Hacker Curious?
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| Hacker Curious? | |
| Number | 2788 |
| Broadcast Date | JUNE 17, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 39:42 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
| Guests | Darren Kitchen, Shannon Morse, Len Peralta |
Hackers get a bad rap and people sometimes fear the wrong things. Darren Kitchen and Shannon Morse from Hak5 bust some common misconceptions about hacking using hacker movies as examples. And Len Peralta is here to illustrate!
Guest
Top Stories
- The Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau ordered Apple to stop sales of the iPhone 6 and 6S ruling that the iPhone models infringed on an exterior design patent held by Shenzhen Baili for its 100C smartphone. Chinese law does allow Apple to appeal the ruling to a higher court. The Wall Street Journal reported several mobile phone stores in the city had already stopped selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus a couple of months ago.
- The Google Play Store started rolling out today to Asus Chromebook Flip users who have the Developer Channel of ChromeOS installed, allowing ChromeOS to run native Android apps. Google's François Beaufort says "more devices will follow very soon." The Verge reports the Acer Chromebook R11, C738T, and the 2015 Chromebook Pixel are expected to get the update later this month.
- Mozilla rolled out a new experimental feature called "container tabs" in its nightly build of Firefox yesterday. Container tabs let you select between four pre-determined identities (work, home, banking, and shopping), each with distinct cookies, caches and storage. You can remain logged into multiple accounts in the same browser. Each container must be manually assigned to each tab, but Mozilla hopes to make this contextual in future builds. In their blog post for the nightly build, Mozilla reminds users that they can still be fingerprinted across containers, as the IP Address, OS, and user agent are not altered between containers.
- Submitted by motang
- Sony is demonstrating the PlayStationVr headset at 30 select Best Buy and Gamestop locations in advance of its autumn release. Sony says the demos will be available in 300 stores starting June 24. It will only be available for a few hours each day and not every day at all locations. The PlayStationVR is available for preorder and will ship October 13th.
- Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reports on Ammon, Idaho’s municipal open access network. Multiple ISP’s can offer service to customers over the city-owned fiber and residents can sign up and switch ISPs, “almost instantly” by visiting a city-operated website, without changing equipment. IN fact the network’s gateways have 4 ports and each port can be assigned to a separate ISP. A pilot program of 12 homes just finished and construction is beginning for 200 more homes and eventually all 4500. All businesses have been hooked up to fiber already without raising taxes.
- Submitted by RackinRico
- Google announced it is bumping up the payouts to its Android Vulnerability Rewards Program. After June 1st vulnerability reports with proof of concept will pay out 33% more. A report with proof of concept, CTS Test or patch will get 50% more. The reward for a remote or proximal kernel exploit is now $30,000 up from $20,000. A remote exploit chain or exploits that compromise a TrustZone or Verified Boot is now $50,000 up from $30,000. Interested parties can check out the Android Security Rewards Program Rules for full details.
- Quartz reports that it is now possible to buy vegetables grown indoor in New Jersey for the same price as those grown outdoors in California, thanks to falling price of LEDs. AeroFarms is shipping arugala, kale, and spinach grown inside a Newark nightclub. A five-ounce box costs $3.99, the same as EarthBound’s California grown box. The Department of Energy says the price of LEDs has fallen 90% since 2010, and should keep falling in the years to come. LED efficiency and lifetime have nearly doubled as well.
- Submitted by tm204
Discussion
Common Hacker Misconceptions
- Difficulty
- There's no magic hack button.
- Security research requires months of digging and experimenting just to develop a proof of concept exploit against a found vulnerability.
- Unless the secret questions to your webmail account are stupid obvious, like your high school and birthdate (Sarah Palin), nobody's doing an online brute force attack against your password.
- Hacking isn't exciting and interactive. The tools aren't pretty and often times don't work.
- Intent
- Hackers aren't bad guys. We're the ones making (the world a better place) by breaking shit
- Stealing your Facebook account is of little value
- Unless you're a big industry engineer, you're not a target
- Ransomware and other schemes aren't hacking - though they employ hacking techniques
- Legitimate security research can be highly profitable, selling vulnerabilities
- Example: FBI iPhone unlock ~$1 million
- Real hacking is about curiosity, learning for the sake of learning, remixing technology in novel ways, and making the world a better place by breaking infrastructure so it can be built better
- Apparel
- Despite what you have seen from article graphics, Hackers don't necessarily wear balaclavas, hoodies, sunglasses and type with gloves on -- though the black t-shirt seems to be an unofficial uniform if you frequent hacker conventions like DEF CON.
- Similarly they don't all hack from their mothers basements or skyscraper rooftops -- really it's somewhere in between.
- Neon rollerblades are optional if you want to be a hacker. It's up to you.
- Regarding computer apparel, while common, a stickered up laptop isn't required and doesn't make your kernel compile any faster. Command prompts don't need to be green text on a black background... They can be white on black too ;)
- Movies
- War games
- Hackers
- The net
- Sword fish
- Sneakers
Pick of the Day
- Eva Luna Marini's minidoc on Patreon.
- Submitted by Tom
Messages
- I have been driving public transit buses professionally for the last 10 years, and in my experience when you are talking on the phone or doing anything other than focusing on what is right in front of you, you go into what I like to refer to as "default mode". This is where your habits you have accrued over the years take over and you are not consciously driving. As a professional driver, my default mode it sometime safer then when I am actually fully consciously driving. I have a phone on the bus for when Transit Communications needs to get a hold of me, and while talking to them, I can go several blocks without remembering anything of what I was doing, because I was driving completely in default mode. It is a little hard to wrap your mind around, but I feel like when people are talking on the phone while driving, it just means they're bad habits they have accrued over the years take over and they are therefore worst drivers in when they are looking forward and actually paying attention. Just my two cents, thanks!
- Sent by Jamie in Vancouver (Halcyon in the tadpool)
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Bots in the Belfry" |
Hacker Curious? |
Followed by: "It’s About Chain Gangs" |