May « 2009 « Hackers For Charity

Thanks to the amazing generosity and heart of the group at Offensive Security, I’m proud to announce that all Informer subscribers have exclusive access to the BackTrack 4 pre-final, at least a week before the rest of the Internet Suhweeet!!!
Check out the official announcement here.

http://www.offensive-security.com/blog/category/videos/

Check out the videos, and you can see that this is a HUGE improvement over BT3 and BT4 beta. We’re talking one-click installs, oh man oh man…

“Up and running with backtrack”
http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/upandrunning/offsec-backtrack-01.html

“BackTrack 4 Persistent USB install”
http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/persistent/offsec-backtrack-02.html

“BackTrack Dual Boot with Vista”
http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/dualbootbt4/offsec-backtrack-03.html

More videos coming soon! But here’s what you’re waiting for…Ready… set… here’s the links:

The BackTrack release is public now. You should have subscribed so you could have had it early!

Our friends over at WeakNet Labs have announced a very cool fundraiser that we’d like to let you know about. They are offering WeakNet Linux Version 2.0 (WNLAv2) installed on a 4GB live USB drive for $25. This is a great deal for this cool distro, but the thing that impresses us most is that it’s not about profit. WeakNet Labs will not make a cent on this. Instead, they are funnelling all the profit from sales into our food for work and classroom programs. Click here to learn more or check out the cool video below that describes the program.

We were in Jinja Uganda as a family on Easter Sunday, March 2007. We set up a little used computer lab for AOET and distributed some swag. It rained. It poured. It rained so hard that day that I thought God had glitched and launched the Nile up into the air. Daughtry was in Jinja that day, too, recording a video cover of What About Now for the “Idol Gives Back” episode of American Idol. Check out the video. Check out the rain. See? I’m telling the truth. We were there. Cool story, huh?

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Flash forward to May 18, 2009. We’re in the final stages of planning for our departure to Uganda and I’m rounding up some gear for our trip. The vision was to install two BIG brand-new computer labs for AOET: one to replace the beat-up one we installed at the primary school in ’07 and another bigger, nicer lab for the AOET high school. I had been keeping an eye out for a deal on Acer Aspire One netbooks for the high school. I was prepared to drain the HFC classroom budget on $300 times 40(!) units when I stumbled on TigerDirect’s refurb deal that dropped the price to $200 per unit.

I grabbed the HFC credit card, picked up the phone and punched the digits for Tiger Direct. On the brink of spending the largest chunk of cash in the history of HFC to build a kick-ass school for some of the most marginalized and vulnerable kids on the planet, I felt…anxious.

The past months have been insane. Many of you have been following my journey, and you know parts of the story. You know about the journeys to Africa, Jen’s sickness, my “unplanned retirement” (self-inflicted, really), our financial bottoming out and the upcoming move to Uganda. What you might not know about is the stress, the doubt and the fear. Yes, I have faith that this will work out. We’re had tons of open doors, but this purchase brought it to a head for me.

Was this the right move? What about the logistics of getting the stuff there? Were these machines too nice? Would they be stolen? Maybe we should just get more beater boxes.

As the TigerDirect stream of “you’re so important that we put you on hold” propaganda wound down, I was sent a clear message. The talking head stopped, and Daughtry’s What About Now began to play.

With every word, my mind jumped back our Easter day in Jinja, to the kids, their plight and their spirit. I chuckled a bit as I remembered the millions of American Idol viewers that must have commented how even in Uganda, kids love Chris Daughtry because in that one shot there’s like twenty kids hanging off him. I chuckled because the kids are like that with EVERY visitor. It had nothing to do with his certified rock star status. Everyone that steps into that community is embraced, and those that make a difference get more than an twenty-child escort–those people get soul-tapped.

I got goosebumps as Chris belted out the powerful chorus in all it’s hi-def phone handset goodness:

What about now?
What about today?
What if you’re making me all that I was meant to be?

Those words were filled with so much meaning, especially in the context of Uganda. I heard the voice of a Drill Sergant (“Get off your butt!”) and the soft whisper of a child (“Can you help me?”) intertwine, and I’m not softy, but the chorus captured me, especially when I remembered the Ugandan children singing along with it.

But the rest of the song was a strange fit. Chris was singing about a girl, and a broken relationship. Then, halfway through the song, half-hidden but gleaming, came some words custom delivered just to me.

Just hold on.
There is nothing to fear,
For I am right beside you.

