dc414 Halloween party

Here are some pictures from the dc414 Halloween party. Me and dw5304 messed with an arduino project I have been working on and Klaiviel gave us a little preview of some sweet safe locks hes bringing to the next meeting then later him and I had a little nerf war!!! My ass was thoroughly kicked, lol. Many thanxs to Ulic and his wife for hosting the party! We had a blast!

My lame IR copy toy pt2

Some of you might remember the first post on my lame IR copy toy. Well I have tweaked the code a little and put it all on a nice little PCB board that fits great over the Arduino, here is the “finished” project:

Heres some video of it working:

Heres it being used to control a helicopter:

Here is the code:

One thing I left out of my first post is in order for this to work you have to use this IR remote library from Ken Shirriff. Thats it, peace.

Internet in Peril

Got this alarming email from the good folks at SavetheInternet.com and thought I should share it with the rest of you.

Dear dc414,

You’ve heard from me a lot recently about the “resolution of disapproval” (S.J. Res. 6) against Net Neutrality, which extremists plan to push through the Senate.

There’s a reason for all the emails: This dangerous resolution would hand over control of the Internet to companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon while stripping the FCC of any authority to protect users’ online rights.

The vote on this resolution could happen as early as next week. So we need you to be a part of Free Press’ national call-in campaign to make one thing absolutely clear to Congress: “Corporations can’t take the Internet away from us.”

Please pick up the phone now and call Sens. Herb Kohl and Ron Johnson. Tell them: “Don’t sell out our basic right to communicate online. Vote ‘no’ on the resolution of disapproval.”

We’ve created an easy-to-use “whiplist” that helps you make the call. Just enter your zip code, find your senators and click their names. We’ve also provided a sample call script should you need to use some talking points.

Here’s the thing our senators need to know: An overwhelming majority of Americans want an open Internet. Period. We don’t want corporations blocking what we say or do online. We want every website, from the biggies like Amazon and Google to sites operated by millions of small businesses and bloggers, to be treated the same, with no fast lanes for companies with deep pockets.

These are simple, common-sense demands, and it’s time our senators heard them.

So pick up the phone, call your senators and demand they vote “no” on this resolution of disapproval. We’ll follow up on our progress as we get closer to the vote.

Thanks for everything you do,

Josh Levy
Associate Campaign Director
Free Press Action Fund
SavetheInternet.com

So if you like the freedom of the net, call your senator now to preserve it, I already did. 🙂

October meeting recap.

October’s meeting was awesome as always and we had a few new faces which is always a good thing! We all hacked away at Windows Server 8 for a bit and found a few bugs, but unfortunately for the n00bs the meeting didn’t really get popping until after they let :/

ngharo gave us all a great talk on the wall of sheep. How he coded it, what he coded it in, what other software was used, and all the challenges that came up along the way. Dark Wind brought a toy remote controlled helicopter that uses IR for control, we found out my IR copy toy could be used to copy codes from the remote and take control of the helicopter 🙂 I was excited to finally get to use my 1337 IR copy toy on something!!

After all the IR fun there was a little talk about making a arduino based safe cracker to get into the safe at Bucketworks, that should be a cool project once its all done. Then I showed everyone how to make their own resisters with little more the a piece of paper and a pencil. The DIY fun didn’t stop there, I also demo’ed how to make capacitors using just tin foil, cling wrap, tap and some wire! Then while trying to make the home made capacitor blow up we did found out that if you expose it to high voltage, like the kind coming out of a wall outlet, it will start buzzing and expanding 🙂

A congrats to Dark Wind on winning the dc414 free junk give away, he got Red Hat Linux 6.1 enterprise with the extended support package 😛 Here is some pictures courtesy of cmoney “tyvm cmoney”, I didn’t get a pic of Dark Wind with his winning because, idk, I failed. Ok thats it see you next time.

BarCamp – Post Conference Report

DC414 got a lot of exposure at BarCamp.  We were the only peeps that setup in “the commons” where most everyone would pass through while entering the building.  This was also the area that lightning talks, introductions, and closing events took place.

Wall of Sheep
The wall was a great success for the most part.  Initially, we had to manually sniff and enter sheep onto the wall.  This was becoming a pain in the ass.  We finally got it automated by taking a log from ettercap and piping it into a ruby script which would post to simple webservice.  The source can be found here.  In the afternoon we started getting flooded with fake logins to gmail.com from a user on the network.  Some nerd had scripted this to create chaos upon us!  Unfortunately, we were tapped onto the network at such a point were we would not see local IPs for the source of traffic.  I lol’d and set dw5304 on the hunt to track the user down.  We knew he was using ruby as that’s what the user-agent string was.  dw5304 quickly found him and we all had a laugh.  The scripter gave a lightning talk on his mischief later in the evening.  We’d like to expand on the current scripts and tweak our filters to automate even more types of insecure communications.

The overall atmosphere was very, very hacker friendly.  I had fun listening in to Klaiviel, Vlad, and darkwind troll some unfortunate hotel workers on their radios.  We also did a bit of urban exploration in Bucketwork’s basement … with a 1w laser 😉  Klaiviel did an awesome job presenting on lock picking/etc.  It was funny how Klaiviel showed up with like 5x as many locks and equipment as the guy who was hosting the lockpicking session.  There is safe at Bucketworks that they need assistance opening … Klaiviel did a bunch of research and came to the conclusion that he will need to brute force it.  I’m hoping dc414 can come together and make this happen.  dw5304 dropped a lot of knowledge to people coming by our setup.  Much thanks to all the equipment and dedication he brought to BarCamp.

Some very smart folks were creeping around and while I personally did not see many presentations, I still learned a lot.  We gave out a ton of stickers, flyers, window clings (thanks cmoney and Anarchy).  With that we should see new peeps start showing up to meetings.

Meeting place change.

dc414 has just about grown out of our current meeting space so we are going to start testing out a few new venues starting with Bucketworks. So the meeting will still be on the 10.7.11 at 7pm it will just be at a new location.

Location address:
706 S 5th St
Milwaukee, WI. 53204
Click here for directions and such.

If you plan on coming bring at least $5 (or more) or a non-perishable food item to donate.