Re:They only forgot one thing - power
on
Spray-On Computers
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· Score: 1
Crystal radios need large antennae to work. There clearly won't be enough room in a device like this, unless you start hitting the sprayed area with high-power RF (which may have its own health implications). I suspect this is probably the best way around the problem - it's the same way proximity cards work. There almost certainly won't be enough room for an on-board power source.
Can't remember the link, but somebody made a board with a few FPGA chips (I think) that cracked a 56bit DES key in a few days or less, and distributed.net had how many computers working on it for how many years?
I think you're thinking of the EFF's DES cracking machine. It used a custom gate array chip - it took advantage of the cheapness of an ASIC, but not the extra efficiency (they couldn't afford to have the first round of chips not work properly - a large proportion of the chips didn't work properly anyway). IIRC, it searched the keyspace in 3.5 days.
There have been many other groups to attack DES on FPGA's, but none have achieved the same scale as the EFF machine. I will be attempting it myself very, very soon (as soon as I can get the key buffer in my design to work on actual hardware, we're all set - today, if I'm lucky!). Some (extremely) preliminary figures suggest that we might be able to match the EFF machine on larger Xilinx FPGAs for only a few tens of thousands of dollars (it cost almost $250k).
I'll be looking at the problem specifically mentioned in the blurb - comparing the price/performance ratio of FPGAs vs. software. At the moment FPGAs are looking they'll come out well ahead, but I have hope for bitslicing techniques to narrow the gap a bit. There are also ciphers that are designed to run well on software and are hence difficult to attack in hardware (DES was designed to run well on hardware).
and yes, there's a metric fuckload of music piracy going on. Look through the Computer Science Honours rooms - students in a bandwidth-deprived country are suddenly allowed free reign on a university network. I haven't been through there for a while, but last year, about a third of all of the (student-owned) Windows machines were running some sort of file sharing program (usually Kazaa).
The Electrical Engineering department provide a few network access points. I'm extremely grateful for the service; I can flush my mail queue and get new messages. But the vast majority of people using the ports simply run Kazaa. Start it up, close the laptop, and go on with whatever work you're meant to be doing. It annoys me in a way, because when they were announced we were told that bandwidth would be monitored and the service shut down if we abused it.
I've seen people run FTP servers while they're there. That seems like pretty blatant abuse to me.
But then, it's not like there's a shortage of points to plug into the network around the uni. At least two of the libraries have open ports, and most of the computers in the Psych department log in automatically as Administrator. And let's not forget the open wireless access point in the *cough* vice-chancellor's office *cough*. Which can be reached from the street. And dishes out DHCP. And is on the internal LAN, with all of that yummy site license software.
Ahh, the things you discover walking around uni with a laptop...
Alston's opinion on broadband in Australia seems to be "we're doing better than other places". That's not necessarily a good thing. People aren't going to start taking advantage of it until it gets cheap and ubiquitous, and it's not going to get cheap and ubiquitous until lots of people start using it.
In Australia, though, we have nice cheap landline access - and yet we still have very high mobile phone usage statistics. There is one landline carrier which holds a virtual monopoly (Telstra), which was, previously, government owned. There's another (Optus) which can hook you into their cable network for local phone calls, but their coverage isn't great.
(Please note that Telstra is rapidly going to shit. Back up a year, though, and my points remain valid.)
My explanation would be lousy pricing plans and service in the US. There are three mobile phone carriers in Australia, and all three are pretty good. There are lots of virtual carriers who lease infrastructure from the big three, meaning really low prices if you hunt around a bit (/me pimps Virgin's $100 prepaid cards).
I can't imagine getting through uni without a mobile phone. I have constant fucking meetings. Group projects. People wanting to know why their network has dropped dead. People wanting to schedule time to discuss some chunk of code I sent them. Work schedules to organise. Do you know how much of a pain it is to contact someone without a mobile phone when you need to get their signature on a group assignment NOW?
Hell, the uni half expects that I have a mobile phone if I tutor a class. I've gotten several calls asking 'can you cover this class in two hours?'
I constantly hear stories about how every network in the US sucks, and how phones suck because they use difference frequencies to those used by the rest of the world, and so on.
A little standardisation never hurt anyone - except the Americans, apparantly. Difference mobile phone frequencies, Imperial vs. metric, driving on the left hand side of the road, spelling everything differently - I mean, my main reason for using Microsoft Word is the freaking Australian dictionary. It's the only editor I know of with a good.au spellchecker. I'm half considering switching to US spelling just so I can have a bigger choice of editor.
The story, in a few words: we compare two different computers and find that they both run games.
Woo-hoo. What, were they expecting the laptop hardware to be magically unable to run games or something?