There’s nothing original about those lyrics. They’re a succinct rendition of Psalms 23:4 (The Message):

Even when the way goes through Death Valley
I’m not afraid when you walk at my side.

In the midst of all the noise and stress and chaos, Psalms 23 dropped into my life through a pretty circuitous route. I’m glad it did.

We’re really familiar with the trek to the local Christian Services (“thrift”) store. We’ve dropped off so much stuff there that it’s become routine. But on this particular trip, we emptied the van, I turned to look at the stuff we had left behind and I laughed.

The fondue maker caught my eye first. We had a fondue maker. We paid money for something that really required no hardware whatsoever. Cavemen, Boy scouts and Kumbaya-singing church groups have been cooking up these tasty treats over an open campfire since… the invention of fire. Well, actually, I guess it started when Doumak started extruding back in the 19th century or perhaps earlier when the ancient Egyptians thickened Marsh-Mallow (althea officinalis) root sap which means the cavemen didn’t make smores, but you get the point. Nobody really needs a smores maker, whether it’s branded by the biggest name in chocolate or not. The thing was frivolous, though not as bad as some of the kitchen gadgets I’ve seen (wireless rechargeagle illuminated wine bottle openers come to mind), but that was only part of what made me laugh. Simplicity is freeing, not funny.

What really got me was the CSC beach bag (which I got from a trade show) which represented 12 years of my life. I never actually used the bag at a beach. It sat in my closet, waiting patiently for it’s day in the sun that never came. In fact, on the rare occasions that we did go to the beach (bundled with speaking gigs like Techno Forensics or the Misti cons at Disney) we forgot all about it because we had too much stuff. Our closets were overflowing, and this particular bag kept getting demoted to the farthest depths of the closet until it took it’s final journey–to the thrift store.

And to cap it all off, there’s that funny brown bag, which we got for free from the kids school (before we started homeschooling in preparation for the Africa trip). I liked the bag because it had travel stickers all over it. I imagined that I’d use it and people would think, now there’s a guy that’s seen the world. I imagined myself as some Indiana Jones type, trekking about in search of adventure, all thanks to my Scholastic book representative wheelie bag.

If only I knew. The Journey Starts Here indeed.

snack that requires nothing more

Update: Although we didn’t find out until days later, on same day all this was happening, Jenny’s mom agreed (“out of the blue”) to keep paying her normal monthly support stipend while we’re in Africa! Between that, and an unexpected and very generous monthly support subscription from a friend, we’re up to 46% of our monthly support target! That’s a whole new ballgame right there! I am so thankful to my friends out there who, day by day are stepping in alongside us in our journey and becoming real answers to prayer!!

I spent a couple of hours working on our front page monthly support thermometer widget. It took me ten minutes to pull together the widget and just under two hours working on the back-end script total the donations and work out the math, which wasn’t adding up. As it turned out, the math was fine, we were just way below what we expected. As of right now, we only have 17% of the support we’ll need to survive in Uganda. With only a month to go, I found myself wondering if I had made a huge mistake with this Uganda thing. After all, I’m supposed to be the provider for my family, and I’m unemployed, uprooting our existence and traveling into the unknown.

So we prayed about it before dinner and explained the situation to the kids, telling them that it was cool and that we were in God’s hands and that this path we were on was the right one and didn’t all the open doors make that all quite obvious?

My own words echoed in my head all through dinner. This was the right path. There was no doubt about that. But without the money, it was a hard path.

At that moment, somewhere on the Internets, some interesting things were happening. First, a man and wife (who want to remain mostly anonymous) were blowing up our Donor Cloud (<plug>Over there on the right, see? That form where you can make a donation, get a link and feed kids?</plug>). Their donation was thirty times bigger than our largest cloud donation EVER. We had some email conversations with the donors in the past and they hinted at wanting to help us personally, through the “Long Journey to Africa” fund. Jen and I agreed to email them, thank them profusely and explain the various options for their donation, especially since the cloud was designed as a low-cost option for funding the food program.

We laid out several options for the money: building a classroom, funding the food program for several months and (in the smallest paragraph) helping us with our journey. The donor said to “use the funds as we saw fit”. It took a split second, but we examined the options.

