I am a big fan of stripe, recently using them for
57north's
MakeIt-Glo workshop
. The payment was smooth
and easy to use, we didn't hear about any issues with stripe from any of the
attendee's either.
Bitcoin I am still unsure of. I would love to make £1000's from idle
speculation, but I haven't been able to buy it from anywhere other than
people in the real world.
Being able to use both together can only be seen as a good thing, the more
services that start to take bitcoin the better. Services like stripe that
are genuinely legitimate and have good standing go a way to remove a lot of
the alarmism around the currency.
Tarsnap
is one of my favourite services on the
internet. If you are looking for secure small scale off site backup I can't
think of anything better.
The decapping of the 3DS chip is the sort of reverse engineer that just
amazes me. The author mentions
Bunnie's Book
as a source of inspiration and I have to agree. Bunnie's book operates well
above the level of chip decapping, but it gives you a window into an entire
world of engineering that is usually hidden. Last year Bunnie released his
book for free in memory of Aaron Swartz.
Bunnie is really cool guy and a hero of hackers around the world. Amoung
other projects he is making the
ultimate engineers laptop
.
by Tom Jones age 23 and 1/4
On Saturday the 8th march 2014 we did a run through of the MakeIt-Glo
workshop. Afterwards I went to the pub, leaving my bag(laptop and camera)
in the space. Ed and Calum stayed in the space.
Charlene text me and awoke the hangover at 0500 on the 9th. Unable to sleep
I headed into the space to get my laptop and bag and shit. The time lock
was disabled at 0657 when I came in and the main door was open for the
world.
I came up the stairs and saw that the door to the kitchen area had been
pried open and all round damaged. I saw a guy that I thought was a lock
smith(hungover head is optimistic), he pointed at our door and said
something like "It is locked". I unlocked the door and walked up to him, I
fumbled questions about his name and what was going on. He went to leave,
but I saw my (United Pixel Workers) laptop sticker sticking out of the bag.
I said it was my laptop, he put the bag down and I grabbed it, my camera and
laptop charger. He placed both the bags he was holding on the floor.
I walked across the lab and put my stuff in my bag then
pulled out my phone. He said "I've called the police already" my witty
retort was "Well I'm doing it again". As the police call center answered he
disappeared down the stairs.
Police came and took immediate details and put out a bulletin. Anther
robbery happened on king st while the officers where talking with my. Logic
ties the two together to both me and the officers. A crime scene officer
came and printed the broken door and the items we were sure he had touched.
This bloke didn't wear gloves, tried to break through an unlocked door and
didn't manage to grab our beer money jar. He broke into a dentist, I have no
idea what he was expecting to steal. The
bastard tried to steal our drinks cupboard.
Years ago I got a copy of
Designing BSD RootKits
by
Joseph Kong. A combination of lack of hardware and probably my own ability
has stopped me from working through the book so far.
But now with
57 North
up and running and an influx of free
machines I have everything I need.
The machine I have been given is part of an old biomed cluster and is really
over powered for what I need. As a 2U server it doesn't have a floppy or CD
drive to easily install an OS, but it does have the ability to boot off of a
USB stick.
The first thing I tried to get a FreeBSD installer running was burning an
ISO image to a USB stick with UNetBootin. I think the project might actually
be dead as the newest version of FreeBSD it supports is 8.0. UNetBootin
takes forever to set up the USB stick and after the second failed attempt I
couldn't stomach another.
I dug around the FreeBSD install guides for a while and then found something
that should have been really obvious. FreeBSD supports installation from USB
and provides a pre packaged .IMG file to dd to the USB.
All the information is
here
with the USB stuff near the bottom. FreeBSD is nice enough to include simple
instructions that work even from windows. This meant I could test the new
media from work and all seems good.
