My head is pretty full writing slides for FOSDEM. Here is an interview with William Binney , if you don't know of Binney this interview is a great introduction. Binney is credited by Snowden as one of the motivators behind his set of leaks.
Binney also gave the keynote at Hope 9, which is a great watch.
Reading: Babylon's Ashes
I reinstalled or upgraded my c720 or something and things are a bit all over
the place. Tonight I started firefox in the
hackerspace
and noticed my
trackpad wasn't working, it needs to be explicitly setup. This is mentioned on
the comprehensive
FreeBSD c720 guide
, but there have been
some
updates
to the driver that aren't reflected on the page. You now need to
load the
chromebook_platform
driver manually.
# kldload chromebook_platform
# kldload ig4
# kldload cyapa
The cyapa driver offers all the features you would want from a trackpad, two finger dragging, thresholds for taps and an three button mouse emulation mode.
# sysctl debug.cyapa_enable_tapclick=3
Which gives me the following awesome mouse button layout on the trackpad.
Trackpad layout
2/3 1/3
+--------------------+------------+
| | Middle |
| | Button |
| Left | |
| Button +------------+
| | Right |
| | Button |
+--------------------+............|
| Thumb/Button Area | 15%
+---------------------------------+
Also disable super danger mode:
# echo "hw.acpi.power_button_state=NONE" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
Physical access is pretty much always game over, apart from the iPhone there are not many devices that can stand up to attack. Intel seem to want to make physical access even easier and are now offering JTAG access on USB.
JTAG is a hardware debugging protocol normally seen on embedded systems or accessed through a special adapter on the motherboard. You can use JTAG to pause a processor, step through the instructions being executed and read into memory. With JTAG access you have full access to the machine.
Reading: Babylon's Ashes
One of the speakers asks the audience early on 'Do you think Internet Censorship should be allowed?' and gets about half the crowd showing hands. I really cannot understand that sort of response, clearly there are things we don't want people to see, but I can't support a blanket censorship system to block that content.
If there was a way to block really dangerous material, without risking blocking completely reasonable material I am sure that is what we would be implementing.
The slides for the presentation are here , there are some other slides here .
Reading: Babylon's Ashes
This podcast it is quite nice.
Went up a hill today.
It was a change from sitting inside, the view was really nice. On the way up I was thinking about photography and finding the right equipment. It is pretty clear my J1 with a 10mm pancake lens isn't ideal for landscape photography, but I am not really sure how to get a set of gear to make the photos I want to take possible.
Sitting down with books and reviews are the obvious way to figure this out, but maybe there is a more 'fun' solution. Here's an idea for free:
Skill will have to be provided by the user.
It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .
Reading: Babylon's Ashes