It's been a couple of weeks - far too long, really - since I've written anything about Project Byzantium. We've been hard at work when we haven't been working our day jobs though we haven't really made a lot of it public (or at least visible). A few weeks back an official developers' page was set up on the HacDC wiki and the mailing list was fixed at long last so you don't have to subscribe to a Yahoogroup and worry about cross-posting. Right now only a little conversation takes place aside from notifications whenver code is checked into our repository at …
One of the problems hacktivists ran into when trying to disseminate useful information to people in Syria and Egypt was how to get through to people when DNS and web access are being filtered or outright blocked. Putting up web pages containing phone numbers of ISPs volunteering dialup access was something of a crapshoot because there was no guarantee that people would be able to view them. Someone (I don't remember whom) hit on the idea of contacting sysadmins in the Middle East by leaving messages in the access and error logs of their web servers. This works but pumping …
As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, here are the pictures I took at the concert. Yes, this would be the show that gave me my first suntan in over six years (by way of a sunburn) and kicked my body's immune system off the edge of a cliff by exposing it to a hellish cauldron of airborn illnesses and allergies that can only come from going to a convention or camping out for a concert.<
Highlights of the show: hanging out with lots of killjoys of all shapes and sorts. I got to meet a lot of new people …
Publically posted for future reference by sysadmins everywhere.
Regarding the Falcon RAID shelf, model ESA16G1B-0030 (3U high, sixteen SATA drive bays, hardware RAID, SCSI interface, two crappy serial ports (headphone jacks? really? you folks took this whole binary thing way too literally!), Ethernet jack, flip-out ears on the front with a rudimentary control panel on the left-hand side) from RAID, Inc. I just inherited one of these at work with no documentation, warranty, or support for it whatsoever. Consequently, I've spent most of a week trying to figure out how to set the damned thing up. Also, I haven't been …
A couple of months back I went hiking by the Chesapeake with Orthaevelve, her mother, and Jarin. It was in mid- to late spring, so it was before the heat and humidity rolled in to settle like a misasma over the DC area. I don't know exactly how far we hiked, only that it was a good four or five hour trip all told, from hiking in to spending time at the shore hunting for fossils to hiking back to where we'd parked. There was a goodly amount of wildlife out and about during our trip, from dragonflies and skinks …
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I've been playing around with the theme for my website in subtle ways (mostly so that, if I do screw something up it won't hose my entire site). This is partially due to the fact that I simply can't leave well enough alone if I can help it, and partially due to the fact that I've been forced to learn HTML by Project Byzantium. But, that's neither here nor there. A few months back, some of the agents over at Telecomix put together a side project called the Summer of Datalove to promote the …
Most of my posts lately have been terse, to say the least. When I've had time to sit and write it's been in fits and spurts over a period of hours or days when I've felt up to it. My queue of things to write about has broken two pages, which means that it's time to delete the older stuff and move on. In Internet time, that's a long while, plus there is more important stuff to worry about. It's not ADHD, it's simple practicality. The "when I've felt up to it" means just what you think it does, I …
Mirrored from this pad at Telecomix, here are links to the deaths of multiple peaceful protestors in Syria. Much of this footage is graphic in nature, but it's also of people literally putting their lives on the line in the hope of making a better world to raise their children in. Please repost and retweet this widely.
For many years in the hidden spaces of the Net, rumors have spread that cryptographic systems as we know them are worthless. Some claim that every cryptographic system out there has already been compromised because the National Security Agency only permits those systems that it has been able to tamper with in subtle ways to be published. Cryptographers they can't compromise, so the stories go, silently disappear and are never to be heard from again. More recently, advances in quantum computing have caused brand new stories to appear on forums and in IRC channels, with the requisite flame wars hot …
