-atlas wandering-
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Jitterblogging


I know it sounds like a B-52's song title, but it's what I'm doing right now. Essentially, it is too little sleep to stay awake, and too much caffeine to stay still... throw that together with a healthy dose of too much to do and no time to blog, and you have jitterblogging. Perhaps these french-fries will help my hands stop shaking.

A few days ago I took my wife to see Phantom of the Opera in the theatre. Awesome stuff. Talk about your social engineering! Everybody fears this guy, he gets an outrageous salary, gets to sing with a beautiful babe, and play nifty tricks, not to mention controlling everything! But alas, like all social engineers, one wrong move can cause the whole thing to come tumbling down... I forgot how much I love the theatre. I dropped nearly $140 for our tickets and it was worth every penny. I've always dreamed of playing the Phantom (yes, atlas can sing!)... but enough about that. If I had been more mature in college, perhaps I would have stuck with the vocal performance degree I started... but I probably wouldn't be where I'm at today...

I've been going crazy at work and at work. Dayjob has been dragging me in 8 different directions. Today it was pitting me against some oddo issues with incompatible PEAP/802.1X wireless devices, and I'm having to laboriously deal with very nice technicians who can't suggest anything I hadn't tried before contacting them. That, on top of some recommendation reports for various aspects of security... Worst part is that I'm having to code some VB.NET for a customer for some crypto stuff... Oh, if only they approved of Python or Perl.

Night job (my company) has me too busy even to hack. Yes, I know, all three of you are waiting with baited breath for my next installment of fucktcpd, but it will have to wait. I have a product which is nearing completion, and am trying to focus on it so I can better enjoy hacking again without the guilt. It's almost to the pilot phase. Then comes the migration tools (from v1.x)... and then Documentation. Ewww yuck.

To make the month even better, my mother-in-law had surgery today, to fuse three vertibra in her neck. For a normal person, this is awful. To a person whose "one thing" is horses, this is devastating. It's difficult to even think about it. Today I also found out that my friend's little brother died 3/1/06. My prayers and heart go out to her and her family. Wes was a good kid. It's hard to imagine losing a brother, or a child. I wish there were more to express what I'm feeling, but nothing comes out. Lack of content here does not indicate lack of impact.

I watched a truly horrid movie last night with my wife. We both wished we could have the two hours back after watching Bee Season. Imagine, one of the few movies Richard Gere doesn't play a total sleezebag and it's a worthless film. I guess it just goes to show that he has to play sleezoids. Either that or the screenwrite needs to be taught a bit about plot. The only thing I took away from that film was that they were all totally horked individuals... that's it. I did enjoy watching Aeon Flux a day or so before that however. What? I spend too much time watching movies and not enough hacking? I can see that point. Movies, TV, and reading are a few things I do with my family. Let me set the record straight: My family comes first. Yes, even before hacking. :) I also spend time cooking, playing soccer with my daughters, and riding horses/motorcycles. Ok, so the last part isn't family time, but hey! I'm jitterblogging. I don't need to be cohesive. Go read CTF prequals are looming I can't get a word from Kenshoto on when they'll be (gee, so maybe I won't plan company to visit for that weekend, or adopting a newborn, like last year) but it's coming. One of my opponents form last year (plato, the runner-up individual) asked me to lead a team this year so he could be on it. Along with Plato, I've been able to scrape up a really promising team. There's a lot of talent and brainpower in the group. Hopefully we can become a team. A couple years ago, the Detroit Redwings were a perfect example of huge talent but team-challenges. They actually did a pretty good job of making it work. Hopefully we can do the same. More on the outstanding bunch of guys later. One thing I'm wondering is how the individual game will be played this year, (if at all; it caused a bit of ruckus last year) and how to capitalize on the wildcard factor. We shall see...

I did submit a talk to the defcon "call for papers" this year entitled "the making of atlas: kiddie to hacker in 5 sleepless nights". Before you go thinking it's a self-glorifying talk, it's not. Several people have seemed interested in this guy who taught himself how to hack from reading... so I'm hoping that gets the foot in the door. The talk is kind of a recount of prequals, specifically stage3, my first ever binary exploit and how I got there. It is a bit of an intro to hacking for the common techie, and is anything but self-glorifying. If anything, it's more of a "you could have done it just as easily" talk. The only thing I can claim credit for is overcoming my self-doubt and committing to it. Anyway, I have been working on my toolset (like converting it to Python and prettifying it) and plan to release it to the public at dc14 during my talk. It's not spectacular, but I've found the tools quite handy. Highlights include a format string exception generator and a disassembly tool (making calls to objdump and labeling, processing etc...)

And that, my friends, is the end of this jitterblog. I hope you've enjoyed it. Time for bed.

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