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DefconBots Sentry Gun Competition

June 24, 2008 by 7 Comments


DefconBots is returning again this year with their shooting gallery robot competition for Defcon 16. They’ve decided to leave the rules unchanged from last year. It’s a head to head competition between fully autonomous guns. The first gun to shoot all the targets on their side of the board wins. The rules aren’t very strict on design; as long as you use nonlethal nonmessy amunition and include a safety switch you’re pretty much good to go. The DefconBots site has a reference design to put you on the fast track to competing. Defcon 16 is August 8-10, 2008 in Las Vegas.

Related: [Aaron Rasmussen]’s sentry gun we covered back in 2005

[photo: Bre Pettis]

The Last HOPE Full Speaker List Released

June 19, 2008 by No comments


The Last HOPE has just released a list of all the schedule talks at the conference. 97 different talks will be divided over three tracks during the course of the three day conference. It looks like a lot of interesting events will be going down. The Cold Boot encryption attack tools will be released. Representatives from Graffiti Research Lab will be showing The Complete First Season and unveiling their One Laser Tag Per Child system. Virgil Griffith from WikiScanner will be mining even deeper into the wretched hive of scum and villainy. Karsten Nohl will present why hardware obfuscation is an impossibility and how they defeated the MiFare crypto. The Last HOPE will be in New York City July 18-20, 2008

LA SIGGRAPH Maker Night

June 17, 2008 by No comments


We coaxed our friends at Mahalo Daily into coming along with us to LA SIGGRAPH’s Maker Night. There were a handful of interesting projects there. [Univac] was showing a circuit bent Teletubby and his CellularRecombomat. [Brett Doar] brought his Bronco Table. Tired of engineers building items that made life easier, he decided to make something that made life more difficult. The table uses a piezo to detect the sound of something being set on top. It then starts twitching and bucking to shake the item free. The motors look like they’re salvaged window motors. Finally, we talked to [Mark Frauenfelder] from BoingBoing/Make about how he got into the DIY culture.

Exploit-Me Firefox XSS And SQL Scanning Addon

June 14, 2008 by 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbL2ptbjoSA&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
One of the best tools we saw at LayerOne was the Exploit-Me series presented by [Dan Sinclair]. Security Compass created these tools to help developers easily identify cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

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The Best Of 2600

June 12, 2008 by 7 Comments


2600 editor [Emmanuel Goldstein], has decided to publish The Best of 2600. It features some of the best essays on lockpicking, phone phreaking, social engineering, and other topics that the hacker quarterly had to offer.

Founded in 1984, 2600 was one of the major catalysts that got the modern hacker scene going. They published controversial articles on topics like red boxing and spawned monthly meetings. This firsthand account of the development of hacker culture will be released in July at The Last HOPE in New York.