cDc cultee Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror) is one of a group of researchers who recently made a fascinating presentation at the 22C3 hacker con' in Berlin.

From the summary:

We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.

Link to the full presentation!


-pic from splitbrain.

Other related links:
about the Chaos Communication Congress events as a whole
CCC page on the presentation
story from the Washington Post
Appelbaum at wikipedia

As a kid who grew up with a summer birthday, I always felt sorry for fellow classmates with birthdays around Christmas, kids who got screwed out of a party or who only got one present to cover both events. Unfortunately for my son I got lucky seven spring breaks ago -- his birthday falls nine months after that, exactly two weeks before Christmas. Sorry, kid.

The good news for the boy is that his mother and I tend to go way overboard when it comes to birthday presents to make sure he doesn't feel slighted when Christmas rolls around. This year when I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he looked at me as seriously as a son can and said two words to me: "Rock Band."

For a few months now, the boy has been saying he wants to be "a rock star" when he grows up. He's only seven, so I let him dream. He struts around the house in hoodies and fingerless gloves and with his hair spiked up in a faux-hawk. He says he wants to grow up and be in a band and be like "Fall Out Boy." Please. When I was seven-years-old I wanted to be in either Queen or Led Zeppelin.

I can remember two specific presents from my seventh Christmas: a red acoustic guitar, and a Mr. Microphone. Mr. Microphone was a microphone with an FM transmitter built into it. You had to physically hold a button down on the microphone to get it to broadcast (which made playing guitar at the same time a bitch), so my dad helped me wrap duct tape around the handle a few times. That freed up a hand, allowing me to both play I Love Rock and Roll and sing at the same time. I'm sure all our radio-listening neighbors loved my performances.

To be honest I did my fair share of pretending as a kid as well. My dad bought a VCR/camera combo the first year they dropped below $1,000 and there are plenty of videos of me jumping around while playing air guitar using baseball bats and tennis rackets. That's the category I lump Guitar Hero and Rock Band into; they're just games. I don't think they're bad and I don't lament that kids play them instead of picking up real instruments. There's plenty of time for that.

I gave up my dreams of being in a band the first time a classmate came over to my house, picked up my beat up, no-name, cheap ass guitar and made that motherfucker sing. Here I had spent weeks learning and practicing the main riff from Master of Puppets and along comes this kid who learned the solo from "hearing it once" and played it note-for-note right in front of my face. That's the day I knew I would never become a rock star. I may have had the dreams, but I didn't have the patience and I certainly didn't have the talent.

I still play around with music, though. Obviously my interests moved to computers. In the early-to-mid 90s I started messing with PC-based multitrack recording. I started with a shitty ten dollar microphone from Radio Shack (Mr. Microphone had long since broke) and crappy drum beats from a crappy keyboard I picked up at a garage sale. Things picked up from there. In the late 90s I helped a few bands by setting up their websites, laying out their CDs, and even recording a few of them. Before my kids were born I temporarily converted a couple of spare bedrooms into a temporary makeshift recording studio. We used one room for the control room and the other as a recording studio, with a network of cables running down the hallway connecting the two. For a couple of years I helped out at a bigger local recording studio, and at one point I was even running my own print 'zine dedicated to my local music scene. I've done a lot of stuff for musicians, helped a lot of bands out and had a lot of fun along the way. I still can't play the solo from Master of Puppets.

While my son has enjoyed playing Rock Band for two weeks straight, there was another present awaiting him, hiding in the back of the closet -- a real electric guitar. It's a no-name brand, just like my first one, but with a Flying V body style. The boy's eyes lit up when he saw it leaning up against the fireplace, Christmas morning. Like his old man, he cranked the distortion up to 10 while hammering out a terrible (but recognizable) version of Smoke on the Water.

I hate to be the one to tell him he won't be a rock star when he grows up, so I won't do that to him. He's too young to understand it all yet; right now he just wants to turn everything up as loud as it goes and play along to the songs he knows from Rock Band and Guitar Hero (which are actually pretty eclectic). I've tried to teach him a few chords but I don't think he's ready for that just yet. Maybe someday he'll take to the six string and if he does I'll be there to back him up. Hell, if he and his friends want to record an album, my recording gear is still out in the garage.

In two years I expect him to be as good (if not better) than Old Skull, a group of nine-year-olds.

YouTube Video: Old Skull's "Homeless"

Seasons Greetings, Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas from cDc and my little metal head.

Continuing our tradition of projects and discourse of the religious and/or philosophical implications of technology, cDc proudly presents Tao Te Ching for Gameboy!


NSFer Jake Kara writes:

A while ago I was inspired by J Schrier's Gameboy software and hardware research which explores the I Ching, the Stations of the Cross, the Rosary, and Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book. So I modified an Apple IIe program that I always considered to be Taoist in nature and rewrote it for the gameboy.

