Daily Archives: November 3, 2009

Jailbroken iphone ransom drama

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A short while ago, some idiot had the brilliant idea to SSH into jailbroken iphones in his area and install some “ransomware” on every iphone system he could. The ransomware, according to tech site Neowin, said “You iPhone’s been hacked because it’s really insecure! Please visit [LINK REMOVED] and secure your iPhone right now! Right now, I can access all your files.”

This mensa candidate not only gave his website address, he actually had the stones to ask for a reward of €5 to be sent to a PayPal address.

Needless to say, he got caught. Now he’s posted removal instructions on how to get rid of his ransomware so people won’t beat him so bad when they catch him on the street.

Even though the hacker was Dutch and this happened over in the Netherlands, the process he followed can easily be duplicated over here.

So if you have jailbroken your iphone, and you haven’t changed your root password, here’s the easy way to do it…

Step one: Install “mobile terminal” from Cydia (if you don’t have it already)

Step two: Run mobile terminal. Type “su root” (without quotes). The default password on all iphones is “alpine”, so you will need to type in “alpine” (without quotes) when it asks you for the initial password.

Step three (optional): Type “cd” (without quotes) to shorten the prompt

Step four: type “passwd” (without quotes) and press ENTER. Now type in your new password of choice. You will be prompted twice for this password as confirmation.

Step five: now type “passwd mobile” (without quotes) and press ENTER. Now type in your new mobile password of choice. You will be prompted twice for this password as confirmation.

That’s it. EXIT and quit mobile terminal.

If you haven’t jailbroken your iphone, or have no idea when I’m talking about, don’t worry. This issue only affects jailbroken iphones.

Don’t retype that PDF!

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Has anyone ever sent you a PDF document that you need to get back into Word format to edit? But nobody has the original Word document to make changes in? Don’t waste time retyping the whole thing! Just let any of these websites convert a PDF file to a Word document for you… free!

The best one in my experience has been Convert PDF To Word. The website and conversion process are both really fast. Just click the BROWSE button to locate your PDF file and press OK. In a few moments, a link will appear for you to immediately download the converted file! It’s been easy and blisteringly fast for every PDF I have thrown at it, and recreates the original PDF file in Word perfectly. The only problem is that is recreates the original PDF file in Word perfectly. If the PDF is complex, with a lot of tables and drawings, the word version will have a lot of tables and sub-tables all over the place. Things won’t be congruently selectable, but you can edit everything as much as you like. Everything I tested came back looking just like the original PDF it came from. If you’re looking for a direct copy of a PDF file that just needs a tweak here and there, this site is the one to use.

My second favorite is PDF ONLINE. This site is fast, with a simple BROWSE button to upload your PDF file from your local computer. In a few moments, you can download the converted word document. This site doesn’t do so well with a heavily detailed PDF in my tests, though. But it does great with grabbing the core content of a PDF and making everything selectable at once. Website PDFs consistently came back with the article as the main conversion. Books would convert in one big flowing document. However, this site converted everything into RTF format. You can go to Word and go to FILE and OPEN to pull the data in for this kind of conversion. If you don’t need the sidebars on a website, or your PDF document is pretty much text and no graphics, this site is the one you should choose.

3rd on my list is PDF TO WORD. This site is similar to the other two in its’ ease of use, but the main difference is that this site will email you the converted file. It’s kind of a mixed blessing. The results were somewhere between the two sites above, and it was nice to know the converted files would be waiting for me in my inbox and not have to be downloaded to the PC I was at. But some complex PDF conversions were so slow, they didn’t show up in my inbox for hours. An overall nice compliment to the two above.