NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently, using about 240W of power. This performance is equivalent to over 1500 Athlon FX-60 CPUs, which would take about 250kW.

This is a really cool project, and this website has an excellent graphical replacement for the "hit counter." Definately check this out. I will be speaking at Phreaknic about an idea Dan Moniz had for building a distributed computer on the internet with FPGAs. I think this is a concept which has a lot of potential, and projects like this hash cracker are just the tip of the iceberg.

Junk Hacked... FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker...

SOA you thought you still had a soul, eh?

In an economy more and more populated by "knowledge workers", one would expect the productivity and real income of employees to move upward together, as an increasingly skilled workforce benefits from its own improved efficiency. But since 1995, the year when the "new economy" based on information technology began to take off, incomes have not kept up with productivity, and during the past five years the two have spectacularly diverged. Between 1995 and 2006, the growth of employee productivity exceeded the growth of employee real wages by 340 percent. Between 2001 and 2006, this gap widened alarmingly to 779 percent.

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Nowhere have "Enterprise Systems" technologies been more rigorously applied to the white-collar workplace than in the health care industry. The practices of managed care organizations (MCOs) have provided a chilling demonstration of how enterprise systems can affect the work of even the most skilled professionals, in this case the physician.

For-profit health care providers that relied on this kind of standardization, such as Aetna and Humana, performed significantly worse than their counterparts in the treatment or prevention of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But many of these health care companies think that ES technologies have made them profitable, and it seems unlikely that these practices will be discarded anytime soon.

In The Culture of the New Capitalism, a book based on a series of lectures given at Yale in 2004, Richard Sennett describes how the widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.

The spread of ES has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

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The evidence themselves suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Here the purpose of the personality tests administered by career coaches becomes clear. They are useless as measures of ability and experience, but they may be reliable indicators of those who are "cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient." The dismal experiences of many middle-aged job seekers suggest that corporations would rather find conformists among younger workers who haven't been discarded by employers and aren't skeptical about their work.

They're Micromanaging Your Every Move

There's all kinds of practical uses for a dye that's only visible to digital chips, but we like all the mischief that could be wrought.

This came up in a discussion I had with some friends this week about anti-counterfeiting technologies. Of course, this immediately lead to They Live references. I urge you not to click on that wikipedia link, BTW, unless you plan to spend the next half an hour lost in a wikihole that ranges from the Tachistoscope to Andre the Giant has a Posse.

Kameraflage - Digital Camera Visible Only | productdose.com

Dagmar writes:

A few months ago a torrent site broke the news that quite possibly, one of the companies currently engaging in prosecuting copyright violations, might have just set up a website for the sole purpose of providing users on the internet with copyright material to violate, willy-nilly.

...basically, facilitating the very illegal actions they were pursuing damages for in court. (Boy howdy is that illegal. Wow.) So of course, it would be very bad for them if this were actually happening.

The company, MediaDefender, denied it completely.

(time passes)

It turns out the report was, in fact, true.

In one of the most spectacular security leaks I've ever seen, somehow, 700Mb of the company's internal emails found their way into a bunch of torrent streams and are winging their way around the interwebs right this very moment.

I would imagine that right about now, to the executive management over there, the internet has just opened up and poured thousands upon thousands of kittens into their offices and homes... and they're allergic.

O. M. G. MediaDefender effs the canine

Russian artists from Moscow presented in London a totally useless but somehow cool device: goggles that you can put on and feel like somebody from "cyberspace."

Click through for the video.

See also HasciiCam.

See the world, Asciified, with The Matrix Goggles

Tsudohnimh wrote:
Simply put I want your recommendations for Access Points.

I need to replace my AP and I'm wanting to explore some different options. I figured Memestreams would be a good place to get informed advice. I've got plenty of experience with the enterprise class HP's and Cisco APs as well as the SOHO market usual suspects...Linksys, Dlink, and Netgears but I want your recommendations.

Their are a ton of vendors from Buffalo to Aruba and I'd like to know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

For what application? Corporate network or home? IS there really much that differentiates these products? In the home basically you'd want WPA and some basic firewall rules. If you're a super nerd you might get one of the Linksys "L" models that lets you load an open source linux distro and do a bunch of QoS and management stuff with it. See this.

RE: AP Recommendations?

The military schedule synchronizes with the political one. By this time next year, if Iraq has not turned the corner, a good guess is that the Republican presidential nominee will be facing a choice: Promise to wind down the war, or lose the election. Whichever choice the nominee makes, the die will be cast.

Democrats have every reason to be angry at Bush's evasion of political accountability for the mess he has made in Iraq. Democrats, Republicans, and all other Americans have every reason to be angry at Bush for making the mess to begin with.

But anger does not justify impatience. If Petraeus says he needs more time, he should get it. If he fails, a course correction won't be long in coming. The 22nd Amendment has seen to that.

Reason Magazine - Be Angry—but Patient

noteworthy wrote:

“Many times the problems you see that you try to correct are not the root causes of the problem,” he said.

We could be talking about a lot of things, but in this case, this is the CIO for the US Customs Agency, and he is talking about a faulty NIC at LAX.

I'm really growing tired of the use of the word "hacker" in this context. I talk about computer security issues with industry and the press on nearly a daily basis and I never, ever use the word hacker. It is deeply misleading to use the word hacker when you mean to say "computer intruder" or "computer criminal."

I recently saw an FBI agent present on computer security issues and it was "hacker" this and "hacker" that for 20 odd minutes. I came very close to saying something to him about it. Its like saying "hippie" when you mean to say "drug trafficers." Eastern European payment card fraud rings and Southeast Asian industrial spies have as much to do with "hackers" as Columbian narcoterrorists have to do with "hippies." By using the word "hacker" instead of using the word "computer criminal" the FBI makes it sounds as if they aren't really focused on computer crime so much as they are focused on people whose politics they don't like.

I think there is a need here for a website, perhaps organized as a non-profit, with form letters that people can send news media organizations that use the word "hacker" in a context that has nothing to do with the computer subculture that word refers to, and which has the ultimately goal of getting the AP style guide modified to prohibit the use of the word hacker where "computer intruder" or "computer criminal" is more appropriate, and includes a lot of text explaining where Eric Raymond went wrong in attempting to resolve this previously.

RE: Who Needs Hackers?

What soldiers call the “battle space”... is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army...

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear....

Two of the authors of this essay were KIA on Monday.

The War as We Saw It - New York Times

This newspaper was not wowed by either man. The spin General Petraeus put on the military achievements of the surge exaggerated the gains. Mr Crocker's claim to see a spirit of sectarian reconciliation bubbling just beneath the surface of Iraq's stalemated politics was even less convincing. But on one point Mr Crocker was surely right. If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

The Iraq war | Why they should stay | Economist.com