Geeksinside.com - S1axter's Tech Log of Crazy Stuff

Lego NXT Laser Mod

s1axter posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST. (Main Post!)

ZeWrestler sent me a link for this cool Lego NXT light sensor module so I thought I would post it here.

http://www.kevincook.net/NXTHack/index.htm

Looks like the 'sensor' is a simple IR detection module that uses a simple emitter and detector LED pair ( http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=9844 ). This hack takes the module and replaces the emitter/detector with a laser taken from a "Microsoft US" (WTF??) remote control and laser pointer device. Not too sure why this individual would want to replace a light sensor with a laser with no detection abilities.

I will keep this remote/pointer in mind since it seems like a good source for a low power laser emitter.

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Slackware 11.0 released (finally)

s1axter posted on Tue. October 3rd 2006 at 06:58 AM PST. (Main Post!)

Slackware 11.0 was released yesterday to slack mirrors across the world. Slackware 11.0 has been a long time in development due partially to the major package upgrade the distribution needed to stay leading edge. This release includes the 2.4.33.3 kernel by default with the 2.6.17.13 and 2.6.18 kernels in /extra. Notable software includes Amarok, KDE 3.5.4, glibc 2.3.6, Firefox, Thunderbird, and X.Org 6.9.0.

Slackware is my preferred linux distribution due to its stability and speed. For those GI readers who visited back in the day, remember me talking about the web server 'redbaron' hosing the site? What most don't know about 'redbaron' is that the site was run from a faulty hard drive for about a year straight. I always wondered why when the server was rebooted sometimes it would hang on boot but once it was running would be fine. For some reason Slackware worked like a champ on the web server, running everything in memory so when the drive erred out it wasn't a problem. I highly recommend you take a look at Slackware 11.0.

http://www.slackware.com

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Toorcon Day 2 and more No Starch Press

s1axter posted on Sun. October 1st 2006 at 11:16 PM PST. (Main Post!)

Well Toorcon 8 is now officially over. Even though there at workshops tomorrow the toorcon closing talk happened here in San Diego tonight.

I have to say, I am quite impressed with the entire con experience. Toorcon was well put together and ran smoothly all weekend.

I attended the afternoon talks today and they were mostly on par with topics from yesterday. "Breaking Pocket PC executable" by WebSense was rather dry but pointed out that Pocket PC is not is not off the hackable scale. With the proliferation of Pocket PC based cell phones measures should be taken now to hinder any future malware advances. Next was a talk entitled "LoLPhone" by ASM and covered the topic of VoIP hacking; caller ID spoofing and man in the middle attacks using Asterisk VoIP ( http://www.asterisk.org/ ) software. The man in the middle attack was interesting since you could call person A using person Bs number and person B with person As number and then connect the two. Some funny audio was played of a few unknown people with the expected "You called me. No, you called me" conversation. ASM's little bio in the Toorcon program says "I have a BS in neuroscience" and that was clear when he loaded up a program that modeled the section of the brain that responds to audio. The OpenGL program ran on the screen as he played the audio from some of the prank calls; that was really cool in my book.

The last two talks of the con were awesome. Really can't say anything else other than just plain awesome. The first was "TrackSploit" given by James Lance and Josh Brashars from Secure Science Corporation ( http://www.securescience.net ). I had talked to these guys a bunch yesterday and it was cool they gave a talk. What they talked about was tracking and catching hackers and phishers. They work for a security company and went into decently deep detail of how they have models of typical hacking and phishing groups and how they can track these groups and nail them before thousands of credit cards are compromised. Their talk pretty much said phishers are stupid. It was quite surprising that these 'L337' groups use pre built phishing software that thousands of other groups use. Obviously (as with most popular software) this can be tracked with a simple google search for a config file; l00sers. Another funny bit was a story of some kid who was running a bot net using the same handle as his myspace page. The myspace page had all the contact information about him and a bunch of his friends, geeze what and idiot.

The final talk was titled "SQL Infection" by Matt Fisher from SPI Dynamics ( http://www.spidynamics.com ). This talk was REALLY good to see at the end of the con. The talk was about SQL Injection and outlined how somebody could pull up almost any information from a database using standard SQL queries sent to a page with poorly written code. I have to say, my jaw was on the table for most of this as Matt showed example after example of how this could be done. The bottom line is one could structure a sequence of URLs to map out an entire database system, with nothing else other than an internet connection and a bash script. It was just plain awesome to see.

