The excellent newsbeuter says I have 80 rss feeds that I pay occasional attention to. There are habit sites I visit like reddit and hackernews, but I fall back on the rss feeds when want to focus and read.

I put the rss feeds from peoples blogs in my reader, normally when I read an awesome article via HN or reddit. People don't normally post more than 3 times a month. This means there isn't so much I can't read it, but just enough that I can process it when I want to.

" This article will still be here when you're done, and blogs are dumb. "

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Butter from my Feed Reader

Due to a Chatham House report on the latest dangers of Satellite hacking uhf_satcom was on this weeks risky business talking about Satellite pirates and exploit possibilities on the birds.

Not the Satellite Pirates of the 90s trying to access free TV and not arrgg Pirates out at sea(though maybe), but people taking advantage of the great accessible repeater in the sky.

A terrestrial repeater takes in a signal on an input frequency and rebroadcasts it on an output frequency. The repeater normally has better antennas system and is situation in a physical position to give the best area coverage.

A satellite repeater does the same thing, from its vantage point in space it can cover a much larger area. There are amateur radio satellites that provide this functionality, but from low earth orbit.

The pirates on Risky Business are probably using a satellite in geostationary orbit and taking advantage of it being a dumb pipe pointing back at earth.

Reading: TLE Files

Listening to this weeks ATP on the bus, they speak about the latest Mach OS release SomthingCali. It reminded me how little I really care for software updates. Of course I want things to get faster, more secure and less buggy so I have to endure updates. Most updates don't just bring clear improvements instead they bring feature updates.

I write software for fun and for a living and for a while I even wrote products that people used. I even provided training for our users on product updates. I saw first hand how annoying changes can be.

Most of the changes we delivered were customer driven (in fact, they were all paid for by individual customers). When we trained a customers users on the new software there were normally a whole bunch of changes to off path functionality that someone else had asked for.

I can't remember anyone ever being happy with changes to their workflow .

They were happy that bugs had been fixed and UI had gotten a little cleaner, they loved that the software was better on the crappy machine IT or we supplied them. But they didn't want change for changes sake.

I have been using Puzzle Alarm Clock to make me get up. It is great it can make you solve puzzles, quizzes, or it can use the NFC reader or camera to scan a QR code to turn the alarm off. Puzzle Alarm Clock updated this week. The UI was improved or something, all I can tell is that it is white instead of black now. But they also removed features, making the app much worse.

Reading: TLE Files

The news on this weeks Risky Business Podcast mentioned the record breaking DDOS against Krebs . 665 Gigabits of traffic per second is a lot of traffic, but that is probably only the start of such massive attacks.

While wondering how these attacks manifest an article about the slowloris attack popped up. This is a different sort of denial of service to the network traffic sent to Krebs and one that should be rather easy to mitigate against at the protocol layer.

The Krebs attack is the first I am aware of with a large IoT component. I think we have all been waiting for the hordes of vulnerable devices to appear in abuse logs. Maybe we can move to ipv6 and leave the Internet of Shit on a blackholed v4 Internet.

Reading: The Puzzle Palace, 802.11 Wireless Networks 2nd Edition, Packet Captures

Yesterday I wrote about the Ex Machina soundtrack, but linked to an hour long loop of one of its tracks. Whoops. The whole soundtrack is equally great, go find it. Similar stuff on youtube lead to 9980 by CONNECT.OHM .

The Science Fiction podcast magazine I listed to, StarShipSofa has had some great CyberPunk stories recently.

• Humans are going to become augmented, this is an inevitablity, we won't be able to resist making our selves better by merging computers and machinery into our body. "Must Supply Own Workboots" considers what happens when our jobs rely on expensive augmentations, but the augmentations become out of date.
• “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail of Dead” is a Gibsonesque Cyber Cowboys fighting with the mob story. Really well timed with the article about the excellent CyberdeckC64

Reading: The Puzzle Palace, 802.11 Wireless Networks 2nd Edition, RFC6347!