/dev/null

I ran across this article via Hackaday. post,link.

hehehe, a guy named John Hargrave pranked the Massachusets Turnpike to see what he could get away with. Man, I LOVE civil disobedience!

On a related note…on Saturday morning I visited a convenience store by my house and noticed a bus transfer card laying on the ground. Being the good citizen that I am, I decided to pick up this piece of litter. The card is made of paper but has a mag-stripe on the back. I wonder what data is encoded on this thing…I think it’s time to finally build a magstripe reader to find out! I’m not a bus rider, but it’d be a fun experiment regardless.

I ran across a link on a Hackaday post about a neat little WiFi hacking/spoofing tool called pickupline. The tool allows you to spoof an already authenticated user on a WiFi network by sniffing out traffic and spoofing the authenticated user’s MAC address. I guess this is no different than spoofing a MAC on MAC-filtered wired network, but for some reason using a similar method on a WiFi network never crossed my mind. This would come in mighty handy at some airports. It’s stupid to be forced to pay ~ $10 for a stinking connection while waiting for flights!

Also, here’s a link to a presentation from DefCon about pickupline

via BoingBoing

HOWTO put an elevator in express mode without a key

This elevator hack sounds pretty cool, if slightly evil:

While some elevators require a key, others can be put
into “Express” mode by pressing the “Door Close” and “Floor” buttons at
the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and
avoids stops at any other floor.

Link

(via Kottke)

I picked up a Linksys USBBT100 bluetooth adapter for my laptop last night. The latest Treo-Sprint firmware (1.12) enables dial-up networking over bluetooth so I can use my phone as a modem again. I had been using a tool called PdaNet but I didn’t like how it functioned and it’s nice to not have to drag my USB cable along everywhere. The Bluetooth was actually a pain to setup (it required rebooting the Treo a couple of times) but it’s working pretty slick now. The next useless toy to go into the queue is a bluetooth-enabled GPS device. Man, I _really_ wish the Treo had built-in GPS. That would make the device so much more functional.

Oh, Alissa returned my call last night so I was pretty excited about that. We’re getting together Tuesday night to do something…now I just need to figure out what. There’s a lot to do in Uptown (especially if the weather’s nice) so I’m sure we’ll figure something out.

Work is quiet today since the “important people” are at a ground breaking ceremony for our first network. Peaceful days in the office sure are nice!

I ran across an interesting piece of sotware yesterday called rrs. rrs is a reverse connecting shell. I had a need for a tool like this since I have a box that will be 5.5 hours away with no way to remotely administer it since it’ll be sitting behind a NAT. I have no control over the router at that location so punching holes through the firewall for SSH just isn’t going to cut it. It turns out this software works perfectly. Here’s how it works…

Machine A: this box is sitting behind a NAT with a private, dynamic IP and no way of accessing it externally.

Machine B: a machine on a network that I control which allows incoming TCP connections.

On machine A, I startup the connector piece in daemon mode:
rrs -s -P rrs.pem -D –infinite-reconnect 15 flyhouse.homelinux.org 2222

The options are: s) use SSL P) public key D) daemon mode –infinite-reconnect) attempt to reconect every 15 seconds and don’t close after a successful connection

The above command will attempt to initiate a connection with my machine at home. It retry ever 15 seconds until my machine accepts the connection.

On machine B (flyhouse in this case), I startup the listener:
rrs -ls -P rrs.pem
The options are: l) listen for a connection s) use ssl P) private key

After I execute the listen command, I wait a few seconds and bam! I’ve got a shell from machine A.

Obvoiously, this isn’t rocket science but the only time I’ve actually used a reverse shell is when playing around with metasploit. I thought it was a cool idea and I’m really glad someone has written this excellent utility which will save me from a 5.5 hour drive if something ever breaks

I’ve had a bunch of X10 gear laying around my apartment for quite some time. I installed a few devices several months after I moved into my apartment. I got 3 devices wired up (live, mind you) and decided that wiring things hot when you’re alone in your apartment, probably isn’t such a good idea….but it would be interesting to see how long it would take before anyone noticed…

anyway, back when I installed everything, I installed a tool called bottlerocket which gave me command-line control of the devices using my linux box’s serial port. I then installed a cgi programmed called bluelava which uses bottlerocket as a backend (it also supports other X10 backends) and has a built in WML UI (to control them from my mobile). I played around with it for a while, then broke it, then got distracted and never touched it again. Fast forward a few months….since I got my new Treo, I decided to set everything up again. After chmod 777 my serial port (777, whatever, I don’t care) everything worked again. I can now browse to the following url and turn on/off my devices.

I’m going to regret posting this to the entire internet, but it might be kinda fun.

