SixApart’s Hackathon
SixApart, the company that makes the MovableType blogging platform, hosted a “Hackathon” day where people could just come, hang out and make cool stuff for Movable Type.
For those, like me, that missed out on the fun: Here is the flickr photo stream and here are a few select videos uploaded by one of the attendees. (via Learning Movable Type)
Why don’t they ever do this kind of thing in St. Louis? Seriously.
A Nasty Fat-Chick-like Update: These video were apparently recorded on a camera someone stole from a museum. They are tough to watch and even listen to. Bummer.
Kevin Mitnick Has Something On His Face
Kevin Mitnick, the famously jailed hacker’s website was recently hacked. I’m not sure why this is such big news. Anyone can get hacked and poor Mitnick is probably one of the biggest targets out there simply because of his background. Lets be honest though, the software that people run will always have cracks and guess what? Even the great Mitnick uses that same software. Now, if the mad wrote all of his own stuff and claimed it to be unbreakable, then you’ve got some news. This story, as it is now, is not news. What is news however is the hilarious picture the hackers posted up to Mitnick’s site (shown above). Mitnick has fixed his site already, but you can see what the hacked site looked like by going to zone-h.org. Be sure to check the “shout-out section” at the bottom. I personally loved this line:
TO MY GIRL “S”, I LOVE YOU
I’m not sure girls are into that dude. I don’t know…maybe they are though. Wait. No. They aren’t. Not only is that the geeky equivalent of spray painting her initials on a bridge, except this lasts all of 2 hours until someone fixes it. No, I think this is clearly not a love letter to your “girl”, this is a masturbatory letter to your geeky buddies. I bet this guy doesn’t even know that he is gay.
Your welcome buddy! Funny picture though.
Step By Step: How To Get Free WiFi at Cheap Hotels
I was recently talking to someone at work about how you can get around the wall of cheapness at those hotels that make you pay $30 dollars for wireless internet access. After that conversation I thought it would be a good idea to write up a tutorial, fully explaining the process. Like most of my ideas though, I forgot about it. However, after a looking around at some old bookmarks I stumbled across the fact that Ray Haque had done the work for me and had posted a walk-through for getting free access to hotel WiFi entitled: “Never Pay For WiFi Again” This tutorial won’t be for you Computer Science graduates out there, but for those somewhat computer literate and able to follow instructions this should be right up your alley and make your friends start to call you “Zero Cool” Here’s a sample…
Sure, I have been stuck in a hotel for a few days with absolutely nothing to do. Left alone with my thoughts, one HBO that only plays shit, and a hotel that charges for WiFi access … I have resorted to network violence. Even as I record this post I am starving some poor victim of bandwidth and leaving a trail of utter confusion. Allow me to explain, and before long YOU TOO can steal all of your paid WiFi access.
What you need:
* A WiFi card and an OS that allows you to change the MAC address
* A hotel that charges upwards of $200 a night, and still wants 10 bucks more for WiFi.
Like all handsome, smart and never smelly people, Ray is a “Mac Guy” so his tutorial is OS X centric, but for you Windows folks just download any of the LiveCD versions of Linux and follow the steps he gives and you should be ripping off hotels in no time.
Thanks Ray! Your blog has earned a stay of execution in my bookmark list.
Xbox 360 Ups the Ante For Xbox Hacking
Remember when I said I would only buy a Xbox 360 when its officially hacked? Well it seems that task is going to be a infinitely more difficult that hacking the original Xbox was. Engadget has compiled a quick list of the road blocks in the way to a hacked 360.
- The flash is encrypted with a per-box key
- The key is stored inside the CPU
- The boot ROM is stored inside the CPU
- Also inside the CPU is a hypervisor that verifies the running state of the kernel, making sure there is no modification (RAM checksums), else the Xbox 360 panics and blows up!
The CPU contains RAM inside of it to store the checksums- All interrupt/exception handling is done by the hypervisor
- All code runs in kernel mode
- The emulator for first generation games can be updated via an official Microsoft download burned to CD by the user, though the CDs’ content will be encrypted and signed with public key cryptography.
- The boot ROM is stored inside the CPU.
Yikes. Anyone think Microsoft is using the 360 as a test run for their “Trusted Computing”? I guess they figured they would throw it all in the 360, and if all the geniuses out there working day and night out of their parent’s basements can’t beat it, then its golden (for now)…and if they can beat it, then they move on the 2.0 for the next try.
Either way, I’m thinking that I won’t be parting with my money for the joy of a new Xbox 360 anytime soon.
Perez Hilton Goes Down…Because of A Hacker
PerezHilton.com, the wonderfully trashy gossip site, was taken down today by a hacker. I’m not sure, but I’m picking up on a little hostility vibe from Perez about the whole thing:
Yes, we were hacked today.
But, like the fucking cockroach that Perez is, not even nuclear anihiliation can take him down.
You want a piece of me? Take it! I’m Cuban, bitch. And I will cut you!
Hacking someone’s website is so lame. Unless its a Nazi or KKK site, but even then I’m not wild about it…free speech and all. Ok, here’s the rule: Hacking someone’s website is only acceptable if it is someone that I don’t like…sorry, not someone that you don’t like, it has to be up to me. So just ask me and I’ll tell you if its cool or not. Also, if I do give you the ok, you have to replace the site with something fun to look at like a big picture of Angelina Jolie naked or a picture of your girl friend naked (unless she is a fatty) or just a picture some other girl that is hot…and naked. Then hacking websites is cool.
How great is it that I can write a story about a site getting hacked and somehow twist it so that I can justify putting a big picture of Angelina Jolie at the top of the article?
CVS Digital Camcorder Hack Getting Closer to Finished
Phillip Torrone at the wonderful MAKE Blog, along with help from the hacking community have taken many steps in getting to a complete hack of the CVS Digital camcorder.
A lot of progress on the CVS camcorder this last week. This weekend I figured out how to unlock the camera, and then daBass found a USB command that downloaded the most recently recorded video. By deleting that video after saving it, you can download all the videos. Lots of other people filled in with code to combine our discoveries. It’s been an amazing group effort…
Torrone said the next step is getting the camera to act as a USB mass storage device. Meaning, that you could record something, hook it to your computer and then just pull it off! Amazing. Once they get that figured out, the next step will be for me to get my ass to a state where CVSs are around to pick one of these up.
Question: Does South Carolina have CVSs? I’m going to be down there in a month…
Hack-A-Day gets hacked
Ironically, the Hack-A-Day blog and several others in the Weblogs, Inc. group were hacked last night due to an old server with un-firewalled FTP ports. Whoops! This according to the blog of one Jason Calacanis…he would know, being he runs the whole Weblogs, Inc thing.
Why am I reporting this? Because there isn’t that much else going on.
Link: Yes, we got hacked.