If you’ve ever hacked around with wireless communications, in particular data networking chances are you’ve come across the oh-so-nifty USB spectrum analyzers that operate in the gigahertz range (which 802.11a, b, and g networks, among other wireless applications, operate within). The idea is simple: you plug the analyzer into a USB port on your laptop, fire up the software, and you can see the whole spectrum broken down into channels with relative signal strengths representing activity on the screen just like in the movies. While granted this can be a useful tool for anyone doing serious RF …

Last week, a group of information security researchers released a whitepaper detailing a practical data extraction attack on DRAM after the power's been cut. Unfortunately, Applebaum et al didn't release the source code for the utilities they used in the lab. One Wesley McGrew read the paper and decided to apply the scientific method by reproducing their experiments. This required developing utilities to extract data from powered-down DRAM from scratch which he's done and released the source code for. The source is mostly in C with some in-line assembly. It's dense and you really have to understand what's going on …

I do.

I've got a laundry list of stuff that I want to say, but every time I sit down to do so, they vanish utterly from my brain and it's really starting to piss me off. I don't know what's wrong with me lately.

Okay. Let's start with something that I picked up a while ago and never got around to writing up - it has to do with some software that Daniel J. Bernstein wrote a couple of years ago, namely, daemontools. Daemontools is a suite of utilities that was designed to keep tabs on network services running on …