2600 Magazine Best Of about to be released

HOPE is coming up and Emmanuel Goldstein is releasing the best of 2600

from Amazon:

In The Best of 2600, Emmanuel Goldstein collects some of the strongest, most interesting, and often controversial articles, chronicling milestone events and technology changes that have occurred during the last 24 years – all from the hacker perspective. Examples:

  • The creation of the infamous tone dialer “red box” that drove Radio Shack and the phone companies crazy. It was in the pages of 2600 that this simple conversion was first brought to light. By modifying an inexpensive Radio Shack touch tone dialer with a readily available crystal, free phone calls could easily be made from all of the nation’s payphones.
  • An historical chronology of events in the hacker world that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • A close looks at the insecurity of modern locks through an article entitled “An Illusion of Security” that debunked the value of Simplex pushbutton locks, used on everything from schools to homes to FedEx boxes.
  • The stories of famed hackers Kevin Mitnick, Bernie S., and Phiber Optik as they unfolded. Through 2600, the world heard these controversial tales despite the efforts of authorities and the mass media.

Here are the Preorder Links:

Amazon.com

Amazon Germany

This will truly be the almanac in American hacker culture…

The Chaos Computer Club has a similar compilation named Hackerbibel 1 & 2 (hacker Bible)

Backtrack 3 goes final

Backtrack, a security and penetration testing oriented Live Boot Linux Distribution has reached Final Stage in the current verison 3.

The Download consists of CD Images, USB bootable Version (which i am booting off a SD Card on my EEE PC) and vmware Images and contains more than 300 tools used by white hats and black hats as well and will give you an introduction on real world attack methodologies on your IT infrastructure.

http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html

Hardy in 3360×1050… yay

Finally replaced my secondary 19 Inch Display with a second 22 Inch and now running 1680×1050 in twin view.

desktop.png

In case you have problem setting up Twin view with 3d acceleration i highly recommend installing EnvyNG which will download drivers and setup most of the configuration for you.

The final step is to tweak your configuration using nvidia-settings.

In case you have problems with full screen applications (such as games) running centered on both screens you can bind the application to a screen using the meta mode function in your xorg.conf


Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, CRT-1: nvidia-auto-select +1680+0; CRT-0: NULL, CRT-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"

Adding a NULL value to your option will make sure the application only launches on one screen.

Tribute to the fiber optic cable

No media component has so dramatically increased the progress of information technology more than the fibre optic cable.

So i decided to gather some information about the manufacturing process and other interesting facts.

Video: Corning Glass Fiber Optic Cable – Historical Footage

Video:Manufaturing a fiber optic cable [english]

Video:Manufaturing a fiber optic cable [german]

Video: Short Film about Undersea cabling

Howstuffworks.com – How Fiber Optics Work

Eavesdropping on fiber optic cable

If you have any more interesting footage, let me know by email and i will be glad to update.

To be free or not to be free….

I like open source software… Especially when its cross platform so i can use it on the occasional Windows Sessions.

Many great Programs like Nessus, Gimp, OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird (i could go on forever) have proven that OpenSource can also appeal to Windows users and help them to get rid of proprietary software.

About a month ago i required an irc client for a Windows Machine and since i use Xchat on almost any Linux machine i own (including the EEE PC) i was shocked to receive a notice that my 30 day trial of Xchat has expired and asked me to register for a small fee.

At first i thought this was a joke until i read this on their site:

Q. Why can’t XChat for Windows be free?
A. It’s free to try for the first 30 days! Building XChat for Windows is a difficult process, it requires quite some skill and expertise to accomplish. It takes time, and is by no means automated. This version also has some value added features only for Windows, such as opening irc:// URLs from your web browser in an existing instance of xchat, spell checking and graphical emoticons.

I have no problems donating a small amount of money to support the hard work which i have occasionally done in the past for the Gnome and Gimp projects, but disadvantaging Windows users by making them pay for software every other user can download for free is pretty much restrictive and the above reasons are no argument to really get users into paying for software.

If you ideologically believe in coding and distributing open source software – make sure you treat everyone who wants to use it equally.