dosman33

Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach.

Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.

#loadbearing

Robotic sputnik tool, it is very slick. Something that's not obvious is that these work best on ABUS or other locks that have one solid driver pin and spools in every remaining pin stack. This way, when you locate and lift the solid driver pin, you gain a ton of "back and forth slack" in the plug. As you lift each successive spool driver the slack reduces until the shear line is hit on that pin stack and suddenly full slack again; repeat the process until the lock is open.

The devil is in the details though, there are some subtle features that need to be incorporated into the mechanics for the sputnik to work right. I have built a sputnik from scratch before, only after talking to Oli Diederichsen at a LockCon did I get some additional clues.

Also, I think there are plenty of other interesting things one could do besides brute forcing the lock with a simpler tool. Falle Safe has a single-wire variant on this for decoding locks. Again, the devil is in the details, just ramming wire up a pin stack doesn't get the job done.

It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.

If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

I miss Notacon and Jason Scott's Demoscene parties.

Man, this brings back memories of playing with Festival back in the day. I wrote a bunch of scripts to generate dynamic Festival text2speech audio for a Part15 AM radio station, a virtual radio station DJ over 15 years ago. The intelligibility was not great back then, the funny thing was after spending many hours listening and tweaking my input text I trained myself to understand the default voice a lot better. Other people had a hard time with the default voice but I could understand it perfectly. Thankfully some of the improved voices available back then helped it a lot.

To fix pronunciation problems I had developed a set of domain-specific "dictionaries", sed substitution scripts that would translate certain words and phrases into their phonetic versions that would be pronounced better by Festival. Besides announcing the names of songs being played, I was also feeding news articles and some other web-scraped info through it. Tons of fun to hear your project working on the air in public as you drive around town.

Ohm lordy, we're blaming the student for not having years of homebrew experience before he entered school? Sure any hobbiest knows what a 555 is, but when the lab assistant doesn't even catch it and the chip was handed out to the student this is not an entry-level students fault.

Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.

Heh, reminds me of the days I kept Win95 and Win98 DOS boot disks for emergency booting Windows machines.

Man, this takes me back.

That's certain to spread joy.

Ah yes, memories of my laptop, an Orinoco card, and Netstumbler cruising down the highway during my day-job. Shortly after that I added an X-10 video receiver and a USB Hauppauge WinTV adapter to capture video transmitters too. I'd reach over and trigger a screen-shot whenever live video came into view. Once in a while I'd even capture myself driving through a parking lot or something on the feed.

I think this was the plot of an episode of CSI (don't recall which sub-series, maby Miami?) in the 2000's. Eventually they determine a guy dies of lead poisoning and they figure out he ate massive amounts of chocolate candy. Conclusion: leaded gas used in other countries caused lead buildup on coco plants there and eventually gets shipped back to US chocolate makers.

"So.. what will the world do with this knowledge?"

"Something something, rule 34."

Very interesting. A TL-15 is an excellent container, but I'm not familiar with a 5 wheel combination lock in commercial service in the US. I have a S&G vault lock which has 4 wheels. I don't doubt 5 wheel locks exist though, especially if the safe was possibly installed for a US Senator. Would definitely be interesting to see some photos of the lock (both outside and inside) if you still have any.

Reminds me of this: https://blackbag.toool.nl/?p=31

Same company makes both combination dials and the large padlocks like the 831, 833, 851. I was lucky enough to tour their manufacturing facility, it's a typical machine shop plus a small foundry as they do their own casting on-site too.

This is called the "soft drill". And strangely, this can still be a destructive attack. There are systems that can do proper manipulation by graphing out the gates, and there are systems that just do brute force attacks by dialing every combination. I've been told that the brute force machines that try every combination typically wear the lock out and it needs to be replaced afterwords.

MSDOS 4 was reportedly an overall bad release and was not in wide circulation, in all my days I think I only came across it once. This is why DOS 3.3 and 5.0 were much more common to find in circulation together.

I'm sure the source for 4 will make for some interesting bug hunting. Anyone remember the MUF list? "Microsofts Undocumented Features".

While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.

I came to the conclusion a cats tail behavior is an evolved anti-predation behavior. We think of this as "I can see the gears in my cats head turning based on its tail behavior". The wider a cats "field of attention" the slower the tail moves, ie: sitting calmly taking in the entire room so the chance for predators to approach undetected is low and hence the tail is nearly idle. The narrower the cats attention the more the more tail moves. Cat is focused on navigating obstacles to get to a coveted perch in the room, tail wags at a medium pace as only half of the room is under observation as it charts a path across furniture to the goal. Cat is stalking another animal with intent focus on attacking, the tail is in its most agitated state and hence will draw out undetected predators to the tail rather than the rest of the cat.

I realized this after watching a kitten that was unable to resist attacking our other cats tails when the older cats were focused on something. Wagging of the tail draws out any other predators that may be stalking the cat itself when its attention becomes highly focused, such as when hunting prey.

IMHO, it was the correct pivot for them - from hardware to the OS.

I remember the OLPC hardware was harshly criticized by industry, and even the audacity of the project was widely attacked. I considered it proof they were just ahead of the market here and industry realized it was behind the 8-ball. Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and tablets did not exist until the OLPC project was first proposed in 2005. Netbooks wouldn't materialize until 2007, and the ipad launched in 2010. Once industry caught up though it was hard to compete against that, and at the end of the day OLPC was about the mission, not the hardware - but you can't have the mission without the hardware. So pivoting to Sugar was a smart move to achieve the mission once industry caught up.

