a113n’s daily dose

It’s been a very informative and fun weekend so far, with the conference about half over. Right now I’m waiting for a much-anticipated talk by Steve Rambam.

The first talk was a great kick-off. Deviant Ollam’s Packing and the Friendly Skies - Why Transporting Firearms May Be The Best Way to Safeguard Your Tech (PPT) was a tribute to the federal regulations regarding carrying firearms while you travel. As it turns out, traveling with firearms is extremely simple and provides a route to provide your own additional security measures with checked baggage. Due to past issues with poor baggage handling, I intend to travel with firearms (where even a $3 air gun qualifies) on all future flights.

Next, we caught Mitch Altman’s (you may know him as the creator of the TV-B-Gone) Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers where I was given a review of basic circuitry application & design, but Mitch is the creator of the infamous TV-B-Gone and demonstrated several other applications of the same basic circuit board with a hands-on workshop throughout the weekend.

We also attended a talk on the Attendee-Meta-Data project, but more on that later. Jacob Applebaum’s Advanced Memory Forensics: Releasing the Cold Utilities covered memory residue when a computer is powered off. Typically, we assume that reboots/power down make the contents of RAM imaccessible, but Jacob & his team have created a set of utilities to find and extract information that we would take for granted as “deleted”.

After a lunch and rest, we caught Jason Scott’s One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer. Jason considers himself a historian and gave the talk looking like Willy Wonka. However, he was able to detail many important events in phreaking history while maintaining my interest through comedies and anecdotes. I had already read about much of what he covered, but he did a good job of linking current hacking to past phreaking to technological advances as far back as the 1800s.

After the history lesson, we listened in on RenderMan’s How Do I Pwn Thee? Let Me Count The Ways, another talk with a lot of valuable information. The presentation centered around Bob, a traveling salesman. Through purely-wireless means, RenderMan documented several different techniques to take over an aspect of Bob’s life, ranging from the familiar wireless laptop and PDAs to the not-so-familiar Bluetooth headsets and “personal gadgets” bought for Bob’s wife.

For a change of pace, next we sat down for C4bl3FL4m3’s Hacking the Mind, Hacking the Body: Pleasure. This talk was not entirely-sexual in nature, though she had a fair share. In general, C4bl3FL4m3 discussed how we can apply hacking techniques to invoking pleasurable experiences using any of our five senses. Aside from the typical sexual aspects of role-playing and fetishes, she also discussed hypnosis and other techniques to enhance past or current experiences.

We ended the night with a debriefing of Project Telephreak by members of the project’s team. This is a fascinating project focused around providing uncensored, free voicemail via Asterix. I think the team has high, noteworthy goals, and I was quick to sign up for an account that I am eager to try out at home (and they use Gentoo for their own systems, even better).

I’ll cover more details of Day 2 and Day 3, including the status of future HOPE’s tomorrow.

• Quote of the Day:
  (after some discussion regarding security and TSA, leading, of course, to Bruce Schneier)
  Guy with Question: Who's Schneier?
  Everyone Else: *gasp* *chuckle*
  Speaker: Wow. You actually had the guts to ask that. Google is your friend.*
  * (I paraphrased)
  
• Current Location: The Last HOPE (Hopper)
  
• Website: http://amd.hope.net
  
• Website Rating:
  
• Website Description: Atendee Meta-Data Project for The Last HOPE--a collection of registrant meta information during the conference