Declan's Blog

So, I decided to jailbreak the glassbroken iphone:

I used Pwnage following these instructions and it all worked well.

One app I really wanted to try out was Cycorder because it allows you to make videos with the iPhone camera. I used the Cydia installer that comes with Pwnage to install Cycorder. Running the app is simple, just remember to hold the iPhone sideways so the video isn’t sideways like I did here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q282oUWz_FI[/youtube]

Next, I wanted to grab the video and put it on my web site at home. I installed OpenSSH from Cydia or the InstallerApp (not sure which, but they both come with Pwnage), then sftp’d the files over to my home server from the iPhone’s hard drive at /var/mobile/Media/Videos. Remember that OpenSSH’s default login is “root” and the password is “alpine”. (I highly suggest changing the password using the iPhone terminal application.) That directory has .mov files that copy over and play just fine on Windows or the Mac.

Next, I wanted to put the movies up in YouTube because my home server is so slow. It was as simple as uploading anything to YouTube, but the audio was bad. Every few seconds there was a loud hissing noise. So, I used iSquint to convert the .mov files to .mp4 files, uploaded the .mp4 files to YouTube, and that cleared up the audio noise.

Too bad it doesn’t make the quality of the video content any better: 😉

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwkY1Q-weM[/youtube]

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… 😉

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]

Some days, this is what my job feel like:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMGJB410Ccs[/youtube]

found on boingboing

This is a great video from CommonCraft, extolling the virtues of Twitter.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o[/youtube]

[youtube]sP-aKSiPibo[/youtube]