I just found this from another blog I read FreeBSDGirl, it is an interesting presentation done by someone at BSDCan and later off course at other cons as well, including the nycbsdcon.
It talks about how BSD currently stands, and why it is dying. Fun to watch, especially since his presentation style is awesome. Watch BSD is dying on Google Video
Imagine you are back in high school. You are sitting in your English class. It is silent reading time. You carefully take a sip of your cup of coffee. You put your book down and stare out the window at the gym class that comes running by. You wonder if you have to do any running for gym today as well, or if your teacher is nicer. You think of your girlfriend and wonder how bored she is currently in French. You pick your book up again, and start reading just as your teacher looks up to see if everyone is still reading. You take a quick peek at the clock, only 10 minutes left to go! You take out your Palm V and add a note to yourself about picking up another book by this author. You take a look down at the floor where your backpack is sitting and you make a quick mental note to clean it out.
The bell rings, and you jump up. You are not in school anymore, you are at home, and the bell you hear is the front door. You get up out of bed wondering what time it is. You go down stairs, without getting the question answered, as it the power is off. You yawn as you open the door, and take a look at the guy standing there pulling the door bell. It is FedEx. They are delivering the hardware you ordered online only two days ago. Just as you are starting to take the package apart the power comes back online, causing all the devices in the house to start flashing 12:00. With a sigh you take a look at your watch that is lying on the kitchen table, 17:35, you make a mental note not to sleep all day again. After all the devices are reset you take a look at the mess on the kitchen table. Motherboard, hard drives, memory, everything all scattered over the place. You take a look at the other box FedEx dropped off, you assume it contains the new computer case. You look at the box and notice that it has been kicked around by FedEx, like always. Your parents are not going to be home for a while, so you decide to call up your girlfriend Melissa. Your heart skips a beat at the excitement of having her around to help you out. She picks up the phone and you say "Hey, just got my stuff from FedEx, want to come drop by and give me a hand?"?Her reply is quick, "Sure, I'll give you a hand in more than one way", she giggles at the sexual connotation. You get back to unpacking. You are just finished unpacking everything when the door bell rings again. Your girlfriend has shown up. You go to open the front door for her. Without even saying a word she walks over to you, and gives you a big kiss, she then walks over to the table. You follow her. As she is about to say something, you reach into your pocket and pull out what she was going to ask about. You hand them to her, and let her more feminine hands take care of the case for you. You take a quick look over all the parts scattered all over the place, and start cleaning up all the foam, and cardboard. It looks like none of the hardware was destroyed in-transit even-though the packaging it came in was for all other intents and purposes destroyed.
The rig is complete, you and your girlfriend completed a task normally done in a few hours within 45 minutes. The big question you have is, does it boot up? You walk up stairs back to your room to grab the spare LCD monitor you have sitting around. You also grab a monitor and the FreeBSD install CD. You think to yourself, a server should not be run on anything else. You head back downstairs, and find that Melissa has already found an extra power outlet in your kitchen. You hand over the keyboard and the CD, and plug in the power to the computer and the LCD. You then plug it into the onboard video card. You hit the power button ....
Fast forward a few years, you are sitting in University and you have an awesome teacher named Ellen. She has just given you an assignment that involves writing in the second person, and you can't think of anything. Your mind wanders as she starts to give more instructions, and something about a free writing exercise. You wander a few years back and wonder where it went wrong with Melissa. Was it the fact that your mom walked in on you two in bed? Was it the fact that you are a lesbian? Maybe it was the distance that was generated between the two of you when your mom did not let you go out on Friday night anymore. Made you go to Church classes, and tried to make you like guys. You start thinking about how society is screwed up, and how it is wrong that society does not accept people that are not like them. You think you are going to write this second person essay on just that topic. You take out a pen and start jotting down ideas, unbeknownst to you, you are following the class. Your teacher Ellen has just told everyone to make a spider web of what they want their essay to be on, and how they should model it. You start having more questions than answers. It is 20 past the hour, class is over. That concludes all the classes you have for today and as you make your way towards the exit you notice a girl you remember from your Linux/UNIX class sitting in the corner playing some new game. As you walk over you ask yourself if you are really falling for her. She has beautiful green eyes, not unlike your own. However hers also have a tint of blue in them as well. You get more and more confused as you walk over to where she is sitting.
