Sunday, June 19, 2011

Is Father's Day over yet?

My wife told me tonight that most men, when polled, say that their ideal Father's Day is a 12 pack of beer and to be, "Left the hell alone" for a day.

I apparently did this wrong.  :)


We constructed a giant Estes model rocket.  Our rocket was "The Dude" (like this one above (not us)) a 7 foot long, inflatable chrome mylar rocket.  My wife had found it at Walmart about 3 years ago.  It had been gathering dust in the basement since then, except when my younger son periodically found it and asked, "When are we going to launch this?".

Apparently today was the day.  We put it together and went out and launched it three times.

Very fun.

After that, after we cooled down, we came home and then spent the afternoon building everyone a home made LED "flashlight" out of some plastic snus cans, momentary contact switches, LED's, 9 volt batteries and resistors.  So, the boys got a chance to learn some basic soldering, constructing a basic series circuit and we had a very minor conversation about Ohm's law.

This page is pretty good is you want to make this circuit:  http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/components/led.htm

We made:

  • 2x High brightness white LED's
  • 2x Yellow LED's
  • 2x Ultra high brightness LED's
  • 1 with a red LED and a pulsing (effect from the blinking LED in series) high brightness white LED

So, anyway, a fun day, but I'm exhausted.  I should have taken a vacation day tomorrow.  :)

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The Problem...

Star Trek Mission:  
"... to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

USAF Mission:
"The mission of the United States Air Force is to fly, fight and win … in air, space and cyberspace."

NASA Mission:
"Drive advances in science, technology, and exploration to enhance knowledge, education, innovation, economic vitality, and stewardship of Earth."

You hit where you aim.


(http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516579main_NASA2011StrategicPlan.pdf)

Saturday, June 11, 2011

4 Generations of "computer crime"?

I read this interesting slide show tonight.  It talked about change in software companies over the past 20+ years.  http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/mo-data-mo-money.php

It divided these companies into generations like so:
  1. First Generation (IBM) "The money is in the hardware, not the software"
  2. Second Generation (MSFT) "Actually, the money is in the software"
  3. Third Generation (GOOG) "The money is not in the software, but it is differentiating"
  4. Fourth Generation (Facebook/Twitter) "Software is not even differentiating, the value is the data"
I found this an interesting idea.  I wonder if you could do the same to define "generations" of "computer crime".

Perhaps:
  1. First Generation: Steal Service (70's and 80's - phreaking, war-dialing, etc)
  2. Second Generation: Steal Software (80's and 90's - cracking, serials, etc)
  3. Third Generation: Steal Network (90's up and 00's - DDoS, illicit file servers, shells, etc)
  4. Fourth Generation: Steal Data (2000-present - SQLi, carding, etc - monetization) 
I know this is probably more often roughly split up like:
  1. Pre-history - Phone systems
  2. PC's - Attacking individual PCs, PC software, viruses, etc
  3. Networks - Attacking network services
  4. Network Applications - Attacking networked applications
Obviously, none of these divisions completely work - there are significant outliers in each case.

But I'm starting to think that we should acknowledge that it has always really been about the application - only the goals have changed.  That ultimately, the problem has always been bad software (requirements, design, implementation, testing, configuration, etc) whether it was phone switch hacking or virus/cracking activity or DDoS/root shells or "modern" web hacking.