SOLDIERX.COM Nobody Can Stop Information Insemination

This is going to be a different write-up than what I saw with how Blake wrote up one of the Defcons. I wish to talk about the positive and negative about Defcon, but first I will explain why I finally went back. In the past decade, circumstances beyond my control had kept me from doing so. However, this year I decided to make this happen as at the time I made this decision, it may very well have been my last clear chance at going. In addition, due to what I consider a less than stellar experience with academia (I am about to graduate and feel that I should have learned far more than I did to be honest) I wanted to see a different perspective. Overall, I saw both the good and the bad.

The Good:
- The Villages were good for learning new skills.
- The Darknet Project, while flawed, was a great experiment to teach neophytes good skills.
- Some really good contests that give an effective test of skill.
- Some pretty good parties and one of the best music sets I have heard in the past decade. (Seriously, I wish more places would play sets like this.)

The Bad:
- The larger area for Defcon works against having small groups come together sometimes.
- Other crew members have stated that this year's speakers were less than stellar. (Due to my unforeseen success in the Hackers Against Humanity tournament, I was more preoccupied with that and Darknet than with the speakers.)
- Some aspects of the con felt a bit less lively than before in the eyes of some crew members and I do agree with some of these concerns.

Since Sunday night, I have been learning the basics of Python and some of the major ideas behind it. The reason for this is that while I do know some strong-typing programming languages, I have not had much experience with scripting languages aside from some VERY basic work in Perl over a decade ago that I have forgotten. I went in there knowing some aspects of Python such as it having some Object Oriented capabilities so that did help me pick it up quickly. After considerable code though I was able to make some initial impressions.

The reality is that Python is intended to be simple to read and simple to handle. As such, this makes for a minimal learning curve. As such, any smaller functions that just needs a simple script I could easily see myself using this. The reality is though that for any professional work I would be less likely to use this unless I would obfuscate the code, and even then my knowledge of other languages would be more beneficial in such a scenario.

Another issue is the implementation of object oriented design. The lack of encapsulation is rather troubling to me as it is one of the four major principles of object oriented programming. This does not spoil everything overall though as the basic reality is that for the purpose that it is intended for it is good enough. I will have to look into furthering my knowledge and skill with the language like I have been doing with C++ recently as I do see it being a great asset so I may talk more about what I find over time.

Bugtraq: [SECURITY] [DSA 2707-1] dbus security update - [SECURITY] [DSA 2707-1] dbus security update [Security Focus Vulnerabilities]

In the last few days, it has come to light that ten days after the Boston Marathon bombing, all phone records from Verizon have been collected. Some levels of the government have said this is warranted to help fight terrorism, with Obama talking about trying to find the right balance between privacy and national security. Many individuals feel though that such an action is an act akin to Big Brother from the novel '1984.' Personally, I feel that this is proof that privacy in the United States may now be irreversibly compromised.

Now, as somebody who saw the horrific footage of the Boston Marathon Bombing it was truly a tragedy. This was something where justice was demanded as it was a terrorist attack and rightfully so. With that in mind, one suspect has been apprehended and the other one killed. So let me ask what exactly warranted the order to track these phone records?

The reality is that when it comes to privacy, Obama has now stated two different things. In 2007, he stated that we would not conduct spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. However, this recent issue and his defense of phone record collecting has now gone completely at odds with what he has said in the past. As such, this leads me with no other option but to call him an outright hypocrite for what he has done.

In addition, the fact of the matter is that barring massive public outcry, nothing will truly be done about this matter. The reality is that I would love to see this happen as we need to make our voices heard like we did for SOPA and PIPA. However, with some politicians going so far as to call people bullies for doing such a thing, I question if they truly want to listen. With that in mind, I think there is a chance for politicians to be more resistant to listen to public outcry against this unless it was larger than what it was for SOPA and PIPA.

Edit: I have updated prices to this when possible.

After a bit of a delay I am going to try to get some recommendations on this one. The fact of the matter is this, I have been a part of SX since April 2000 and having recently turned thirty, I have to admit that I am not getting any younger. Also, this summer may be the last, best opportunity for me to do something special as I am at the point where some of my commitments outside of the site are becoming more involved. (This can be a bad thing sometimes, but in this case it has actually helped me expand my knowledge immensely.) With that in mind, I think this may be my best chance to attend Defcon, but there is one thing that may stop it.