You can certainly make other arguments against some of the ideas of the project and what it was trying to achieve though. It definitely is a Western idea being applied to problems other civilizations may not have an interest in contending with. Water and food security, let alone electricity and communication infrastructure, are still real problems in the areas OLPC was targeted at.

I've been watching the Home Assistant scene for a few years now waiting for a time to dip my toe into the water. I'm fairly selective about what I would possibly even want to automate. During the stone age I was a user of X10 devices, I had most lights in my apartment wired up with it. Also diddled some with X10 scripting automation at my hackerspace using the fire cracker X10 serial interface. However X10 taught you one thing: it worked when it wanted to. It worked great for me for years and then suddenly it'd quit for a few weeks, then start working again. Even wiring in a phase-coupler couldn't guarantee reliability and I finally gave up on it after it mostly refused to work in my first house. Listening to all these stories seems to reinforce HA is just as reliable as X10 was back in the day, lol.

After moving on from X10 I found another poorly known "automation system" called Home Heartbeat as I was away from home a lot. Having some reassurances the doors were closed and the basement was not flooding was good at that time. Seems like the main thing this system was intended to do was to allow remote water main shutoff and then provide sensors (although the water shutoff valve was unobtanium, lol). I picked up the system and a bunch of sensors on clearance as it went discontinued. This was a system that was just a few years too early to market, it had some features that would be considered hokey today, but could be repurposed into a useful tool. It used an early Zigbee wireless mesh for sensors (door open/close, overhead door tilt sensor, water sensors, motion sensors, etc). The base station had an integrated modem, but also had a USB port for computer integration. I wrote some perl to digest the USB status output and that made its sensor network entirely accessible the way I wanted, I had status updates viewable on my phone from there. I was considering integrating it into HA at some point, but another problem the system had was that the sensors were AVR based rather than ti MSP430 with low-power features, the sensors ate CR123's like candy.

At this point I'd just like a page to view all the wireless temp sensors around my house in one place. I don't need another light-switch-with-more-steps.

On another note, any users of Mr. House here? (Pst, hey kid... you like perl AND home automation? I got just the thing for you!).

Have an upvote, I am dumb.

I didn't say the radar was there to replace looking. All you do is set your mirrors correctly and then there's no more blind spot. That's the entire point of the radar system, to "fix" the alleged blind spot problem. The problem doesn't exist if people were just taught how to properly adjust their mirrors in the first place.

there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.

...

What's funny is that so much effort is going into these radar systems for non-autonomous vehicular systems that can be resolved by teaching people how to correctly set their side mirrors to cover their blind spots. You eliminate your blind spots by moving your side mirrors out enough that you can't see the sides of your car without tilting your head a little. You don't need to see your own car in your side mirrors.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...

After I got my most recent vehicle I discovered it has a 24GHz rear-facing radar in order to alert me to a possible car in my blind spots. It misfires all the time and alerts me to guard rails and phantoms that don't exist. I don't need it, because I now keep my side mirrors set correctly I know where cars are beside me before the radar knows. I turn it off but now I'm curious if that actually deactivates the radar emitter or just stops alerting me to hits.

I think what's important here is not this first low-level stab at manipulating car radar systems. It makes a beach head on what adversaries can possibly do and demonstrates that manufacturers need to try harder.

I was meaning to ask, was the group of German hackers you encountered affiliated with the CCC/Chaos Computer Club at all? It's been a while since I read the book and NOVA didn't go into any detail there.

I know some of the CCC folks went on to start the SSDev lockpicking club. The first time I attended the TOOOL lock picking conference in Sneak NL I met some of the SSDev guys and their then-president mentioned that they "learned lessons" from the early days of the CCC and applied those when they started SSDev. Lessons such as having members/friends "disappeared" by the Stasi/etc. and trying to play nicer with the authorities this time. It had never occurred to me until recently that the guy who met an unfortunate end in the woods in The Cuckoo's Egg could be related to these other stories I had heard years later.

Here here. I love Cliff and have my own Acme Klein bottle, a wedding present from my wife.

I read the book ages ago of course, but I just discovered the NOVA documentary last week. It's quite amazing to see the original people involved recreating events just a few years after they took place (docu was released in 1990). So... I can't believe Cliff's wife agreed to do a shower scene as part of a recreation for the documentary... Just sayin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5AE-qYan8

I remember this site from back in the day! Somehow the profile view of Flo's head/shadow was still taking up space in my cranium after all these years.

Usually starts with "this can't be THAT hard to add this to my project, let's try it". Six months later you've got a solid working knowledge of running a lathe and you've started teaching workshops to other hackerspace folk on how to run it because everyone has seen you running that machine and needs help on it. Then you realize you forgot to finish the project that sent you down this road in the first place. You get bored and stop using the lathe for a few months. "Hey, it can't be that hard to design a PCB for this project, lets do some of that now..." Six months later you're teaching workshops on it...

And then years down the road you know how to make most things from scratch from the electronics design, PCB gerbers, and the enclosure both in metal (both machined and fabricated), laser cut, and 3D printed. But just conjuring up any cool thing you want to make summons a mental spreadsheet of the time it will take to complete the project, possibly including making a small-run of extras to sell for much less than your time is worth, and then you set your drink back down and shake your head because ain't no one got time for that any more. And then you buy the Etsy/Kickstarter version instead because you realize they have woefully underpriced their super cool widget.