Good night, sweet prince
By iggdawg | June 30, 2009
I don’t think I need to elaborate on the information below.
According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.
There’s always Mininova…
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Big money
By iggdawg | June 11, 2009
So I’m back from Vegas. Some months ago I decided it’d be cool to see Vegas before I turned 30. Probably after watching CSI or something. So Emily took it upon herself to be awesome and make it happen. She got us plane tickets and a room for relatively cheap on Orbitz or something like that. It’s pretty much exactly what I needed.
I’d been coming to work angry for the last few weeks just due to frustration… There’s a hiring freeze on engineers so I’m stuck in an operator position for now. It’s fine, I like my company but the waiting was getting to me. There hasn’t been much to do except push trash at work recently. I thrive off solving challenging problems, and spending hours troubleshooting something complex that I’ve never touched before. But recently it’s been all boring standardized notification type stuff.
Vegas was impressive. We stayed at Circus Circus, mostly because it was possible to get a big room on the strip for dirt cheap. It’s the place with the massive motherfucking creepy clown outside. It took a day or so to really take it all in. Sure it’s all artificial but the novelty, and sheer density of that novelty, was what was really cool to see. As with most people I didn’t net any wins. Emily and I played a bunch of slots… We’d find the loudest and most ADD/obnoxious machine we could find and we’d rock it for a few hours. All while sucking down free booze of course. I won a little at blackjack, but nothing worth mention. On the last day I got to visit a cousin of mine in the area and his GF. We wound down the vacation with a little BBQ, and leeched a ride to the airport. It was everything I thought it would be and more, and did exactly what I wanted it to. We left Thursday and came back Tuesday, and I returned to work calm and relaxed for once. I even got to do some really fun events at work on Wednesday.
That’s my story. That place is good times, looking forward to going back sometime.
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Not that I’d ever buy a VW…
By iggdawg | June 3, 2009
For whatever reason, probably my own coffee habits, I was remembering a VW commercial from back in the day. Some girl that owns a coffee place running around delivering things with her golf. At the end she says “I’ve got to cut back on the caffeine”, which I always find myself saying to myself at around 2 in the afternoon. So I found it on youtube for kicks, and was surprised when I started watching it. I actually had to hunt down some info and see if my hunch was right. It was. If you watch NCIS, you’ll know it when you see it. The ironing is delicious.
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Project crash override
By iggdawg | May 27, 2009
Saw this article on Digg today (clicky for full text): U.S. Military are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking.
From the article:
U.S. Defense Department officials were so impressed with the level of coordination between ground military ops and cyberattacks against strategical targets during the recent conflicts, that they are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking. Aviation Week glanced at such a device and reports that it is being designed to be easily used even by non-techy soldiers.
Apparently, there are several devices currently being developed behind closed doors specifically for such purposes, but the one Aviation Week talks about is intriguing. It is basically a highly complex hacking tool designed for the unexperienced that is to turn soldiers into veritable script kiddies. Granted, script kiddies with a lot of firepower.
Script kiddies are widely regarded as being at the bottom of the coding barrel. Whether the government means to refer to soldiers using such devices as such, they basically are making script kiddie boxes. Just as their namesake, script kiddie soldiers would be useful against most civilian targets and most non-hardened or haphazard websites. The irony here being that the stimulus for making these hacking boxes was more sophisticated or coordinated attacks against our own government or military. Any kind of hardware “hack box” that joe blockhead soldier could finger mash would be useless for such an attack.
The device is easily able to map out all the nodes of a given wireless network and, if necessary, cause them to disconnect, then watch them getting back online in order to identify weak spots. Once the best target is determined, the soldier (slash hacker) is presented with several attack attributes and can adjust their respective level by using sliders on a touch-screen. These attributes include, but are not limited to covertness, speed, or collateral damage.
I’m no hacker, and all of those things are quickly and easily accomplished with free tools. Ther are live linux distros that fit on a keychain USB key with all those wireless tools. I don’t think Backtrack has any tools to drop wireless clients, but ARP poisoning is a technique that’ll do it on most wireless nodes. But to do that you’ll need a little talent and patience to learn why and how it works. Ethernet, wired or wireless, is a dumb and gullible protocol. It’s trivial in most cases to fool it into telling you more than you should know, or making it do what you want it to.
I really hope the government is still thinking of employing hackers to do our cyber defense and offense. You can’t weaponize an abstract talent. that’s just not how it works. I’ve always advocated this and I’ll do it again, hacking is a love based skill. A real hacker is a very highly trained and very disciplined person, even if it’s all self taught. You can’t distill that and drop it in a box for anyone to use. Deploying script kiddie soldiers against an enemy with even a couple moderately skilled personnel would be like beating a tank with a baseball bat. And about as good on defense when the tank fires back. Never mind when (not if) any enemy gets their hands on these devices and analyzes them.
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Kupo
By iggdawg | May 21, 2009
This might be nerding out a little more than usual, but it’s also pretty awesome:
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Fight math with math
By iggdawg | May 9, 2009
In my previous post I made the mistake of poking fun at people going hysterical over swine flu. After crunching the numbers it looks like my caution may have been hasty. I’ve compiled a chart of other causes of death that have nothing to do with swine or flu. Keep in mind these stats are PER YEAR, and swine flu killed 30 people last month alone! Maybe a little panic would do us all some good.
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I can’t stop loving bacon
By iggdawg | May 8, 2009
… Just sayin’
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There’s no place like… Allston?
By iggdawg | May 7, 2009
So I’ve finished moving. I’m right on Comm Ave in Allston now. My commute is a hair longer, but much less complicated. I can technically take a right onto comm ave and just keep going till I get to work… the pike is a little faster though. The place is tiny, but I don’t really notice too much (unless I’m cooking). We’re only here for a few months till we move again in September. We’re headed to a gorgeous place in east Boston. It reminds me a lot of the place I used to live with Dan in Marlborough. Heat and AC are included which is pretty awesome if you’re like me and you don’t want to skimp on being comfortable. It has a pool and a huge fitness center, so I can cancel my gym membership. And parking is (finally) included. Our room is huge… we have our own bathroom and walk-in closet. It’s on the 6th floor, so we get sweet views of the city. Really looking forward to this place. Normally I’d be freaking out at how small my current place is, but my head isn’t in it.
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Hide your corn
By iggdawg | April 27, 2009
Found this random bit of awesome on the internet.
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Bringing it all together
By iggdawg | April 20, 2009
Stumbled on this a little earlier. At first it just looked like some kind of vintage computer book. I like those just from the standpoint of seeing what people back in the day thought stuff would be like now. Then I actually started reading it, and it’s been edited a little. It gets funnier as the pages go on. Content behind the cut.
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