One comment and one angry email was all the encouragement we needed to keep Line Noise alive, so it's time again for another one so you can witness the extremely worksafe version of the links the DVLabs research team have been sharing with each other on our internal IRC.
- RepRap is a 3D rapid prototyper that can be built on the cheap. All of the components are listed and the design is entirely open.
- I love celebrity gossip, so I couldn't not post about this this hack someone utilized to view private pictures for the myspace accounts of several celebrities.
- There was an article on Rich Smith's PDOSing. PDOS is an acronym for Permanent Denial of Service, where the hardware itself is damaged, making recovery more costly and time consuming.
- A local privilege escalation for OS X was realized this week. Thomas Ptacek gave a good summary of the flaw and as usual, we had our own writeup on the vulnerability here.
- Sequels to the poker bot guide have been posted. Part 2 covers the logistics behind a working poker bot, including an introduction to DLL injection and input simulation. Part 3 covers the design choices behind the AI of a poker bot.
- BMW GINA is a really interesting car design concept that breaks a lot of the current industry molds. Instead of a metal shell BMW is tinkering with the idea of utilizing a flexible fabric skin that gives the automobile an almost organic feel to it.
- Lock "bumping" is an efficient and fairly successful method for simple lock picking. Master has a partial solution to this technique with their BumpStop technology, here is a video demonstration.
- Goosh is an interesting hack. The creator wrapped the various Google API into a web based unix-esque shell. It's easy to navigate and actually quite useful. You can search the web/images/videos, read RSS feeds, pull news articles, translate and more...
- Need some tips on how to help you sleep? Very useful for people like Aaron who generally dont keep normal hours. This article outlines the complications polyphasic sleeping can have with people who have different chronotypes, or natural periods their body expects to be asleep.
- We came across this interesting multi-part blog on the effectiveness of simple methods for check washing: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Final Thoughts. Pretty scary results, we'll have to try this one for ourselves to see how mauled checks look after sitting in various solvents for an extended period of time.
- The psycho stalker significant others in the world can bask in the glory of mobile phone software from FLEXISPY which when installed can forward logs and allow for remote control eavesdropping via the microphone.
- An anonymous (to avoid later prosecution) member of our team came up with the idea of an ice shiv as the ultimate weapon, it looks like he's not the only one thinking along ice weponry lines. The Wasp knife has nothing to do with computer security, but a basketball sized ball of ice is pretty crazy.
- Legitimate sites with embedded malware is on the rise. This is interesting when you think about the talks of white-listing being the solution for malware detection in a browser, or perimiter device. Obviously if you allow CNN and they embedd malware, your risk of infection has increased exponentially. Lets hope this is a trend that gets derailed very soon.
- Kaspersky Labs has identified a new version of Gpcode which is a type of ransomware in the wild. The scary aspect of this malware is the fact it uses a well known and strong asymmetrical encryption algorithm to hold the users files hostage. Kaspersky is in the process of trying to pull the community together to solve this. It's going to be tough but hopefully they can find a weakness in the implementation of the RSA encryption the author settled on. Lets hope they didnt use a well audited open source encryption library.
