We recorded Ep 5 last night, and will hopefully have it out faster than last time.  I experimented with using logmein.com to remotely connect to my desktop at home, and using an alternate Skype name added into our conference call, recorded a backup steam with MX Skype Recorder.  I stopped the recording at around 1 hour 40 mins (the show isn’t that long.. haha) and the file was around 1 gig.  The quality blew away my expectations, if after editing it sounds good enough we might forego having folks record on their end (although it may be a good backup plan should the world explode), and may result in faster turnaround.

I had the crew down last weekend and we did the traditional Rock Band stuff, but also spent awhile at the beach, as well as Jillian’s arcade at the Waterside in Norfolk.  I hope to always have friends like these throughout my life.

In other news, Christine’s moving in this weekend, I’ll be driving up tomorrow and after a farewell party at her apartment we’ll be packing every last thing she owns into both of our vehicles.  Some would say it’ll be an interesting change, but I can’t really say that considering how much time we’ve spent together over the last 10+ months.  I’m very much looking forward to not having to drive 4-5 hours every other weekend, at least, alone.

Here are some recent pictures:

The past week included one CISSP study group session, installing Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty” on my spare hard drive, and the usual weekend partying/cooking out.

I’ve been using the latest Ubuntu release since early Saturday morning, and I have to say I am impressed. If my parents lived closer than a 10 hour drive from me I might actually consider switching them over to this, although I think we’re at least a few releases away from it being a smooth enough experience for them.

I had never really run a Linux desktop for more than a week or two as my primary desktop OS before, and I believe this one is going to stay for quite a long time. Beryl/Compiz makes things look nice and shiny, as well as providing functionality.

StumbleUpon has come through once again with an interesting tutorial on how to get started with picking locks. I now have something to keep me entertained at work tonight, as the entire site is chock full of good information on lockpicking. I might as well add a new skill or two to myself eh?

Work on the possible podcast progresses. I am working on a little project that I think might provide for an interesting commentary.

More later!

Obviously I’ve neglected to mention much about what happened outside of Shmoocon this past weekend, mainly because I wanted the Shmoocon posts to be about Shmoocon, and not much else.

So here we go:

DC Sleeps Alone Tonight

I had never really partied in DC before, and it makes VA Beach look like an elementary school playground. There are so many places to go, it’s a bit overwhelming. I should’ve paid more attention to the actual names of the places we went, but I know The Reef, Bourbon, and Adams Mills were pretty decent.

Friday night involved roughly 50 people from the podcaster meetup at the Chipotle near the Marriott Wardman. It was basically a train of geeks bar hopping, and while we didn’t cause any damage or get into any trouble (c’mon, geeks!) it was very entertaining.

Saturday night was even bigger, with the entire Adams Mill bar being taken over by Shmoocon people. Picture well over a hundred geeks talking about linux or hacking or whatever with a billion attractive women walking around, and those women finding themselves lacking attention. Well okay i’m fibbing a little, but hey this is semi-professional right?

Read more »

Day Two was more about DC than it was Shmoocon. We managed to hit up some of the presentations while also making sure to visit with the various vendors and talk with some real security gurus at the same time.

Unlike the first day, this was more about one presentation for me than any of the others.

Read more »

I write this now, having slept from approximately 4am to 8:30am, but we’ll get to that in a minute or two

Registration was supposed to start at 1pm according to the guide, but it was more like 1:40ish. In any event Andy and I were all set by 2pm and collected some vendor swag, had an appetizer upstairs at the Pub built into the hotel, and hung out till things kicked off at 3:30pm.

Opening comments were by the Shmoo group staff, I forget the guy’s name now but i’ll get it later. He was decently entertaining, and basically is the founder of this thing, so he drives the flow of everything. I’m going to summarize each speaker:

Read more »

My new addiction when i’m at my desktop at home is StumbleUpon.  I’ve been using it for approximately a month now, and i’ve discovered so many interesting and useful websites through it, I don’t know how I used to surf the internet the way I did to be honest.

The other day I was greeted to a YTMND page, and usually I don’t like those very much, but this one in particular is different.  There’s nothing weird on it, just a picture, a very very humbling quote, and extremely good background music.  The theme centers on a picture of our Planet Earth taken from deep space, and the quote by Carl Sagan is really spot on regarding the human race.

Pale Blue Dot

Read more »

In the computer world, credentials have always been a little bit different from most other industries. Lawyers, Engineers, Teachers, Doctors, and similar professions have some sort of structured peer-reviewed and enforced system for distributing and maintaining credentials for the work that they do. It is a way of protecting people from illegitimate practice and giving them an avenue of redress should they experience any problems with a particular individual or entity.

Many professions within the computer industry umbrella do not have such credentialing bodies, especially within computer engineering and computer security. There are degrees, vendor and vendor-neutral certifications, however there is no such thing as the equivalent of a bar exam, or a license to practice. I believe that while this should not be necessary for most situations, however, if one is going to testify in a courtroom as an expert, they should have some sort of credentials to prove what they claim to know that aren’t possible to obtain with a credit card and a couple of hours taking a test online.

Read more »

I’d like to point out some of the places I go at least once or twice a week in order to stay current in the network security field.

Official/Semi-Official channels:

The SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC):  http://isc.sans.org

Secunia:  http://secunia.com

SecurityFocus:  http://www.securityfocus.com

US-CERT Current Activity page:  http://www.us-cert.gov/current/current_activity.html

Unofficial:

Slashdot:  http://slashdot.org

Google News (Sci/Tech and Business):  http://news.google.com

InfoSecNews Mailing List:  http://www.infosecnews.org

Hi folks,

I’m Chris, as you probably have already figured out. After a number of different attempts at getting a website up that I actually liked, I’ve settled on what you see here now. It is still undergoing a bit of tweaking, but should be fully up to standards here in the next few days.

This is going to be my semi-professional line of communication to anyone interested in hearing what I have to say, and who are or want to be a part of my network. There will be more information along this line in the About section of the site eventually, so I don’t need to expand too deeply on what this whole thing is about.

I hope you learn something from me, and I hope I can learn something from you too.

You might not notice it by looking, but we’re running 2.1 now.  It appears no functionality was lost.