This is a quick and dirty video documentary of the things that when on around the talks and event at Phreaknic 12 (2008). Don't watch if you get sick at shaky cam movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield. A rough timeline of the content in the video is as follows:

        Intro and leaving Louisville with Brian. Morgellon talks about hacking the Arduino micro controller platform. Sorteal talks about the LiVes Open Source video editor. AT&T Batman building by night. Mojo-JoJo soldering some stuff for the shooting range. The patron gods of hackerdom. Registration. Con swag overview. Morgellon  gets his discreet logic on. AK-47 building with HandGrip and Buttstock. Froggy talks up Notacon, which I plan to go to next year. Skydog explains the Jware chair toss event, and then we compete. Rootwars hacker wargames. I ask Int80 about using his nerdcore music in some of my videos. NotLarry explains rootwars. Some iPhone hacking with Lee Baird and John Skinner. I do a little Bluecaseing/Warnibbling with the Bluetooth on my Nokia n810. John, Lee, Brian and I go to the German restaurant. I blind DOSman with the light from my camera and check out what folks are doing with the Arduinos Droops brought for folks to play with. I check back in on R00tW4rz. I blind Droops. I talk Ettercap filters with operat0r. USB door key fun with the Arduino. More breadboard fun. Nokia n810 + Ettercap Filter + Lemon-part = win. Int80 gets down with his own bad self, and the rest of Phreaknic. I find an energy drink with protein. Folks play with the hardware keyloggers I brought, and we have some epic fail with the IBM Model M + USB adapter + Mac OS 10.5. Winn Schwartau joins in on the keylogger fun. DOSman and Zack use a directional antenna from the 9th floor to search downtown Nashville for WiFi access points. Zoom in on Al. John and Lee eat jerky. Daren and Shannon from Hak5 blind me this time. :) Then they do a quick interview. I interview TRiP about the legalities of wardriving, sniffing and leaving your access point open so you have plausible deniability of copyright infringement (most likely it won't hold water in court if you are a computer geek). I give Hak5 Daren beef jerky. Ziplock had more con badges than God. I meet up with Iridium. I talk with Nightcarnage about the audio/video setup at Phreaknic. As I predicted, the Potters won the WiFi Race. I say why this was the best Phreaknic ever. Using green lasers on crack dealers. Techno in the dark, the Aiptek action HD does not do well in low light. Nicodemius shows off his Minority Report like multi-touch table. Hula hoop contest. I check back in with Jeff Cotton and his USB keyed door. I strap on my gear to leave the con. Brian and I do a wrap up of our thoughts on Phreaknic 2008.

This is a quick and dirty video documentary of the things that when on around the talks and event at Phreaknic 12 (2008). Don't watch if you get sick at shaky cam movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield. A rough timeline of the content in the video is as follows:

        Intro and leaving Louisville with Brian. Morgellon talks about hacking the Arduino micro controller platform. Sorteal talks about the LiVes Open Source video editor. AT&T Batman building by night. Mojo-JoJo soldering some stuff for the shooting range. The patron gods of hackerdom. Registration. Con swag overview. Morgellon  gets his discreet logic on. AK-47 building with HandGrip and Buttstock. Froggy talks up Notacon, which I plan to go to next year. Skydog explains the Jware chair toss event, and then we compete. Rootwars hacker wargames. I ask Int80 about using his nerdcore music in some of my videos. NotLarry explains rootwars. Some iPhone hacking with Lee Baird and John Skinner. I do a little Bluecaseing/Warnibbling with the Bluetooth on my Nokia n810. John, Lee, Brian and I go to the German restaurant. I blind DOSman with the light from my camera and check out what folks are doing with the Arduinos Droops brought for folks to play with. I check back in on R00tW4rz. I blind Droops. I talk Ettercap filters with operat0r. USB door key fun with the Arduino. More breadboard fun. Nokia n810 + Ettercap Filter + Lemon-part = win. Int80 gets down with his own bad self, and the rest of Phreaknic. I find an energy drink with protein. Folks play with the hardware keyloggers I brought, and we have some epic fail with the IBM Model M + USB adapter + Mac OS 10.5. Winn Schwartau joins in on the keylogger fun. DOSman and Zack use a directional antenna from the 9th floor to search downtown Nashville for WiFi access points. Zoom in on Al. John and Lee eat jerky. Daren and Shannon from Hak5 blind me this time. :) Then they do a quick interview. I interview TRiP about the legalities of wardriving, sniffing and leaving your access point open so you have plausible deniability of copyright infringement (most likely it won't hold water in court if you are a computer geek). I give Hak5 Daren beef jerky. Ziplock had more con badges than God. I meet up with Iridium. I talk with Nightcarnage about the audio/video setup at Phreaknic. As I predicted, the Potters won the WiFi Race. I say why this was the best Phreaknic ever. Using green lasers on crack dealers. Techno in the dark, the Aiptek action HD does not do well in low light. Nicodemius shows off his Minority Report like multi-touch table. Hula hoop contest. I check back in with Jeff Cotton and his USB keyed door. I strap on my gear to leave the con. Brian and I do a wrap up of our thoughts on Phreaknic 2008.

