How to prevent your WLAN being 'low hanging fruit' for the script kiddie next door

Stop using memorable WPA-PSK passphrases! For god sake the computer even saves them for you. There are really large rainbow tables out there that have precomputed hashes for most common passphrases. If you don't heed this warning then watch this and carry on with your life somewhere far away from any wireless network that I have to use.

The minimum number of characters for a WPA-PSK passphrase is 8. The maximum is 63. Very few users actually use more than about 20 characters. As well, they also choose known words and phrases, likely to be in a dictionary. This means that rainbow tables are likely to be effective in cracking the network relatively quickly.

To get decent protection from WPA-PSK, you should use a very long, very random, alphanumeric string longer than 20 characters. To protect yourself further, particularly against the WPA-PSK hashtables, you should use a SSID not on the top 1000 list (another very long, very random, alphanumeric string would be ideal). Failing that an original 32 character passive aggressive message to your neighbours works nicely e.g. "NiceBudgieSmugglersDouchefag" This will force the attacker to compute their own list, rather than use one of the tables.

Ideally, one should be using WPA2 with a radius server to get more reliable protection.

source (adapted from): http://forums.hak5.org/index.php?showtopic=12708

Ubuntu desktop colour switching behind a transparent wallpaper.

A fun little idea I had when I saw a transparent background on deviant art: Why not auto-rotate colours behind a transparent background? I am certain the idea is not original but I wanted to work out how to do it. Here it is:

gconftool-2 -t str --set /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color orange;

So far most common colours work: {red, blue, white, orange, grey, green, yellow, purple}

Enable a transparent wallpaper.

Here is the result:

LHS Workshop Upgrade :D

So as a Tuesday social turned into late-night hackery at 2am on Wednesday... a few of us spontaneously decided to upgrade the workshop, we hope you like it. :D

I suppose the only way of summing up what we were aiming for was, "a place for everything and everything in it's place". By Wednesday evening we accomplished the following:

• installed a tool board from an old metal-framed bed (see picture).
• installed shelving for power tools.
• reorganised the wood store.
• printed some PLA coat hooks on the makerbot and made a rack for labcoats.
• generally tidied the workshop.

We are really hoping that you guys like what we did and invite anyone that is good at woodwork to make and install new mounting plates and boards for the remaining tools that have not been mounted yet and are homeless! You can find them in a clear plastic box below the new tool rack.

Special thanks to Billy, Matthew Gaffen, Kaloyan Palatov.

Thanks to others that leant a hand moving stuff, taking photos and keeping morale high with choice banter.

LHS ftw

Saturday Night in East Berlin (Kreuzberg)

I have been walking around Kreuzberg late this evening to take in the atmosphere and see what's going on. I found a theatre group doing some kind of outdoor tour with headphones at Mehringplatz, 10969 Berlin. I kept walking around until I stumbled across checkpoint charlie and then I started prowling for a coffee shop. I headed to a place called Jazz-Cafe Junctionbar. The atmosphere in here is really nice so I am just chilling here having a couple of coffees. It is open until late (it opens at 17:00 and closes at 02:00). I could really do with finding somewhere like this in London.

Also I had a chat with some guys from C-Base (a hackspace in Berlin) on IRC and I arranged a meeting for Monday at noon. I am looking forward to going over and having a look around to see what they get up to.

Just going to enjoy my second coffee and then maybe head back home for an early start tomorrow. More exploring to do!

Just been doing some research about the area, it seems that Kreuzberg has one of the youngest populations of all European city boroughs. Statistically, its population has been swapped completely twice in the last two decades. It really shows and it has a really young, fresh, arty vibe about it. I wanted to find out why. Wikipedia tells me that after World War II, Kreuzberg's housing rents were regulated by law which made investments unattractive. As a result, housing was of low quality, but cheap, which made the borough a prime target for immigrants coming to Germany (and Berlin). So in the late 1960s, increasing numbers of students, artists, and immigrants began moving to Kreuzberg. From the cafe in which I am sitting at the moment it really shows. The cafe is alive with conversation and people laughing and drinking and I have scarcely seen a person over 30 in the last few hours.

SSH peeping through the little cracks in the Great Firewall

One of the HPAMakers has gone to China for a couple of months. We don't tolerate internet filtering. In fact we hate it- they even block facebook :'(

So we decided to help him peep through the cracks of the great firewall. We tried Tor onion router. No go. We tried PHP proxies. No go. etc...

I lost patience at this point and gave him a locked down SSH account on our server and we just tunneled the web and IM traffic through it so he could enjoy tasty unfiltered internet just like they make it back home.

Server: Ubuntu Lucid OpenSSH

Client: Windows XP, putty + firefox portable

Here is a guide that should show you how get the same system working: howto

1. The basic idea was to setup a local SOCKSv5 proxy from putty(tunnels menu), settings: port 7071, dynamic, auto

Since we chose port 7071 so the proxy will run on the client as: 127.0.0.1:7071.

When the SSH connection is made serverip:port, the tunnels are created dynamically and hey presto we have unfiltered internet. Speedtest from lhopki01's end indicates he is getting about

2. Then tell firefox et al. to use proxy server 127.0.0.1 and port 7071.

Then you think: hey great I am done. This all makes sense I can get blocked pages up woohoo. Then you realise that the Chinese govenment have been poisoning and changing DNS records. So you shout: what the f^&"*"£ hell are they playing at!?!

Then you take the final step to make sure the DNS lookups happen back home too: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20100121_how_to_access_twitter_and_facebo

ok_in_china.htm

3. In Firefox, enter "about:config" into the address bar (Yes, it is a strange URL, just in the location where you typically would enter http://....) After click "I'll be careful. I promise" button, you will see a long list of configuration options started with Filter input box.

Enter "network.proxy.socks_remote_dns" (without quotation marks) into the Filter input box, and you will see a line with network.proxy.socks_remote_dns as Preference Name appears. Double click it so the Value field changes from False to True (and you will also notice the line becomes bold).

Molin A0 Architects Drawing Board

Just found a beautiful A0 architects drawing board. I cannot wait to get my first large schemaitc prinout up there for inspection.

Specs as follows.

Molin A0 Architects Drawing Board

Width:1270mm

Height: 920mm

Parallel Motion Ruler

Adjustable Height

Adjustable Tilt

Foldable

Durham University Solar Car

Well done guys!