2. Robots Windsurfing Asteroids

   
   

   

   China is like the punk house of the first world.

   Okay, China, your firewall is so draconian as to be absolutely silly¹, and it causes me extra work to send Tor bridge addresses to your citizens. And your hackers, the ones you scoop up by the dozen and put on government payrolls simply to cause havoc for hackers and activists in your own and other countries… yeah. That’s a little annoying. And your cute little botmaster who has been sending bad requests to my server for the past week or so: meh, whatevs.

   But I just found out, China, that y’all are planning to send a robot to an asteroid to deflect it from a collision course with Earth in 2036. And how are you going to do that? Oh, okay. The robot is going to windsurf the asteroid away from Earth.

   I’m willing to forgive the above transgressions, because you just earned +9000 punk points with that idea. You guys are not a country — you’re a giant punk house.

   ¹ The Great Firewall of Chinese uses a method very similar to this.

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3. Botnets and DDoSing

   I was recently the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) target of a known Chinese botnet. Why some random Chinese botmaster decided to target me, I have no clue. Fortunately, the attack didn’t really do any damage because I use CloudFlare. Which is awesome (and free!). It made it slightly more difficult for me to update my blog, and I ended having to go into Wordpress though the frontend after tunneling to the server over the Tor network. But, due to CloudFlare, my sight stayed up throughout the entire attack, which lasted several days. Take that, Chinese hackers!

   I mostly wanted to say that I just tested a new web server stress analyzer, called Hailstorm, made by some of my friends over at Radical Designs. It’s basically a website (with a pretty UI!) that you tell to go to your website, and it attempts to DDoS your website, and then gives you a bunch of pretty graphs and charts on what happened. I set the concurrent threads to their highest setting at 1000, and the maximum requests to the highest setting at 5000. I gave Hailstorm the highest bandwidth requests I could muster, like some of my music files and artwork. My site didn’t flinch. Not one bit. I even Hailstormed this site several times within a period of a few minutes. Nothing.

   So, Hailstorm, you didn’t really tell me anything. You should allow your maximum requests and concurrent thread settings to go way higher. I guess if you did tell me anything, you told me that that Chinese botnet was a giant scary monster of a botnet. Which told me, in turn, that CloudFlare is an even more giant monster, albeit less scary. Thanks, Hailstorm and CloudFlare, for teaching me things!

   And, fuck you, Chinese botmaster.

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4. Basic Digital Security

   
   

   []Working off of a series of workshop that friends and I have done for various activist groups to teach basic digital security, I’ve begun to put up pages outlining the steps taken in these workshops.

   As of right now, the basic security tutorials for Windows and Linux are done, and Mac users could probably follow along and just look up the software and configurations for OSX. I’ll get the Mac page done as soon as possible, and I’ll probably have a chance to work on the advanced security pages after Defcon.

   And thanks again to everyone who has worked with me, everyone who has contributed to educating other activists on security issues, and all the activists out there risking their health, safety, and happiness to make the world better.

   Have fun, everyone, and be safe(r).

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Hacker_Emblem.png

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5. Censorship Again

   
   

   Fuck them. Seriously, fuck them.

   Blocking outgoing ports. Goddamn turdgurgling velociraptory ISP.

   Now I have to send email through Tor or Freenet. Pretty soon everything but HTTP/80 will be blocked. It’s not like I’m sitting here emailing myself homemade malware or anything. Bastards.

   Maybe if I write a stupid haiku about this I’ll cheer up:

   Make total destroy

   On Comcast’s shitty network

   Dance on the ruins

   This is fun. I think I’ll make a poetry book of haikus for all my little tarballs of hate. Oh, and xkcd helps rage, too.

   []

   Thank you, Randall Munroe. I can now be productive again. While I was torifying Thunderbird, I finally got around to getting rid of that pesky and overly-informative user agent string. You have to open about:config, and add new pref “general.useragent.override” with empty string as value.

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/tech_support.png

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6. Advanced Digital Security for Radicals Workshop

   
   

   Some friends of mine and I are going to do another community workshop on the 29th of May at the Black Rose Infoshop. Here’s the flyer!

   []

   ![][1]

   The last workshop we did covered the basics: encrypting emails and chat, and using Tor. This workshop will cover a teensy bit more advanced topics, and it’s leading up to the next one which will be on DDoSing techniques and tools and online activism. If you missed the first workshop, but feel reasonably comfortable with the basics, or you just want to hang around and listen, you should stop by. Everyone’s more than welcome to attend — our aim is to help our fellow activists regardless of where they’re at. Come on by, and bring your questions and computers!

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/hackzor-page1.png [1]: file:///D:/isis agora lovecruft/Desktop/hackzor-page1.png

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