Fusion, In My Backyard?!

June 24, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 79 Comments

Here is the 32nd amateur fusion reactor built in a basement. [Mark Suppes] is right behind [Will Jack], the (then) 17 year old [Thiago Olson], and [Mileiux] in engineering a homemade nuclear reactor. By taking two light elements and colliding them under extreme speed and pressure, a heavier element and energy are produced.

[Mark’s] goal is to lasso in investors to earn enough money to build a larger Bussard Reactor, which will hopefully produce as much energy as it consumes. Free energy at only a couple million dollars; who wouldn’t pass up this opportunity?

[Thanks Imp]

Free Day Recap Video And Book Recommendation

January 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgFayRF4M2c]

SparkFun’s free day came and went as entertainment for some and an infuriating event for others. They filmed some video in their office during the madness to give us a look at how it went on their end. We find it amusing that Solarbotics, one of their competitors, sent them flowers with a card reading “Rest in Peace SparkFun”.

According to [Nate’s] original post, the concept of free day was inspired by reading [Chris Anderson’s] book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. We recently finished reading this wonderful work and we’re making it our next book recommendation. [Chris] is editor-in-chief of Wired and has had a ring-side seat as the digital world rose around us. He takes a historical look at what the price of free really means, defining cost by adding more terms like Gratis and Libre to the mix. If you have a good handle on the companies that have defined the 21st Century business model so far you wont’ be able to put this book down.

Now, we should mention something that is remotely related to hacking since we try to do that sort of thing around here. The SparkFun post also reminds those folks lucky enough to get a $100 credit to chronicle and share their projects. We’d love to see them too so get your projects written up and send us the dirty details.

Free Issue Of Hackin9

December 23, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

hackin9

Until midnight tonight, you can download a free copy of the 1/2008 issue of security magazine hackin9. It’s 84pages, 10.5MB, and requires you to provide an email address they don’t verify.

[via TaoSecurity]

Crawling + SQL Injection With Scrawlr

June 24, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

Scrawlr is the latest tool to come out of HP’s Web Security Research Group. It was built in response to the massive number of SQL injection attacks happening on the web this year. Most of these vulnerable sites are found through googling, so Scrawlr works the same way. Point it at your web server and it will crawl all of the pages and evaluate the URL parameters to see if they’re vulnerable to verbose injection. It reports the SQL server and table names if it comes across anything.

It only supports 1500 pages right now and can’t do authentication or blind injection. It’s still a free tool and a great way to identify if your site is vulnerable to automated tools finding you website via search engines.

[via Acidus]

Free Web Development Tools

June 21, 2008 by Eliot 1 Comment

OStatic has a collected some great free tools for web developers. We talked about Quanta in an earlier post, but this article reaches beyond just HTML editors. LaunchSplash can be used to generate splash pages while you build. IBM, responsible for the Eclipse IDE, has built Project Zero to encourage web app development; even the IDE is web based. OpenX is an open ad server. Piwik is a free web analytics package. There are also quite a few open source CMS’s and sites collecting open source designs.