As you walk over to her, you start to get more scared. You start asking yourself questions like, how should I approach her. You feel insecure, and worst of all, you have no-one to fall back on yet. You have no-one to talk to about your feelings. Right before you get to her, you panic, you turn around and walk away. Away from the feelings of insecurity, away from someone you are falling in love with. You know you are falling in love, the butterflies, they are all signs. The cold sweats, the dreams. You want to be with her, you can't foster the courage to walk up to her and talk to her. You don't seem to have power over your legs as your body walks away while your brain and heart want to go back. You know you want to be with her, everything about her makes you complete. Her eyes, her body, the way she moves, the way she talks and smiles. You know Jennyfer would make you a complete human being, and happy again. You just don't have the power, you are afraid of failure.
That night as you are lying in bed, thinking of Jennyfer you wonder how to approach the problem. You ponder on it for a long time before finally falling asleep. You dream about being with Jennyfer again. Holding her hand, kissing her lips, hugging her, taking showers with her, sleeping with her. It seems like the dream never ends, but at 07:30 your alarm clock goes off, and wakes you up. You hit it, and it stops making the god-awful noise. You get out of bed, and head into the bathroom, you turn on the shower. After which you walk out of the bathroom to the kitchen. You grab some corn flakes and some milk. Following your daily ritual you take the milk and put it in the bowl, after which you let it sit there and walk back to the bathroom. By this time your shower is nice and warm and provides a soothing stream of water. You wash your hair, and shave. You get out of the shower, still naked you walk back into the kitchen, grab the bowl, the corn flakes and you poor them in. You start eating as you walk back to the bed room. Here you quickly throw on some clothes, put on some eye liner, and grab your purse and head out the door. You take care to lock the door, and run to the bus.
As you are on the bus it hits you. You are going to go back to your high school days and do what you did best. Write little notes. The ones you used to write about the teacher when they had their socks on backwards, or when you tried to get Melissa's attention to go out to lunch after school was over. You start thinking about how you could approach the situation. As you write the note you start thinking of how to get it to Jennyfer. The note you write is simple. In it you ask her if she wants to come out to dinner tonight. You see her in the computer lab when you walk in. Different location, yet she still seems like she is sitting alone in a corner. Her beauty shining like the ray's of the sun as it rises. As you walk by, you nonchalantly put the note down on the table and walk on. You have two classes to go before you might get a reply. You are hoping so desperately to get a reply. You sit through your two classes with anxiety wondering if Jennyfer will take you up on your offer, or if she will shoot you down. As you walk into your Linux/UNIX class you notice that at the stop you normally sit at, there is a note half hidden underneath the keyboard. You take it out and read it. All it says is "Who is asking?". Your heart drops as you fear that she thinks you are helping out some guy. You scribble on a note "Me", and hand it to her with a slightly trembling hand. The smile she gives you though gives you hope. At the end of class as you are exiting you feel a slight tap on your shoulder. You turn around and there is Jennyfer. She smiles and gives you the most reassuring nod, and then says "Yes, I do want to go out to dinner with you!"
So Friday at around 1600 hours, someone in the Hardware lab up in room 422 at UAT goes "We are all going down to San Diego for Toorcon, want to join?". I am down for almost anything. We get together a total of 11 people at 22:00 at night, get in 3 cars, and start the 5 hour drive down to San Diego. We drop by the local Fry's Foods and buy food (11 people walking in at once is scary looking, especially all geeks :P). Once we are stocked up, we get on the road. Armed with nothing more than a few laptops, some clothes, deodorant, soap and tons of tech gear and a map-quest printout of directions, we are off.
We get to San Diego at around 0400 hours in the morning, and we look around for a Hotel. We head over to a local Days Inn, and WifiWarrior1 the oldest of the group, our schools student government vice-president lets us get the rooms at a discounted rate for $1092 per night, 2 hotel rooms, for $260 total. THAT WAS DIRT CHEAP. So we get some sleep, and head over to the convention center. We pay admission $120, and get these cool Lan Yard's with Pac Man's attached to them as our passes to the convention. We sit in on the Saturday morning talks and then head over to the CTF 3 and sign up for 11 college students to compete under the team name UAT. We set up, and start trying to hack the servers, not knowing what we are doing we just basically DDoS the shit out of the servers, and the other teams are starting to get pissed about the fact that they are not able to get any real work done since we are slowing the network down too much. Tough shit. We never get into a single computer, but we do end up knowing what services the machines are running so we can decide a plan of attack the next day.
