Free Picture Recovery

Fien hit by accident “remove all” on our canon. I was able to recover all the pictures without buying some (expensive) recovery tool. Here is how you recover Jpeg pictures from a deleted drive.

If you have a canon, save yourself three hours of work and use a card reader instead of connecting your digital to your computer. Then, make a dump of the entire disk. (My SD card is 1Gb, so the count x block size should be 1Gb). Do not use the mounted directory, but use the /dev/… directly. Do not use a Mac (as dd seems to act differently)

dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=canon.file count=1005696 bs=1024

Now you have all the raw bits in one file. The following script dumps picture by picture in a new file:


#!/bin/bash
prev_position=0
for i in `hexdump canon.file |grep " d8ff e1ff" | sed -u "s/ d8ff e1ff.*//"`
do
  j=$(echo $i | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')
  position=$(echo 'ibase=16;obase=A;'$j |bc)
  if [ "$prev_position" = "0" ]
  then
    prev_position=$position
    continue
  fi
  the_count=$(echo $position'-'$prev_position |bc)
  dd if=canon.file of=test$i.jpg bs=1 skip=$prev_position count=$the_count
  prev_position=$position
done


This simple script will do the trick. Of course, some modification might be needed (like you might have a different version of hexdump, so the easiest way ot know if the magic number is right is to do a hexdump of an old picture you have taken with that camera)

Super Shuttle Rip Off

Yes, they got me! I booked a cab on SuperShuttle.com and at the end of the process, they gave me a $10 coupon for the next trip. I clicked on it and BINGO: they secretly enrolled me in a program which costs me $12/month! ((But the really bad thing is that I looked over it on my credit card statement for the last 4 months so I paid for it the last 4 months.))

The way they tricked me is rather new to me. When the transaction with SuperShuttle was completely done, they offered me a $10 coupon which they would send me by e-mail. So, they send you an e-mail with the $10 coupon, however, it was not SuperShuttle that e-mailed me, It was reservationrewards.com! You only have to click to confirm and there is still no mentioning of any monthly fee or what-so-ever. Only after you click to have the $10 coupon, they send you a very, very messy e-mail with all the coupons you can use, information,… all kind of shit you’re not interested in. Somewhere at the end, there is a section that tells you that you’re enrolled in a program which will cost you $12 a month AND they grabbed your creditcard from your SuperShuttle payment!!! Yes, you never have to enter your credit card number, they just share it (which seems to me clear violation of the PCI DSS).

This is really, really bad. Now, you can enroll in a program without even giving your credit card. If they have a “partner” who is willing to give them your personal information, you’re a click away from enrolling in all possible programs by just surfing the internet…

Computer Security Must Come From Inside Out, Not Outside In

Interview with Ted Schlein in Investor’s Business Daily

The new face of cybercrime

Trailer of the documentary: The new face of Cybercrime. Made by Fortify Software!

Here comes another bubble…