Messages

126

Living Room / Re: We Drove a Car While It Was Being Hacked

« on: June 02, 2014, 12:20 PM »

I'm currently sitting behind the wheel of a 1984 Ford Econoline, remodelled into an RV.

And you know what, this 4 barrel carb 7.0 liter V8 is making an astonishing 8 MPG, which for a vehicle this size is nothing less than incredible.

Plus because it's an old carburetor with no catalyst and no nonsense its a piece of cake to tweak the wiring to do whatever I want it to do. Like last night the radio stopped working. pull over, twist three wires together behind the radio, tape it up, and rock out.

If you know how to handle an old rig like this, it just works.

127

Living Room / Re: We Drove a Car While It Was Being Hacked

« on: June 01, 2014, 11:44 AM »

The tech to do this is already implemented.

If your car is equipped with OnStar, it can already be remotely locked out and disabled with the system being sold as an anti-theft measure.

Likely this researcher simply figured out how to gain access to that system and transmitted the same signals.

I draw the cutoff at 1996. At that point vehicle computers began complying with government regulations (Such as ODBCII emissions requirements) and also simultaneously became sufficiently integrated to make the car unable to function without computer oversight.

Driving a 2014 is out of the question. I want another 1988 with a carbureted engine.

128

Living Room / Re: Ivy Bridge vs Haswell

« on: May 21, 2014, 11:28 AM »

The haswells in my experience are quite incredible compared to the sandy and ivy cores.

Long as you pay close attention to its cooling needs, they absolutely haul while using a lot less power than previous generations.

I've been mining altcoins on one almost nonstop for a few months now. With all 4 cores pegged, its about 80W and maintains 65C using a large heatpipe. Gives 83kh as well, unusually high for a CPU.


My favorite build right now is a haswell CPU with 8-16GB of ram, a 160GB SSD for the operating system and programs, and a 1TB conventional for bulk storage. Add a nice GPU to the mix and throw it all together in a cheap case and you get a system that boots Windows 7 in about 14 seconds while staying nice and chill under load and using very little power at idle.

129

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Web Space if you already have free domain?

« on: May 15, 2014, 10:41 PM »

I'm here.

Is anyone using free web space for an existing free domain?  Search is difficult because all the hits offer a free domain if you sign up.  I already have a free .tk domain. I'm looking to try out a web creation tool and thought I might as well put it up on a real site instead of using a simulator. What I want to do is dummy up a few sample web pages.  See if I can get some work.

DotTK apparently has free DNS service if I can find a spot to plunk on.  I don't really know what html5 is.  But I want to find out.  

Edit: I should add I don't want a site that forces you to use their picture dragging tool etc.. I want to be able to upload the html files produced by this tool I'm trying ..(  Deleted tool link. I'm not spamming the site creation tool after all  )  

-MilesAhead (May 14, 2014, 01:30 PM)

I don't believe in that fancy online content designer stuff anyway. The sites they create are cookie cutters with bloated and buggy code that invites trouble and often won't even run right on another server if you have to change providers.

My services keep it simple- I provide FTP access for uploading files, and a basic web-based SQL management for databases. What you build on that is entirely up to you as long as it isn't anything I would object to.

Using your domain name is no problem at all! I've got other people doing exactly that, and have a whole bunch of domains I own personally that I use on the same infrastructure without issue.

Just PM me on here with what plan you had in mind. I need a username, the domain name you want to use, which plan you had in mind, and an email I can send the account info to and contact you at if there are issues.

130

Living Room / Re: An interesting look at what 'Big Data' means to privacy

« on: May 08, 2014, 01:04 PM »

My workaround to the facebook problem is I keep my facebook in my business name.

That way if anyone asks to be able to login to it, I can respond with okay but you have to sign this nondisclosure agreement and contract with my company in order to access company confidential resources.

To date nobody has ever taken me up on it, and given that I keep the account in a perpetually dormant state there's nothing there to see anyway.

People need to not be so eager to put their life stories on the internet. Your facebook is the easiest possible way to have your identity stolen, because anyone can get the info they need to social engineer their way into your accounts from it.

