I’m back in Los Angeles but I thought I’d leave you with one last image from ShmooCon. Larry Pesce from PaulDotCom has been been bringing new ShmooBall guns to the conference for the past few years. ShmooBalls are foam balls given to the conference attendees so they can throw them at speakers they disagree with.
This year Larry brought a turret mounted to a Power Wheels. You can see the 2008 and 2009 versions on Hack a Day.
Michael Ossmann gave a really interesting talk on bluetooth keyboard security at ShmooCon. He specifically covered the bluetooth HID profile from 2003 and the bluetooth 1.2 spec from the same time, which all current keyboards on the market implement. He covered many attacks on the system that take advantage of bluetooth not authenticating its devices.
As was bound to happen, I put the finishing touches on my GPU post and immediately ran into David Hulton (h1kari) at Pico Computing‘s ShmooCon booth. As the organizer of ToorCon, he was the person that originally introduced me to the power of the FPGA.
For having to fill a last minute ShmooCon opening, dragorn delivered a very provoking talk. You may know him for his indispensable wifi tool, Kismet. He blew through 100 slides in 20 minutes and I’m sure I’ll miss the finer points but it really turned out to be something potentially incredible (and destructive). He laid the ground work by discussing how open public wifi hotspots are so heavily used. Many of us understand the risk but he set out to show even more unexplored territory.
I’m at the ShmooCon hacker conference in D.C. this weekend and will be posting about some of the more interesting talks. The Friday round of talks are limited to 20 minutes and cover a wide variety of topics. Collin Brack opened with a subject I’m thoroughly interested in: GPU based cracking.
Goozex is a videogame and DVD trading service I’ve been using and I’m quite happy with it. Each game or DVD has a point value based on the age and demand. You earn points by giving items and spend points to receive items. Each trade costs the receiver 1 dollar. Points can be purchased 100 for $5. New games usually enter the market at 1000 points and age in 50 point increments.
I’m not running out of topics but more couldn’t hurt. UPDATE: Here’s the Reddit link.
When I was 17 in the summer of 1998, my twin sister and I dug a fish pond in front of our house. I thought I’d share a little bit about it since it wasn’t that difficult to construct. It sits in the front yard and has about 3 kiddy pools worth of surface area (yes, that’s a unit of measure).
I bought my first digital camera in 2003. It’s a Panasonic DMC-FZ1 and you can find a picture and review of it here. I bought it for a couple reasons: it’s 2.1 megapixels which looks acceptable if you’re printing 4x6s. It had options to shoot either 2 or 4fps at full resolution. 12x stabilized optical zoom and f1.8 meant it was very flexible. I went to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb shortly after purchasing the camera. The zoom was very useful as we could see ~11 turns and 700 feet of elevation change. I used the multiple frame mode to shoot cars going through turns and then assembled them with panorama software.
This last week, Machine Project has been hosting several different events as part of their FungiFest 2010. Chris and I decided to check out their mushroom walk this morning at Franklin Canyon Park. I was a bit skeptical when we showed up and they turned us loose into the woods to gather whatever we found with only a few words, but the whole experience was quite interesting.
Eliot Phillips is currently looking for managing editor work and is the Head Editor Emeritus for the hacking empire: Hack a Day.