Control my lights via WML

I ran across this link on hack-a-day:

Robot Platform Design Instructions

this looks like a pretty cool and simple robotics project….I wish i had some motivation…

Most importanly, please member, as PedX|ngs t-shirt says, “Robots need hugs too”

A few weeks back, I decided to get a Minneapolis telephone number. I setup an account with Broadvoice for $5.95 per month with free incoming calls and 100 outgoing minutes. My apartment building has one of those telephone entry systems whereby someone punches in an apartment number and the system dials your phone number. I mainly got a local number so I could let people in the door…because I’m too lazy to walk downstairs. I called my landlord and he said he’d set it up the next time he was over at my building. This got me to thinking…I wonder how those systems are administered….

I tried a test call from downstairs to my apartment…it worked. A quick investigation showed that there was a modem on the other end of the line but I didn’t bother trying to connect…it has to be easier than that.

Next, I decided to turn to the Oracle of all knowledge: Google. A search for “Silent Knight 5083″ returned some very interesting information. On the manufacturers website I found a pdf titled “Installation and Operational Manual”….sweeet. The manual contain complete instruction for system administration, including the default password which is….wait for it… 123456

I decided to run downstairs and try it out. Sure enough, *, 0, 123456 dropped me right into the admin mode, surprise, surprise. I really wanted to give myself access so I could punch in a secret code and have the door open (since my key is hopeless) but I was rudely interrupted when the crazy, creepy dude who lives in the basement came out the door with his bike. He looked at me creepily and said “do I know you?” “I live in this buidling,” I replied. “Do you park out back?” “Yes.” “I knew you looked familiar.” This is typical of conversations I’ve had with this guy before…he’s serioulsy crazy. I went back inside and decided to wait for another time to continue playing with the phone.

I’ll probably give it another shot tonight and see what I can do. Codes for keyless entry are assigned on a per user basis so my plan is to setup an entry code for another user in the system (possibly the creepy guy). That way, there’s somewhat of a buffer…

Anyway, it’s fun stuff and I was pretty excited so I thought I’d share….hope everyone had a good weekend.

In case anyone is interested, here’s some good info on the Silent Knight system

since I’m fresh out of originality, here’s another reblog from hack-a-day.

tv-b-gone now b a cellphone

If I had some more motivation, maybe I’d do this hack. It is _really_ hard to hide when you’re trying to use one of these things.

My best experience with my tv-b-gone was when Honl and I went to Champs one night. It was trivia night and we hit about 6 tv’s in a semi-circle around where we were sitting. The announcer stopped trivia “so we can figure out why all these TVs are turning off.” An employee then walked around with a chair and turned all the TVs back on. A few minutes later the accouncer said “did someone bring in a universal remote to turn off all the TVs or something!?” Needless to say, it was quite difficult to hold back the laughter at that point.

My second best experience was one night at the Leaning Tower of Pizza. I was there with Gus on a Monday or Tuesday night and there was professional wrestling on the TV. Now usually, the Leaning Tower is a pretty hip place to be so I wouldn’t expect wrestling to be playing on the TV. However, everyone in the bar seemed to be glued to the tele. There were a couple of hicks and a couple of middle-eastern guys on the program arguing about terrorism, Islam, Christianity, etc. As could be expected, it was complete rubbish. I was getting super upset that people were actually watching that crap so I hit the TV across the way. A riot nearly erupted but the bartender turned it back on immediately. Something strange was going on here….but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, I think our waitress overheard my not-so-quiet remark along the lines of “SERIUOSLY, WHY ARE WE WATCHING THIS!?” and cleared things up by saying “the owner’s son is the guy on the right”, speaking about one of the wrestling performers….ooops!

reblog from Hack-a-day….

This guy built a WiFi AP with EVDO backhaul for his vehicle…very cool stuff.

This article reminded me of when I used to have EVDO service from Monet wireless in Fargo. Wow, what a waste that was. The service wasn’t that great and using bittorrent always caused the ppp connection to die (on linux at least). I remember when PedX|ng mentioned the bittorrent bug and I figured he was full of crap. Sure enough, he was right!

the worst part of that service was that I was so stinkin’ lazy that I paid for that service for about 4 months while it went completely unused! Then when I finally got the motivation to cancel my subscription, I found out they’d gone out of business. hahahaha…stupid me.

stolen from Hack a day

yes you read right. it’s possible to install linux on gmail. richard jones wrote some python that allows you to mount linux within gmail. you can use all kinds of unix commands to communicate with gmail like ls, rm, grep, cp, etc. it’s an ongoing project in development but it’s very cool and allows you basically a 2gb virtual drive of sorts. you’ll need to have libgmail and FUSE at hand to make it work properly. libgmail communicates with gmail while FUSE provides the filesystem. Give it a shot, it looks like it’s progressing very nicely.