It generates nonstatic images that at times can be quite visually appealing. You can pause it at any time, but it will spit out a verse from the classical Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching. The point is that you can never pause or even consciously consider any moment without losing its beauty through intellectual abstraction.

I never finished the project -- I was going to add color and package this in cartridge form, and enter the entire classical text, but since I have to pack up most of my computers in my move this weekend, I didn't want it to be forgotten. If anyone wants to pick up where I left off, the code is posted below.

Note that the menu screen and some of the screen captures display "HAL666" because that was the name of the Apple IIe program I originally wrote to be used on stage.

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS:

TAO TE CHING
At the start menu, the user may press any button when he is ready, and nonstatic images, or moments, will begin to generate. Sometimes they are visually appealing. Once in tao mode, the user has the following controls:

PAUSE (AWARENESS)
When one wishes to preserve a moment, he may press the START button to pause it exactly as it is. But he may not be happy with the results, because no moment can be paused without intellectual abstraction. The instance one realizes one is in a moment, he is pulled out of it by that very realization.

CATCH (ANTICIPATION)
When one likes the way an moment is forming and wishes to wait for it to complete its current rotation, he may hold the SELECT button until the rotation is complete. The image will then be frozen, but again abstracted intellectually.

INVERT (SAMENESS OF OPPOSITES)
When one wishes to view the opposite of what he is currently viewing, paused or not, he may press the A button to do so. But he may find that the opposite of that moment is more similar to that moment than anything less polarized, like a tree, a smile, or a song.

CLEAR
When one wishes to empty the abnormalities on the canvas, he may press the B button.

Grab the goodies here!

Several years ago one of our division managers at work handed out printouts to everyone in my department informing us that our branch would "soon be going paperless." Irony is delicious. I still have the printout hanging in my cubical.

With 2009 just around the corner, now is the time to start getting your New Year's resolutions in order. My personal goal for next year is to go completely digital. Here is how I plan on doing it.

I love books and magazines, so much so that I have bookshelves in every room and boxes of old paper out in my garage. To solve this problem I picked up a Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner. Not only is the little bugger fast, but it's designed to be able to scan (almost) to a book's inner margin. This allows you to scan in books and magazines without destroying them. Once the material has been scanned in, you can either OCR it or compile the scanned pages into a PDF. At five-to-six pages per minute it'll take a while to scan everything in, but now when magazines show up in the mailbox I scan them in (even before reading them) and recycle the paper within 24 hours. One thing I should mention: if you're looking to pick up the scanner simply to scan in old computer magazines, somebody may have already scanned it ...

Last year we finally got rid of our last VCR. In the living room I'm running GB-PVR (a free Windows-based PVR suite), although I'm thinking about switching to MythTV. Either way, all of our television programs are now recorded digitally. A second hard drive has been filled with hundreds of DIVX/XVID/MP4 movies. I'm also running a UPNP server (TVersity)on the machine so I can stream the television programs and movies to the PS3 upstairs. What VHS tapes we have left are slowly being converted to DVD via a set-top combo VHS/DVD-R recorder, and then ripped to XVID and archived that way.

I've been enjoying my music digitally now for several years. I have a few hundred CDs left to convert to MP3/OGG/?. Last year I picked up an Ion USB turntable for getting the rest of my vinyl collection into the computer as well. Next to my workhorse PC is a dual cassette deck for digitizing the last of my cassettes. I really have a handle on the music situation and I suspect this will be the first goal fully achieved.

To store all this crap, with this year's Christmas bonus I purchased the parts for and assembled an 8 terabyte RAID for the house (eight one-terabyte SATA2 drives and an additional RAID card). I now officially have more free drive space than I could ever fill (this week).

Additionally, for enjoying all this digital media on the go I pre-ordered a Pandora. If you missed the announcement, the Pandora is a hand held gaming device with an ARM A8 CPU, 256MB RAM, 800x480 touch screen, Wifi (b/g), bluetooth, 512MB NAND, dual SDHC slots, analog sticks, d-pad with six buttons (two shoulder), and a USB port. It's about the size of a Nintendo DS, but designed to run Linux (there are videos of dev units running Ubuntu floating around). I'll be loading mine up with all those digitized books, magazines, movies, television programs and music. (Oh, who am I kidding; I'm dying to try out the Amiga, PlayStation, Super Nintendo and MAME emulators that have already been ported).

If you haven't already, it's time to start thinking about your goals for 2009, and use Christmas 2008 to ask for gifts to help you achieve those goals.

Hey, water you doing mann? I'll let you in on something sexXxy spechul.

BOVINE DAWN

Tons of wonderful little gems and misfits and multimedia train wrecks and stuff!

Fellow super sexXxy NSF'r Devolish found this bit on the jewtubes:

Wasn't that schizophrenically delicious??!112

Other threads you may find interesting:

Show me your computer! Show me your desktops!
Energy Drink Favorites/Addiction
Douchebaggery

Hop on over to the dojo, assholes!

!oc80mg!