Midnight Research Labs

tracking people with rfid
sth posted in interesting, rfid on October 28th, 2005
comments:0

Karen Marcelo who does a couple other pretty cool things like dorkbot
and survival research labs helped a couple others put together an interesting thing tonight at SFMOMA.

From what I can gather, they handed all the entrants a RFID tag, and proceeded to track them throughout the exhibits. Then they wrote some visualization software to track them as they wandered about. I haven’t seen any of the output from this, but it sounds pretty cool, and I’m sad that I missed it (just saw the announcement tonight).

october meeting aftermath
sth posted in meetings on October 26th, 2005
comments:1

Thanks very much to everyone involved — we had a successful meeting this month. We had some annoying issues with video-conferencing that gave us a late start, but other than that, I think it went well. We had some cool toys, some great project ideas, good interaction, and I think that people had fun as well. Next month we’ll have a little more focus, and we’ll start to work on specific projects. I promise that the AV issues will be worked out beforehand, =). Comment on this post to let me know what you thought, =)

Thanks!

October Meeting Announcement
sth posted in meetings on October 20th, 2005
comments:0

/* ****************************************************************************
*                           Midnight Research Labs                            *
*                     !!  October Meeting announcement !!                     *
*                        (http://midnightresearch.com)                        *
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                      / , _/ -_|_-< --_) _ `/ __/ __/ _ \
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		Fellow Hackers, Slackers, and Code-crackers:

	On Friday October 21st at 8pm PST we will be holding the first
	official Midnight Research Labs monthly meeting.  While we've had
	several unofficial meetings, this is the first official
	scheduled meeting.

	Anyone with project ideas, or active projects that they want
	help with are encouraged to bring them along.  This can either
	be just to show them off, or to actively propose them for an
	official MRL project.  Projects are generally either security
	or "novel computing" related, though we're always open to cool
	and new ideas (read robotics, electronics hacking, etc =).
	Don't feel pressured to come up with something or bring anything
	if you don't want -- I have a few projects worthy of attention
	(or at least I think so, =) until things get up and running.

	We will be voting on the initial project list, and will start
	some of the project definitions on Friday.  We'll try to come up
	with a quantified attainable goal for the evening, and work
	towards that in phase 1 (and 2 if relevant).

	Light refreshments, pizza and beer will be served.

	Agenda:
		Phase 0x0: Bootstrapping
		  - Greetings and welcome
		  - Who we are, and what we do
		  - Project presentation and initial selection
		  - Food
		Phase 0x1: Initialization
		  - Project outline and goals
		  - Design, brainstorming, etc
		  - Project Hacking!
		Phase 0x2: Local exploits
		  - Whatever till whenever -- This is the more social
		    part of the event.  People are invited to stay and
		    hack and have a couple drinks till whenever this
		    phase is no longer self-sustaining, =)

	This is an "invite only" event, so, don't distribute the
	location to everyone you know =).  That being said, we're still
	looking for active members, so if you know someone that would be
	interested in contributing and want to sponsor or vouch for
	them, feel free to bring them along (let me know in advance if
	possible)

	Location:
		[ edited for web.  Please contact
		sith [{@}] midnightresearch.com for more info ]

	Notes (nfo):
	- We're about 1.5 miles from bart.
	- Bringing a Laptop is a probably good idea if you have one.
	- Please feel free to contact me by email or phone if you have
	  any questions
	- Don't mistake having an agenda for being a "dry" meeting.  I
	  only want to impose the minimal structure possible while
	  keeping a good flow.  I expect things will run rather
	  informally once we get going.  I just want to avoid the "2600"
	  effect which is everyone just sitting around with no
	  structure, and nothing getting done
	- I don't expect hordes of people to show up, probably between 4
	  and 8, but I do expect the signal to noise ratio to be very
	  good.  I hope that people learn and are challenged by
	  attending, and on the flipside, I expect great things to come
	  out of MRL.

	  Thanks! Hope to see you there!

interz0ne update
sth posted in hacking contests, meetings, wifi on October 17th, 2005
comments:0

Just a quick update to mention how great Interzone was this year. MRL’s Jason gave a really good talk on Combat Reverse Engineering. He gave some insightful tips, tricks and tools for competitive hacking, and outlined a methodology for how to approach the “combat” scenarios you can find yourself in during a competition.

The only negative thing about the weekend was that Jason and I found out that we would not be able to compete in the rootwars competition because of our involvement in a previous competition. It ended up working out well though, I won the wireless competition, and Jason mentored the other people that were competing. There wasn’t too much competition, but I think that everyone had fun and learned some things. I was just glad I had a chance to break out the wireless gear, =).

Once again I’ll say that, if you’ve never been, you definitely need to check it out next year. And thanks again to Richard for hooking us up.

Satellite Hacking
sth posted in interesting on October 12th, 2005
comments:7

This is pretty cool — these guys have posted basic procedures for intercepting satellite data directly from NOAA’s weather and imaging satellites. Some of the setups even use a sound card as input from the decoding devices. The resulting images are pretty cool. They also have some information on the different types of satellite systems, and some basic terminology.

interzone this weekend!
sth posted in meetings on October 7th, 2005
comments:0

Interz0ne West is this weekend! Lots of good speakers, and lots of interesting stuff going on. RootWars are Friday and Saturday night. It should be a good “serious” security conference for the west coast. Come out and have some fun, and make sure to say hello, =).

remote-exploit.org
sth posted in Uncategorized on October 3rd, 2005
comments:0

If you have a few extra bucks, you might consider donating a couple of them to these guys (http://new.remote-exploit.org/). They have some great tools and tutorials (even videos!). Whax (formerly whoppix) and Auditor are two of the best security live CDs, and right now they are working on combining them into “backtrack”.

Google decided that the site did not meet the terms of service requirements for adsense because it allegedly contains “Hacking/cracking content”, and so they are losing some ad revenue that would normally support their hosting. Hopefully this won’t become a trend that could indirectly affect many security sites that rely on this type of funding. This is another (small) example of how powerful Google is starting to become. Hopefully they’ll stick to their “Don’t be evil” policy.