Daily Archives: July 6, 2021

Getting Your iPhone Near This Cursed Network Breaks Its Wifi

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iPhone doesn’t even have to connect to the network to mess up.

Back in June, security researcher Carl Schou found that when he joined the network “%p%s%s%s%s%n”, his iPhone permanently disabled its wifi functionality. Luckily, this was fixed by resetting all network settings, which erased the villainous wifi name from his phone’s memory. You would think that would have been the end of connecting to networks with weird and fishy sounding names, but you are not Schou.

On Sunday, he decided to try his luck again by investigating a public wifi network named “%secretclub%power”. According to Schou, just having an iOS device in the vicinity of a wifi network with this name can permanently disable its wifi functionality.

“You can permanently disable any iOS device’s WiFI by hosting a public WiFi named %secretclub%power,” he wrote on Twitter. “Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality.”

Schou apparently struggled to find his way out of this one and get his wifi functionality back. He said he reset network settings multiple times, forced restarted his iPhone, and even contacted Apple’s device security team. The researcher eventually got some help from Twitter, which advised him to manually edit an iPhone backup to remove malicious entries from the known networks plist files.

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Source: Getting Your iPhone Near This Cursed Network Breaks Its Wifi

1994’s Star Wars: TIE Fighter Remade With Modern Graphics

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If EA’s Squadrons wasn’t quite to the scale you were hoping for from your Star Wars flight game, never mind: you can always replay 1994 classic TIE Fighter, which now has vastly-improved visuals and some other modern tweaks instead.

What you’re looking at here is TIE Fighter: Total Conversion, which isn’t actually the original TIE Fighter. Instead, it’s a mod for its sequel, 1999’s X-Wing Alliance, porting the original game’s menus and missions into a more robust engine, then using more mods on top of that (the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade Project) to make everything look nicer.

Having been in development for years, the project was finally and fully released over the weekend, and is so much more than just “TIE Fighter with better lighting.” Because this had to be rebuilt in a whole other game, the developers decided to take the opportunity to mess with the original, and have designed a “reimagined” campaign that goes for 37 missions and adds “more ships, bigger battles [and] in some cases completely new missions.”

The soundtrack has also been remastered, proper widescreen resolutions are available, and there’s VR support as well. Though it’s important to note that both those reimagined missions and the soundtrack are optional improvements; you can still play the original campaign and listen to the old MIDI soundtrack if you want.

Source: 1994’s Star Wars: TIE Fighter Remade With Modern Graphics

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features and govt / police spyware

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Contributors disgruntled with the recent direction of cross-platform FOSS audio software Audacity are forking the sound editor to a version that does not have the features or requirements that have upset some in the community.

One such project can be found on GitHub, with user “cookiengineer” proclaiming themselves “evil benevolent temporary dictator” in order to get the ball rolling.

“Being friendly seemed to have invited too many trolls,” observed the engineer, “and we must stop this behaviour.”

Presumably that refers to the trolling rather than being friendly. And goodness, the project has had somewhat of a baptism by fire in recent hours as a number of 4chan users elected to launch a raid on it.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The project is blunt with regard to the causes of the fork – Audacity’s privacy policy updates, the contributors licence agreement, and the a furore over introducing telemetry have all played a part.

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Source: Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features • The Register