This video is of a panel attended by former L0pht members in Boston 2008. It’s a really fun talk. And it’s amazing but l0pht is now over 10 years old… also now owned wholesale by Symantec =/. I really miss the HNN, woulda been neat if in a parallel dimension they ended up beating out Slashdot.

But it’s an interesting panel by some of the first folks in the United States to run a successful hacker space in a time when such spaces were very few and far between. Plus every one of the L0pht members was every bit as interesting as the history of their space.

Check out lOpht.com for more info.

So, both of my grandfathers were engineers in their own way. My grandfather on my father’s side (Ed Joyce) was a mechanic in the merchant marine during “the” war. My grandfather on my mother’s side (Ed Latimer.. what are the odds?) worked with the army air corps at one of their Radar Research Facilities in Arizona. He later worked as a foreman with Ma Bell for basically the rest of his life… One of his past times was curb collecting electronics and repairing them. Thanks to him every kid in my home had a black and white tube tv growing up… which was a little odd since color televisions were 20 years old at that point =P. Anyways when he passed he left some old electronics stuff that was passed off to me. A pretty awesome old tube tester, bunch of tubes, and various ancient components… but also some old service news magazines. Which had articles on how to service televisions and radios, and discussion of the technology of the time. Pretty amazing stuff. A window into a bygone era so to speak. All the documents are now public domain according to my research so enjoy!

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So, there was discussion today around the tables at NYCResistor as people worked on their various projects regarding the ability to produce bots that “baited” people. Bre, remarked that designing a bot that sat around eliciting angry responses would be simple and very similar to simply capturing things I say and spraying them about.

This is when I was reminded of a project I wrote when I was in my first year of college. I was having some trouble showing up to classes, and I needed to ween myself off of IRC, so I basically wrote a bot that would take care of my IRC session for me while I was gone. It was like methadone for an IRC addiction. Sure I was still suffering withdrawal, but the channel was none the wiser and I suffered no ill effects from my repeated absences.

What’s really astounding is the simplicity of the code, and that it somehow lasted 3 weeks before someone realized it was a bot. Ultimately the zero delay responses are what got it caught.

Anyways here’s a blast from the past… one of my first perl scripts…

openfly.pl

Full of early 2000 IRC goodness. Enjoy! Please don’t judge me.

Our friends at Bug Labs will be hosting the next Make:NYC Meeting!

It’ll be on Thursday February 26th, 6:30PM at Bug Labs.

598 Broadway at Houston
4th floor
New York, NY 10012

6/B/D/F/V to Bleeker-Lafayette
R/W to Prince

Read more at makenyc.org

ShmooCon is an information security conference held in Washington DC, this past weekend. About 1300 people attended talks ranging from DIY UAV design to disk recovery methodology. It was an intensely fun time. HACDC the local DC hackerspace and close friends of NYCResistor hosted a pretty amazing party inside of a church down there. I remember grabbing rubens with Nick Farr and company at around 6 am the following morning, and thinking… goddamn I am glad I came. However, as of Friday around 1 pm I had still not left NYC. I was working and being a generally busy person. But I got a call from an unnamed person whom we will for the sake of time refer to as “Deep Throat”. Several hackerspace members had arrived at Shmoo to discover that this year’s badges were in fact made of acryllic.

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