri-L solutions to cover the LTE OTA test.

The Agilent PXT wireless communication test set represents a significant breakthrough in testing LTE user equipment. It incorporates flexible base station/network emulation and RF parametric tests into one integrated unit and extends Agilent’s unmatched portfolio of LTE test solutions for development and verification. The PXT hardware is configurable with a number of software options for advanced testing and analysis.

Additional information about Agilent’s wide range of LTE measurement and analysis solutions is available at www.agilent.com/find/LTE.

About Tri-L Solutions

Tri-L Solutions Inc., a branch of General Test Systems Inc., is a wireless terminal OTA test system and solution provider for the …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

The Window Is Closing on the Next Wireless Land Grab

By Dan Radovsky, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Remember The Beverly Hillbillies? If you don’t, here’s the premise of the long-running sitcom, as explained in its theme song:

“Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed,
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.
Then one day he was shootin’ at some food,
And up through the ground come a bubblin’ crude …
Oil, that is … black gold … Texas tea.”

It goes on to explain how finding oil gave Jed and his kinfolk the cash to leave the holler and move to Beverly Hills, where foolish hijinks involving movie stars and swimming pools would then ensue.

The Beverly Hillbillies, running nine seasons from the early ’60s into the ’70s, was a big hit for CBS during the shank of broadcast television’s golden age. However, more than 40 years after The Beverly Hillbillies’ oil well finally dried up, Jed’s good fortune now mirrors that of the denizens of broadcast television’s current backwoods — the UHF television stations.

UHF station owners are sitting on the equivalent of newly discovered oil reserves in a world that’s fighting for every last drop of crude. The valuable substance in this case is spectrum, the frequencies that the mobile operators covet as wireless broadband usage is driving the telecom industry.

The UHF channels are in the highest wireless frequency range allotted to broadcast television, and those frequencies are more useful to mobile communications than to the lower frequencies of the VHF channels used by the network affiliates and some independent stations.

Suddenly, UHF stations have become a valuable commodity — not because of their programming, audiences, or facilities, but solely for their spectrum licenses.

Spectrum is the lifeblood of wireless communications, and the major mobile operators are willing to pay big bucks for it.

AT&T tried and failed to buy T-Mobile USA and its spectrum in for $39 billion. Verizon paid $3.9 billion to Comcast and other cable companies for their cache of spectrum. Clearwire is currently being sought by Sprint Nextel for its frequencies, and now in a bit of a turnaround, T-Mobile USA wants to buy MetroPCS and its airwave resources.

To take advantage of the need for spectrum, there is a UHF station buying spree going on, according to Variety. Like real estate speculators searching out run-down properties in changing neighborhoods, investors are scooping up UHF stations for later sale to the highest bidders.

The San Francisco Bay-area UHF station, KTLN, residing on channel 47, a religious-programming broadcaster, was bought for $8 million by OTA Broadcasting, a group headed up by computer impresario Michael Dell in 2011. OTA also owns three other stations: KFFV and MeTV in Seattle, and WEBR in New York City.

But UHF station owners are also facing a dilemma. If those in the higher channels don’t sell voluntarily, they might face eviction from their current FCC-designated spectrums and be moved to a new home to share spectrum with another station on a lower …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Priceline Can Fuel Upside By Making Further Inroads In Europe

By Trefis Team, Contributor

Quick Take OTAs are focusing on international markets – Europe & Asia-Pacific – as growth in the US online travel market slows down. The European online travel sales are expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.7% till 2016 as compared to 4.8% CAGR for the US online travel market. With a lower online penetration (compared to the US), a fragmented hotel market and low OTA penetration in Eastern Europe, European online travel market offers considerable growth opportunities for OTAs. Priceline’s Booking.com has been one of the primary drivers for OTA growth in Europe. Key European markets represent around 60% of Priceline’s total room nights booked while Booking.com only accounts for 6% of the European hotel market leaving great potential for further growth. Competition from locally based OTAs and other leading US based OTA‘s could limit Priceline’s growth potential in Europe. As growth in the US online travel market slows down, online travel agencies (OTAs) are turning towards growth opportunities in other promising markets such as Europe and Asia-Pacific. Having acquired Booking.com, Agoda and TravelJigsaw, Priceline has significantly expanded its international operations in Europe and Asia-Pacific. While Booking.com is one of the premium booking platform in Europe, Agoda is focused on expanding Priceline’s presence in the Asia-Pacific travel market. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Benjamin Kerensa: Upgrade Sprint Galaxy Nexus to 4.2.1 on Ubuntu

Screenshot 2013 01 18 01 23 51 168x300 Upgrade Sprint Galaxy Nexus to 4.2.1 on Ubuntu On Tuesday I discovered (which resulted in lots of buzz) the new Sprint Android 4.2.1 Update that is still being staged as a OTA for Sprint Customers. Now you can wait for Sprint to roll the update out through a normal OTA or you can follow the steps below which do not require root or even a unlocked bootloader and since you’re not flashing a custom ROM but instead just sideloading a official update your warranty should stay intact.

