Ian Foster - LANRAT

For those of you not in the know, ambergris is defined as: a wax-like substance that originates as a secretion in the intestines of the sperm whale, found floating in tropical seas and used in perfume manufacture. However, that will not be what this post is about (sorry to disappoint)…

A while ago I came into possession of a few HID iClass readers. After collecting dust in my project drawer for a few months I decided to find a fun use for them, which ended up in the project I call Badgy. Background The back of the HID readers have…

Last week at DerbyCon 5.0 the CircleCityCon folks had a booth with a challenge, the Challenge of Tiamat’s Eye. @CircleCityCon: Can you solve the Puzzle of Tiamat's Eye? Visit our booth at @DerbyCon to take the challenge! pic.twitter.com/yJzPvxOQk9— Circle City Con (@CircleCityCon)…

Sonic (my home ISP) offers an IPv6 tunnel for their customers who have a service plan that does not offer native IPv6 yet. Sonic’s IPv6 tunnel operates much the same way Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker does, however since the endpoint is located inside the ISP you should get…

I gave a presentation at WOOT 2015 demonstrating how network enabled telematic control units (TCUs) can be used to remotely control automobiles from arbitrary distance over SMS or the internet. Abstract Modern automobiles are complex distributed systems in which virtually all functionality—from acceleration and braking to lighting and HVAC…

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about the recent Heartbleed vulnerability found in some versions of OpenSSL. The attack works due to a mistake in the server validating part of the request made by the SSL client. The popular web comic XKCD has made a great simple comic…

At an internship I had a while ago one project assigned to me was to regain access to a CCTV security system which we had been locked out of for some years. (The previous manager left without leaving the password.) The DVR system was a TRIPLEX DVRLink DVR468RW, whatever that…

Update: ActionBarSherlock is no longer necessary. The latest Google Support Library includes appcompat which is a better solution. ActionBarSherlock is an Android support library designed to allow you to use the ActionBar which was introduced in Android 3.0 Honeycomb with older devices, back to Android 2.1 Eclair. This…

A while ago I was working on building a custom kernel for my Android phone. Once you get the source the compilation process is not as straightforward as I hoped. Here are the steps required to get from the kernel source to a flashable image for your phone. Get a…

By default CrunchBang Linux does not have hibernation support enabled in the shutdown menu. The reason for being excluded is likely because not all computers support hibernation. However most modern computers will support it. To add a hibernation option just download this file and place it in the bin directory…