Darren Kitchen

Paul, Harrison, and myself.

Have you seen this hacker? http://arch.kimag.es/share/65497694.jpg[/img] The technolust seems to be strong with this one.

You can replace the OS. Why is the keyboard shitty? Too small or something? Why is the screen shitty? I'm expecting it to be small and low-res. Is it simply difficult to read outdoors or something? I would very much expect you to consider the wireless card shitty, if anything on account of its low powered-ness. Any additional reasons? The battery is claimed at like 3 hours or something, right? That not enough, or does it simply not make it that far? I'm curious, as I'm considering the thing as a toy box. The OS can be changed which fixes that issue. My problem with the wireless card is more related to drivers, you can get it working on other distros but you have to jump through a few hoops, really your better of changing it. The power output really doesn't bother me. The card also does not support a few things I like, master mode being one and I get people saying that it won’t go into monitor mode. I changed the card so it’s no longer an issue. The screen is really just very low quality although the back light is quite bright. The screen really should have been LED backlit (not with the cheapest shit they can find) to lower power consumption. The unit I have has keys that stick and other units I tried had the same issue, this is fixable, but still. The keyboard also feels like something of a kids toy, the size is what is to be expected but the quality and feel is very low. Now my issue with the battery is that for this type of device 3 hours is awful, it uses solid state storage, has a small screen and a fairly low heat output. My ThinkPad gets 6 hours and that’s got quite a few moving parts and a much bigger screen, it also works a lot harder over that time. My little Sony Vaio TZ which I have a solid-state drive in gets about 19 hours and that’s also bigger than the eeepc. The eeepc is very cheap but 6 hours would be easy to get on such a device. 5 stars on OS for being easy to change Agreed, OS is not an issue. 4GB is fine for OS and some programs. bigger stuff goes on SD cards. Best thing is you can select boot device from ESC at startup. I'm booting XP from the internal SSD and BackTrack3 from the SD slot. Got an 8GB SDHC card for $30. 2 stars on keyboard for at least having letters, numbers, arrows, etc. I agree with metatron on the build quality of the keyboard. Its no inspiron or apple keyboard but its better than those crazy CE devices form years ago. I don't have any sticking keys but it did take a few days to get ok at typing at a reasonable speed. I can't stand some of the key placements. For example, the right shift key is to the right of the arrow keys, so when you first start typing on it you often press the up arrow instead of shift. Also, the tilda key is between ESC and F1, rather than to the left of 1, therefore shifting the numeric keys over to the left. Its only a slight shift but its still taking some getting used to after 2 weeks in. There are hacks out there to remap keys but i think thats a bit lame. 2.5 stars on screen for being bright The resolution is slightly too small. I find myself using the virtual desktop of 800x600 rather than the native 800x480 since some apps (thats you wireshark) make it nearly impossible to click OK at the bottom of dialogues. The screen isn't 16bit, its like 4096 colors with dithering. I wouldn't recommend using this as your primary porn watching device. The brightness is great but agreed with metatron on LED for battery saving. I find that I use it at 50% bright most of the time for conservation. In a pitch dark room I set the screen as dark as it will go and its easy to read. About as difficult to read in direct sun light as any other screen. 7" is sad. I understand for the pricepoint that its small but I'd be willing to pay a little extra for a bigger screen. I hope the rumors of the 10" are true because I would get it in a heartbeat. 3.5 stars on the wireless card for good support The latest BackTrack3 beta has madwifi drivers that allow for monitor mode right out of the box. Was able to do packet injection with ease. On the windows side cain, wireshark complain that it wont do promiscuous mode. Supposedly commview drivers fix that. Need to play around with it more. Still able to arp cache poison / packet capture regardless. Fun on public wifi. Would be nice if it were pre-N but its a standard mini pcie and simple to replace. 2.5 stars on the battery. 3 stars on the battery with a little hackery The battery is fine. Gets the reported 3 hours. Yawn. But seriously after coming from an inspiron with a huge frickin batter its a slight disappointment. Out of the box the ACPI isn't optimized for longevity. There are ways to get slightly more battery life out of it which I will blog about on eeehackers later. Basically on XP theres a patch for processor idle + utility for disabling webcam when not in use. For the most part its just "as advertised". I'll be getting a 9 cell or whatever larger size they come out with as soon as its available. Some other battery annoyances include the meter only reading % in increments of 10 and no "time left" feature in windows or linux. Hopefully this will be resolved in a bios update. Overall I'd say its a good companion to your existing arsenal of mobile tech. Cheap (both in cost and build in some areas), and full of hacking/modding potential. As I've stated before the biggest selling point to me was portability. This is the notebook I actually take places *gasp*.

It's a full laptop, just like the old mobile ones that came with a docking station. Oh I understand technically that it is a fully blown laptop, but the price range, spec and physical size of the thing would just lead me to put it in roughly the same usage bracket as a modern Psion type device. I have a Dell X300 12" laptop, but it seems a little fragile for throwing in a backpack when compared to something like the eeePC. The eeePC just seems like a fun toy, something you wouldn't be overly pissed about if you dropped it in a puddle or sat on it. Basically a psion but big and powerful enough to be useful actually yet not big or powerful enough to be a fulltime computer. I'm the same way with my 12" laptop. I never brought it anywhere because it was so cumbersome. Dispite its shortcomings (and believe me there are some annoyances to get over) it goes everywhere and thats the main selling point to me. To be honest the biggest selling point to me was the size + wifi + webcam + bluetooth headset for skype. I'm in a long distance relationship and I'm getting tired of having to be at my desk to talk on skype with video.

