tech

The Dynamic and Depreciating Value of Computers

 audit, data, philosophy, security, tech  Comments Off on The Dynamic and Depreciating Value of Computers
Jul 062014
 
The Dynamic and Depreciating Value of Computers

I wrote this while I was at my company Elemental, and was meant for engineers to implement, so despite some of the very specific language for implementation purposes it was never meant to be dogmatic. I love the idea of calculating value based on… not much. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I can say that when run on systems (just before Elemental spontaneously combusted) it produced some really cool […]

Jul 012014
 
Def Con, Jeff Moss, and Sexism

I suppose this could be subtitled “why I won’t be going to Def Con again.” Last August I wrote a letter to Jeff Moss (who is the founder of Def Con) about the disturbing sexism – including a conference sponsored strip show – I personally witnessed on a short jaunt I took to Def Con along with some anecdotes from the Internet from some women who were harassed.  He […]

Even more IPMI, woohoo!

 BMC, crypto, embedded, ipmi, tech, work  Comments Off on Even more IPMI, woohoo!
Jun 052014
 
Even more IPMI, woohoo!

I wrote a small paper surveying the scene of IPMI in the wild – Sold Down the River – the title of which might give you some clue as to make on the situation. Used to be folks used guns to rob us… computers make everything so much easier!

From A on B to C on D

 code, hack, security, tech  Comments Off on From A on B to C on D
Apr 272014
 

I find iptables to be a bit of a beast… so for posterity (or my own sanity, in case I lost this, I might recover from search engine caches!) this simply forwards a port (A) of a certain protocol from one host (B) to a second port (C) on a 2nd IP (D). Linux only, unless your OS happens to support iptables… no error checking, although it will echo […]

Random bits

 crypto, dinosaurs, security, tech  Comments Off on Random bits
Apr 212014
 

… well, literally… or pseudo literally? To generate 128 bits of pseudo-randomness: dd if=/dev/urandom bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null| hexdump |awk ‘{$1=""; printf("%s", $0)}’ | sed ‘s/ //g’ Block size 16 = 16 bytes… do that once (count=1); that’s 16 bytes * 8 bits/byte = 128 bits. I’ve been using this in scripts lately, like “foo=$(…)”.