Pardon our dust

Sorry for the long-delayed conclusion of the Web filter evasion series and the severe lack of updates in general. I am working on the web filter evasion article now.

Life gets kind of crazy sometimes, and right now is crunch time on many levels in my personal and family life, to say nothing of the other writers' situations.

Among the mess, I'd been having trouble actually finding time to DO the kinds of things I like to write about here. Without ideas, hands-on tinkering, and consumption of new (and ye-olde) media, hammering out content first becomes mundane without fresh ideas, then becomes difficult to impossible as motivation fades away.

All this to say, pardon our dust while we gather our thoughts.

Reminder - 2600 Meeting - May 2, 2008

The meeting usually starts around 5:00PM at the Oak Park Mall food court in Overland Park, KS -- the north entrance between Macy's and Dillard's. Look for nerds. If you see any three of the following items at one table, you've found us.

• MacBook
• PDA
• Guy wearing a black t-shirt
• Strange, smallish antennae
• Backpacks
• Any O'Reilly and Associates Book

OpenBSD 4.3 Released Today

I haven't gotten to play with it yet, since I'm still downloading it. I plan on doing a snapshot and upgrading my OpenBSD Parallels VM tomorrow.

Highlights:

• Now supports SMP on most Sparc64 platforms
• Loads of device driver improvements (and additions) for most architectures
• Built-in SNMP Support (no more need for net-snmp)
• Disks/Partitions/Filesystems larger than 2TB are supported for ffs
• Scads of little bugfixes

See the OpenBSD 4.3 Release Notes for details.

IT Security World 2008

It looks like I'm headed to IT Sec World this year. This is a convention with seminars for Health, financial and government IT workers.

The seminars appear to be a re-hash of things I'm always familiar with, but I figure I'll be using this as a network opportunity as well as a way to get my finger back on the pulse of financial services InfoSec.

Does anyone else plan on attending?

What a crazy weekend!

Saturday, I set up my Jornada 720 with the enGenius 200mW card, a Garmin GPS12 (olde school) and a pair of 19dBi antennae. I used Kismet running on JLime Linux. About 3:00 PM, I hit the road with my wife. Here's the setup in the car.


Only in rural Missouri... What the hell?


And if that's not strange enough, I hit a low-flying goose (yes, a big, huge Canada Goose) about 10 miles outside of town. I had to limp my car into town. I could see, but only just. And speeds higher than 50 MPH or so made the windshield cave in more. Yikes!



After we got into town, it was off to 1984. 1984 is an arcade that looks quite literally like it got put in a time machine and beamed here.


They even have a Mac Classic running all of their business software!


Darren tries his hand at BattleZone (a cheesy tank battle sim)


Darren and Sl4cker


Gauntlet!


After we got tired of the arcade, we grabbed some sandwiches, then took off to a bar for beer, gadgets, pool, and more beer. And some pool. And shots. Then more beer. And after I left, I think they had more beer too.






This is Adam, the new owner of Jordan Valley Pedicabs. He manages 5 pedicabs in the area, and who knows how many "drivers" around in Springfield. You haven't really lived until you've tried riding in the back of a three-wheeled bicycle while rather inebriated.


More carnage. My wife and I were stranded in Springfield since there were no glass repair shops open on Sunday.


We spent some time with family friends north of Springfield while we were waiting for my windshield to get fixed up. They have cows in their back yard. This is definitely Missouri.


Life's no fun unless you're geeking out and wrenching on stuff at least once a day. I helped Ray install an electronic cruise control system on his Vulcan 2000. Wiring diagrams, Fluke testers, soldering iron, and lots of shrink tubing made up most of my Sunday.


I didn't get many good pictures of the Hak5 meetup because it was too dark and I didn't have a tripod (and my camera is crappy). I think Darren and Snubs will likely have a bunch of photos up sooner or later. We'll have to see.

My Kismet/JLime/200mW/19dBi Dipole rig found about 6,500 networks this weekend. About half of those were new, never reported to WiGLE. Another weekend like this will boost me to WiGLE's top 100.

Edit: If photos aren't working, try this album link.

Weekend Blurbs

Sorry I haven't finished up my series on Web Filter Evasion yet. I had most of the articles pre-written except this last one and life's been kind of busy this week. I don't even know if I'll get around to Sysadmin Sunday the way this weekend looks.

Speaking of which, we could use more writers for security, electronics, or other geeky topics. You don't need to be in the KC area, but it would help. Feel free to drop us a line in the comments.

Tonight's The Friday Geek-Out at Daily Dose in Overland Park, KS. I'll probably be there around 11:00PM.

Darren published meetup details so maybe we'll see you there. If you're around KC and want to convoy or car pool, let us know in the comments. We'll probably roll out from KC around 3:00 tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon.

Pics will follow, I'm sure.

Who's down for a trip to Springfield, MO this weekend?

Midwest-region hackers.

Darren from Hak5 will be kicking it in Springfield, MO this weekend (April 24-29th, actually) and I'm planning on heading down there to hang out, get a few drinks, and what have you. Drop a comment and I'll try to get more info to you.