Hacker News Reader

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

It was unanimous except for the person getting kicked out. The violations of rules or lack of effort was given ample warning to be corrected.

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

He used spacerog

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

My space in Cambridge is not on the list. It’s hastypastry.net. Been there for 20 years. It’s private so no need to advertise. I think it’s good to be on these lists so people know hacker spaces exist

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

If you are in the Bay Area during RSA Conference, Space Rogue and me, Weld, are going to be fireside chatting and signing books at the W Hotel. Come get one and hang out! https://info.veracode.com/rsa-2023-book-signing.html

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

In the 90s the L0pht was not commercial and was funded as a hobby. Nearing 2000 we wanted to make it our day job and not a hobby and transition from to jobs we all had working for someone else. It was the beginning of my journey to entrepreneurship but this transition was very rocky. Manu didn’t survive. It was a huge learning experience documented in Space Rogue’s book.

weldon The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace

The L0pht had no leadership. Only partners that paid rent and utilities. You had to pay to cover your share of expenses but also contribute with sweat equity. We ended up kicking out a couple of people that ceased to contribute to the common good even if they paid.

weldon L0phtCrack Is Now Open Source

Hashcat can’t dump password hashes. L0phtcrack can and it has been a core feature for 20 years. I suppose a decent career is founding a security unicorn, Veracode. :)

weldon L0phtCrack Is Now Open Source

The idea behind the weak license protection was hackers could crack it but it would keep the govt and corps honest.

weldon BBS Graphics History: Pretty awesome, until the web showed up

In 1986 I was a developer for IBM's IBM PC support BBS. You could access knowledge base articles and patches. At that time we wanted to add graphics and were looking at adding NAPLPS support.

weldon Bosch Smart glasses: A tiny laser array paints images directly onto your retina

The next evolution will be implanted direct optical nerve stimulation. Should I hold out?

weldon Dissidents Are Using Shortwave Radio to Broadcast News into China

It won't be long till dissidents are using FT8. Audio is dead. http://www.arrl.org/news/ft8-mode-is-latest-bright-shiny-obj...

weldon Unhackable: New chip stops attacks before they start

This would only seem to protect from memory corruption vulnerabilities that are exploited. I don't see how this would protect from the most common vulns: SQLi, command injection, crypto implementation weaknesses, OWASP top 10. Would this even protect against sensitive data leakage like the Heartbleed vuln?

weldon Mathematicians have found a new way to multiply two numbers together

The paper - https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02070778/document

weldon Learning from a Year of Security Breaches

Great article! For those interested in security debt and how it relates to startups, I wrote this in 2011: https://www.veracode.com/blog/2011/02/application-security-d... and presented it that year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdiiXgvz_U This predates by a year the referenced security debt presentation which has much of the same material uncited.

weldon Jennifer Lawrence to Play Elizabeth Holmes in Movie about Theranos

It would be great if they case a Muslim woman to play Holmes.

weldon Odds are we're living in a simulation, says Elon Musk

The "White Christmas" episode of "Black Mirror" touched on the subject of ethics towards AIs. Highly recommended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)

weldon Finnish Filmmakers Gave a Drone a Chainsaw

Combine this with a vulnerability that allows you to take over a professional drone and it could get messy.

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Rodd...

weldon Speaker Break In: Fact or Fiction? (2005)

Then there are people who think it takes so long for their DAC to reach the sweet spot after being powered on that they transport it to shootout on UPS so the unit only needs an hour to acclimate to its new environment. http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f6-dac-digital-analog-conv...

weldon Extracting the SuperFish certificate

Looks like the technology used by Superfish is SSL Digestor by Komodia.com

weldon Processed foods that dilute protein content subvert our appetite control systems

People are eating more, hence the 8% increase in carb/fat consumption. But since they are actually getting a hair less protein it means people must be eating food with less protein in it on average.

weldon Does innovation happen in Bay area only?

Didn't the innovation of Napster, Facebook and Dropbox happen in Boston/Cambridge. It was execution that happened in Bay Area. Then there's the ones that stayed: VistaPrint, Hubspot, Kayak, Demandware, TripAdvisor. Veracode stayed and we will hopefully soon enter the big boy club.

weldon Adafruit CEO Limor Fried named Entrepreneur magazine Entrepreneur of 2012

I first met Ada at the Boston 2600 meetup in Harvard Sq in 1992. I think she was 14. Deth Veggie from Cult of the Dead Cow introduced her to me. He said he could tell she was going to amount to something big. Heh. Congrats Ada!

weldon Changes In Stair Design Could Help Fight Obesity

Oh please. If you can't walk a little further and find the stairs and open a door you aren't going to climb 3 or for 4 flights. The lazy are lazy for a reason.