Dec 10, 2008
Talk is cheap, but talk takes time, time being money is not cheap, so why do we talk at all? Communication is important to life as social animals. Humans are bound to their society by needs, wants, and so forth and communication is needed to properly satisfy those tasks. From communicating for work, to community, and friendship, communication connects people in a way that no other medium can. Television, blogs, essays, and speeches fail to solve this because they are one-way monologue communication. If a person is properly coherent, people can glean meaning from a monologue form of communication. For example, a person who knows me well or who doesn't know me can read this and understand what I'm saying because I'm a straightforward speaker and I speak my mind in the same way I write a one sentence blog.
E-mail, IM, blog/forum comments, and telephone (a certainly dialogue form of communication) are notorious for their lack of appropriate guides for meaning. Face to face communication solves this issue by adding very quick responses, control over who gets to talk when, and facial expressions which help a lot for context and meaning. The obvious problem with face to face communication is that it takes time and energy to get to the same place at the same time. Since face to face communication is so important, people put a lot of work into making sure it occurs.
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June 9, 2008
Doing a bit of preliminary analysis, I found out that I could cheaply portscan a single port on every machine on the internet. To what end? Since I wrote a research virus that exploits weak passwords on SSH, it makes sense to know what servers exist and how likely an SSH attack would succeed against the network as a whole. Though I don't plan to unleash this attack and I don't expect that my virus adds to the already widespread SSH bruteforce attacks currently underway by malicious entities, I would definitely like to research and release data on who is using SSH. Since portscanning is quite easy, I started my server on the task. Note that I'm not releasing a tarball at this time since the software to do this can be printed in the usage section.
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Sept 25, 2008
Japanese spam is a good indicator of text in Japanese language. It is also very good tool for understanding common Japanese speech. Most spam is designed to trick the recipient into e-mail or visiting a site. Unlike English spam, most Japanese spam is extremely well-written, targeted at the net savvy and quite well-educated Japanese audience. Also, since spam filters in Japan can pick out words much quicker (since Japan uses Kanji), spammers are using higher quality spam generators.
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Written Oct 8 - 26, 2008
Research Done Apr 27 - May 25, 2008
Reverse Engineering 1 version 0.1
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Linux Kernel drivers are very important this year and will continue to be in the coming years. Multiple kernel driver projects are underway and multiple methods are being used to develop them. As a software developer and hacker, I find that reverse engineering is one of the most important methods in writing kernel drivers for devices that currently lack open source drivers. Whether the method is snooping in on communication, brute forcing data, or analysis of driver state, reverse engineering tactics are employed. In this essay I will be reverse engineering a binary kernel driver, which is protected under copyright law as a fair use of copyrighted material. If you feel that I am violating your copyright during the production of this, please feel free to contact me and I will be glad to discuss this. Note however on the other hand that currently several Linux copyright holders consider binary blobs to be violations of their GPL copyright. These issues are connected and yet immaterial at this point. Let's just write the code.
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