Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

The D241H Display+ is a new monitor with what i can only describe as bizarre features for a monitor. I’m not saying their bad features by any means just strange. In a world where most people own mobile phones or PMPs which can do your social networking, emails and photos, why not have a monitor that can do it independently of your desktop PC.

This 1080P Full HD panel with a 2ms response time, HDMI and DVI port, it’s your standard fairly decent LCD monitor for your desktop, What makes it stand out though is its ability to connect via Wi-Fi(or ethernet) to the net when your desktop is powered off. Once connected it’s widgets can check your email(Gmail and Yahoo! mail) collect RSS feeds from your favourite MightyGadget blog, and other assorted web feeds.

You can also plug in an SD card or USB dongle and playback your pictures turning the monitor into an oversized picture frame. What’s cool is you can have three widgets working at once too. It also comes with a remote with a slide out QWERTY keyboard making it easy to write your emails or messages from a comfortable distance.

No pictures of the screen yet but it’s believed to be available in May and pricing is still TBC.

Looking for a decent media streamer? Not got a PS3 or 360?(maybe you do and you want something a little more dedicated.) Then Taiwanese specialists ASUS are letting us in Blighty get our grubby little mitts on the O!PlayAir HDP-R3.

Not the first media streamer ASUS have brought to the table but this one is its first to incorporate WiFi a must in most peoples eyes for a good media streamer. Now this baby is packing N-standard WiFi so if you’ve got an N enabled WiFi network you’ll get the full benefits.

So what does it do? Well firstly plug it into your TV via HDMI. Set up the usual settings of your network and BAM! you can play media wirelessly straight from your PC(providing your up to date with your Windows Media Player) or media server. For those who have ethernet connections, you can use that too.It plays all your standard file types, AVI, MP4, MPG etc but the bonus it does is play MKV which if you’re not familiar with seems to be the most used now for HD content.

Asus haven’t set a UK price yet but the HDP-R3 is retailing in Italy at €129.90 which is around £115 and should be available hopefully by the end of the week.

Mobile broadband dongles seem to be the way forward these days but mobile network 3 have come up with this genius piece of kit for better internet on the go whether it be with a laptop or netbook, but also now handheld gaming or anything that can connect via WiFi.

It has been named MiFi, a portable wireless modem and router, that like a mobile broadband dongle, connects to the 3G broadband network, but allows a number of devices to connect to it and use the connection unlike the one device dongle. So that means you can carry the device in your bag, or pocket(if its big enough) connect your laptop to it and play the latest multiplayer game on your PSP.

“There are millions of Wi-Fi devices out there, but they can only be used in fixed locations. Using Mobile Wi-Fi from 3, consumers can connect to the internet wherever they have a 3 signal, whether at home or on the move. They can download a track onto their iPod touch, or tweet their latest updates to their mates, or both. Either way it’s simple to set-up, without the need for wires.” says Marc Allera 3 UK’s Sales & Marketing Director.

No Definite date or price yet but we’re looking at Christmas.

Recently we reported that cracking WPA and WPA2 could be speeded up by 100 fold using two GeForce GTX280’s per workstation. However the practicality of this for your every day hacker is not very realistic.

Security researchers are now saying they have refined an existing WPA crack, making it more efficient that earlier reports.

Erik Tews will appear at PacSec security conference in Tokyo next week with a presentation named "Gone in 900 seconds: Some Crypto issues with WPA." where he will show off his findings in TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) cracking, that allow WPA to be broken in a brief 12-15 minute window.

Apparently once TKIP is initialised the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) can be obtained. Normally the hacker would then have to use a brute force dictionary attack, which is slow and crude.

Tews and his partner Martin Beck have discovered a "mathematical breakthrough" that allows the WPA encryption to be cracked dramatically faster. Some of the tools Tews and Beck used are rumoured to have been already included in Aircrack-ng WEP/WPA PSK cracking tool.

It is unlikely that this hacking technique will cause any issues in the near future, and certainly not a problem for average Joe and his home wireless router.

Over the past few years WEP encryption has been on the decline thanks to the serious security flaws associated with it allowing people to crack the encryption within minutes. This has led to more and more people using WPA and WPA2 to secure their wireless networks.

Russian security company Elcomsoft have posted a press release detailing a new method to cracking the increasingly popular WPA and WPA2 stating:

With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.

The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation, you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.

Granted this is never likely to be an issue for home users, though it could cause issues for a company using Wi-Fi.

It is worth noting that the main cause of concern would be a company using a static key. Also keys should not use English words but an alphanumeric string.

Via: securityandthe.net