Declan's Blog

So many times I visit a city and think, “man, I wish I had my bike!” Well, with a little planning and the generosity and height of Joe Gross, I was able to borrow a bike and we did 55 miles from the Mission district, across the Golden Gate Bridge, then through Sausalito, past Larkin, then along the Paradise Loop.

Here’s the map from Motion Based:

Here we are by the bridge:

Here I am crossing:

I call this one: Find the Bike:

It’s a study in vertical lines and horizontal curves. 😉

Thanks so much to Joe and Lorah!

A few weeks ago, San Diego held its third BarCamp and Dan Tentler (@Viss) and Billy Marsh (@cannibal) made a mini-defcamp challenge. Gabe (@gebl), Holly (@pomopants), and I (@declan) won last year in about 2 hours, so Dan vowed to make this year’s challenge much harder.

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire! 😉

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… 😉 There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-6FXJQgfCM[/youtube]

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2j4gvCAvRc[/youtube]

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless 😉

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30! 🙂

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me… 😉

Yes, I’m too young to have this going on:

Here’s a very cool video about KPBS and the fire map they created during the October 2007 wildfires:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7y4MlYNBTI[/youtube]