That night we go out to dinner for Thai food (real good food as well, Lotus Thai in San Diego on 9th and Market), and we get to spend the evening with Captain Crunch (Wikipedia him). He is one of the coolest guys ever. He has some awesome plans to stop much of the spam email many of us are trying to deal with lately. The amount of fun 11 people can have is awesome. 11 people that share the same interests and or passions just got together and had tons of fun.
During the con, I met several key security people, that keep our networks safe. People like Dan Kaminsky. That guy got up on stage hung-over/drunk and gave his entire presentation, and it seemed to make sense, some parts were just way over my head, but it left me with some great ideas for future projects and or research I would like to do. Captain Crunch was awesome in his own way. His ideas and thoughts were great, but sometimes he just seemed to be unable to tell people just exactly what he was thinking.
The second day we got back, and we finally got into one of the servers through a Samba exploit, getting us our first 30 points on the leader-board! Then I out of my sheer "Let's secure this now" mindset removed all the services that could be exploited, and hard rebooted the box. Thing is, we had re-set the root password to "sorry" to thwart the other people, and thus the people running this CTF could not get in, to fix whatever services I had closed, since after all, others should have a fair chance of getting in as well. In the end we had 60 points. Which was two servers hacked, and rooted! We, as in almost all 11 of us, learned more in just two days than what we could learn from some of the classes at UAT. The creators of the contest talked with us afterwards giving us tips of what we should strengthen up on, and what we should look into, that way when we come back next year, or DefCon we can show up strong.
The car ride back was about as eventful as the event there. In our car we had great talks about American politics, and other software/hardware. What we learned, what we needed to learn, and other really useful information. This was one of the best weekends I have had so far here at UAT, and I can't really say I have had a bad weekend here. Just the entire attitude that 11 people could get together last minute, with about 10 minutes of preparation and jump into 3 cars, drive all the way down to San Diego (California), and everything was perfect, was just really cool. The entire rush of "Let's go to San Diego!".
I bought two books, and a T-Shirt. Total money I spent: $320. Time to earn that money back! People still owe me some money, so I am getting some of that money back, but it is gone from my bank account, so it really does not exist in my books anymore!
To learn more about Toorcon, visit their website http://toorcon.org/. To learn more about UAT visit the website http://uat.edu/
This name was given to him by lostboy when he pulled out a 3 - 5 ft 18 Dbi gain Marina antenna and his 15 Dbi Directional wifi antenna and held them up like he was a knight, with a shield and a sword! ↩
Normal price: $129 per night, plus $20 per person extra. Social engineering for the win! ↩
Capture the flag. Computers are set up with operating systems running known services that can be exploited, the point of the game is to steal as many of these systems that are running, and capture those that others have taken. The OS's can range from Linux to FreeBSD, to Solaris, to Mac OS X, to Solaris. This game is normally only entered into when one has the skill-set, but at smaller cons like this one, even with no skill-set, one may jump in and just attempt it, and learn from the experience. ↩
So today I was playing around with this crap named Ubuntu and I could not
figure out why my extra loopback interfaces I added to
/etc/network/interfaces would not show up after restarting networking with
/etc/init.d/networking restart. The reason for that is that it excludes all
loopback interfaces.
auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto lo:0 iface lo:0 inet static address 127.0.0.2 netmask 255.0.0.0
Then use the function "ifup" to restart all the networking stuff. ifup -a. You are not set, check with ifconfig.
So Maddox was here in Tempe, AZ for a book signing (The Alphabet of Manliness, if you have not bought a copy yet you should right now!) at the borders on Mill Ave, which meant I headed over there with another friend of mine here from UAT. Maddox is an asshole! Seriously.
He was one of the coolest people I have ever met. I got my book signed, and he said "Manly handshake" in mine. My handshake is a strong grip (just like his), and two very small pumps, quick and subtle. I off course got a picture with me and him, but since it was taken on my Phone, the image quality is shit, and because of the lighting, it tried to expose it too long and it caused it to be moved. :-(, but at least it is a picture with the man, the myth and the legend!
I will take some pictures of the signing he did in the book, and post those online soon as well.