Signal Hacker

Because they're so blocky-looking, I call them the Telecaster of handguns. But seriously, the only thing cheap about a Glock is the price. Haven't heard of a bad one yet.

I got my company to bankroll me for the SSCP (Systems Security Certified Practioner) exam. It's from (ISC)2, the same org that does the much-coveted CISSP, which I'll go for once I have the necessary years of working experience under my belt. Honestly, I kinda wish I'd done the CompTIA Security+ instead. Not because I think it's a better exam, I actually think the SSCP is really good for beginning security specialists, especially because you're required to continue your professional education in under to maintain it and you have to have at least 1 year of IT security experience to get it.....the problem is that (ISC)2 doesn't freakin' market the SSCP cert like they do their others, so more companies know what Sec+ is vs. the ones that know about SSCP. To be brutally honest, if you're looking for a job, Sec+ is probably better to have because there's a better chance that whatever security-ignorant HR person is combing through resumés will actually recognize it. I'm in the same boat as far as the CEH. I really reeeeaaaaally wanna attend this hacker boot camp the InfoSec Institute offers (gets you both the CEH and Certified Penetration Tester)....but the classroom course is ~$4000 and the online course is just under $2000, even after my company discounts. Good luck getting that past the training budget coordinator :(

I definitely support those in the US, Europe, and elsewhere who set up encrypted proxy servers so that people in places like Iran and the PRC can bypass government censorship of the web!

I thought about the VMWare route, but I doubt my POS Celeron processor and 0.25gig of memory on that box can handle it! But now that I think about it...I think I WILL run VMWare.......on my 2gig x64 laptop. I'll use VMWare on the lappie to play with the *BSD's, and just have XP and a lightweight Linux distro (like Xubuntu) native on my stunt box. Thanks for the response! :)

At home, I have an old POS Dell desktop that I've turned into a victim for my pentesting "target practice." The thing was built in 2002, has a junk x32 Celeron processor (I'm at the office right now and I don't remember what speed it is), and 40ish GB hard drive. Originally, it just had XP and, since my Symantec subscription had long ago expired, the thing was festering and bloated with malware, so I wiped everything and installed Xubuntu. Worked great! Decided to dual boot it with XP, that worked great too. Then I decided to put openBSD on it as another plaything and something to help sharpen my technical skills. XP and Xubuntu might still be there, but since openBSD comes pretty bare out of the box (read: no boot loader), they might as well be gone. No big deal, there was no important info in either OS anyway. I've seen a few dual-booting guides for openBSD on the web...but what I want to do is triple boot this sucker. Is this possible with a minimal impact to sanity? Or would I be better off triple booting XP/Xubuntu/FreeBSD (I'm under the impression that FreeBSD is a little more user-friendly) for now, until I attain enough 1337 H4X0Rness to tackle openBSD? Don't worry, I have no illusion that this will be easy...the whole point is that I want to really start learning and delving into *BSD OS's (especially openBSD because of it's rep for being super-secure), but I don't have a single box that I can devote to just running a BSD Unix distro, it'll have to share space with something.

In the Army, I've got to play with various toys: M16/M4, the M203 grenade launcher attachment (and I'd always heard before trying it that grenade launchers had no recoil.....LIE), .50 caliber M2, and probably the coolest: the Mk19 grenade machine gun!!!! Unfortunately, where I reside now in Illinois has ridiculously-restrictive gun laws already, and add Cook County gun laws on top of that. So I've given up on trying to own any firearms while I live here...the old Louisville Slugger will have to do as my anti-burglary device :( My good friend in Indiana has a Soviet weapons museum going on: a Romanian-made AK47 clone (wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it, but it's fun to take to the range when it decides to work), Makarov PM handgun (chambers the funky Makarov 9mm round that's a little fatter and shorter than the 9mm Luger round), and two Mosin-Nagant rifles (one all tricked out with high-power scope and a buffered stock, because that SOB can kick worse than a shotgun, and one old-school Enemy At The Gates one that's covered in grease and supposedly was dug out of a Ukranian salt mine from an old Battle of Stalingrad-era weapons cache). If I could own some firearms, I'd love to have an H&K USP .45 (Kyle, is that the .40 you have?) or a tricked-out M1911-style .45 from Springfield Armory or Ed Brown Custom. Also a nice 12ga shotgun, at least in Indiana, since the terrain is so flat that rifles aren't allowed for deer hunting.

Only reason I'd ever want one is because of Google Maps. It works better for finding places than any of the GPS devices I've ever used!

And about Contra....I'll never forget that bonding experience of my older brother teaching me the Konami Code so I could get 30 lives in Contra! :D

Hello all! Hak5 newbie here. Most of my pre-teen gaming was the usual stuff: Mario, Legend of Zelda (didn't beat it until I was 15 or 16 because I never could figure out where the damn Silver Arrows were hidden, though it seems so obvious now, and this was the days before gamefaqs.com), etc. But everyone played those, so I'll bust out a rarer one. King's Quest VI! One of the very first PC games I played when my mom (who was going back to school to get a computer science degree in the early-mid 90's) came home with our first home PC, back in the days when Windows 3.x was king! Again, this was the days before gamefaqs, and even as 10 year old, I was actually able (through rigorous trial and error) to figure out a lot of the puzzles. I was so damn proud of myself when I figured out how to pass the Cliffs of Logic! But then I'd always get stuck in the Minotaur's Labyrinth, because I didn't know how to stop the gears in the room where the ceiling crushes you. And of course, once I found a walkthrough on the web, I felt like an idiot because I didn't put two-and-two-together and figure out if I just threw the damn iceberg lettuce in the boiling pond on the Beast Island, I could get across, pick up a brick, and use THAT in the Labyrinth to stop the gears!!!