Tools of the Trade - Now with Chaya!

Chaya (Cnidoscolus chayamansa and Cnidoscolus aconitifolius), also known as Tree Spinach, is a large, fast growing leafy perennial shrub, native to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It is popular in Mexico and Central America as a leafy vegetable, cooked and eaten like spinach; raw leaves are toxic. A USDA study in Puerto Rico reported that higher yields of greens could be obtained with chaya than any other vegetable they had studied. In another study chaya leaves were found to contain substantially greater amounts of nutrients than spinach leaves.

Chaya is a good source of protein, vitamins, calcium, and iron. However, raw chaya leaves are toxic as they contain a glucoside that can release toxic cyanide. Cooking is essential prior to consumption to inactivate the toxic components. In this respect chaya is similar to cassava, which also contains toxic hydrocyanic glycosides and must be cook before being eaten.

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I ate a ton of Chaya on my recent vacation to the Mayan Riviera...hopefully, it was all cooked...lol

On to the tools...

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1) On Sept 30th, Pidgin 2.2.1 was released. Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. This version fixes a MSN DoS that was found recently.

2) On Sept 29th, Foxit Reader 2.2 was released. Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7. This version fixes several bugs, including some problem with selecting text.

3) On Sept 28th, CCleaner v2.01.507 was released. CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. This version improved index.dat cleaning on XP & fixed a bug where some IE Temporary files were not removed....among other things.

4) On Sept 28th, Wine 0.9.46 was released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. Main Changes in this release include:

• A variety of fixes to improve Photoshop CS2 support.
• More complete support for device installation in setupapi.
• New Bidi text implementation that doesn't depend on libicu.
• The usual assortment of Direct3D improvements.
• Beginning of I/O completion ports support.
• Lots of bug fixes.

5) On Sept 25th, THC released thc-orakelcrackert11g. It is the first full blown cracker for Oracle 11g. This tool can crack passwords which are encrypted usingOracle's latest SHA1 based password protection algorithm.

6) On Sept 22nd, SOSDG released ClamAV for Windows v0.91.2-3. ClamAV/SOSDG is a port of the powerful ClamAV anti-virus software package from UNIX/Linux to Windows using the Cygwin compatibility layer.

7) On Sept 18th, VMware released VMware Server 1.0.4 Build 56528. VMware Server is a free virtualization product for Windows and Linux servers with enterprise-class support. See the release notes for all the update details.

8) In other news, H.D. Moore recently started to add iPhone exploitation support to MSF 3.0. I heard about this right before going on vacation and it looks like it was released to the public while I was gone. Apple might be patching bugs...but as HD pointed out, all the apps run as root by default. We haven't seen the last iPhone exploit but any means.