If you’ve ever read a story about Defcon, the lede probably had something to do with The Wall of Sheep, the giant pojection of every plaintext username and password crossing the network. You may have even seen one of your favorite sites fall victim to it. One of my favorite people, Irongeek, decided to whip up a little PHP script so that anybody could set up their own Wall of Sheep style system. The backend is powered by the near-magical Ettercap and the script just parses the output into an easy to read format. I think this would be a great warning sign to place on your hotspot’s splash page.

[via PaulDotCom]

Continue reading “Irongeek’s Wall Of Social Science Majors” →

Tor is an overlay network that lets you browse and use other TCP based services anonymously. Normally if you use a secure tunnel an observer can still see the destination and origin ip addresses; They may not be able to tell what the payload is, but they will be able to tell who is talking. Onion routing uses a series of encrypted hops to hide this information. The Tor client creates unique routes through a network of Tor nodes. First the client contacts a node and negotiates an encryption key with it. Once that link has been established the client instructs that node to contact another and get the next key. Once all of these keys have been collected the client can begin encrypting its information. The payload is encrypted by each key in route order. When the first node decrypts the payload it determines where to send it next. The encryption is removed one layer at a time as it travels along the route arriving at its destination fully decrypted.

Tor recently reached 100 verified nodes. If you’ve got some spare bandwidth why don’t you set up a node of your own. You can even use Tor to provide anonymous web services. Of course using Tor will make it more difficult for sites to show you “singles in your area”, so make sure you consider the consequences.

Continue reading “The Onion Router” →

The RIAA/MPAA empire has been tearing down tracker sites left and right; making tracker operation a risky proposition. Distributed tracking guarantees the torrents on these sites will be available even when the site tracker is down. Distributed tracking also makes publishing content easier. Instead of posting a .torrent file to a tracker site you can publish to a distributed tracker. Then you just post the .torrent file on your blog/fan site/forum. You don’t even have to go that far. Azureus can generate a “magnet:” link for any bittorrent file it is currently tracking. Anybody can open that link in their Azureus client and the .torrent file will be retreived directly from the database. I think this system will be great for people publishing their original works since they won’t have to provide lots of bandwidth or rely on someone’s flakey tracker. Recently support was added to the official client and many more will probably follow. Azureus explains the magic after the jump. Give it a read if you’re not too busy downloading crappy RotS cam movies. (EDIT: I guess there is a workprint out there, so the quality is probably pretty good)

Continue reading “Distributed Bittorrent” →

Synergy is a cross-platform keyboard-mouse switch. It’s also one of the most well-named pieces of software out there. Here’s why: I had a laptop running XP with a nice usb keyboard and mouse plugged into it. To the right of that, I had a laptop running Linux. Both computers are on a wireless network. Using synergy I can slide the mouse off of the right edge of the screen and onto the Linux laptop’s XWindows screen with no lag. In the process it transfers  keyboard control over to the other system too. You can even cut and paste between systems. This is a great solution for using your desktop keyboard with your wireless laptop or if your laptop is sitting in the living room you could easily use its mouse and keyboard to control your home theater pc. Set up is simple, scales easily, and works with OSX, too.

Continue reading “Synergy KM Switch” →

I don’t think “nuisance breeds innovation” was ever a common phrase, but that is exactly how greasemonkey, the firefox extension, came into life. Greasemonkey lets users add their own scripts to web pages they visit. Yeah, I didn’t really jump out my seat when I heard that in January, but then I started to see people apply it. Sure there’s the standard “remove all advertising” hacks and the slightly more interesting “skip full ad pages”, but there is so much more you can do. You can beat stupidly designed web pages into submission: force Ain’t It Cool News headlines to use reasonable font sizes and turn off that stupid highlighting crap, clean up Slashdot’s ugly section colors, replace Pitchfork’s flash menu with text links. Greasemonkey can do so much more though. It can be used to combine the information of multiple sites like some sort of magical duct tape (not that duct tape isn’t already magical). Check out the screenshot of Book Burro above. You can also imbed information from IMDB into your Netflix pages or vice versa. Of course all of this rampant page modification hasn’t gone unnoticed. Greasemonkey and its scripts are really easy to install (falling down the stairs level of ease). So, there is no reason not to try it out. Check out the excellent free online book Dive Into Greasemonkey to get started.

Continue reading “Dive Into Greasemonkey” →

welcome citizen engineers. hack a day (beta) is a web magazine devoted to cataloging all the best hacks, mods and diy (do it yourself) projects from around web. each day i’ll post one hack i like, seen or tried and once a week a special how-to. this is in beta, so enjoy the occasional oddity and sawdust while it gets cookin.

why a site? i thought it was time to have one spot on the web with all the things you can do with ipods, digital cameras, consoles, portables, locks, macs, pcs, anything that can be modd’ed or hacked. a lot of the desire to do this is so i don’t have to hunt around as much for ideas. the goal is for anyone who–has an old pda, a tivo, an atari, an ipod, xbox, or any device just sitting around, then hits hackaday.com, bang, sees all the things folks can do with it to void the already expired warranty or get more out of it.

i’ll post some resources like make, pop sci, books and other things to check out too since i get get asked about that a lot.

if you have feedback, ideas, a cool hack or mod, send it along to me via email for now or aim me.

Continue reading “Introducing Hack A Day (beta)” →