3dPO, our newest robot is alive and well! Yep, these are all playing back at real-time speed. w00t!
Swiss ‘white’ Trojan programs
To make a short story shorter, Ruben Unteregger is a swiss programmer has spent the last 7 years working for a branch of the Swiss government (Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) ) to create a so-called ‘white’ trogan program to sniff and scan VOIP calls. Since much of VOIP (such as Skype) are encrypted, this means he was was writing a client-side Trojan, which would record calls to mp3 files without the computer owners consent or knowledge.
As usual, if there is a way to break encryption, it will be skipped in favor of grabbing the data before/after encryption happens. Being an awesome human being(tm), Ruben Unteregger released MegaPanzer to the public, and has done a good interview explaining in simple I-have-to-explain-it-to-my-mom language what the whole thing is about. It’s an interesting interview, and worth the read. Other coverage is also here.
Or you can watch the nifty ‘How to take over an e-banking session in 7 easy steps” video if you are lazy.
How to Plunder a Bank Account with Megapanzer 0.1 – I’m not such a fan of this web player……
PLUG Into Hive 76
Tonight PLUG and Hive 76 meet for our monthly collaborative meeting, entitled: “PLUG Into Hive 76”. Expect extreme amounts of fun and possibly kernel debugging. Or not. In any case stop by at 7 PM this evening. We’ll be brainstorming about projects and future project ideas.
Photos from Open Hours
One of the Atom (or is that Adams?) took some photos of our open hours last night. The place was packed with people working on our MakerBot, frabjous, LED lighting for our newspaper box, and all sorts of other trouble. We also spent some time deciding on new membership rules, which will be posted in a few days once everyone has had a chance to give some input.
If you want to see what 11 crazy hackers working on 4 separate projects squeezed in one 10×20 room look like, you should check ’em out.
Hive76 Meeting (and stuff)
Wednesday we had a Hive76 scrum (a mini management meeting) and Open Hours, as we do every week. But unlike every week, this time we have a fresh in the box MakerBot to unpack and mess with. Also, I grabbed some photos of the occasion. If you are at least kind-of friends, want to help build this thing, and have some technical, software, or 3d modeling skill, come on out Saturday and help get our MakerBot put together and online!
Water Rockets, Boosted!
Just in time for the Make:Philly BBQ this Sunday, here’s an article on building a water rocket with passive, drop-away boosters. According to the article, these rockets have been successfully launched over 600 feet. Check out the link for more details, and be sure to come out for Make:Philly BBQ and bring your rockets!
Python Hacking
Python hacking was a success. After a few hours of messing around B-Man and I managed to get a good cross-platform version of tab completion running on OS X/Windows/Linux all. It’s the first version of full cross platform tab completion I’ve run across. If anyone has shown me an earlier version of the same thing, I’d be keen to see how someone else did it.
Python hacking night was a success, we brought some new functionality into the world, and hopefully it will be useful to folks. Catch you at the next one.
MakerBot Workshop #2
The MakerBot workshop is happening right here at Hive76, starring MakerBot co-founder Zack Hoeken. The class is Saturday September 19th, from 1PM to 5PM. You just need to show up on time, and with a laptop, and we do the rest. We’ll teach you everything you need to do a first design, and a first printing using the MakerBot. Tickets for the 4 hours class are $25 (or $5 for students).
**BONUS: If you were a MakerBot Donor you will get a discount code for this class emailed to you. Thanks again!**
Cleaning and Planning Sunday
Just a quick update. A few of us are meeting for cleaning and some planning on Sunday 8/2 from around 1PM to 6PM. If you want to help (and not just gawk) come on down and help out
PhillyCocoa iPhone Deviation, August 4th, 7-10 pm
Bring a project you’re working on or just a general curiosity about coding for iPhone. Exchange knowledge and improve your apps and their interfaces.
We’re continuing efforts on ShareUrMeal — building an open-source iPhone app to be distributed free on the App Store! You can also come to work on your own projects, learn from others, or help with beta testing :-]