The Iggblog

Poking my head into the internet to say hi. Two weeks ago I moved into a new place. About goddamn time. The last place I was in, Emily and I were subletting for 4 months while we waited for this place. Thank God it was only 4 months… the place was a hole. Emily and I were like “Hay, lets move in with Lindsey. It’ll only be 4 months, how bad could it be? lololol”. Well, it was bad. The living room was also an entry and a hallway. About 8 feet by 12 feet, minus space for a closet. Kitchen was (I shit you not) about 7 feet by 4 feet, not including counter space. There was no air conditioning, and window units were not allowed. On the day of the move we threw our sheets away, they were (watch me keep this work safe) yucky. There was an elevator, but it was like something out of a horror movie. The thing gave you a new appreciation for life every time you’d successfully exit it.. It was more of a cross between a cage, an electric chair, a bathysphere. Apparently it’s the oldest cage elevator in Boston, and it lets you know for damn sure.

The new place is pretty rockin. We’re right next to the JFK Library and UMass Boston. Technically it’s in Dorchester, but we don’t own up to it. It’s so close to the line that we just call it Boston. We’re on the 6th floor and it has an awesome view of Boston (and Dorchester, depending). It has all new everything. Central AC, even ethernet drops in every room with a patch panel in a central location. Hell yeah. The living room is massive and has floor to ceiling window that might as well be a wall. The elevator doesn’t threaten my life and affront my senses. I’ll try to get some pics of this place up soon, I’ve been too busy unpacking and enjoying downtime in a place that doesn’t give me headaches and make my ears pound from heat.

Anyways… yeah. Checking in. Sup, internet?

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

“By 2047 the Air Force says unmanned aircraft with blazing artificial intelligence systems could fly over a target and determine whether or not to unleash lethal weapons –without human intervention.”

Full article: Clicky
Source document: Clicky (warning, it’s a PDF)

Are you fucking with me? Really? In what distorted reality is this a good idea? Machines break. Usually when machines break, they do it in such a way that halts their operation. But sometimes it “degrades” their operation in such a way that it operates outside of its normal parameters. Machines can also be tampered with… I mean, there’s no way they’d let these things loose without a way to communicate with them. If you can talk to it, chances are you can tamper with it remotely with malicious intent. There’s no way to completely 100% safeguard against that.

The argument could be made that humans break too… But humans CAN’T FLY OR MOUNT DOZENS OF MISSILES. We’re slow, soft, landbound, and can be stopped pretty easily with a pistol. Autonamous flying killer drones sophisticated enough to make kill/dont kill decisions on its own, and “the [ability] to swarm multiple drones on a single target” aren’t something that should be left up to machine logic. Thought engines are notorious for false positives. And once you refine them sufficiently in a lab environment, they get tons more in the wild. I can’t think of a way that developing a machine like this behind close doors, then bringing it to production wouldn’t be grossly irresponsible. I’m not saying “look at how many movies are about AI type machines going rogue!!!”. I’m saying that there’s pretty much no machine that’s been released into the wild that hasn’t been cracked and remotely exploited by someone with malicious intent given a reasonable period of time. And if there’s anything that internet badguys have proven it’s that they’re better at getting into the military’s electronic systems than the military has been at keeping them out.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Many moons ago I had a “pics” directory on my website full of random crap, with a bunch of subdirectories also full of random crap. Among these was the pics/misc directory full of anything I found on the internet that was remotely funny, useful, or offensive (usually the latter). I knew nothing about scripting at the time, so I wrote a monolithic hack of a script to manage everything. When invoked by browsing to index.cgi, it would check each file, and if it was a picture it would generate a thumbnail and stick it in a thumbnail grid for easy browsing. Pretty much the most basic possible page to take care of thumbnails and gallery functions. It worked well for a while, but my image dump has grown considerably. Loading ~800 images on a single page is bad for a number of reasons… especially when the page is generated on the fly. Originally I used it as a method to learn more about bash scripting, so you can imagine how gracefully it was written.

