HOPE 2008: Wikiscanner 2.0


[Virgil] presented the next version of Wikiscanner at The Last HOPE today. To build the original Wikiscanner, he scanned the monthly database dump of anonymous edits and compared that against a purchased list of known company IP addresses. The 34.5 million edits account for nearly 21% of all edits. The idea was to unearth businesses and groups … Read the rest

HOPE 2008: Cold boot attack tools released


The team from Princeton has released their cold boot attack tools at The Last HOPE. Earlier this year they showed how to recover crypto keys from the memory of a machine that had been powered off. Now they’ve provided the tools necessary to acquire and play around with your own memory dumps. The bios_memimage tool is written in … Read the rest

The trackable Last HOPE conference badge


While Defcon badges have taken on the habit of being hackable electronics, The Last Hope badge is taking a new shape this year. It’s dubbed the Attendee Meta-Data project (AMD for short). Aside from the tombstonian dimensions, it features a trackable RFID tag that’s going to be used to create a different sort of conference experience.

Sure, the creators might … Read the rest

HOPE 2008: The impossibility of hardware obfuscation


The Last HOPE is off and running in NYC. [Karsten Nohl] started the day by presenting The (Im)possibility of Hardware Obfuscation. [Karsten] is well versed in this subject having worked on a team that the broke the MiFare crypto1 RFID chip. The algorithm used is proprietary so part of their investigation was looking directly at the hardware. As [bunnie] … Read the rest

Xim360: Mouse and keyboard for 360


Many a computer gamer has scowled at the thought of trying to control an FPS with thumb sticks. When you’re used to the precision and speed of a mouse, the analog stick feels, well… just wonky. XIM360 has built, what is hopefully a big step forward in inputs for the 360. The device is an add on to the XFPSRead the rest

Techie Hall of Shame


In the aftermath of [Terry Childs], the jailed disgruntled software engineer who created a God password and effectively locked San Francisco officials out of their own computer system, IT Grind unveils its Techie Hall of Shame. The Hall of Shame highlights figures who give computer professionals a bad name. From [Roger Duronio], the systems administrator who wasn’t satisfied with … Read the rest

Cheap ARM color LCD platform


Today, [sprite_tm] let us in on one of his pet projects. This is an inexpensive portable game platform runs about $50 and happens to use an ARM CPU and a 320×240 color LCD. Because it’s so cheap, he’s been working on reverse engineering the thing and there’s already a proof of concept homebrew version of Pong out for it.… Read the rest