The reality is that I don't have much of any money as I am currently in the midst of getting a higher education. As a result, I have been looking at the logistics of attending Defcon and how much it would cost to see how I could possibly make this happen one last time. From this here is what I have seen in costs:

Transportation: $380
Lodging: $300
Defcon Pass: $180

Now the honest reality is that I expected to exceed $1,000 as that was the figure the last couple of years. This year however I have been much more fortunate with regards to my planning and pragmatism. At the same time though, this is a considerable amount of money for a full-time student so any help on ideas with how to minimize the financial burden of this trip would be appreciated.

Today, I am going to blast the one person who since I started this whole thing, has had a blast coming for years. However, most people wouldn't think of such a subject getting blasted. The reality is that I am equal opportunity when it comes to blasting people though. As such, today, I will be blasting Amp.

The basic reality about Amp is that he has done quite a few things. There was his numerous screw-ups in his misspent childhood that he cannot remember. There is also the fact that he had huge issues with rage, coming off as being butt-hurt so much of the time. The biggest issue though is that when he points out a problem, most of the time he didn't even bother to offer a solution, which just made him a fucking asshole.

What makes his actions more egregious is this simple reality, he wasted a considerable part of his life with worthless pursuits that would yield nothing worthwhile. Lemme ask him what the end result of constant gaming from 2005-2008 yielded him? Oh wait, I don't need to ask cause we see that it got him nothing in the long run. The biggest sin he made however was this. At one point during this time, he was handed the holy grail of information in terms of programming, and threw it away like it was worthless. To me, he is truly a short-sighted fool for doing this.

Take it from me, Amp, when I say that Amp was a giant dumbass. It took him nearly dying to wake the fuck up and realize that he was wasting his life on worthless pursuits and was around people who didn't give two fucks about him. He woke the fuck up somewhat, but he needs to make damn well sure that he doesn't go back to the path of fail that he was in.

Gonna mention very quickly that I am planning on making my final blasts post at the end of the week. Also, around that point in time I will make an important newspost.

Disclaimer: This post is not only protected by our usage policy, I wish to give the additional warning that this particular blasts post is pure comedy. Most of what is said on here is to be taken as comedy and is untrue.

I am in the home stretch of the blasts posts essentially. With that in mind, I figure why not give my boss a good blast or two. Now, RaT's work has become rather legendary over the years and pretty much has been shown as being beyond reproach. However, did many of you know that RaT has a cocklust for Apple products?

Seriously, he owns more Mac based products than anybody I know. The reality is though that in the late 2000s, he was recruited by Steve Jobs to harvest organs for him in the hope that one day, Jobs could continue living. The end result of this planned project was going to be the creation of Mecha-Jobs, a man who could forever make new products for Apple. However, Jobs decided to end this project after finding out that some of the organs were taken from Orphans from China by one of the other people working on this project, which horrified him beyond belief that they would use 'such cheap organs.'

Also, there are plenty of rumors of where RaT hails from. Well, I'm going to spill the beans on this and states he lives out in Montana. Seriously, its probably the perfect place to hide as nobody that we know thinks of anybody who has any involvement with this stuff coming from that state. Now that I've revealed that, I think I should hide for a while so that RaT doesn't try to relieve me of one of my kidneys. (*Gets in a car and drives to an undisclosed location.*)

Recently, there has been some discussion amongst some of my associates about if Debian really is as difficult as others make it out to be. One of the reasons for this discussion is the popularity of the Mint and Ubuntu distributions by the few people who I do know outside of SX who use Linux and their expressed fear of Debian being "too difficult." Personally however, I saw that after doing the initial setup work for a Linux server that it may not be as hard as many people think. As such, I decided to do two different methods of installing Debian to see how well it would work.

The first method in question was installing Debian with the desktop environment built in. This would allow for the GUI and most aspects of the system to be available immediately. This is good for users not familar with Debian and Linux, but does not give the best setup. First, the default for this is gnome, which does bother me a bit as I have a stronger preference for enlightenment. A more troubling development though is the usage of Pulseaudio, which upon further research found that real-time schedule handling introduces security issues and sometimes didn't work with programs such as Wine correctly. Overall, for somebody who has some knowledge of Linux, the desktop environment packages are not suitable for you.

I need friends and Mentor that can teach me on how to become a better hacker...