I decided I wanted something new. First and foremost it had to be ridiculously simple… I didn’t want anything with bloated features, flickr integration, or some kind of drag-and-drop GUI. I wanted a script that got dropped into a directory, and would simply generate a gallery of all the images in that directory, as well as links to subdirectories. Some smaller features I wanted was something that would split thumbnails into a reasonable amount per page, create links to subdirectories, have a big preview pane, and be driven by some sort of sexy javascript. So I basically chopped up my old script, and messed around with some CSS and JQuery till I got it looking how I wanted, learning a ton in the process.

Anyways… here’s how it looks now:

Image dump, now sexier

Its only requirements are a couple jquery files and a few CSS files. Once you have them placed, it’ll work in any directory. It looks in its present working directory for a “thumbs” folder with 75×75 and 500×500 version of each image. I have a script that is a terrible, terrible, awful hack that does this via ImageMagick. It’s basically the guts of my old script when thumbnails were generated on the fly. The CGI script, CSS, Jquery, and thumbnail generation files are all here:

The main sexy: the index script (rename index.php)
The above file is the only one you need to put in every directory. The following only have to be placed once.

Basic CSS file
Gallery specific CSS file.
Dropdown menu CSS file
Main jquery library (current as of 07/2009)
Galleriffic jquery plugin (same caveat as above)

And my own little creeping horror…
Thumbnail generation script, use it if you need it.

I have a link to an upload page in the dropdown menu, which is a feature I was going to include into the page itself. But for now I’m leaving it separate for my own reasons. I leave the menu entry there because it works for me, and as a placeholder for anyone else that wants to use the script. My only gripe is that I’m unwilling to dive deep enough into the javascript to figure out how to make it launch a full sized image in a new tab when you click on the preview… for now you have to click “download original” on the bottom right. It’s still a kludge of a page, I’ll take 9/10 things I wanted accomplished. Feel free to use, redistribute, hack up my script.

Credit to Gallerific for the jquery plugin, this guy for the CSS I stole to make my dropdown menus, and to Dave Taylor for his web gallery CGI script… ancient echoes of which still exist in my index and thumbnail files. My page looks a lot like the Gallerific “advanced example”. The work I did was mostly for the on-the-fly link generation for the thumbnails and directories so that this will work dynamically in any folder.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Simply Orange: Because orange juice has become so goddamn complicated. I find that when I wake up in the morning I almost want to skip breakfast entirely because of “the juice issue”. Things used to be so easy… cereal, coffee, orange juice, perhaps some toast if I’m feeling naughty. But then orange juice got ugly. It started making things way more of a chore than they had to be. And so confusing too… I mean, who could even figure that crazy stuff out? I never thought something as straight forward as orange juice would turn into such a shitstorm of micromanagement.

Then BAM, out of fucking nowhere comes Simply Orange. All the sudden breakfast is easy again. No more of those orange juice related morning issues that we blindly started accepting as a part of life. I’m ready to start living again.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

I don’t think I need to elaborate on the information below.

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

FULL STORY

There’s always Mininova…

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

So I’m back from Vegas. Some months ago I decided it’d be cool to see Vegas before I turned 30. Probably after watching CSI or something. So Emily took it upon herself to be awesome and make it happen. She got us plane tickets and a room for relatively cheap on Orbitz or something like that. It’s pretty much exactly what I needed.

I’d been coming to work angry for the last few weeks just due to frustration… There’s a hiring freeze on engineers so I’m stuck in an operator position for now. It’s fine, I like my company but the waiting was getting to me. There hasn’t been much to do except push trash at work recently. I thrive off solving challenging problems, and spending hours troubleshooting something complex that I’ve never touched before. But recently it’s been all boring standardized notification type stuff.