What conference or expo is complete without free/cheap sw4g? Yesterday I mentioned I talked with the guys from hackaday. Today I ran into Will and he gave me a free shirt for being a loyal follower, Thanks Will! At the closing talks the goons were just giving stuff away, I walked out with two free issues of Blacklisted 411 and a Blacklisted hat that has "Hack the System" on the front which i really think is cool. While the free stuff is cool I couldn't pass up getting two books from No Starch Press, "Hacking the Cable Modem" and "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts". After I took a look at what firewire bought yesterday there was just no way I could let these go...that and they were 30% off :-). The guy Tyler from No Starch and I talked for a while yesterday and then again today. As I was buying the books I told him about firewire's post on "Steal this Computer Book" and he asked if Geeksinside would like to be a reviewer of No Starch's publications! Of course I said hell yeah. So in the future Geeksinside.com might be an official book reviewer of No Starch! http://www.nostarch.com

Well that's it, this is the longest post I've ever made on GI but I think it was warranted. I am going to start looking at "Hack the Cable Modem" tonight and crash.

Later

EDIT: It looks like the guys from BanTown (the ones who did the LOL talk at Toorcon yesterday) have generated a lot of heat from their announcement of 30 exploits for firefox. Here's links to the slashdot article and a Cnet one.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/10/01/148202.shtml
http://news.com.com/Hackers+claim+zero-da...08.html

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Toorcon - Day 1

s1axter posted on Sun. October 1st 2006 at 02:23 PM PST. (Main Post!)

Well day 1 of toorcon is over and what a ride. I started the day off by listening to the keynote by Corry Doctorow. His talk was about freedoms on the internet and restrictions on rights management. Of particular interest to this geek was his take on iTunes, how it's not just a $250 iPod it's a $250 iPod and $300 in songs from itunes that will keep people from switching services. I thought the talk was enlightening and well thought out. Johnny Cache's talk was cancelled and his spot was taken over by an 'open mic' type talk. Johnny's talk was about the wireless Mac exploit that has been discussed for the past few months on sites like slashdot. Seems like John and his partner David had a little 'disagreement' with Apple over demonstrating, or even talking about this little piece of hacker tech. Kinda sad to see some lawyers stop a talk about hacking at a security conference.

After lunch I attended a presentation on Wicrawl, a new wireless scanning tool that can be found http://midnightresearch.com/wiki/index.php/Wicrawl . This tool is wicked cool and is built around a plugin architecture. The plugins look straight forward to write so get those old perl books out and make some cool stuff. After the wicrawl talk I hit up the C++ Reversing for a bit but wasn't very impressed. Next was the session titled "Lovin the LOLs, LOL is my will". I don't really know what to say about this talk or these guys. Lets just say I think the main speaker too too much acid and is hell bent on breaking anything on the net...that or going to jail, maybe either, maybe both. To say the least it was a sardonic talk, one that made me wonder why I was laughing at such dark topics.

The last two talks I went to today were the ones that sold me on Toorcon in the first place. The first one, at 6pm was "CheapCrack" which talked about implementing an DES cracking system on an array of FPGA boards. What really got me was that the guy was talking about using the same SpartanIII board used in the traffic light controller. Really cool stuff, I am going to see if maybe I can help out with the project, who knows.

The final talk of the day was the "Nostalgia" panel. The panel had a bunch of cool people who really know their stuff when it comes to old skool Apple ][ hacking. For some reason I was quite amused with the demonstration of some Apple ][ assembly and a 8bit Apple ][ emulator running a 16bit processor emulator, all running on a 32bit macbook, lol. The capstone for today was having the one and only Captain Crunch, John Draper on the Nostalgia panel. For those who don't know who Captain Crunch is, take a look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper . The man had some interesting stories on prank calling the CIA and President Nixon back in the late 70s.

All in all it was a good day. I also did get the chance to meet both Captain Crunch and the Hackaday group. Captain Crunch is a ledgend in his own time and I just like the hackaday site, so it was really cool meeting them. Well that's it for now, more tomorrow about Toorcon day ][.

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Explanation and TOORCON

s1axter posted on Sat. September 30th 2006 at 02:03 PM PST. (Main Post!)