What might have been useful would be to time how long the Inspiron lasts running games off a battery, just for interest's sake. I'm an occasional laptop gamer myself (Inspiron 4100, though), and my battery life drops from 4 hours (per battery - I have two) to about 1.5 hours, when playing games.
I guess you'd also have to cut power if it got to the point where the sprinklers were going to go off... I can think of much better places to be than in the middle of a server room with water going everywhere and tons of POWERED ON computers. (bzzzt)
I've never seen a full-on datacentre (we don't have many in.au, although I work a 2-minute walk from one) - I was under the impression that rooms with Halon were usually isolated in some way from the rest of the NOC to prevent people getting trapped in there?
Using seven of the available channels was ranked as "sort of OK", nine described as "highly dangerous" and eleven of the available channels ranked as "marginally suicidal", by a team of highly trained hamster analysts.
If channel overlap is an issue where you are, you probably have too many damn AP's. Witness, rooms 424 and 417 of the EE building at Sydney University - two access points PER ROOM. Admittedly, they're large rooms (labs). I'm told that one is meant to be taken out of each and used elsewhere.
Exactly. "Sir, can I look inside your bag? We think you've got a laptop trying to invade our WLAN". Eat me.
There was a paper on how to track people scanning your WLAN by triangulating their location from several access points (here), but that seems like an awful lot more effort than just securing the network in the first place.
It might be useful for statistical interest (go to the boss asking for money because X number of people have been trying to hack the WLAN). Package it up and install it on a machine somewhere.
Note that this won't pick up Kismet (not that anything will, short of scanning for moving RF emissions from a computer). But that's another point entirely.
> Will the wardriving of the future include scooping up pictures?
Probably not. 1. This seems like a very gimmicky feature, and hence won't be used much in the future. 2. Most people want to take their cameras away from the computer, and hence need some sort of on-camera storage. 3. Bluetooth's range is very short - only a few metres. 4. Bluetooth isn't particularly fast, so things like dumping the contents of a memory card across it is likely to be painful.
that doesn't eat up bandwidth on your network, is to simply disable beacons on your AP. Having thousands of beacons sent makes it fairly obvious that there's an actual AP somewhere in the area, and there are other ways to determine the real network name.
Admittedly, not all AP's allow beacons to be disabled. But then, Kismet doesn't need them at all to detect networks.
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Crystal radios need large antennae to work. There clearly won't be enough room in a device like this, unless you start hitting the sprayed area with high-power RF (which may have its own health implications). I suspect this is probably the best way around the problem - it's the same way proximity cards work. There almost certainly won't be enough room for an on-board power source.
I think you're thinking of the EFF's DES cracking machine. It used a custom gate array chip - it took advantage of the cheapness of an ASIC, but not the extra efficiency (they couldn't afford to have the first round of chips not work properly - a large proportion of the chips didn't work properly anyway). IIRC, it searched the keyspace in 3.5 days.
There have been many other groups to attack DES on FPGA's, but none have achieved the same scale as the EFF machine. I will be attempting it myself very, very soon (as soon as I can get the key buffer in my design to work on actual hardware, we're all set - today, if I'm lucky!). Some (extremely) preliminary figures suggest that we might be able to match the EFF machine on larger Xilinx FPGAs for only a few tens of thousands of dollars (it cost almost $250k).
I'll be looking at the problem specifically mentioned in the blurb - comparing the price/performance ratio of FPGAs vs. software. At the moment FPGAs are looking they'll come out well ahead, but I have hope for bitslicing techniques to narrow the gap a bit. There are also ciphers that are designed to run well on software and are hence difficult to attack in hardware (DES was designed to run well on hardware).
and yes, there's a metric fuckload of music piracy going on. Look through the Computer Science Honours rooms - students in a bandwidth-deprived country are suddenly allowed free reign on a university network. I haven't been through there for a while, but last year, about a third of all of the (student-owned) Windows machines were running some sort of file sharing program (usually Kazaa).
The Electrical Engineering department provide a few network access points. I'm extremely grateful for the service; I can flush my mail queue and get new messages. But the vast majority of people using the ports simply run Kazaa. Start it up, close the laptop, and go on with whatever work you're meant to be doing. It annoys me in a way, because when they were announced we were told that bandwidth would be monitored and the service shut down if we abused it.
I've seen people run FTP servers while they're there. That seems like pretty blatant abuse to me.
But then, it's not like there's a shortage of points to plug into the network around the uni. At least two of the libraries have open ports, and most of the computers in the Psych department log in automatically as Administrator. And let's not forget the open wireless access point in the *cough* vice-chancellor's office *cough*. Which can be reached from the street. And dishes out DHCP. And is on the internal LAN, with all of that yummy site license software.