The food program had a solid stream of income thanks to the Informer, the donor cloud and royalties from sales of No-Tech Hacking. Our “Long Journey” fund was struggling, but at least we had some money coming in (17% of what we needed was something, right?). The computer classroom initiative, however was really struggling. We hadn’t had a solid donation for months, aside from a check that we couldn’t yet cash because it was made out to HFC and our business account wasn’t ready.

In that split seconds, despite the ability to use the check as we saw fit, we Jen and I knew the money would go towards a computer classroom. The story didn’t stop there, however.

At almost the same time (right after dinner), another donor was making the single largest donation ever into our family fund. There was no decision to be made. The donor wanted us to use the money for our one-time living expenses.

The lesson was clear enough to me. This would not be an easy path. It would be littered with tough decisions and potential distractions, but in that moment, my faith was bolstered.

We’re still at 17% of what we’ll need every month and I do find myself checking the monthly subscription totals in the “Long Journey” fund, but we’ve taken another step forward, and we remain faithful that either a financial miracle will occur or that we’ll at least be given the strength to carry on if the money doesn’t come.

Either way, we’ll be in Uganda in less than a month!

We’re headed to Uganda on June 15th to settle as a family, and we’re welcoming our first HFC filed trip during the first weeks in August to install computer classrooms and help fix up the AOET’s administration computers. (More on this trip later).

Here’s a list of item’s we’re trying to get for our trip. We need to have this stuff in-hand by June 1, so if we don’t have this stuff, we’re going to start buying the most critical items. Help us out if you have any of this stuff laying around and save us a ton of money! Send all donations to AOET’s ICO PO Box in Maryland:

AOET – International Correspondence Dept.
P.O. Box 1833
Sykesville, MD 21784

Computer Hardware

• IDE to USB adapter and power supply (must do 240v, for connecting IDE devices to USB for backup/diagnostics)
• Minimalist cases/sleves for full-size IDE drives (slim plastic case to cover electronics when drive is used with USB-IDE adapter)
• Laptop locks (aka “Kensington/Targus”)
• USB thumb drives, 1GB or larger
• SD Cards (512MB or larger, for netbooks)
• SMALL multicard flash readers
• USB anti-virus thumb drives (free everywhere with contract, for A/V in the offices. One virus can wipe out children’s records, stranding them)
• Waterproof / wireless webcam (an idea for a webcam in the field)
• External USB CD-ROM drives (First choice: portable, USB powered. Second choice: powered, 110-240. For classroom netbook updates and installs.)
• 1TB or larger external USB or Firewire drives (110-240)
• Projector (at least SVGA, 800×600), Smallish “Portable” projector, (going in a suitcase with a weight limit) must have many hours of bulb left and / or extra bulbs. Second choice: LED handheld projector (low lumens, 10,000 hour plus “bulb”)
• Flatbed scanner (small, small, small, but capable of scanning 8.5×11 sheet, USB-powered)

Computer Software

• Mac OSX 10.5 Install Disk / ISO image *for PowerPC* (for my kids’ laptop)
• Windows XP disks w/license (Home/Pro, whatever, for AOET office to allow them to do Windows updates)
• CD/DVD – based curriculum of any kind

Electronics

• Solar chargers of any kind (cell phone, accessories, etc), fancy solar bookbags welcome! =)
• Power plug adapters (US in, UK out): PLugs in Uganda accept British 3-prong rectangular blade plug, often referred to technically as BS 1363 (British 13 A/230-240 V 50 Hz earthed and fused), see http://www.kropla.com/!g.htm for more information. Also, three-prong UK style plugs (see here: http://international-electrical-supplies.com/uganda-plug-adapters.html)

Camera equipment (for filming child interviews, creating HFC promotional videos, blogs)

• Collapsable camera monopod
• Wireless lapel mics
• Microphone windscreen foams for lapel and handheld mics
• 37mm (camcorder) lenscap
• camcorder “shotgun” mic
• Basic field audio mixer (small, 110-240)
• Any equipment for the Canon VIXIA HF10 camcorder (batteries, lenses, accessory shoes, etc)
• Class 6 SDHC cards (for camcorder)
• SMALL, portable built-on lighting for camcorder

Hardware

• GOOD padlocks / combination locks (consult a TOOOL member if you aren’t sure… no Master locks, etc)

