Hacking Soceity

Started: 2003-06-26 21:05:00

Submitted: 2003-06-26 21:50:00

Visibility: World-readable

After a long long praise practice at the church (it helps when the musicians in question practice in advance -- the one the PA operator (myself, in this case) shows up to is just supposed to be a sound test), I headed south to Table Mesa Shopping Center to Caffé Solé for tonight's meeting of the Boulder chapter of the Hacking Society. (If I get ambitious, I'll hunt down links, but Googling might work as well.) I'm drinking a large cup of chai, which is rather good, and is decreasing the blood level in my caffeine system. (I stayed up too late a few nights early this week to read Kiln People. My report of the book and the science fiction book club last night will be coming sooner or later.

Ken (to my right) and Phil (using a Vaio, across the table from me) are talking about OS X (I'm wearing my Apple t-shirt today) and now about Qt/KDE vs gtk/GNOME.

I'd like to have a wireless Ethernet card on Vigor so I can take advantage of the local access point, so I can post updates in real time, but this is still worthwhile.

Bitscape, you'll be amused to know that the guy sitting next to Phil is wearing a t-shirt from Colorado Dark Arts Festival 25 May 2003.

Hydrogen has officially been rooted. The good news is that the cracker was a serious moron, which let me figure out what happened. (.bash_history is a useful tool.) The first phase was a ftp scan. One of our customers had, once upon a time, created an account named test; I'm guessing the password was also test. The next phase was a ptrace race condition exploit to gain root. Then he changed the root password, which was my first big clue something was Catastrophically Wrong.

I managed to recover, barely, and purged the offending account. I *think* my system is clean now... unless the simple attack was one to make me feel better. How about a little paranoia?

My sleep deprivation is getting to me again. I think I'm going to take off in the near future. This was entertaining; I think I'll have to attend in the future. But with a wireless card would be handy.