This is a quick and dirty video documentary of the things that when on around the talks and event at Phreaknic 12 (2008). Don't watch if you get sick at shaky cam movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield. A rough timeline of the content in the video is as follows:

        Intro and leaving Louisville with Brian. Morgellon talks about hacking the Arduino micro controller platform. Sorteal talks about the LiVes Open Source video editor. AT&T Batman building by night. Mojo-JoJo soldering some stuff for the shooting range. The patron gods of hackerdom. Registration. Con swag overview. Morgellon  gets his discreet logic on. AK-47 building with HandGrip and Buttstock. Froggy talks up Notacon, which I plan to go to next year. Skydog explains the Jware chair toss event, and then we compete. Rootwars hacker wargames. I ask Int80 about using his nerdcore music in some of my videos. NotLarry explains rootwars. Some iPhone hacking with Lee Baird and John Skinner. I do a little Bluecaseing/Warnibbling with the Bluetooth on my Nokia n810. John, Lee, Brian and I go to the German restaurant. I blind DOSman with the light from my camera and check out what folks are doing with the Arduinos Droops brought for folks to play with. I check back in on R00tW4rz. I blind Droops. I talk Ettercap filters with operat0r. USB door key fun with the Arduino. More breadboard fun. Nokia n810 + Ettercap Filter + Lemon-part = win. Int80 gets down with his own bad self, and the rest of Phreaknic. I find an energy drink with protein. Folks play with the hardware keyloggers I brought, and we have some epic fail with the IBM Model M + USB adapter + Mac OS 10.5. Winn Schwartau joins in on the keylogger fun. DOSman and Zack use a directional antenna from the 9th floor to search downtown Nashville for WiFi access points. Zoom in on Al. John and Lee eat jerky. Daren and Shannon from Hak5 blind me this time. :) Then they do a quick interview. I interview TRiP about the legalities of wardriving, sniffing and leaving your access point open so you have plausible deniability of copyright infringement (most likely it won't hold water in court if you are a computer geek). I give Hak5 Daren beef jerky. Ziplock had more con badges than God. I meet up with Iridium. I talk with Nightcarnage about the audio/video setup at Phreaknic. As I predicted, the Potters won the WiFi Race. I say why this was the best Phreaknic ever. Using green lasers on crack dealers. Techno in the dark, the Aiptek action HD does not do well in low light. Nicodemius shows off his Minority Report like multi-touch table. Hula hoop contest. I check back in with Jeff Cotton and his USB keyed door. I strap on my gear to leave the con. Brian and I do a wrap up of our thoughts on Phreaknic 2008.

Is it supposed to make me feel better about getting my problem fixed if I’m talking to someone in the Midwest versus someone in Bangalore? (Please no hate mail – I’m from the Midwest.) Honestly, I just want my computer to stop showing me a blue screen of death.

But apparently, I might be in the minority. According to the Black Book of Outsourcing (yes, outsourcing has a black book), reverse outsourcing is on the rise with “India’s leading service providers opening offices on Main Street, USA” to be closer to customers (mainly North American) and draw from the “local talent pools”.

The one area of outsourcing bucking this trend – infrastructure management. Co-writer Scott Wilson says that infrastructure management is largely automated, low touch and does not involve a lot of interaction.

Speaking as a vendor of infrastructure management tools, that’s a bunch of malarkey. Perhaps at a very low level this is true (i.e., is the device responding), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to monitoring performance, availability and SLAs for today’s networks, systems and applications.