Ahh, the things you discover walking around uni with a laptop...
Alston is still a tool. Telstra still blows.
Alston's opinion on broadband in Australia seems to be "we're doing better than other places". That's not necessarily a good thing. People aren't going to start taking advantage of it until it gets cheap and ubiquitous, and it's not going to get cheap and ubiquitous until lots of people start using it.
In Australia, though, we have nice cheap landline access - and yet we still have very high mobile phone usage statistics. There is one landline carrier which holds a virtual monopoly (Telstra), which was, previously, government owned. There's another (Optus) which can hook you into their cable network for local phone calls, but their coverage isn't great.
.au spellchecker. I'm half considering switching to US spelling just so I can have a bigger choice of editor.
(Please note that Telstra is rapidly going to shit. Back up a year, though, and my points remain valid.)
My explanation would be lousy pricing plans and service in the US. There are three mobile phone carriers in Australia, and all three are pretty good. There are lots of virtual carriers who lease infrastructure from the big three, meaning really low prices if you hunt around a bit (/me pimps Virgin's $100 prepaid cards).
I can't imagine getting through uni without a mobile phone. I have constant fucking meetings. Group projects. People wanting to know why their network has dropped dead. People wanting to schedule time to discuss some chunk of code I sent them. Work schedules to organise. Do you know how much of a pain it is to contact someone without a mobile phone when you need to get their signature on a group assignment NOW?
Hell, the uni half expects that I have a mobile phone if I tutor a class. I've gotten several calls asking 'can you cover this class in two hours?'
I constantly hear stories about how every network in the US sucks, and how phones suck because they use difference frequencies to those used by the rest of the world, and so on.
A little standardisation never hurt anyone - except the Americans, apparantly. Difference mobile phone frequencies, Imperial vs. metric, driving on the left hand side of the road, spelling everything differently - I mean, my main reason for using Microsoft Word is the freaking Australian dictionary. It's the only editor I know of with a good
What about low fidelity CD players? And all of those middle-range ones? Cheapskates have a right to music, too!
(I'm being an idiot, please move along)
The story, in a few words: we compare two different computers and find that they both run games.
Woo-hoo. What, were they expecting the laptop hardware to be magically unable to run games or something?
What might have been useful would be to time how long the Inspiron lasts running games off a battery, just for interest's sake. I'm an occasional laptop gamer myself (Inspiron 4100, though), and my battery life drops from 4 hours (per battery - I have two) to about 1.5 hours, when playing games.
I guess you'd also have to cut power if it got to the point where the sprinklers were going to go off... I can think of much better places to be than in the middle of a server room with water going everywhere and tons of POWERED ON computers. (bzzzt)
.au, although I work a 2-minute walk from one) - I was under the impression that rooms with Halon were usually isolated in some way from the rest of the NOC to prevent people getting trapped in there?
I've never seen a full-on datacentre (we don't have many in
Using seven of the available channels was ranked as "sort of OK", nine described as "highly dangerous" and eleven of the available channels ranked as "marginally suicidal", by a team of highly trained hamster analysts.
If channel overlap is an issue where you are, you probably have too many damn AP's. Witness, rooms 424 and 417 of the EE building at Sydney University - two access points PER ROOM. Admittedly, they're large rooms (labs). I'm told that one is meant to be taken out of each and used elsewhere.
There was a paper on how to track people scanning your WLAN by triangulating their location from several access points (here), but that seems like an awful lot more effort than just securing the network in the first place.
It might be useful for statistical interest (go to the boss asking for money because X number of people have been trying to hack the WLAN). Package it up and install it on a machine somewhere.
Note that this won't pick up Kismet (not that anything will, short of scanning for moving RF emissions from a computer). But that's another point entirely.
with not nearly enough geeky stuff lying around (hey, I'm meant to be studying for exams).My desk.
> Will the wardriving of the future include scooping up pictures?
Probably not.
1. This seems like a very gimmicky feature, and hence won't be used much in the future.
2. Most people want to take their cameras away from the computer, and hence need some sort of on-camera storage.
3. Bluetooth's range is very short - only a few metres.
4. Bluetooth isn't particularly fast, so things like dumping the contents of a memory card across it is likely to be painful.
that doesn't eat up bandwidth on your network, is to simply disable beacons on your AP. Having thousands of beacons sent makes it fairly obvious that there's an actual AP somewhere in the area, and there are other ways to determine the real network name.
Admittedly, not all AP's allow beacons to be disabled. But then, Kismet doesn't need them at all to detect networks.