Ophcrack to get Windows admin password

I knew that was possible but never had a chance or reason to try. But yesterday I needed to install something on my friend's Windows XP laptop under admin account, but he had only the password for his restricted account.

So, here is what I did:

1. I had Ophcrack Live CD downloaded from here
2. Then UNetbotin tool came in hand to make my USB flash drive bootable with Ophcrack. Actually there was no need to separatelly download .iso image as UNetboot can be used to load various system utilities including Ophcrack as well as it can load various Linux distos
3. I booted my friend's laptop from this USB stick (had only to check the video mode)
4. Ophcrack started automatically, so I stopped it (this is optional of course) to delete some users from the list to reduce password cracking time by Ophcrackinging :) only the admin user
5. About 10 minutes it took to get a88nr24 admin password

That is it.

You can read more about Rainbow Tables used in Ophcrack here and more sofisticated here...oh, what the hell! Just google it! :)

The methods like this one were no good for my task as it was not enough access rights.

How to make middle button in Firefox in Linux behave like in Windows

Hey, long time no see. :)

Here's a little how to. I find it useful when you can click middle button on your mouse and then scroll through the page just by moving the cursor.

This Firefox behavior is default in Windows but not in Linux.

So, here is how to fix it:

1. In the Address Bar type in about:config and hit Enter. This will open the Advanced Preferences in Firefox
2. In the Filter bar type in middle and you will see about 5 options
3. Double click middlemouse.contentLoadURL so that it changes to false
4. Double click middlemouse.paste so that it changes to false
5. In the Filter Bar type in scroll and you will see about 20 options, and the second one down from the top is general.autoScroll. Double click general.autoScroll so that it changes to true
6. Now you can just close your browser and the settings are saved
   

Got it from here.

Finally they updated it...

Skype has updated their Linux software - 2.1 now. Yeah, it's a bit better. :)


Details here.