Sometimes, life is nothing but “bad news and the pills that go with it” (to quote Achewood). And then, sometimes, something goes right.
Archive for July 30th, 2009
A small slice of heaven on Earth.
Thursday, July 30th, 20090-Day DEFCON Notes
Thursday, July 30th, 2009I like DEFCON. I like Dark Tangent personally. I like Joe Grand, the guy who has designed the DEFCON badges for the past few years.
But, guys, it looks really bad when, for the second year in a row, you run out of badges early on Thursday and have to issue temporary badges until more real ones get to the con Friday morning. You don’t even have the Olympics to blame this year. This is especially frustrating now that badge hacking is an official event/contest.
DEFCON talks I will not be attending:
“Hacking UFOlogy 102: The Implications of UFOs for Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
“Two years ago at Def Con 15, Richard [Thieme] presented Hacking UFOlogy. He supported his contention that (1) UFOs are real and (2) the data to support that statement is voluminous with numerous references and links…”
DEFCON talks I plan to attend:
“Is your iPhone Pwned”, Mahaffrey, Hering, and Lineberry. (This may be tough to get into, but it is scheduled against Dark Tangent’s intro and Joe Grand’s discussion of the badge, so we’ll see.)
“Hacking with the iPod Touch”, Willhelm
“That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars”, Scott
“Three Point Oh”, Long. (For the speaker’s reputation; I’ve heard Johnny Long speak before, and he’s someone I’d like to know better.)
“Something About Network Security”, Kaminsky. (Again, for the speaker’s reputation; Kaminsky is to TCP/IP what Musashi was to the sword.)
“Hacker vs. Disasters Large & Small”, RenderMan and Schearer
“Personal Survival Preparedness”, Dunker and Dunker
“Picking Electronic Locks Using TCP Sequence Prediction”, Lawshae
“Sniff Keystrokes With Lasers/Voltmeters”, Barisani and Bianco
“Bluetooth, Smells Like Chicken”, Spill, Ossmann, and Steward. (It looks like they’re going to talk about using software-defined radio to sniff Bluetooth, techniques for breaking the pseudo-random hopping sequence, and apparently some stuff that can be done with sub-$10 off-the-shelf hardware.)
“RAID Recovery: Recover Your PORN By Sight and Sound”, Moulton
“USB Attacks”, Vega
“Cracking 400,000 Passwords, Or How To Explain to Your Roomate why the Power Bill Is a Little High”, Weir and Aggarwal
I missed the panels on “Hacking With GNURadio” and “Hacking the Apple TV and Where your Forensic Data Lives”. Perhaps next year I need to arrive on Wednesday. If there is a next year.
Clippings
Thursday, July 30th, 2009I’m not exactly sure how to describe this *NYT* story; I would use the phrase “human interest”, but it’s actually about a revolver. Specifically, a vintage S&W .32 Hand Ejector that fell out of a perp’s waistband, went off, and hit a cop.
The revolver was traced to the Smith & Wesson plant in Springfield, Mass., according to law enforcement sources.
Oh, boy. That’s some fine police work there, tracing a Smith and Wesson revolver back to the Smith and Wesson plant.
But, when a .32-caliber revolver is fired, it keeps the casings inside its rotating chamber instead of spitting them out like a semiautomatic pistol, making it hard for forensic investigators to determine whether it had a criminal past.
Say what?
Like other guns seized by the police, it will be melted down and reincarnated as wire clothes hangers.
(insert cheap Mommie Dearest joke here)
(Above by way of the S&WCA mailing list.)
In other news, the legendary Reverend Ike has died.
Going Transmetropolitan FYI
Thursday, July 30th, 2009I’m in Las Vegas for DEFCON, so posting may or may not be light.
I may try to do some live (or semi-live) blogging from the convention, depending on how things go. I may end up just compiling notes and posting when I get back to the room at night. (For those who are not familiar with DEFCON, one of the things it is most famous for is having the most hostile network in existence.)