News and Olds

A project in Chicago for eight weeks has turned into me sitting at home instead and catching up on my RSS Security Feed. In which I learned about KeySweeper, KeySniffer, Patchwork, and more. I've also begun to watch Blackhat and Defcon videos. Yesterday I saw an interesting presentation from last year about Abusing XLST. This will be a good way to keep up to date on industry happenings.

P.S. I really want to try this out: http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/hack-wi-fi-creating-evil-twin-wireless-access-point-eavesdrop-data-0147919/

Toorcamp Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/markkerzner/toorcamp-2016

The presentation at the Hadoop and Apache Spark Meetup went well. Unfortunately I do have to work on presentation skills, specifically determining how technical an audience is by asking questions or a show of hands, then tailoring background details based on the responses. Later, I realized that the audience was heavily based towards database admins, systems analysts, SQL people, to my uneducated eye. They might not have known what a CTF was, when I discussed Vito Genovese' presentation on running the Defcon CTF.

Edit: Unrelated - What a great write up, hadn't seen it before: here

Toorcamp presentation

I'm presenting a slide deck to the local Houston Hadoop and Apache Spark Meetup - Special Guest Presentation. The slides should be up on slideshare later on.

July 4 fireworks and reviews

I finally got to use the whole stash from last year, freeing up a bunch of space under the bed. Here's a review:

Nightmare Fountain - As always, amazing display and great value for $25:

1000 roll of BC firecrackers - gee whiz, this is too long. 500 is better, especially when left in rolled up form for maximum effect.

Bug Eyed 200 gram fan cake - nice, but I'm realizing fan cakes really aren't suitable for lighting in a neighborhood street without distance to appreciate the effect.

Motormouth - Misfired and something like 70 shots went off simultaneously. Otherwise, nice, but I still prefer Fireworks Fiesta.

Brothers 'Box of Bombs' - Got this instead of a second case of the 'Brothers Anniversary Combo' because they didn't have enough - Except for 'Cobalt Bomb', I wasn't impressed. The colors are similar across all cakes and the breaks aren't all that high.

'Brothers Anniversary Combo' - Firefly was amazing, with heart-thumping breaks and launches. Ditto for Baby Boomers with its amazing willows thrown in. Saturday Night Special was fun because of the special effects but just a bit underwhelming.

Proud 500 gram fan - not impressed. Too short. 

BP Firecrackers - very good, but commercial 500gram cake breaks are even louder.

Rockets - sugar rockets all were too powerful or failed spectacularly. Firecracker launched on D12-7 was just fine. The thrust was plenty enough to compensate for the seven-second delay.

My Artillery shells - Last two remaining. Two were launched, on a D12-0 plus E9-4 combo, each. Stabilization wasn't perfect, as each rose at an angle. Each broke a good thousand feet up and the effect lasted for almost a minute as the wind carried the firefly stars slowly back towards us. Video will be posted later. Here's an example, which turned out vertical on Youtube. I'll fix it later.

Wax-based Smoke Bombs - 100 gram size makes too little smoke for taste, and for 3 straight minutes. The 300-gram size is much more effective, both in the burn and the actual smoke.

R-candy equivalent smoke bomb - Actually flew up 30 feet and burned up in just a few heart-pounding seconds. Perhaps adding a wide-throated nozzle was a bad idea.

All In cake - great as usual. New this year was Evil, with amazingly wide breaks for such a small, cheap ($4.50) cake.