At ToorCon, our friends at Midnight Research Labs released a new automated WiFi auditing tool called WiCrawl. WiCrawl automatically scans for accesspoints. Once an AP is discovered a number of plugins can be run against it ranging from getting an IP to breaking encryption. Aaron Peterson’s talk and demo is 50mins. You can download the 640×480 170MB .mov version here. The tool is going to be included in the next BackTrack CD.
Author: Eliot1332 Articles
Cory Doctorow’s Keynote From ToorCon 8
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BoingBoing‘s Cory Doctorow gave one of the keynote addresses at ToorCon. The video is 50 minutes and covers all the internet hot buttons like DRM, net neutrality, MPAA, RIAA, EFF, etc. Watch the video above, at blip.tv, or download the MP4.
Hack-A-Day Anniversary 10
We are entering our terrible twos which means we’re not above making stupid binary jokes like the one in the title. With the comments still broken, this year’s celebration is going to be pretty low key. You’ve got a few entertaining options though. Have a look at our first anniversary posts: first post and HADA01. Visit the Team Hack-A-Day forum for HAD’s Unofficial Folding@HOME Team. They do a lot more than just fold so feel free to ask for help if you’ve got a project you’re working on. You can also stop by #hackaday IRC channel on EFNet. Check out or current blogger, Will O’Brien’s how-to archive on Engadget. Engadget also got there hands on a Chumby recently. Will, Fabienne, and I will all be attending ToorCon in San Diego at the end of this month. It was my favorite conference from last year and definitely worth your time if you are in the area. Check out last year’s coverage. The staff at Hack-A-Day would like to thank all of the readers. Reader contributions to the tipline are what keep this site fresh every day.
Chumby
The biggest hacker news of the weekend has to be Chumby being revealed. We heard whisperings of this at Defcon, but the device has finally been seen in the flesh at Foo Camp. Chumby is an open hardware flash player. That’s just a starting point though. Chumby is designed to be hacked. Even though they aren’t selling hardware yet, they’ve already posted full schematics and software notes (create an account to view). The device comes with a dongle for further expansion. Christine.net, Dyl World, and ScottJanousek all have posts covering the device. Friend of Hack-A-Day, bunnie did the hardware design and posted shots of the board on his blog. We’re planning on getting a good look at the device when Fabienne, Will, and I are at Toorcon in San Diego next month.
Mikey Sklar On The Daily Show
Yesterday’s The Daily Show (8-23-06) had a segment featuring friend of Hack-A-Day Mikey Sklar. You probably remember his projects: Making RFID proof pockets, embedding an RFID chip in his hand, and his current project the high-lighter, a trampoline controlled flame thrower. Mikey is on the road to Burning Man right now so he hasn’t seen the 2 minutes they got out of the 8.5 hours of filming. It can’t be all bad though: this screen cap is right before Samantha Bee unzips her pants and he got just as much screen time as Ray Kurzweil. You can download the torrent here. Mikey’s segment starts at 7 minutes; there is some more during the credits.
UPDATE: Dan Lane (also chipped) uploaded the short segment to YouTube. Video after the break.
Gas Powered Blender
I’m attending the funeral of my best friend’s father today. As a mechanical engineer, I always admired the man as an excellent machinist. What follows is a post I wrote last year about his gas powered blender. You’ll be sorely missed Mr. Frost.
My roommate Frosty has often joked about how many lawnmowers and weedeaters his dad has laying around. It seems that his dad has decided to take care of the clutter and I, for one, am scared. Yes my friends, a gas powered blender. It has been done before, but you’ve got to respect Greg’s scratch building prowess. Finally you can vaporize ice in mere seconds and with the way the handle bars are mounted it’s guaranteed to make the goofying process far more intimate than usual. By my count this means he still has four more engines in the garage; I don’t know what’s next, but god help us all.
Xen On Intel Mac Mini
The Scalable Computing Laboratory has posted instructions on how to get Xen running on a Intel Mac mini. Xen is an open source virtualization system that lets multiple guest operating systems run on the same processor. The Mac mini is small, relatively inexpensive, and because it supports VT instructions you can run WindowsXP without modification. This makes the mini a really good choice for a hardware virtualization box. The install does have some quirks. You need a distro that uses lilo to boot because of Mac mini’s lack of an A20 gate. Once installed you switch to a patched version of grub because that’s what Xen requires.
[thanks steve, the good steve]
