Posts

Stefan Helander

Canon Powershot G9 user friendly translation for disabling sound

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Canon Powershot G9 sound offThis translation train wreck has somehow slipped through Canon quality check. The menu is in Swedish and controls sound effects of the camera. Instead of just writing Sound (“Ljud” in Swedish) with the selection On or Off the translator wrote “Ljud av” which backtranslates to “Sound off”. In order to disable the sound you should set “Sound off” to on. Why make it easy? 🙂

Stefan Helander

Vivotek PT7137 network camera connection problems

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Vivotek PT7137I use the Vivotek PT7137 network camera connected through wifi/wlan to my network. Even though it is located only 7 meters from my accesspoint (with a couple of walls in between) the camera lost connection once in a while. And it wouldn’t reconnect unless I rebooted the camera. Upgrading to the latest firmware (v2.6 2009-04-14) didn’t improve either.

At the time my accesspoint was a DLINK DI-624+ broadband router and before I had time to dig into the problem any further, the DLINK passed away permanently and I got myself a Linksys WRT54GL which I pimped with Tomato. Now I had much better control over the wireless environment. I could boost the output on my Linksys to 80 mW (from the original 42) and the wireless survey helped me select a good channel with as little interference with my neighbours as possible. This helped a bit – the loss of connection occured more seldom. But they did still occur.

External WLAN antennaFinally I bought a small external antenna for the Vivotek in my local computer store. It has a 5 dB gain and a magnetic mount so I could move it around without moving the camera. This finally solved my problems and my camera haven’t lost it’s connection in months.

I still haven’t found the reason to the loss of connection. 7 meters should be no problem in a wifi/wlan environment. All other gadgets I connect through the same wireless network works without any problems. Possibly my Vivoteks wireless is broken or something in Vivoteks implementation makes it really sensetive to interference? I don’t know and honestly, I will not spend more time on it unless it causes me a problem again.

Stefan Helander

Siemens Gigaset WLAN camera vulnerability

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The Siemens Gigaset WLAN camera is vulnerable for unauthorized users to gain access through telnet and ftp by logging in as the user root. The user can log in without any password. When logged in, it is possible to view the cameras configuration file where the administrator password is stored in clear text.

The vulnerability is verified to exist in firmware version 1.27 but might be present in other versions too. At present time there are no updates available from Siemens later than version 1.27.

It is therefore a recommendation to maintain the Siemens Gigaset WLAN camera only on a private network or behind a firewall and to use an administrator password that is not used anywhere else.

See also the Siemens web page for Gigaset WLAN camera.