Observations of Alecm's Observations of @cryptopartylond / #cryptoparty

Alecm,
thank you for your observations expressed in your blog post: http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/8623

From reading your post I believe you perhaps have not quite grasped what Cryptoparty is. Please read this page which holds the currently held view of what cryptoparty is: https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoParty
 
It seems that you are evaluating this event in terms of a format (the Bar Camp) and a culture that we have never subscribed to or endorsed. So please take care to read our documentation to see where we are coming from before comparing us to something which is largely irrelevant.
 We have been very clear about our culture on our documentation and when explaining the idea to people, Cryptoparty London has inherited a culture of Do-ocracy, Sudo-Leadership, and Excellence from here https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoParty#Suggested_Conduct which derives from Noisebridge's 'Tripartite Pillars' https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Vision#Tripartite_Pillars and, ancestrally, from the international hackspace design patterns (from the 24th CCC in 2007, http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns). You now have all of the references to correctly inform yourself of our culture and our aims.

Regards,

samthetechie

A quick retrospective: Inaugural Cryptoparty London

Hi everyone, here are a few brief thoughts about last night's first ever  Cryptoparty London meetup.
Audio (3:31): http://snd.sc/OxFMv6

do you dig sks.mit.edu

Random thought as we were doing cryptoparty, apparently MIT's Keyservers were updated a while back from http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/ to an 'sks' server. I think I prefer the old service, IMHO it is better for teaching.

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx:~$ dig sks.mit.edu

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> sks.mit.edu
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- 11741="11741" br="br" id:="id:" noerror="noerror" opcode:="opcode:" query="query" status:="status:">;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;sks.mit.edu.            IN    A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
sks.mit.edu.        3585    IN    A    18.7.76.74

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    strawb.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    w20ns.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    bitsy.mit.edu.

;; Query time: 4 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 30 06:48:54 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 106

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx:~$ dig pgp.mit.edu

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> pgp.mit.edu
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- 10526="10526" br="br" id:="id:" noerror="noerror" opcode:="opcode:" query="query" status:="status:">;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pgp.mit.edu.            IN    A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
pgp.mit.edu.        3600    IN    CNAME    CRYPTONOMICON.mit.edu.
CRYPTONOMICON.mit.edu.    3600    IN    A    18.9.60.141

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    w20ns.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    bitsy.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    strawb.mit.edu.

;; Query time: 273 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 30 06:49:02 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 134

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx:~$

CryptoParty London: First London Cryptoparty Confirmed

CryptoParty London: First London Cryptoparty Confirmed: 29th Septermber, London Hackspace 7:30pm Hi everyone, welcome to the first blogpost from the London cryptoparty

Thom Yorke at UBS xmas party

Win

Crowdsourcing versus containment: a Sukey development workshop

Crowdsourcing versus containment: a Sukey development workshop

Monday, 5 December 2011 from 18:30 to 21:00 (GMT)

London, United Kingdom

Free Event: Crowdsourcing versus containment: a #Sukey development workshop 6:30pm #Goldsmiths Register:http://bit.ly/stt_lecture #occupy #ftw

Under the guise of giving a workshop the university is actually just paying for an extended training session for me to get loads more students who are techies involved in the occupy movement *evil laugh*

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