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documentary.avi

A small dump of links to interesting videos I’ve bookmarked over time. Some are documentaries, some are short episodes. Some are just WTF. In no particular order:

Hackers & Phreakers (Walk on the Wildside ~ Channel 4)

Hackers The History Of Hacking

ALGORITHM: The Hacker Movie

Defcon 21 - Unexpected Stories - From a Hacker Who Made It Inside the Government

Defcon 17: That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars

Freedom Downtime

Defcon 19: Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin ! (w speaker)

Hackers Testifying at the United States Senate, May 19, 1998 (L0pht Heavy Industries)

Bypassing Endpoint Security for $20 or Less

Defcon 21 - The Secret Life of SIM Cards

DEF CON 22 - Deviant Ollam & Howard Payne - Elevator Hacking - From the Pit to the Penthouse

Deviant Ollam -- Distinguishing Lockpicks: Raking vs Lifting vs Jiggling and More

SkyDogCon 2 20 Hack your Credit Score, How the System is Flawed Scott Moulton ByteAssassin

Deviant Ollam "Mastering Master Keys" [HOPE Number 9]

Hackers On Planet Earth (1994): The New York City Metrocard (1994)

Beyond HOPE (1997): The L0pht (1997) #HITB2012AMS KEYNOTE 2 - Bruce Schneier - Trust Security and Society

Schuyler Towne’s Youtube playlist on basic operation and manipulation of locks

Blechley Park documentary in 4 parts

Who Was Ada Lovelace ?

Discrete Math You Need to Know

The Internet: Encryption & Public Keys

#videos #defcon #infosec #security #Deviant Ollam #Bruce Schneier #Ada Lovelace #hackers #hacking

Clickity Keyboards on NPR

Martin Kaste of NPR does an interesting report on mechanical keyboards. 2009 Vintage.

Via @NPR: Old-School Keyboard Makes Comeback Of Sorts http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100076874

#mechanical keyboard #npr all things considered

Bots and Markovs ...

Markov’s Bots ?

Here is another example of a tweet bot in Python. It’s a simple bot that uses Markov chains to compose tweets. A Markov chain is a process that, in our example, choses words from all available possibilities in a given list without remembering the previous choices or combinations; the probability of the next choice would depend on the current choice. Depending on the word grouping and source text length, the output you receive may look like a random word dump. One of the free to download text sources I’ve used is textfiles.com . You can also use the excellent Gutenberg archive with over 58,000 free ebooks. For this occasion, I joined text from two random publications.

The code below should work on Python 3 as well as 2.7. Instructions below assume you’re on a Mac. If you do not have Python installed, you can download it here. Once installed, open a Terminal window and verify the installation:

python --version

Next, verify that Python Package Manager (pip) is installed:

pip --version

Once pip is installed, we can use it to install the necessary libraries:

pip install tweepy

pip install setuptools

Also verify that oauthlib is there:

pip install requests requests_oauthlib

You will also need to get markovgen.py from robincamille / bot-tutorial. This will be the engine under the hood driving our bot. Next, you will need to obtain application credentials from twitter. Sign in to your twitter account and go to apps.twitter.com. Click on create new app on top right then follow directions to complete the form. Once your application is created, go to the Keys and Access Tokens tab. Click on the button to generate My Access Token and Token Secret. You will also need to copy the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. This will be used in credentials.py

credentials.py

# keys and tokens

CONSUMER_KEY = "your_consumer_key"

CONSUMER_KEY_SECRET = "your_consumer_key_secret"

ACCESS_TOKEN = "your_access_token"

ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "your_access_token_secret"

twip.py (twippy) will generate tweets by using content of your readme.txt file. Once executed, the script will generate twitme.txt

twip.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import markovgen

import re

import string

# readme.txt has to be in same dir as script

# twit.txt is the output

original = open('readme.txt')

output = open('twitme.txt','w')

# text generator

newtext = []

mk = markovgen.Markov(original)

counter = 0

while counter < 50:

line = '\n' + mk.generate_markov_text()

exclude = ['"','(',')',';']

line = ''.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in exclude)

line = line.lower() + "."

print line

newtext.append(line)

counter = counter + 1

for aline in newtext:

output.write(aline)

output.close()

original.close()

# end of twip.py

bitbot.py is a script that will post text as tweets from your twitme.txt file.

bitbot.py

#!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # from original script:

import tweepy import time from credentials import * auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_KEY_SECRET) auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET) api = tweepy.API(auth)

# will tweet this # twitme.txt generated by twip.py filename = open('twitme.txt' , 'r') totwit = filename.readlines() filename.close()

for line in totwit: api.update_status(status=line) print line time.sleep(3600) # 1hr in seconds

print "completed"

