July « 2010 « Hackers For Charity

This officially makes me a geek. But I’ve been working on this for two straight weeks.This shows the traffic graph for our two 512k WAN drops from Uganda Telecom. Before you laugh, that’s pretty darn good for Uganda. Thanks to pfsense (Beta) we’re load balancing across the interfaces. The graph astounds me right now because I’m streaming live to DEFCON (video) and we have like four customers surfing the web at the same time. We’re right at the (theoretical) limit of 512k across both interfaces. Woot for open source! =)

I’m “at” the DEFCON booth right now! We’ve got a Skype link to Uganda and I’m getting a small taste of DEFCON. Come by the booth if you see this message and say Hi… I’ll only be on until about noon… (we’re 10 hours ahead of you guys…)

I MISS DEFCON…. =(

It’s really strange seeing the con from afar.

I hear Green Sector in the background (or is it Shadowvex? I get them confused… the ambient one..) and I’m seeing the stream of attendees. I see a few familiar faces, and at least a couple of friends, but I feel like… a virtual dismembered head on a table.

More than one person has “seen” me and backed away, like… “Eww… a virtual dismembered head on a table”. Then I wave, and that really freaks them out.

This is kinda fun, actually.

Ahh… who am I kidding? This just kinda sucks.

We’ve been without power all day. It’s a pretty rare thing for the power to be out this long. But, this is Africa. I just hope all the food in the cafe freezers and fridges doesn’t go bad.

It’s been a good day though. I got to read and hang out with the kids a bit, and … miss computers.

Anyhow, I hope everyone’s doing well. Hello to everyone at DEFCON. I’ll be on Skype all weekend, so tell the guys at the booth to get their Skype on and check their email!

I’m on thanks to a little power in my laptop and an MTN 3G modem. See you guys later!

It’s the day before DEFCON and I’m depressed. I’m going to miss DEFCON for the first time in I don’t know how many years. These past months I’ve really started to feel distant from the community. (Mostly my fault. I haven’t even been blogging lately so no one has an idea of what I’m up to. Let me fix that. Again.) Part of me as a geek is slowly dying. I haven’t really done much technically in the past year. I’ve done a couple teaching gigs (forensics) and ethically hacked a government system (anti-forensics.. heh..) but other than that a lot of my days are spent in the trenches of decidedly low-tech projects.

I moaned about my slow techdeath to John Chamberlin, a Linux guru and fellow geek, and we came up with the idea to start a Linux User Group (LUG) in Jinja. So we did it. Here are the photos from our first meeting. We gave an introduction to Ubuntu and gave out free copies of 10.4. The attendance was small at first, with only HFC employees in attendance, but as the meeting continued, our audience grew to about 30.

Kyle and Simon came down from the Kampala LUG and through the training and the after-chat, part of me came back to life. It was great being able to chat in “geek” and for the first time in a long time, I felt invigorated about tech. It’s been hard work for the past year and somewhere in the dust, muck and politics that is my life here I had lost that.

But I’m back just in time to really really REALLY miss DEFCON. Enjoy the photos.

Fred’s amazed! A Linux User Group in Jinja! Wow!

John Chamberlin makes introductions.

Johnny doing that thing he does so well… talking and making faces.

John prepares to give an intro to Ubuntu.

HFC and Linux… a match made in heaven!

John’s into it now. We’re using the OLPC’s as test machines as well. We had these from Bugembe, as our staff is doing updates.

Here’s Simon and Kyle from the Kampala LUG making intros and talking a bit.

I knew the minute it hit the ground, that was it. Jen’s MacBook fell the impossible distance from the table onto the concrete floor with such impossible force and with such a sickening thud that I knew in my soul it was done. The details are sketchy, but it just… happened.

I’ll do my best to recover the years of photos and documents we never backed up. The prospects are grim. Based on how hard it hit and how bad it’s acting, it’s a total loss.

I really feel like vomiting. Jen had really gotten into Facebook lately. It was a way to communicate with the world, and a way to keep in touch with her friends. Jinja is so freaking lonely for us that Facebook had become a bit of an oasis for her. She never was a computer user, but after two years with the Macbook, she was creating documents, emailing, writing schedules, designing DVD’s.. so many things. And right now, it looks like it’s all gone. (Most of the intellectual property of the cafe is gone, too, but that’s not even on the radar at this point.)

And it’s not like we can take it to the Apple Store. There isn’t one.

This made me realize how insane we are for using Apple products here in Uganda. If anything happens to these machines here, they’re DONE. No one works on them and even if they did, the parts alone would be too expensive. But we’ve come to rely on them and we’re used to them. Switching back to Windows at this point would be painful at best. We’re wired for OSX.

But we might have to start using Windows because we might never be able to afford Apple products again. In the US, when I was working, it would hurt to buy another Macbook, but in this case I would run out and buy one if it was totalled. But on this path we’ve chosen it’s simply not possible anymore.

I’m in deep mourning. For Jen and also for the inevitable future that awaits my machine as well. For the first time in about five years, I’m almost regretting our move to the Mac.

Jayson Street has been a big supporter of HFC for a long time, and he’s at it again. He’s taking a copy of the latest edition of his book “Dissecting the hack: the f0rb1dd3n network” to DEFCON, getting the whole crew to sign it and he’s auctioning it with all proceeds going to HFC! For more info, see http://f0rb1dd3n.com.

Monte has donated one of his rigs to the cause. See http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250665614014&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_1116wt_1137. It’s really cool of him to donate all of the proceeds for this auction. Spread the word!

The Kismet Drone is a very useful device for anyone responsible for monitoring a wireless network.  They allow you a remote presence to sniff the air from anywhere on your LAN or over the internet using cheap and easily available embedded routers.

The RenderLab has updated and rewritten the previous Kismet Drone guide for modern builds of OpenWRT and Kismet Newcore.

(Read More…)

The folks at Offensive Security (you know, Backtrack?!?) have been HUGE supporters of us in the past, and they’ve done it again. Their “How Strong is Your Fu” charity event netted over $2500 for us! This is a lot of money for an organization as small as ours, and I’m thrilled at the creativity that was poured into such an event. Thanks to the whole offsec crew and all the participants that took part in the event! We’re so very grateful!

http://www.offensive-security.com/backtrack/how-to-hack-your-way-to-blackhat-vegas/