We’ve got to pack light for Africa so we made a proclamation: 15 DVD’s per person, for a total of 75 DVD’s, or one good size DVD folder. I was stressing that whole thing, and initially I chose to forget about my absolute favorites because there were all series releases and there were WAY too many discs. So I picked up my single flick favorites like Fight Club, War, So Close, Banlieu 13 and the Matrix (first movie). But my family amazed me. Without me saying anything, the kids picked Lord of the Rings (all 8 discs), Pirates of the Caribbean (6 discs) and the Star Wars Trilogy (6 discs). But it got better… my wife picked the Ocean’s series, the Transporter series and Jenny picked the Bourne series. ALL my favorites were accounted for! So for an added bonus I grabbed the bonus discs for Pirates and LOTR. Now all we have to do is make sure we don’t spend the whole trip as African couch potatoes. Of course, I also have to be a good husband and watch Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice and the other Jane Austen flicks for my beautiful wife.

I wanted to post some pictures of our storage unit. Yeah, I know… a storage unit. But this thing is a big deal to us. It’s a 10×12 in a loft donated by a friend of ours, which means we pay no rent. It’s a great little space, but it needed some work. The walls were lined with these very sturdy shelves, which took up a ton of space:

So Trevor (my son), Bryce (a family friend) and I ripped out the shelves. There was lots of gruntin’ and yankin’ to get to this point:

The room looks absolutely cavernous, doesn’t it? Notice anything in the photo?

Did you see what I saw? That little white box? Our storage unit has the Internets! =)

Not that I would actually use the Internets from my storage unit, especially now that it looks like this.

The thing is, it’s really quite hard to fit everything an American family of six owns into a 10×12. I mean EVERYTHING. We have to rent the house empty so this storage unit has to fit all of our stuff. We’re having to make some tough choices (more on that in another post) but the point is that we’ve really come face-to-face with what’s actually important to us. And the result of this exercise is that we all realize home much crap a typical American family can accumulate. Before this move, I had gotten to the point that I scoffed people that had a two-car garage packed with crap and multiple storage units to store more crap. My time in Uganda revealed that the vast majority majority of the world’s population can fit all of their possessions into something smaller than a grocery bag. So it’s an interesting time, although I doubt we’ll leave any extra space in the storage unit just on principal. More later.

Selling the heart of my Atari 2600 collection was really tough. I spent YEARS at flea markets and thrift stores trolling for stuff to round out my collection. When we were first married, my wife and I would go to flea markets and thrift shops at least once a week. On some weekends we would spend hours travelling from one flea market to the next. She loved old, delicate things, and I love old, 8-bit things. My fascination with the Atari started when I was a kid. I remember taping yellow construction paper to my old B&W TV in an attempt to recreate the game Adventure. I had no idea how they “got” those images onto the screen. My memory of my youth faded after I got a car, got a job and got married. But after seeing an Atari cartridge in the thrift store, my mind instantly triggered memories of people (I play Atari with), places (where I played Atari), music (that was on the radio when I played Atari) and even smells (that I smelt or dealt while I was playing Atari). That triggered my fanatical collecting. Eventually, my closets were stuffed with loads of things from that era: ColecoVision, Atari, Intellivision and more. It was way too much, but I had lots of happy hours with those games, although I know I spent way too much time collecting it all. I would have been better off talking to my wife for hours and sipping tea. But one relationship did blossom as a result of my maniacal collecting–I formed a great friendship with Joe Grand thanks to my recognition of the 8-bit beastie on a button he wore.

I started selling stuff off to raise money for my first Uganda trip, and remember being disappointed that it didn’t go for more. I was so disappointed in the payoff that I horded my collection after that. Besides, I reasoned, I want my kids to know about this stuff. My kids (and I) play the Wii and the XBOX360. So now that we’re scaling back in preparation for our year in Africa, the last of my collection is going. I gotta admit, it hurts, but space is limited and after all, it’s just stuff. I’ll be selling my rares and prototypes next week I’m not expecting much for them. But I do hope that one day when I’m old and Alzheimered, some kind soul will bring me a boxed copy Raiders of the Lost Ark so I can remember the kids I played with in the farmhouse and that blasted “Sweet Dreams” song by the Eurythmics. Just don’t bring me a copy of Atari 2600 Pac-Man. That one reminds me of Craig and smell of the week-old Doritoes he had lodged in his braces.

This is one of Johnny’s most “famoustest” talks ever, and this is the evolution, which Johnny presents to audiences all over the world! Now it’s available as a video exclusively to Informer subscribers! Enjoy!

The link and password to the video are:

[private]
Link: http://vimeo.com/4616236

Password: n0techh@ck
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