teenage mutant ninja hero coders

Click on the image at the reight so see the results of our WiLDing session from Saturday rendered as a map. Every red circle is a different WLAN. The black lines show where we have been driving.

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We proudly announce that we will hold this fall a contest combining elements of war driving, geocaching and capture the flag.

You can participate by foot or by car. You should bring 802.11b, spartial orientation (GPS or GLONAS recivers, good maps or something else) and digital imagery equipment and 24h time. The whole event will take place in the Cologne/Bonn area. Exact dates to be announced. If you are interested to participate, please add a comment to this story.

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Today, after two years absence we started WiLDing/war driving again. This time we started with much more massive equipment. Most important thing: we equipped our scanning-rig with 220V AC power so our trip was not limited by notebook battery time and we were able to run as much power-consuming programs as we liked.

We had a Powerbook G4 equipped with Airport hardware and an ELSA Airlancer PCMCIA card (basically identical to the well known Orinocco Cards) and a Dell notebook with build in WaveLAN and an Orinocco card. We had also two omnidirectional external antennas, one of them the small indoor one from Lucent, the other a 12db one for mounting on the car’s top. We had a Garmin GPS 12 but found out that none of our notebooks had a serial port. So we will try now to merge spatial data logged by the GPS and WiLDing data logged by the notebooks ‘post mortem’.

We ended up in using only on WiFi card per notebook to do the actual scanning and we were missing a pigtail to connect the 12db antenna. Nevertheless it turned out that we where able to locate about one network every 40 seconds. Which is a much higher destiny than two years ago. Also now around 50% of the Networks are encrypted which is an improvement compared to the 30% encrypted networks we found two years ago.

After experimenting with iStumbler, MacStumbler and kismet we settled for KisMac on the Apple machine. On the Wintel machine we tried dstumbler on FreeBSD and then settled for Netstumbler on W2K. It turned out that Netstumbler was not able to utilisize the Orinocco card, we assume a crippled driver was the reason. Also using the “auto configure card” option totally broke scanning.

We placed the Mac in the rear of the car, with the WaveLAN card facing to the rear window. KisMac was set up to read SSID names to us. The Dell Notebook was placed on the passenger but because it is really a sub-notebook with cleverly placed antennas in the screen-lit we where able to keep it in a position with reasonably good reception.

It turns out that using two machines is really a good idea because both machines found networks the other didn’t. Generally the Mac found more networks – probably because the better placement.

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If you are a Mac user and like GPS you should sign this petition which aims at convincing Garmin to produce better GPS Support.

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Ganz neu: der demagoge ist in unser trautes blog-Mehrfamilienhas eingezogen.

Um mit Kantel zu sprechen: allerschärfstes Willkommen!

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bibclean is a nice tool to fix your BibTeX files.

One problem I had with bibclean was that it uses quotes instead of curly brackets arround values. This is somewhat a problem because I used curly bracets up to now and so a bibclean run would modify every line in my bibliography which makes spotting the real chhanges difficult.

This patch lets bibclean use curly bracets instead of quotes.

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cl-bibteck: a replacement for the BibTeX program in Common Lisp.

cool. Programming BibTeX gave me so much pain …

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… wie men seinem Powerbook ordentliches WaveLAN beibringt. Hier.

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Jurabib seems to be unable to grok @InProceedings. Example:

[c0ldcut:~/Documents/diss/test] md% cat test.tex
\documentclass[12pt]{book}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[%
 authorformat=smallcaps,%
 titleformat=colonsep,%
 commabeforerest=true,%
]{jurabib}
%%
\begin{document}
\bibliography{test}
\bibliographystyle{jurabib}
This is a test\footcite{spafford92observing}
\nocite{*}
\end{document}
[c0ldcut:~/Documents/diss/test] md% cat test.bib
@InProceedings{spafford92observing,
  author =       {Eugene Spafford},
  institution =  {Purdue University},
  title =        {Observing Reusable Password Choices},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of the 3rd UNIX Security Symposium,
                 Berkeley, CA, September 1992. Usenix Association},
  pages =        {299--312},
  location =     {Baltimore, MD},
  publisher =    {USENIX},
  address =      {Berkeley, CA},
  month =        sep,
  year =         {1992},
  urldate =      {9.7.2003},
  URL =          {http://202.112.57.4/documents/observe.pdf},
}
[c0ldcut:~/Documents/diss/test] md% latex test
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.4.5)
...
Output written on test.dvi (1 page, 460 bytes).
Transcript written on test.log.
[c0ldcut:~/Documents/diss/test] md% bibtex test
This is BibTeX, Version 0.99c (Web2C 7.4.5)
The top-level auxiliary file: test.aux
The style file: jurabib.bst
Database file #1: test.bib
[c0ldcut:~/Documents/diss/test] md% latex test
...
(/sw/share/texmf/tex/latex/jurabib/jurabib.cfg)) (./test.aux)
(/sw/share/texmf/tex/latex/jurabib/enjbbib.ldf) (./test.bbl
! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.
l.20   \jbPages{299--312}}
                           {\bibhowcited} \jbdoitem \bibAnnoteFile

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For the last months several openssh security holes have appeared. I’m wondering if “Open” means “wide open for
everyone”.
I always try to avoid using GNU software, but today
I installed lsh for testing purposes. Another alternative would be good old telnet (over ssl, of course!)

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