Curiosity Killed The Twit, Twitter Clickjacking

February 12, 2009 by Eliot 24 Comments

Twitter was flooded this morning with users posting “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6”. TinyURL has since terminated the URL. The original page doesn’t seem to be live either. It displayed a button that said “Don’t Click”. If the user happened to be logged into Twitter, it would automatically update their status. The instigator partially describes the method on his blog (translated). The page would load the user’s Twitter page in an invisible iframe. The status would be pasted in and the “Don’t Click” button is placed on top of the update button. You can find the code snippets here and the original author credits this post for the inspiration. Twitter has since added a JavaScript fragment to each page to break out of iframes.

if (window.top !== window.self) { window.top.location.href = window.self.location.href; }

Defcon 17 Call For Papers

February 9, 2009 by Eliot 6 Comments

defcon

Notorious hacker conference Defcon has just published their Call for Papers. The 17th annual event will happen July 30th through August 2nd. Most of the announcement is the same boilerplate they’ve included for the past two years. Like last year, they’re not defining the specific speaking track themes and will come up with them based on submissions. New for this year is a half-day of workshops on the Thursday before Defcon for anyone that’s showing up early. This pre-con event is targeted at newbies. It certainly sounds like an interesting way to ease into Defcon instead of the usual delays and fire marshals. We’ve been attending every year since 2005 and love seeing new things. You should definitely consider presenting this year (we want to see more hardware!).

Radio Controlled Beetle

February 9, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 57 Comments

Scientists at the university of California have managed to implant a chip in a giant flower beetle that makes it respond to commands from the computer. They can tell it to fly, stop, turn left and turn right. The controls are done through its optic nerves and wing muscles. Though the article states that flight signals are sent to the optic lobes and steering is done through stimulation of the wing muscles, the video shows steering being accomplished through optic lobe stimulation.

Though we’re sure there’s some grand scientific goal behind this, we can’t help but think (hope) that we’ll be seeing giant robot controlled beetle battles with lasers and rockets.

TinkerKit, Physical Computing Toolkit

February 5, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

tinkerkit

TinkerKit is a collection of 20 different sensors and 10 actuators. It’s meant to make prototyping of physical computing devices much quicker/easier. The devices plug into a Sensor Hub Arduino shield. There is also a similar hub board that can emulate a keyboard; it translates sensor input directly to key strokes. It looks like a very ambitious project and it’s still in development. We love the idea though and think the wide variety of components will foster better final designs. The TinkerKit site covers the current component lineup and there’s a demo video embedded below.

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Parking Violation Leads To Malware Download

February 5, 2009 by Eliot 26 Comments

parking

It seems some enterprising individual in Grand Forks, North Dakota has been placing fake parking violations on cars. If the recipient visited the URL on the flyer, they would be told to install a toolbar to view pictures of their vehicle. That piece of malicious software would then attempt to install several more. The actual vehicle pictures were from Grand Forks, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar attack happen in a much larger city.

SparkFun Releases RGB Button Controller

February 5, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

rgb_button

SparkFun has been selling button pad parts for some time and we used them in our RGB door lock project. A excellent part, but you needed to implement your own interface to use the boards. SparkFun has just released two additional versions to make it easier on builders. The first is their Button Pad Controller USB. It has a 4×4 grid of buttons lit by RGB LEDs and a USB interface. This board can be expanded using the Button Pad Controller SPI. The SPI bus means it should be easy to add the button pad to embedded projects. This newest release puts you much closer to building your own RGB monome clone or other custom controller than ever before. The unit pictured above is their own project and they have no plans on selling anything like it.

ToorCamp 2009 To Be Held At Missile Silo

February 3, 2009 by Eliot 12 Comments

toorcamp

After running a successful hacker convention for ten solid years, the people who brought you ToorCon are planning a new event to shake up the US hacker scene. ToorCamp will be held July 2nd-5th, 2009 at a former missile silo in central Washington state. Hackers will camp on-site for two days of talks followed by two days of workshops. Art and music events are planned for every night. Camps like this are already help biannually in Europe: What the Hack in 2005, Chaos Communication Camp 2007, and Hacking at Random 2009, coming this fall. The complex is one of three Titan 1 missile complexes in the Moses Lake area. The sites were in operation less than three years between 1962 and 1965. The former missile command center has been converted to a secure data center run by Titan I, LLC. ToorCamp promises to be a very unique experience and we’re looking forward to attend this and future years.