Well it's been a while! Yes I know GI kinda died for 2 weeks but I was on the road, living on couches and working. Right now I am in a temporary apartment until I can move into the main one. Article 124 gave a brief explanation of what is going on with me. In short, I received an offer from an interesting company, Iowa wasn't panning out to be all I thought it was going to be, my friend go the job too and the company is based on San Diego. Taking all that into account, THAT is why I've been on the road, on couches and (this week) working. There...explanation done...next order of business.

TOORCON 2006!!!!!!!!!!

I think my decision to move to San Diego was a good one considering Toorcon 2006 is at the San Diego Convention center this weekend!! Taken from the toorcon site http://toorcon.org "ToorCon has been providing a meeting place for many of the top hackers and security professionals from all around the world to get together and discuss today's bleeding edge issues...", freakin COOL!!!!

I had read about Toorcon, Shmoocon, Defcon for a number of years, always resigning myself to dreams and tears that none of the 'cons decided to host their conferences in the arctic that is upstate New York. Well this year I'll be damned if I'm not going. The conference center is like a 1/2 mile from my place, and I don't have anything else to do...8-)

Hackaday.com has been making a deal of Toorcon for about a month and they plan on attending so maybe I'll run into them. I promise pictures and stuffs from the reception tonight, conference tomorrow, party tomorrow night and maybe some stuff from Sunday. So check back this weekend!!

Later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toorcon

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Seagate claims world record for magnetic recording

s1axter posted on Mon. September 18th 2006 at 01:56 PM PST. (Main Post!)

This link was submitted by a friend of mine and reader of the site. The storage density increase using perpendicular bit storage is amazing! Here's the Wikipedia article on perpendicular storage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording

When will we see 500GB iPods??

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/17/seagate-claims-world-record-for-magnetic-recording-density/

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Old Computer Commercials

s1axter posted on Mon. September 18th 2006 at 01:17 PM PST. (Main Post!)

Well, GI has been kinda dead for a few days, that has been because right now I am in the midst of moving from Iowa to San Diego. I start my new job this coming Monday the 25th. Right now I am in Salt Lake City, Utah leaching wireless off a coffee shop AP and figured it would be a good time for a post.

Before I left Iowa I found a number of cool old (circa 1980) computer commercials on YouTube.com and wanted to post some of them here while on my little cross country trip. Rather than embed 5 videos at once I'm just going to provide the youtube.com links.

Not the most innovative post but fun for wasting some time, Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgTCE6PTXsE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEI7mm8M7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHaHFp62ww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EntiJhQ9z_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eXkkf8m8k0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5gelel83u4

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MazdaPC awesome in car PC system

s1axter posted on Thu. September 14th 2006 at 06:38 PM PST. (Main Post!)

I’ve wanted to put a PC in my car for a while. The closest I ever got was putting a 333Mhz laptop under the passengers seat. The computer ran Windows 98 without the GUI (MSDOS 7) and a MP3 player built for DOS connected to the AUX in on the stereo head unit. The MP3 program controlled an alphanumeric LCD mounted on the dash using a PS/2 keyboard next to the driver. The LCD part can be viewed in the PPORTLCD project here on GI.

While I thought my little setup was cool, this guy has taken it to the next level and done what I have dreamed of doing for years. A full multimedia PC with LCD built into the center console, and unlike other car PCs I’ve seen, this one looks sweet!

https://www.timekiller.org/carpc/index.php

The system is called Mazda PC and has 512Mb RAM, 80Gig drive, Bluetooth, Wifi, (no specs on the proc), runs Gentoo, and is all based on MythTV. This is one sick setup! I might get the cash to buy and LCD like this and make my own some day….boy doesn’t that sound familiar.

Gentoo Linux: http://www.gentoo.org/
MythTV Software: http://www.mythtv.org/

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CD & Cereal Spectrometer

s1axter posted on Wed. September 13th 2006 at 09:28 PM PST. (Main Post!)

Have a CD? Have an empty cereal box? Why not make a spectrometer?

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/astro/html/spectrometer.html

Jerry Xiaojin Zhu did just that with his hacked together CD spectrometer . A spectrometer is a tool used to measure properties of light. Some interesting information can be obtained just by looking at the spectrum given off by different light sources such as a high pressure sodium lamp, CRT display or neon signs. The material that gives off or reflects the light can be determined by dark lines in the spectrum and gaps in the colors. While this is a little over my head and not really computer or hardware related, some geek out there loves this stuff, plus it’s made from a cereal box, that right there makes it cool.

Build one yourself and try it out, the person who emails me the craziest light source gets a cookie

Here’s the wikipedia page on spectrometers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer

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