 

 

Step One: POWER Phone Off

Step Two: Hold UP and DOWN VOLUME + POWER until you land in fastboot menu then use the up arrow to select “Recovery” and press POWER to confirm the choice. You will then be taken to a screen showing an android with a red exclamation mark on this screen press UP and DOWN VOLUME + POWER until your taken to the next menu where you will tap the DOWN VOLUME once and use POWER to select choose the option “apply update from adb.”

Step Three: Connect your Galaxy Nexus to your Ubuntu system via USB cable.

 

Step Four: In terminal run the following command without the quotes “wget http://android.clients.google.com/packages/ota/samsung_proxima_toroplus_sprint/c5ea6e959840.update_mysidspr_FH05_to_GA02.zip && adb sideload c5ea6e959840.update_mysidspr_FH05_to_GA02.zip”.

Now you should see progress in terminal and then after about 10 minutes your phone will complete the update procedure and you can use the volume control to select the reboot option. You should now have Android 4.2.1 on your Sprint Galaxy Nexus and to check just go to “About Phone” under Settings and it should look like this:

Screenshot 2013 01 18 01 24 35 168x300 Upgrade Sprint Galaxy Nexus to 4.2.1 on Ubuntu

 

The post Upgrade Sprint Galaxy Nexus to 4.2.1 on Ubuntu appeared first on Benjamin Kerensa dot Com.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Mario Limonciello: Multi-homed MythTV backend

This is the first of my non OpenWRT related posts.

I have a peculiar situation.  I have two houses that I split my life between.  I don’t want to pay for cable in both houses, but I also want access to some of the TV shows that you only get newer episodes on cable and not via Netflix/Hulu/Amazon.

So to solve this, I have set up MythTV in both houses.  Both setups run Mythbuntu 12.04.1 (www.mythbuntu.org).  In the house without cable I have a Silicondust HD Homerun.

The HD Homerun is set to record OTA content exclusively.  I get all the basic TV networks this way in that house.

In the second house I have a Silicondust HD Homerun Prime.  I’m fortunate that in that house I have Comcast, which is one of the more friendly companies with regard to copy protection.  I’m able to record pretty much everything except the premium networks like HBO and Showtime.
 

In the second house I duplicate all the OTA recording schedules but also schedule things on the other stations I care about.

Secondary House

Now to get the recordings from the second house to the first house, I had to setup a collection of scripts that run in staggered cron jobs.  The first one is on the secondary house.  I first determined which channel ID’s I needed to export from.  This can be found by looking through mythweb or by examining the database with a tool like phpmyadmin.  Look for ‘chanid’ in the ‘channels’ table.

Once I had those channels figured out I created this script.  On each daily run it will find all the recordings who’s starttime happened to be “today”.  It exports all relevant SQL data about that recording into a flat SQL file that can be imported on the primary house.

Next it creates a list of recordings that will need to be synced over to the primary house.  This list is based upon the last successful sync date from the primary house.  It only syncs all recordings between the lastrun date and “tomorrow”.  This sets it up so that if for some reason the primary backend doesn’t sync a day it will still work.  Also it’s important to sync only a handful of days because the autoexpire will be happening at different rates on the two backends.

I store all this content in the directory /var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql 

sudo chown mythtv:mythtv /var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql

/home/mythtv/export.sh 

#!/bin/sh

#export SQL
chanid=”2657 2659 2622″
DIRECTORY=/var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql/
BIGGEST_DATE=`find $DIRECTORY -maxdepth 1 -name ‘*.sql’ | sort -r | head -1 | sed ‘s,.*exported-,,; s,.sql,,’`
for chan in $chanid;
do
[ -n “$where” ] && where=”$where or”
[ -n “$BIGGEST_DATE” ] && date=” and starttime > ‘$BIGGEST_DATE 00:00:00′”
where=”$where (chanid=’$chan’$date)”
done
CONFIG=$HOME/.mythtv/config.xml
DATE=`date ‘+%F’`
if [ “$DATE” = “$BIGGEST_DATE” ]; then
echo “Already ran today, not running SQL generation again”
else
db=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//DatabaseName)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
user=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//UserName)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
pass=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//Password)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
host=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//Host)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
fname=/var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql/exported-$DATE.sql
mysqldump -h$host -u$user -p$pass $db recorded recordedseek recordedrating recordedprogram recordedmarkup recordedcredits –where=”$where” –no-create-db –no-create-info > $fname
fi