# end of bitbot.py

Keep in mind this is not the best or the most ‘intuitive’ bot. Here’s a snippet of a generated text from my sources.

most of them the lightness a. number of instances, to expend double the sums so collected be offered as a matter of seeing the tubes resultant. we ought to be raised next year will be seen, that. stores, etc., as have rifles, pistols, and--at short range between british german. arms, numbers, and civilization. what, i say, these declarations answer enough? but for england to suppose herself and. govern it well and watchful,. bills. in the month of may, the duke gloucester. spies nor suspected as such your security is there. them. i look out forrard, one,. concerns: and when at war, make.

As you can see it’s fairly garbled and confusing. Code I posted above was written as an exercise; feel free to add to it or re-write it !

#twitter bot #python #python code #programming #python exercise #learn python

Development Env.

I like to believe that I am a solid programmer. Like many others, I started writing short programs and scripts to better understand how computers function. More specifically, to understand how games work, to discover and to take advantage of un-patched loopholes. In the beginning, Notepad and Notepad++ were more than enough to write a quick hack. Coding and style guidelines were not of any concern, as long as the code worked. This approach carried over into my professional IT career; a script written in Notepad++ would help me complete a repetitive (and often menial) task.

These simple tools, however, fell short of what’s needed when it came to writing a longer, more complex code. This became obvious at the University, where we had to write programs that were a bit more complex than a simple backup script. Fortunately, as students we had free access to Microsoft Visual Studio and WingIDE. Both tools offer integrated features such as code completion (or autocomplete), debugger, incremental compilation (helpful with syntax and compilation errors), code inspection and code templates, source control and many more. We used MS. Visual Studio mainly for coding C, C# while WingIDE was used for Python. Many of these features come in handy when you have to spend days, weeks or months coding and simply don’t have time to hunt for bugs line by line, hunt for missing libraries or logic errors. One of the features I find most useful is the debugger. In short, the debugger is a tool (or a set of tools) that finds and highlights coding errors. While not perfect by a long shot, I found it to be the most helpful.

Some ‘veteran’ programmers hold the opinion that IDEs are not necessary. As a skilled professional, they believe that a true coder can accomplish everything and then some just by using Vim. (not starting the vim vs. emacs war here, topic for another post). They consider an IDE to be more of a crutch than a useful tool. While that may hold true for some, I tend to be in the opposite camp. After you decide to jump down the programming rabbit hole, you will need to learn the intricacies and complexities of whichever language you’re trying to learn. You will need to do it step by step, learning the syntax and structure. It may seem counter-intuitive or even discouraging to write code in a simple editor but it is a great learning exercise. You will make mistakes; it is crucial to recognize and correct them as much as possible without help. Using an IDE at this stage will only overwhelm and confuse you. To that point, writing code in a simple editor will offer a distraction free learning experience.

Now, once you move beyond ‘Hello World’ and develop your own coding style, an IDE can be of great help. You will find that features such as code coloring schemes, smart typing and debugging can help you focus on more important tasks. Using a single environment to do your coding, updating, de-bugging and deployment will save you time and increase your productivity. Keep in mind, even the best IDE is not bullet proof and may not have all the answers you need. Do not rely on it to do the job for you; think of it as a complement to the rest of the tools in your arsenal.

#IDE #programming #coding #Integrated Development Environment

dbareactions

Meanwhile, at the Delta airlines backup power generator site

A free-for-all ATM machine !

Via krebsonsecurity.com

#infosec wtfsecurity cisco ATMsecurity

Getting Data. In order to create a Twitter Bot in Python in the style of @theRealDonald we need to access the Twitter API with the Tweepy Python Library.

Here is a nice tutorial on using Python to interact with Twitter. And what is more fun than making it mimic tweets of one of the (in)famous.

#twitter #python #twitterAPI #tweepy

rewind (fp);

Back to the blog after a long absence. Taking some time to earn a degree and other life things getting in the way did not leave much time for photography. Dust accumulated on the camera and the batteries died, lonely and tucked away in the bag. Most of the little of the free time I have is mostly spent on those ‘other’ life things, the rest is behind a keyboard. Having gone down the computer science rabbit hole, I find myself up until dark hours of the morning drinking heavily and cursing re-configuring my home lab network, coding or reading about encryption and latest breaches or watching Mr. Robot.

And the blog ? The blog ! Cob webs shall be removed and content will be posted at a random but more frequent pace. Posts will be a mixed bag; mostly networking, hardware / software, programming and a bit of everything else. So stay tuned, you may see something interesting !