HIR Issue 10: Hacker Newz: A Look into the goings-on of the HiR Crew
Well, we obviously had some major productional slow-downs this time around. It's been months and months since the last issue, but at least we're not trying to release garbage and pass it off as a high-quality Text E-Zine. Defcon 7 was a complete and total blast, and much was learned there, both educationally and practically. There was a great amount to be absorbed this year, and we didn't have time to take in all aspects of the convention.
This year, unlike last, all of the HiR Writers that attended Defcon were able to bring full-fledged laptops. Axon purchased a fairly nice Pentium 90 with 40 megs of ram and 810 megs of hard drive just before the convention. He took two other laptop hard drives along for the ride. (The three drives had different OS's on them). Frogman bought a newer laptop for defcon (a 486/75). We got quite a bit done at the convention. Each of us made some new contacts, picked up some vital information, and purchased all sorts of sordid goodies.
We bought one copy each of NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. As a whole, It'd be safe to say that the HiR Crew really loves the work that all these guys are doing. The mentality behind the BSD's is quite a bit different from the driving force behind Linux (Availability of source code and the ability to obtain the OS for free are some similarity), but the BSD's are really a tad less glamourous, but usually more stable, and more secure. (The OpenBSD Project, for instance, is proactively focused on security, and produces what many people, myself included, would call one of the most secure OS's available)
New on the hardware list for DefCon 8:
- Axon picked up an RS/6000 for cheap. It's a pizza-box style case. Perfect for number crunching. We'll probably run John the Ripper Under AIX 4.3.2.
- Asmodian's almost got his hands on a new(er) 200 MHz Laptop. This will replace the one he's currently using (Pentium 120?), which he got shortly after returning from Defcon 7. He took a 486 to DC6&7. =]
- Frogman's Parting out his ThinkPad 720. He'll probably have something better for DC8.
On other notes, we changed URL's again. Changed Servers and everything. Mega-Shouts to Razathorn for gracioucely providing the space and bandwidth we need. "Even if you're not in the scene, you rox0r. (inside joke)"
Hopefully, we'll be able to pump out s'more goods here in the near future. We have some more stuff lined up.
Oh yah. I didn't have a really cool hands on project in this issue... What to do? hrm... Ah, well... Maybe next time, guys.
--HiR Crew
