Diyomate K9 Firmware Update A20 14-5-8

Well, it seems that a lot of people had been looking for the firmware to update your Diyomate K9 and it was nowhere to be found, even on Diyomate's website. Actually, to be honest, it IS on Diyomate's site here:
http://www.diyomate.com/DownLoadList.asp?CID=66

But it doesn't say K9 anywhere right? Yes, that is because the K9 box uses a chip call A20 (AllWinner) and Diyomate release the firmware according to the chipset rather than the Box model. Now you will see that there are 2 firmware release in May for A20.

So, what is the differences? Well in case you did not know,the K9 is one of the few model from Diyomate that ships with an option to have either Android or Ali YunOS. So theses 2 files corresponds to the 2 different options. And the good news is that in case you had chosen the wrong version, you just need to reflash it or if you want to change to the other favors, you too can just flash that in.

Ask me, personally, I prefer Ali YunOS and in fact, that is what you actually paid a little bit more for!

Have fun with your upgraded firmware! (Please copy all your important files to your SDCard first before flashing...)

Windows XP Extended Support Till 2019 Registry Hack

I am not the first to disclose this registry trick to change your Windows XP into Windows XP POS Edition. The purpose of doing so is that while all other desktop edition of Windows XP had been withdrawn from support, the POS (Point-of-sale) version is however still supported until 2019. This essentially give you extended support on your Windows XP.

HOWEVER, even if this trick works to give you updates until 2019, Microsoft will make some assumptions. For example, people will not be using it wo surf the web, read email, load Youtube of Facebook etc. Because this is a POS system, which is pretty much those dump terminal operated by sales in stores. So what does that mean? It mean you will not be FULLY protected anyway. IE will probably never be fixed. So, my advise is still to just ditch Windows XP and upgrade to Windows 7/8 as a long term solution.

Anyway, here is the simple hack. Put the following into a text file and save it as WinXP2019.reg :

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
"Installed"=dword:00000001

Double click this file to have Regedit execute it. That is all to it.

Kali Linux Slow Update

For those using Kali, you must had noticed how slow and painful it is to update the Linux. Unless you have a very fast internet, which will not be the case on a oil rig or the space shuttle. Just kidding about that. But its slow. That's a fact.

What I am going to show you here is a simple tweak and it will work much faster. And I am not talking about private or custom repository, which I strongly discourage as these are not verified and could contain something else which you do not want on your Linux.

Let's find a file call sources.lst in /etc/apt. Open it and look for http://http.kali.org.... Now, all you need to do is to change it to http://repo.kali.org..... You should have 2 instances of it if you are using the default installation.

Now do you normal apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and you will see the differences. While Repo and Http are both official Kali sources, there are slightly different, but I do not suppose most users will be affected by this differences.

Well, good luck updating and happy pen-testing!

Adobe Flash Player 13 Full Offline Installer - Fixing the stopped at 7% Error

The latest Flash Player 13 may had stopped downloading for some at 7% and giving a message:
"Lost connection. Trying to reconnect..."
And actually it does nothing of that sort...

The Flash installer had been one of the worse nightmare ever. For a start, its a EXE executable, but because of whatever reason, something its saved as a ZIP and you can imagine the mess of confusion it is to average user.

Then the download is horrible and I get 10% success rates only in some places.

To top that up, the installer is ALWAYS deleted once it is ran and no matter if it is successful or not! Obviously a waste of bandwidth.

I had talked about it again and again in the past:
http://blog.winston-avalon.com/2011/11/flash-player-11-download-fail-at-12.html

My advise is DON'T use Flash. Really. Given the track record, its probably one of the easiest door to open on your PC if not the MOST. And most of the bigger players had long given up on Flash, like Apple (not surprising) and finally Google in Android 4.4.

But if you really have no choice, need to run it in a VM etc, there is still the option to download it.
Just go to :
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

And I really want to stop hot-linking the direct EXE file now since Flash is updated ever so often and that last thing I need is to misdirect someone into downloading a old version.

But hopefully, I will not need to post this for Flash 14 (if it will ever exist...)

Change in Domain

From the old http://blog.90283600.com, the blog is now moved to http://blog.winston-avalon.com.
You may want to update your bookmark etc.

Thanks for the support for all these years!