Vegas was impressive. We stayed at Circus Circus, mostly because it was possible to get a big room on the strip for dirt cheap. It’s the place with the massive motherfucking creepy clown outside. It took a day or so to really take it all in. Sure it’s all artificial but the novelty, and sheer density of that novelty, was what was really cool to see. As with most people I didn’t net any wins. Emily and I played a bunch of slots… We’d find the loudest and most ADD/obnoxious machine we could find and we’d rock it for a few hours. All while sucking down free booze of course. I won a little at blackjack, but nothing worth mention. On the last day I got to visit a cousin of mine in the area and his GF. We wound down the vacation with a little BBQ, and leeched a ride to the airport. It was everything I thought it would be and more, and did exactly what I wanted it to. We left Thursday and came back Tuesday, and I returned to work calm and relaxed for once. I even got to do some really fun events at work on Wednesday.

That’s my story. That place is good times, looking forward to going back sometime.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

For whatever reason, probably my own coffee habits, I was remembering a VW commercial from back in the day. Some girl that owns a coffee place running around delivering things with her golf. At the end she says “I’ve got to cut back on the caffeine”, which I always find myself saying to myself at around 2 in the afternoon. So I found it on youtube for kicks, and was surprised when I started watching it. I actually had to hunt down some info and see if my hunch was right. It was. If you watch NCIS, you’ll know it when you see it. The ironing is delicious.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Saw this article on Digg today (clicky for full text): U.S. Military are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking.

From the article:
U.S. Defense Department officials were so impressed with the level of coordination between ground military ops and cyberattacks against strategical targets during the recent conflicts, that they are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking. Aviation Week glanced at such a device and reports that it is being designed to be easily used even by non-techy soldiers.

Apparently, there are several devices currently being developed behind closed doors specifically for such purposes, but the one Aviation Week talks about is intriguing. It is basically a highly complex hacking tool designed for the unexperienced that is to turn soldiers into veritable script kiddies. Granted, script kiddies with a lot of firepower.

Script kiddies are widely regarded as being at the bottom of the coding barrel. Whether the government means to refer to soldiers using such devices as such, they basically are making script kiddie boxes. Just as their namesake, script kiddie soldiers would be useful against most civilian targets and most non-hardened or haphazard websites. The irony here being that the stimulus for making these hacking boxes was more sophisticated or coordinated attacks against our own government or military. Any kind of hardware “hack box” that joe blockhead soldier could finger mash would be useless for such an attack.

The device is easily able to map out all the nodes of a given wireless network and, if necessary, cause them to disconnect, then watch them getting back online in order to identify weak spots. Once the best target is determined, the soldier (slash hacker) is presented with several attack attributes and can adjust their respective level by using sliders on a touch-screen. These attributes include, but are not limited to covertness, speed, or collateral damage.

I’m no hacker, and all of those things are quickly and easily accomplished with free tools. Ther are live linux distros that fit on a keychain USB key with all those wireless tools. I don’t think Backtrack has any tools to drop wireless clients, but ARP poisoning is a technique that’ll do it on most wireless nodes. But to do that you’ll need a little talent and patience to learn why and how it works. Ethernet, wired or wireless, is a dumb and gullible protocol. It’s trivial in most cases to fool it into telling you more than you should know, or making it do what you want it to.

I really hope the government is still thinking of employing hackers to do our cyber defense and offense. You can’t weaponize an abstract talent. that’s just not how it works. I’ve always advocated this and I’ll do it again, hacking is a love based skill. A real hacker is a very highly trained and very disciplined person, even if it’s all self taught. You can’t distill that and drop it in a box for anyone to use. Deploying script kiddie soldiers against an enemy with even a couple moderately skilled personnel would be like beating a tank with a baseball bat. And about as good on defense when the tank fires back. Never mind when (not if) any enemy gets their hands on these devices and analyzes them.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

This might be nerding out a little more than usual, but it’s also pretty awesome.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.