Courtesy Zach Hoeken's Flickr Stream. CC'ed

Every tech blog on the planet is covering CES. I’m not. I don’t get to spend a week in vegas hanging out and seeing the new technologies. I have to go to work. I cry, and sometimes I wonder what the whole point of it all is. But, at least some of our members aren’t confined to this special weekday hell that I am.

Makerbot Industries, co-founded by three of our members is manning a booth at CES!

I hear a lot of the technology this year is related to 3D. I guess a 3D printer is right up their alley. Personally, I’ve been pretty turned off to the whole 3D thing since Zaxxon. But, I try not to judge.

Also I heard there was some form of polar bear television on display there. Not sure why they’d want to encase a visual display device in the horrific visage of one of the worlds most infamous killing machines. I guess I’m just not up on what people want out of their electronics these days.

So, the end of the year is fast approaching. It’s time to look back and take stock of your life. And for me, NYC Resistor has been a big part of my life, though not as big as I’d like for it to be at times. This will be our second full year as a space coming to an end. We’ll be celebrating our third anniversary early next year. I’ve been a member for most of that time. The reason we look back at this time of the year is because it’s hard not to be a funk. With the weather worsening, the sun shining less, and the cabin fever setting in as we begin an all too familiar rotation of our winter haunts; we’re faced with the apparition of our own failure. Goals unmet, aspirations unrealized, and battle damage from another long year of economic woe and misery. But in a few short days, we start anew. We take all this nasty funk we burn it and set out on a journey into the next year, fresh and ready to be simply better. From the ashes of that funk comes resolve. That’s what new years resolutions are all about.

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So way back in the 2.4 Linux kernel days I operated a shell server. It was kind of like a “proto honeypot”. We set it up to portray a bunch of fake information about itself. We then released it into the wilds of IRC claiming it was a “machine we just owned here have a free account.” Then we monitored the systems use via ttysnoop applications and pulled copies of anything uploaded.

The result was we pulled about 4 gigs of exploit archives. And a bunch of logs of people trying to figure out why their x86 exploits weren’t running on the DEC alpha that was pretending to be the wopr.

Anyways, one of the neat side effects of my playing with the proc file system was finding a limit on the upper bounds of top. By setting up procfs to displays stats for 1048 processors I managed to get top to collapse after one iteration of showing cpu usage stats. Added a fun screenshot to the gallery.

Among the fun easy things you can do to tweak your kernel, upping your jiffy count to present 16 years of uptime, and customizing your HZ values are the most fun. I remember running HZ at 1024 back when the rest of the world was rocking it at 100 and slowing themselves down massively. Kernel tweaks are fun, relatively easy, and a great way to learn. Be fearless, be stupid, and be prepared to watch stuff explode catastrophically. But, don’t be afraid to slash and burn and start anew.

My long time friend Seth, and a founding member of the Hacklab.to hackerspace in Toronto is making a run at Board of Directors for (ISC)2. In case you aren’t familiar with what (ISC)2 does, read their “about” page. The short story is, they set the standards for testing and certification requirements in the Information Security arena for large enterprises. The now almost mandatory CISSP certification is one of their creations.

For a long time now there has been considerable dismay in the hacking community with the quality of the CISSP certification. In spite of this, it has become the defacto standard in required education for work in any infosec related field of technology. Which is why it’s time for some reform. Seth is a proven security professional whose academic background is grounded in math and more specifically cryptography. He has presented several times at Black Hat and other prestigious ( and less prestigious) conferences in matters of security and cryptography. He currently is a malware researcher for a major anti-virus company. He’s also a pretty cool guy and doesn’t afraid of anything.

As a former security auditor myself, I’ve seen first hand some of the very real problems with the CISSP and the industry that’s built atop it. Placing Seth in a position to make changes to the way (ISC)2 does business is better for everyone in the long run. Which is why I’ve decided to make this post. If you or someone you know holds a CISSP certification please let them know about Seth’s campaign for a seat on the board of Directors. Only CISSP holders can vote for these positions.

You can read more about the campaign here: sethforisc2board.org

UPDATE: Eric had his laser etch painted and tossed some pics up!

Eric came by last weekend and threw caution to the wind as he placed his macbook pro under the photon beam. The results ( with many hours of investment by multiple people both outside and inside resistor ) are pretty staggering. So feast your eyes on one of the best laser etches I’ve seen on a macbook to date.