#generate a recordings list
lastrun=/home/mythtv/lastrun
tomorrow=$(date –date=”tomorrow” ‘+%Y%m%d’)
if [ -f $lastrun ]; then
        tmp=$(cat $lastrun)
else
        tmp=$tomorrow
fi
while [ “$tmp” != “$tomorrow” ]
do
        test_dates=”$test_dates $tmp”
        tmp=$(date –date=”1 day $tmp” ‘+%Y%m%d’)
done
test_dates=”$test_dates $tomorrow”
for date in $test_dates;
do
        for chan in $chanid;
        do
                from=”$from /var/lib/mythtv/recordings/${chan}_${date}*”
        done
done
ls $from 2>/dev/null | tee /var/lib/mythtv/exported-sql/recordings-list
Next I set up rsync to export my /var/lib/mythtv directory (read only) and my lastrun successful (write only).

/etc/rsyncd.conf

max connections = 2
log file = /var/log/rsync.log
timeout = 300

[mythtv]
comment = mythtv
path = /var/lib/mythtv
read only = yes
list = yes
uid = nobody
gid = nogroup
auth users = rsync
secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets

[lastrun]
comment = last rsync run
path = /home/mythtv/
write only = yes
read only = no
list = no
uid = mythtv
gid = mythtv
auth users = rsync
secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
Last thing to do on the secondary house is to set up the crontab to run at night.  I set it for 11:05 PM every day.  It should only take a 10-15 seconds to run.
5 23 * * * /home/mythtv/export.sh
Because of the way this all works, I decide to leave my secondary house backend on all the time.  

Primary House

Now in my primary house I need to sync recordings, SQL data, and then update the last successful run at the secondary house.

/home/mythtv/import.sh

#!/bin/sh

domain=rsync@address
sql_directory=/home/mythtv/sql
recordings_directory=/var/lib/mythtv/recordings
password_file=/home/mythtv/password-file
lastrun=/home/mythtv/lastrun

sync_recordings()
{
today=$(date ‘+%Y%m%d’)
from=$(cat $sql_directory/recordings-list | sed “s,/var/lib/mythtv,$domain::mythtv,”)
RET=30
while [ $RET -eq 30 ]; do
#rsync -avz –partial –timeout 120 –progress $from –password-file=password-file $recordings_directory
rsync -av –partial –timeout 120 –progress $from –password-file=$password_file $recordings_directory
RET=$?
done
echo “rsync return code: $?”
[ $RET -ne 0 ] && exit 1
echo “$today” > lastrun
rsync -avz –password-file=password-file lastrun $domain::lastrun/
}

sync_sql()
{
rsync -avz $domain::mythtv/exported-sql/* –password-file=$password_file $sql_directory
}

insert_sql()
{
CONFIG=$HOME/.mythtv/config.xml
db=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//DatabaseName)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
user=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//UserName)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
pass=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//Password)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
host=`xpath  -q -e ‘string(//Host)’ $CONFIG 2>/dev/null`
old_host=supermario
new_host=kingkoopa
for fname in $(find $sql_directory -maxdepth 1 -name ‘*.sql’);
do
if [ ! -f ${fname}.imported ]; then
cat $fname | sed “s,${old_host},${new_host},g; s,INSERT INTO, INSERT IGNORE INTO,g” > ${fname}.imported
mysql –host=$host –user=$user -p$pass $db < ${fname}.imported
fi
done
}

suspend()
{
sudo /usr/local/bin/setwakeup.sh $(date –date=’18:00′ ‘+%s’)
sudo pm-suspend
}

mythfilldatabase
sync_sql
sync_recordings
insert_sql
#suspend
I’m careful about the order I do things.  The SQL has to get inserted last in case for some reason the recordings fail to sync or don’t all sync while i’m watching.
I currently don’t suspend afterwards due to some instability on my system, but I have been experimenting with that too.  If S3 is reliable you can configure the setup to suspend after the sync is done and wake up next time you need to use it or record from it.
I set the cronjob to run at midnight every day on the primary backend.
0 0 * * * /home/mythtv/import.sh

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu