Podcasting What Geeks Really Want To Hear

We had an audio problem, but we did get a new episode recorded last night! I’ll be editing it as quickly as I can to get it out to everybody!

Forget about all that 3x vs 32x data over-write crap to make sure your data is deleted. Get one of these.

The best feature… an emergency hand pump allowing for operation when the power is cut to your building and the ninjas are about to get your drives. :)

Hello all,
Thesis defense is completed (successfully)! I still have paper edits to do, but we’ll be starting up the podcast again shortly. I hope we still have a few fans who have stuck with us. :)

Holy shit! Didn’t see this one coming (especially since Solaris 10 comes with PostgreSQL, not MySQL).

I think this is good news – Sun has been doing a lot of open, progressive work (OpenOffice & OpenSolaris) and I think MySQL (and its users) will benefit from the acquisition.

From http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/:

But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means – we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.

Hello all – the good news is that steady progress on getting my f*&#ing Master’s degree done is being made. I’m hoping to be done with my project in mid to late January. At that point, the podcast should be back in swing, as working on my thesis paper will require a lot less of my time than the project.

At any rate, to all of our listeners, we wish you the happiest of holidays and a fantastic new year!

From:  http://www.hackaday.com/2007/12/02/wireless-keyboards-easily-cracked/

The “encryption” used on each regular keystroke involves XORing the key against a random one byte value determined during the initial sync with the receiver. So, if you sniff the handshake, you can decrypt the keystrokes. You really don’t have to though; there are only 256 possible encryption keys. Using a dictionary file you can check all possible keys and determine the correct one after only receiving 20-50 keystrokes

What I don’t get is this – who thinks this is good encryption for the real world? Yeah, an XOR is a nice and easy obfuscation, but is it not encryption!

As an industry, we really have to get our heads out of asses on this. Wireless communication is being used more and more in production environments and this shit is often way too easy to hack.

First off – I’m back deep into working on my thesis. Hopefully, we’ll have another episode out soon.

In the meantime, I just came across this on Slashdot:

Slashdot | Shake a Secure Bluetooth Connection:

I like the concept. Bluetooth needs something extra for security, although I’m not sure if I’m 100% behind shaking my devices to get them to pair, it is a novel concept.

Next question, though… are more devices going to come with screen shields to help against all the rubbing they’ll undergo from being shaken with other devices to get them to pair?

Yes, boys and girls, we’re not dead. And… we’ve recorded episode #58 (again). We were a little rough and we tended to rant a bit, but we’ll back in the swing of things again in no time. Look for episode 58 to be published later this week.

I’m a fan of TrueCrypt on Windows (still using encrypted HFS on Mac).

Anyways, a new version, 4.3, is out, with many new features. From their website:

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 4.3 has been released. Among the new features is full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista, support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (such as new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.), auto-dismount when a host device (e.g., a USB flash drive) is inadvertently removed, and many more. In addition to new features, there are many significant improvements. Some portions of the TrueCrypt device driver have been completely redesigned and several bugs have been fixed. For a comprehensive list of changes, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

Travis mentioned in Episode 51 about hating USB thumb drives with “U3” technology. Especially scary since it shows up as a CDROM drive on windows (usually with an ‘autorun.inf’ file – very bod). Anyways, my buddy Brian just happened to bitch to me tonight about this shitty USB drive he had. I grabbed it up, did some Google searches, and about 5 minutes later, reformatted his USB drive without the U3 partition (and gained an addition 5MB of space).

I don’t know the legalities of distributing it, so I’ll just say ‘do a google search for U3_Uninstaller.exe‘. It’s Windows only, takes only a few seconds to run, and worked like a gem on the drive I tried it on.