131

Living Room / Re: State of US Nuclear Silos (60 Minutes)

« on: May 01, 2014, 12:56 PM »

There's a big difference when you build something for a purpose vs. build for a buck.

-Renegade (May 01, 2014, 09:11 AM)

Damn Straight! That's why after 50 years of technological "advancement" the cars we have now are shit compared to what was available in the late 60s and early 70s. Yeah they're all child safe and cuddly and "Eco Friendly" and squirt butterflies out the tailpipe ... but performance???

1968 Dodge Charger (Auto)         0-60 mph 4.7   Quarter mile 13.3
2013 Dodge Charger Police Car    0-60 mph 5.1   Quarter Mile 13.7
2013 Dodge Charger SXT             0-60 mph 6.5   Quarter Mile 14.9

...What's up with ^that^

-Stoic Joker (May 01, 2014, 11:44 AM)

They're not even eco-friendly.

1988 Chevy Nova. (1.6L 2bbl carb, ~70 horsepower curb rating)
I measured 38-40 MPG consistently with this as long as I stayed away from E10 gasoline, it absolutely hated that E10 crap.

The 2011 Ford Fiesta Hybrid- state of the art when I was driving that old Nova, was making a mere 35 MPG... on a HYBRID.

Where have we gone so wrong?

Oh and the E10 thing is a load of crap too. How exactly am I protecting the environment when I have to burn significantly more fuel to get from point A to point B when using E10 compared to straight gas.

That Nova I mentioned in my earlier example, the measured MPG dropped into the low 30s when using E10 instead of the straight gas it was designed for.

132

Living Room / Re: State of US Nuclear Silos (60 Minutes)

« on: April 30, 2014, 01:01 PM »

Those Nuclear attack submarines also get pulled into the workshop every 10-20 years for refurbishment, just as a fact of life for an oceangoing vessel. Among the upgrades usually are weaponry-related system improvements.

I'm actually surprised that they still have 8" floppies in service. I expected the silos to be controlled by punchtape or punchcard. That way the control system would be totally immune to enemy magnetic or EMP attacks.

But the old iron is really hard to beat. Technology that put a man on the moon is still perfectly functional to this day, especially when paired with a talented maintenance team and a supply of either new old stock or remanufactured parts to fit.

And then you get to craft like Voyager, which is beyond any hope of ever being touched by a human being again, and yet is still -almost- fully functional more than 40 years after launch. The biggest hinderance to its current operational status is that its radioisotope thermal generator is decaying as it was expected to do, and the available electrical power is no longer sufficient to operate all of its functionality. I don't think anyone who built it expected it to last that long, but there it goes.

133

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« on: April 25, 2014, 05:10 PM »

Or just install the bitcoin wallet to a server somewhere and write a payment handler to use the wallet RPC for generating donation addresses and crediting incoming payments. Bitcoin doesn't need a third party payment processor like fiat currencies do. The wallet daemon provides a JSON-formatted RPC to use for making your own and not having to deal with the fees.

What gets you on such a project is the sheer size of the blockchains. They can get to be a few gigabytes in size.

134

Living Room / Re: ImgBurn - full of OpenCandy and other crap

« on: April 24, 2014, 11:49 AM »

Conduit SearchProtect is malware straight up.

If you let that get installed, you'll be hunting it for hours trying to get it out again.

It sounds to me like ImgBurn went the same way as Daemon Tools, sold out to backroom malware deals to try to make ends meet because the donation box wasn't keeping up.

This kind of thing is why I archive all of the software I use. That way I still have known good versions that have worked for me before in case I need them again.

135

Living Room / Re: TOR Vidalia - newest update has no control panel

« on: April 23, 2014, 12:01 PM »

Isn't Tor kind of pointless with heartbleed?

It too was affected by the OpenSSL issue.

136

Living Room / Re: web hosts

« on: April 21, 2014, 04:32 PM »

I'm still here representing Seraphimlabs.

At the moment my own site is down indefinitely, it is in dire need of an overhaul and redesign that I just plain haven't gotten to. But I do have servers still active, and can set you up with an account.

137

Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug

« on: April 11, 2014, 03:21 PM »

http://www.usatoday....sco-juniper/7589759/

Reports coming in from unconfirmed sources that the NSA has been utilizing Heartbleed for years.