You're spec'ing out a full blown laptop. Think of the eee as more of a companion laptop, or big PDA with keyboard. I was just toting it around town and had no problem with the HDD because my iPod was supplying the tunes. The emphasis is on the fact that I was even toting it around town while I got my car fixed up. It doesn't matter that I've got a bangin full size laptop at home. I don't bring it anywhere because its huge and heavy (12" 5lbs). Think of it as your laptop's laptop. Botton line: Cheap small hacktoy. Quite handy to kick around town with.

Wordpress isn't borked. I wanted to post it but not make a big deal about it. Maybe I should have used a pi symbol? lol Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_Technical_Journal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_%28hacking%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_Of_Deception http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nynex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_%28phreaking%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5ESS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS-100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_%28PBX%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_id http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passwd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LM_hash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasploit http://www.oxid.it/ http://www.telecom.paper.nl/news/article.a...=194983&nr=

http://www.hak5.org/temp/Teh-DMZ--Christmas-in-Hak5.mp3 Featuring Harrison Holland, Paul Tobias, and Darren Kitchen. Merry Christmas!

I think the price is very reasonable. I just picked up a copy without hesitation. I'm looking forward to showing this off on a future episode of Hak5. The 6.5536 MHz crystal reference brought back so many good memories for me. Awesome work!

I'm sick of the standard Christmas email that everyone sends to themselves and BCC's everyone in their contacts list. Seriously. Then again it can be somewhat fun if they don't understand the concept of BCC and happen to have "interesting contacts" in the distribution list.

omg I almost died

Without a network port it doesn't really do much for me. Regardless of whether you buy from Newegg, the reviews and sorting options make this a good place to start: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.as...ame=NAS-Storage Oh, and I hear they have good deals on evil servers.. then again I wouldn't trust me data to one of those.

The license doesn't allow me to distribute the music outside of my work. Sorry.

Flickr is great for sharing photos with friends and family. Now I say that and it turns out I see more pictures from my sister in the mid-west from her facebook profile than anywhere else. I too upload my photos to both Flickr and <insert social network of choice> and they probably get more views on the social network side but for longevity I trust Flickr over other sites. I dunno, I guess I like the fact that its simply a good photo sharing site and thats it.

You're right and I totally will after the holidays

Not to sound like a noob, but what is the universal customizer? I'm just now getting back into U3 stuff with the chainsaw dev. Edit: http://wiki.hak5.org/wiki/Universal_U3_LaunchPad_Hacker Oh, we have a wiki? Cool!

Yeah, we're kinda a wee bit late on development of that one. Basically the chainsaw is a OS agnostic USB Boot & Brute utility, but I've started to think up other sysadmin / rescue / white hat things that can be done with it. The scenario is this: U3's CDFS partition shows up in BIOS as CD-ROM. Set PC's boot order to allow booting from U3 drive. May need to bypass BIOS security with commonly published backdoor passwords. U3 drive boots, loads NTFS read support. Loads USB Mass Storage drivers. Mounts USB drive's main read/write FAT32 partition. Copy %systemroot%system32configsam to the USB drive. Run SAM against SAMDump2 to grab the hashes. At this point you have the option to either remove the drive and run the hashes against some tables on your machine, or let the target computer crack its own hashes with rcrack and a set of tables loaded on the USB drive. I love the irony of instructing a computer hack itself. Anyway, all the while use some spiffy utilities to either blank out the screen or display a defrag/booting/bsod/otherwise image on the screen as not to bring attention to itself. Thats the basic concept. I've got 90% of that working now but I'd like to get networking support going before talking about it on the show. Once its on the network a lot of fun things like netcat or sshd can be used to connect target machine to the mothership for further instructions. This is of course all assuming that you can get the machine to boot from the CDFS partition on the U3 drive. So far my experience has been mixed. Our VTR took it no questions asked while our friend Chris Gerling's machine wasn't having it. Normally it shows up in bios as a CD-ROM labeled "Sandisk Cruzer" or something of the sort. Thoughts?

Which season's intro? Or possibly the 3x04 (rock out) intro? Season 3's intro is done in a combination of Vegas and 3d Studio. If there's enough interest I may release the project file for people to play with / remix.

Mogulus is an interesting concept but we can do better with what we currently have +skype. In fact, we've successfully tested two skype callers at the same time. woot.

Same here

What does it matter if it has U3. You can easily remove the U3 crap with the freely available and supported LPInstaller tool. I recently picked up a 4gb Cruzer Micro U3 drive and its great. The CDFS partition doesn't bother me in windows as I can't see the files on its boot sector, and the main 4gb partition is able to carry a 3gb set of rainbow tables. Ok, based on the above statement you can probably guess what my new toy does.

Agreed on the BS part.

I remember many good times playing that game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, at LAN parties. Looks pretty cool bit watching the video just made me want to smack the little kid that wouldn't shut up. Little fuckers. They're like people, but smaller and more annoying.

http://www.podcastersmeetup.com/ Organized by Mubix, held in Washington DC during Shmoocon Feb. 15-17. * Hacker Media.org * Hak.5 * Legion of Ethical Hackers * PaulDotCom * Room362 * Secthis * SploitCast

Virtual Console Controller. Feels like holding an SNES gamepad. Works like a charm

What are you talking about? Yeah it does. Hell, just last night Paul was tearing up a game of Metroid 3 for the SNES (Virtual Console on the Wii) and that totally made him cooler IMHO. Anyone that doesn't see the leetness in 8 & 16 bit gaming is in fact a noob.