Contest: What's In Your Hackpack?

From what I can tell, a good chunk of our readers are road warriors. Road warriors come in all shapes and sizes, though. I personally know one guy with an nmap-armed Palm Pre (and similarly weaponized iPhone carriers) and a few battle-ready Techno-Thugs ready to bludgeon your skull with a pair of Panasonic Toughbooks.

Goal: Go mobile. Cause mayhem. Get out. What would you rock in your hackpack? Here's an example of what I'd load myself down with this (You can click here to see my Flickr Notes where I've labeled everything)



And it all fits nicely in here:


Now, for the contest! Up For Grabs: Two Pairs of AMC Silver Experience movie passes. Each winner will receive vouchers for two movie tickets at an AMC Theater. Sorry folks, that's all I have laying around, unless someone wants to donate some wicked schwag. So, there are two ways to win.

The first way is to e-mail hackweight (at) h-i-r.net with your guess as to how much my hackpack weighs when it's packed with the contents above. You can guess once per day. The first person to get it within .1 pound will win. If the contest goes too long, we'll just let the person who got the closest take the prize.

The other way you can win is by submitting pictures of your hackpack (both spread out and packed up) to hackpack (at) h-i-r.net. You can attach the photos (800x800 max, please) or host them somewhere and link us to them. Sometime before DefCon the HiR Crew will feature our faves and put it to a public poll. Whoever gets the most votes wins!

Asmodian's Workbench

Whats on Asmodian's workbench?
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Google mini
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The Google-mini is an Internet search appliance. It is essentially a 1u Intel server with Googles search engine with a simple web based interface to specify what sites it should index. The mini lacks the capability to access anything but web or samba based resources. To this end they have a feature called a Onebox.

A Onebox module is an XML profile describing what to do if a certain set or format of keywords are encountered during a query. The definition then tells Google to access a certain collection or an external script which then is sent the query and any applicable authentication information and expects back an XML response. The response is pared with an XSLT style sheet and displayed with the search results.

The Onebox can search queries by key words, Perl regular expressions or on every search.
The example they made was an employee directory which searched by lastname and returned basic contact information in a formated box with a graphic.

Informative resources:
Google Inc. "One Box Guide". Accessed 2-18-2008
http://code.google.com/enterprise/documentation/oneboxguide.html
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Pure-FTPd Follow up.
I am working on an adaptation of my previous article on Pure-FTP using Mysql as the user database and creating an automated user web space system, or adapting an existing one.

I am in a situation where I have user information sitting in LDAP (via Novell NDS) however I cannot implement my own schema so I must use a Mysql back end to store the user information.

So what I plan on doing is setting up the interface to poll LDAP for user info and import it into the authentication database.

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iPOD Touch Hassle
It seems I am cursed to buy the one technological widget which is resistant to modification.
It appears that the new iPOD's purchased since December 2007 are resistant to Jail breaking.

Worst yet, information on this is buried amongst a deluge of you tube videos and un-readable Interweb BLAG's with a crap ton of advertisements so that searching for helpful information is an all night task. I'll tell you what doesn't work:

Upgrading to the 1.1.1 firmware via Itunes 7.5+ (Mac and PC)

Though it has been a learning experience:
The iPOD touch /iPhone uses a Arm processor some where around 500Mhz.

You can access the media folders on the iPOD via iPHUC. However on a standard iPOD this dumps you into a chrooted folder (/var/root/media)

The downgrade/jailbreak process goes like this 1.) Get the old firmware 2.) Put it into recovery mode(see above) 3.)Use iTunes to load the old firmware 4.)on your ipod goto the site with the giant tiff with the overflow info and payload. 5.) It will load the program installer.

Then theres some tricks to upgrade the iPOD back to the latest firmware while keeping the ability to load 3rd party software.

Like I said, this has not been working.

You can resurrect a "bricked" iPOD or iPhone by holding in the Sleep button and the home button then letting go of the sleep button when you see the apple logo. Then you should see the iTunes logo and the iPOD cable symbols. Attach it to iTunes and then restore the firmware. (This wipes out EVERYTHING).

I understand that if the boot loader is corrupted or overwritten with an incompatible version there is a way to reload it too but I haven't seen any articles with sufficient details on this.

Informative Resources:
ARM web page. "ARM Powered Products". Accessed 2-18-2008 http://www.arm.com/markets/mobile_solutions/armpp/18665.html

Johnstone, Jeremy. "Howto: Run custom apps on iPhone (Part #1)" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://www.jeremyjohnstone.com/blog/archives/2007/08/05/howto-run-custom-apps-on-iphone-part-1/
*This describes a utility called iPhuc and has little to do with the iPOD touch

ilounge.com. "white screen lockup", Accessed 2-18-2008
http://forums.ilounge.com/archive/index.php/t-209541.html
*This references a couple of Youtube videos on updating the firmware.

iPHUC Homepage, "iPHUC" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://code.google.com/p/iphuc/
*iPhuc gives you an interactive (albet chrooted) shell to your iPhone or iPOD.

True, Nathan. "ibrickr" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://cre.ations.net/creation/ibrickr
*The iBrickr application is very handy in even though it's meant for the iPhone.
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Old tech that I still love

Sure, I might loathe ye-olde mainframes, but there's actually a lot of retro-tech stuff that I love. Two of them are pictured left. The IBM Model-M Keyboard and MiniDisc.

The IBM Model-M is practically a tank, the mother of all ultra-durable keyboards. They're almost impossible to break or wear out. They have a springy tactile feel, and make a lot of noise when you type on them. Many people see this as a horrible turn-off, but there's a certain subset of people who really, really like it. I'm one of them.

MiniDisc is a somewhat failed experiment of the early 1990's, at least in the US. You can still buy MiniDisc players and recordable media, but they're getting increasingly difficult to find. One thing that I really enjoy about MiniDisc aside from the size is the fact that many of the portable MD recorders have optical S/PDIF ability as well. I actually use the MiniDisc player shown above quite often. I don't have a modern MP3 player with the exception of the CD-MP3 player in my car.

I could go on and on for quite a while about old-school stuff that I still love and use, but I'll save it for another day.

What are some old-tech things that you still love?