Of course, I have to say I totally saw this coming. This is the kind of massive security breach that would explain their uncanny ability to get into any system anywhere at any time. A simple exercise in spreading disinformation to seed people's trust in the affected library and cover up the flaw would allow them to preserve it for so many years unnoticed.

Which means that all those people concealing their activities using SSH, Tor, and proxies? Yeah. The NSA was way ahead of them.

138

Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug

« on: April 10, 2014, 12:07 PM »

HSBC is always insecure. More than once now I've shut down phishing operations where someone copied HSBC's exact site layout and patched it onto their own backend. At one point I even managed to catch such an operation alive, and sent it intact to HSBC for analysis so they could fix their stuff.


I can't help but have my tinfoil hats out for this one though. This will be the first time that I have ever heard of Linux having a crippling security flaw that was not also found in Windows. And for it to exist in such a vital library that has been in use for such a long period of time, all I can say is NSA was here.

139

Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!

« on: April 08, 2014, 01:15 PM »

There are at least 5 machines in my care that will run XP until the day they die.

3 of these are industrial control solutions, relying on proprietary hardware and software that was only ever supported under Windows XP. They literally cannot be upgraded beyond what PC I can construct to carry that OEM interface board, and the software is forever tied to XP.

The other two are simply old machines in secondary roles. I keep them around for compatibility, and they will continue to use XP until hardware failure ends them.

140

Living Room / Re: LillyPad Arduino Projects

« on: February 04, 2014, 12:56 PM »

I've got a MEGA 2650 here that I was tinkering with.

Was going to turn it into a closed-loop servo control, but I couldn't come up with a circuit to go from the arduino's PWM outputs to the bipolar +/- 15v DC that the machine amplifiers needed.

It's still a fun little gadget.

141

Living Room / Re: Breaking madden - fun video game experiment

« on: February 01, 2014, 11:58 AM »

Every game that lets you tweak the settings to that extent can be 'broken' quite horribly. A really good example of this is Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. While very entertaining, a determined person can 'game' the system and then you've got an over-powered character running around in the game environment.

I can see how this would be fun for all of five minutes. Once the novelty of 'Hulk smash!' wears off I think I'd become bored very quickly.

-Innuendo (February 01, 2014, 08:52 AM)

This. Skyrim becomes hilariously broken in seconds with a little bit of console codes and maybe some amusing mods.
Amusement like this: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=kY3cbzx6Svw

And this: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=efnJ2OidSc0

Most any games break in a spectacular fashion when modded though, talented coders and modders can do some amazing things even with the worst of game engines.

142

Living Room / Re: Net neutrality is dead. Bow to Comcast and Verizon, your overlords (AKA DOOOOOM)

« on: January 16, 2014, 03:51 PM »

Tbh I have to agree partially with both sides in this.

While the FCC very much should pass regulations prohibiting ISPs from charging end-users additional fees to access certain services, at the same time they cannot reap the benefits of CDN technology and the efficiency gains that introduces while staying perfectly neutral.

Thus, service providers are allowed to pay other service providers for premium placements, but providers to end users cannot restrict or otherwise paywall what is available to their users.

Kind of a compromise there, best of both worlds.

143

Living Room / Re: email provider for multiple accounts

« on: January 12, 2014, 06:27 PM »

What are you using multiple emails for? 

Sorry, as a service provider I have to ask. So many people running spam operations these days.

These days a lot of household ISPs include anywhere from 5-25 email addresses as part of their service bundle.

It also doesn't take much to simply create a server- giving you as many emails as you want off your own domain name.

144

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« on: December 24, 2013, 05:29 PM »

Heads up for those looking at Dogecoin.

It originated as a joke, and has since gone viral due to its association with the popular doge meme.

Although it is showing explosive growth, it is known that early adopters mined abnormally large shares of the coins that they are now seeking to unload. The hype we are seeing may be a pump and dump attempt.

At the same time, it has a much larger trading pool than most other cryptocurrencies and might stick around because of its recognizable branding.

If you really want to get into it, mine for it instead of buying it. That way if this is a bubble or a scam you don't lose any money.