Certainly as vendors, we try to put as much automation as possible into our toolsets – helping our customers to simplify IT management wherever possible, enabling them to be proactive by setting up “intelligent” alarms and thresholds that warn of problems before they become showstoppers and reacting at a speed in this increasingly virtual world that simply is not possible for human manual interaction.

But infrastructure management doesn’t happen in a vacuum and you can bet when something goes wrong which affects some mission-critical app state-side, that there is a LOT of communication and interaction. And it takes a lot of work and setup to get to a level of automation where the alerting is proactive and intelligent and customized for each business.

One of the main points of tools like ours is to automate where possible in order to free up the valuable time of the sysadmins, network engineers, IT managers, etc to do the higher order work – which is how they’ll get to the next level of infrastructure management. Beyond “is it up”, infrastructure management should be providing answers to questions like: “is it always up”, “is it doing what I expected it to do” and “will it still be working as expected as my company grows”.

Jon used a desktop computer attached to a GPS satellite simulator to create a fake GPS signal. Portable GPS satellite simulators can fit in the trunk of a car, and are often used for testing. They are available as commercial off-the-shelf products. You can also rent them for less than $1K a week -- peanuts to anyone thinking of hijacking a cargo truck and selling stolen goods.

In his first experiments, Jon placed his desktop computer and GPS satellite simulator in the cab of his small truck, and powered them off an inverter. The VAT used a second truck as the victim cargo truck. "With this setup," Jon said, "we were able to spoof the GPS receiver from about 30 feet away. If our equipment could broadcast a stronger signal, or if we had purchased stronger signal amplifiers, we certainly could have spoofed over a greater distance."

During later experiments, Jon and the VAT were able to easily achieve much greater GPS spoofing ranges. They spoofed GPS signals at ranges over three quarters of a mile. "The farthest distance we achieved was 4586 feet, at Los Alamos," said Jon. "When you radiate an RF signal, you ideally want line of sight, but in this case we were walking around buildings and near power lines. We really had a lot of obstruction in the way. It surprised us." An attacker could drive within a half mile of the victim truck, and still override the truck's GPS signals.

Someone on the IE security team forwarded me a document that had additional details. So here, for your enjoyment, is a chart listing the default settings for each security level. To answer the newsgroup poster, "medium" and "medium-high" aren't the same.

About the formatting: to get it to fit within the width of the blog's text section, I've made some abbreviations.

In a few cases, the table shows a number rather than D or E or P; below the table is a description of each such entry.

At the very bottom of this post I've included the settings from the privacy tab, too.

Note: these settings reflect those for Internet Explorer 7 on Vista SP1. Please see the MDSN link above for differences between IE 6 and IE 7.

.NET Framework

.NET Framework-reliant components

     1 = High safety

ActiveX controls and plug-ins

Downloads

Enable .NET Framework setup

Miscellaneous

     1 = Prohibit downloads from software update channels
     2 = Cache content downloaded from software update channels
     3 = Automatically install software updates

Scripting

User authentication

     1 = Prompt the user for name and password
     2 = Automatic logon only in intranet zone
     3 = Automatic logon with current user name and password

Privacy settings (on the "Privacy" tab)

Linksys addressed many of my concerns with that previous device. The 610N can mount a drive and share it via SMB and FTP, have two full-speed connections running over both bands without skipping a beat, and supports several methods of getting the one-click WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) to work. Read the review for all the details, but I can't recommend this router to Mac users with any needs beyond basic networking; I'm perfectly happy to give it a full thumbs-up for Windows XP and Vista users, however.

WPS is a particular mess, by the way. Linksys has four somewhat distinct methods of using WPS to enable a password-free encrypted connection between a client and a base station: a button on the front that, when pressed, turns on WPS; and three modes (one of them similar to that button) accessible via their Web configuration software. One option is to get the base station to create a short PIN that's then entered on the client system as an out-of-band confirmation that there's no man in the middle.

Apple, by contrast, has a single way of joining a WPS-offering base station: it displays the network's name in bold. Select the network, and Mac OS X displays a key code that needs to be entered on the base station. But the WRT610N can't handle that option. If you put the WRT610N into a mode in which Apple can spot the device as offering a WPS handshake, you can't enter the code into the Linksys router!

This shows that there's still rough edges in the WPS protocol that two of the highest-selling makers of Wi-Fi gear can manage to not mesh up their respective options. (Apple declined to comment for my Macworld story; Linksys confirmed the lack of compatibility, but put the burden on Apple's doorstep.)