HR Geeks

HR-2600: Meeting Summary for September 5, 2008

enferex — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:05:03 +0000

That’s right, its time once again to spread the corruption of scary hackerdom amongst the populace, and impregnate the youth with ideas of ohh so spooky hacker stuff. Ok, that’s not what the meeting is about, and the term hacker, is not a rant I’m about to even get into. In other words, this meeting, as it has always been, is about hanging out, meeting people, and dorking-out.

The meeting was quite plentiful of regulars. Of the aforementioned, the attendance consisted of Tele, Dave, Andrew, Remad, Sunpuke, and myself. The mall was fairly chill, not too many annoyances, this can be attributed to two factors one of which was the loooming tropical storm Hanna, whom was not poised to really “hit” the area until 2AM, and the other was the fact that schools have gone back in session. Either way, it was a great dork out. What was talked about? Well since its free-form, pseudo random babblings. And “babblings” should not be taken in a negative context.

-Matt (enferex)

757Labs Project: MP3nema Release

enferex — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:35:03 +0000

I would like to announce the release of a 757Labs tool, mp3nema.

MP3nema is a tool aimed at analyzing and capturing data that is hidden between frames in an MP3 file or stream, otherwise noted as “out of band” data. This utility also supports adding data between frames, and capturing streaming audio.

This tool is under the GNU GPLv3 license. So have at it!

Thanks to Tele, skhisma, and the rest of the labs!

-Matt (enferex)

Attack of the amature radio licenses

Ethan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:12:04 +0000

It’s finally happened. Being geeks, many of us have grown up around HAM radio people. A number of us have owned various pieces of radio equipment for other projects. But some of us just never gotten around to actually taking the HAM test.

At the HOPE conference in NYC, it was announced that HAM tests would be given. Some of the people surrounding 2600 really promote it. Erik and Jeff managed to study up enough and take the tests, both earning a license. I brought study materials and hyped it, but actually didn’t take the test myself. Another local (Bill) actually took the test, but Erik & Jeff didn’t know him at the time. Congrats to all 3!

Once back in Hampton Roads, I managed to take and pass tests as well. I encourage others to do so as well. It wasn’t too difficult and the practice tests at www.qrz.com help greatly. Once you’ve studied up, then find the next testing date at www.arrl.org.

Be sure to check out the Virginia Beach Amateur Radio Club (www.w4ug.com) as well as the Chesapeake Amateur Radio Service (www.qsl.net/cars) .
At some point HRGeeks may look into standing up a repeater, but this is still in discussion. Most likely we would look to do HAM (data capable), GMRS and possibly a Motorola business band UHF or VHF repeater capable of moving DES encrypted traffic (just because encryption is cool, not that we have secrets).

The Last Hope - Video network a success!

Ethan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:05:09 +0000

A number of locals participated yet again in assisting with 2600 magazine’s HOPE conference at the famous Hotel Pennsylvania, located in New York City. The additions provided DVD quality video streaming from the 18th floor to the 2nd floor over a fiber optic network connection (provided by the network guys - props to Dragorn, Binary, Porkchop and their assistants). The big new feature this year, implemented by Erik as we drove to Manhattan was a comment system. Members of the audience in front of the large projection screen had the ability to anonymously post comments on a web page that would scroll across the bottom of the large display. Being anonymous, one can only imagine what ended up on the scroll (full analysis pending). While it was only active for a periods, it still racked over 7,000 comments.

There is the possibility we will be working on a rapidly deployable media management system intended for “hacker” conferences, and usable by other groups.

HOPE 2008, the 7th Hackers on Planet Earth conference was great fun, and we are glad to hear there will be a 8th HOPE in 2010.

Two Hampton Roads companies finalists for Linux World

Ethan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:34:40 +0000

Two Hampton Roads companies have made it into the best business category at Linux World 2008. One is xTuple (www.xtuple.com) with xTuple ERP 3.0, and the other is Concursive with ConcourseSuite 5.3 (www.concursive.com). Times must be ripe for name changing, xTuple used to be called OpenMFG and Concursive used to be called CentricCRM. Congrats to both Norfolk, VA based companies and good luck winning against Drupal!

757Labs Tool: PDFResurrect

enferex — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:30:23 +0000

I would like to announce the initial release of the 757Labs’ PDFResurrect tool:

PDFResurrect is a tool aimed at analyzing PDF documents. The PDF format allows for previous document changes to be retained in a more recent version of the document, thereby creating a running history of changes for the document. This tool attempts to extract all previous versions while also producing a summary of changes between versions. This tool can also “scrub” or write data over the original instances of PDF objects that have been modified or deleted, in an effort to disguise information from previous versions that might not be intended for anyone else to read.

This tool and accompanying whitepaper can be found over at the labs:
http://www.757labs.com/projects/pdfresurrect

Special thanks goes out to all the hr-geekers, and 757labs. Many were consulted on this and provided suggestions. including Tele, Derez, Remad, Count, Sunpuke. Special thanks to Brent, not really part of the 757 crew, but aided in proofreading the paper. Thanks Guys!

-Matt (enferex)

HR-2600: Meeting Summary for August 1, 2008

enferex — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:03:42 +0000

“A great meeting it was, as nerds descended on the mall.” Ohh wait, hold on, that sounds reminiscent of the mantra devoted to pimping the Last HOPE conference, which just concluded earlier in July. HOPE was of conversation this month at the meeting, as was other topics. Talk of photography(the old-school film method), digital communication with an internal measurement unit, radar detectors, radar detector detectors and radar detector detector detector detectors. There is really only so much recursion that can occur with such devices, and it is probably sufficient to say that once you are detecting devices made to detect you, the recursion can stop. Dave and Sun both made words of visual identification of biological material. The meeting ended with a browse of Barnes and Nobel.

In attendance was Sunpuke, Telemonster, Andrew, Dave, and myself.

-Matt (enferex)

Norfolk Wire aquires Priest Electronics, closes location

Ethan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:00:17 +0000

Norfolk Wire & Electronics has acquired Priest Electronics in Chesapeake. The Chesapeake store was closed and consolidated into the Cain Electronics store in Norfolk. Cain Electronics was also a fairly recent acquisition by Norfolk Wire & Electronics.

Dataline Consulting Services changes name, location

Ethan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:55:51 +0000

Dataline Consulting Services changed names to Planit Technology Group and moved to Virginia Beach from Norfolk. You can see the building (Former TAF Group?) along 264, sporting a very nice but underutilized full color LED based “jumbotron” style display.

Local company Wasabi Systems, Inc. expands

Ethan — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:18:51 +0000

Job listings have been appearing in mass for local company Wasabi Systems. While I figured they would be gone by now, it appears they are indeed growing. Wasabi once employed a number of the people behind the awesome NetBSD project, not bad for a company in Norfolk Virginia! Wasabi makes iSCSI target & NAS solutions (Similar to the open source OpenFiler project, but a much smaller tighter package). Wasabi also performed coding work for a number of major companies in the embedded space. I’m not sure what the expansion is for, but if anyone knows it would be great to hear what is going on!