145

Living Room / Re: How long do hard drives actually live for?

« on: December 18, 2013, 12:00 PM »

Kentsfield Quadcore would put it sometime between 2006 and 2009. Overall a machine that age that was well built and kept clean should survive another 2+ years without too much of a change in the failure rate.

It probably would handle 7 as long as it has a generous amount of RAM, and any performance changes would probably be only slight. The Yorkfield machines I built in 2010 were all outfitted with 4GB of ram and Windows 7 64-bit when they were assembled.

(Re that article ... if a Hard Drive sits in a "forest" and does absolutely nothing, does it still die?)
It still can. If the drive was powered and controlled, Windows will periodically spin it up and give it instructions just to make sure it is still ready to use. Even without data being moved, the drive's mechanical parts are still accumulating some wear and the electronics are still under the effects of aging.

Leaving a drive sitting completely unplugged inside a casing, the only aging phenomena it would see are electronics aging and thermal cycling effects- mechanically it would remain a new drive, and as long as the controller did not fail it would still be a like-new drive when you finally did decide to plug it in and use it.

146

Living Room / Re: Anti-Tracking Smartphone Pouch

« on: December 10, 2013, 04:22 PM »

Those walmart disposable phones work rather well.

Mind you, if they want to know who is holding it all they have to do is pull the records of it and then get IDs from the people you talk to. Its not hard to fill in the gaps in a social network, even for an antisocial person.

If you ask me though, the iphone with its permanently fixed battery is a fire hazard. Lithium packs can and do explode after all, and should be required to have a method to quickly eject them in order to spare the device's contents.

147

Living Room / Re: When did the world of the NSA and technology get so surreal?

« on: December 10, 2013, 03:05 PM »

I have one very strong objection to this plan, based on personal experience with these types of games (and probably being watched in them).

The people who play them are typically people who aren't going to do anything outrageous in real life. With some rare exceptions, people spending vast amounts of time indulging in a MMORPG usually are the same people that might talk big but not actually act on it.

Also it seems my news is a day late, you guys posted this yesterday and I just found out about it a few hours ago.

148

Living Room / Re: badBIOS revisited - it is possible to bridge the airgap after all

« on: December 06, 2013, 03:45 PM »

First time I played with a fork bomb, I turned it loose on a benchtop machine. Poor old Sparc-powered Sun4U, the linux load was up to 2600 and it was still stable. A sign? Maybe.

What interests me is how it is able to infect other machines on the other side of the airgap. Somehow I don't think most computers routinely check their microphones for incoming data, let alone execute data recorded from the air.

You would have to first breach the airgrap, but once you did you could control stuff across it.

149

Living Room / Re: How long do hard drives actually live for?

« on: November 27, 2013, 03:29 PM »

I have used it before on an experimental basis to see what it could do when turned loose on an aging drive, but it was a benchtop drive and not one of my good ones. Didn't really do enough with it to tell you about how it works, other than that it is a very time consuming process.

My last round of hard drive data recovery was done using dd-rescue, which returns a drive image that can be then re-cast back onto a new drive.

150

Living Room / Re: How long do hard drives actually live for?

« on: November 26, 2013, 03:27 PM »

SSDs have come a very long way though. I've begun deploying SSD based workstations where I work because of their speed, in workstations designed for 3 years of service before being repurposed. The MTBF of the devices I am using is comparable to a conventional drive, and should at least make that first 3 years problem-free, while their actual use is such that if one does die prematurely I can have it running again off a spare drive in a couple of hours. After the three years it will be interesting to see how they age.

At the same time, my oldest working system has been running very nearly 24/7 for the past 8 years, and is still operating the very same hard drives that it has had the whole time- one of which is actually more than 12 years old and still going strong after being given to me because it was 'dead'.

Sure they don't all last that long, gotta run the statistics. But those that do survive a few years often go for a very long time afterward, it's not like a SSD where it will suddenly lose its ability to accept new data due to accumulated wear.

Also it has been a strange month for the electronics. I've had no less than 4 video hardware related failures in November alone, after going many years without ever losing a video card in active service. A workstation that gets powered off every night also turned up one morning with a dead mainboard as well, I've not had that happen in a while either.