We found a bunch of locks to play with

I'll have some notes up about CHDK a little later, for those of you who couldn't make the meeting (and those who aren't in KC, obviously)

After the meeting, some of us left to hit one of our favorite dumpsters. We came away with nearly a dozen electronic vault locks including several each of Sargent and Greenleaf AuditLock 6126, Kaba Mas Cencon S2000. I've dealt with both of these models in the past, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty with them again. Maybe I can even make some of them work!

Stay tuned!

June KC 2600 Meeting: CHDK

For the June meeting, I'll be demonstrating some of the power that CHDK unleashes on relatively inexpensive Canon digital cameras. Some highlights:

• Installing and navigating CHDK
  
• Taking and working with RAW photos
• Writing scripts to automate camera actions
• Introduction to other useful features
• Using the UNIX command-line and CHDK to make time lapse animations

As always, we'll discuss whatever else is on peoples' minds, and grab a bite to eat. We might hit a dumpster or two, if time and weather allow.

Come on out and join us. Oak Park Mall Food Court. Friday, June 6 at about 5:00 PM.

Minimalist keychain reworked.

Have you seen the minimalist keychain post? Maybe the idea is a bit too unwieldy for you, like it was for me? Reading though some of the posts about it brought the idea of using a screw post to me. Thus, my quest today to finally put it all together.



The Parts:



Match the Post to the Bit:



The flutes of the 1/4" bit fit in to the slot of the key. Use all sizes of drill bits from what shank size just fits up to the intended size to ream out the hole. Clamp the key in a vise when drilling and wear eye protection (do *not* hold the key to drill it!):



When it's all drilled and layered ( Post:steel washer: key-nylon washer(repeat) :steel washer:Screw ) be sure to use some thread lock to keep it together:



The final result:



One key had a slot and is offset to attach a key ring if need be:

Debian/Ubuntu SSH/SSL Epic Failure

Every one has been talking about this but this is a big issue so here's my take on the SSL/SSH debacle.

1. Yes, This is horrible. The package maintainer deserves a bit of flameage on this.
2. After Flameage is done (say about 72 hours worth), Package maintainers deserve some props for supporting a great package system.
3. This is the situation we silently agreed to when we used binary packaging systems, it's a calculated risk which reared its ugly head.
4. This is a reminder to us all that good security isn't a static state of being but a continuous process in which this type of failure is part of the system provided the root cause is identified and acted upon.

So, if you want to be sure about security, compile from source and invest your time, sweat and life into making a bullet proof system. If you want a little life on the side, take these situations in stride and look upon it objectively and deal with it accordingly.

... Or use OpenBSD. ...

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.