eMarkLee

F CamelBak’s for $50 when you can get one of these from Costco for $20:

Recently, at Westlake High School in Oakland, Asian-born students held a mass “Fail-In,” refusing to answer any test questions correctly. Among their test answers: “Hydrogen is an adverb,” and “The President of Russia is 2.6.”

Ok, I couldn’t resist and made a duct tape wallet for my passport with the aluminum foil shielding. It’s highly attractive and should be worn around your neck.

The new passport looks the same and feels the same as the old one for the most part. There is one big difference, however: RFID. As far as what the reason is for deploying such a insecure technology…who knows. There have been various demonstrations that have proven this fact, yet we are still stuck with it. There was one clear example performed at the Black Hat Conference last year that proved this exact point. There is probably some congressman and some salesman somewhere smiling all the way to the bank. Oh well…my passport is valid for 10 years, so I will need to figure out how much I want to live with all of my information available to be accessed with the proper RFID scanner. Yes, my lazy ass should have renewed my passport in 2006 so that I can keep using a plain old paper passport, but alas I have a RFID Passport.

You can see a lame demonstration here:

What are my choices to protect my identity?

1. Break the RFID chip with a hammer. This technique was highlighted in Wired. The problem is that what if it takes me an extra hour every time I use my passport because they ask me why my passport doesn’t work? I’m not sure if this is worth it.

2. Buy a RFID shielded wallet. Like this one. But who wants to pay $20 for a passport wallet?

3. Zap the RFID chip with your own zapper.

My Way
Or you can do it the good ol underground way, with tin foil. It’s long been used by criminals for shoplifting. Line a shopping bag with foil and toss all of those DVDs in there and just walk out. Boo ya. They even banned foil underwear in Colorado. Ha!

1. Make sure you tie a rubber band around your passport. The passport has a mechanism that does not allow for transmission when closed all the way. As the video demonstrated above, just a half inch opening is enough for a $200 scanner to detect.

2. Break out the aluminum foil (side note, why do Americans take the “i” out of Aluminium?):

3: Mold it into a bag. I will not demonstrate how to do so. but will just give tips on folding along the edges and the opening.

4: You can line it with duct tape, but I think I will hold off on that for now since it will make it heavier, and also because I don’t know where the hell my duct tape went.

Voila. You’re now safe from RFID information theft…just hide that foil in your travel bag because it isn’t exactly designer. Some people say Fritos bags work the same way, but who wants to risk getting your wallet thrown away with lunch? Some say those anti-static bags that your hard drive came in also work, but there are some rebuttals to that claim so I’m sticking with my aluminum bag. I may try to test these methods out at work with my badge and see how well they actually work….

It’s here. The most exciting sporting event of the year. There are two events out of the year that I drink before noon for. One is the Bay to Breakers, the other is March Madness. For those of you that aren’t aware of what March Madness is, it is the NCAA Basketball tournament with 64 teams in the running. They just play ball until we crown one champion. Generally there are teams you don’t care or know about but because you have selected specific teams in your basketball pool, you will be rooting one way or the other. With the way it is lined up, you get to watch the endings of a slew of games for the first 4 days. It’s pure excitement, filled with upsets and surprises.

Best of all, I will get to watch the games in person next weekend in San Jose.

FYI: I, team name Shaving Ryan’s Privates, have Kansas winning the whole thing against North Carolina.

In light of recent as well as past malware such as trojans, keyloggers, spyware, and other nasty infections your machine can get, I hope you are not skimping by not installing a proper anti-virus application on your machine. While this won’t necesarily protect you from social engineering attacks, it is the most basic level of protection you can provide your computer. When you are in the information security space, you realize how broken the Internet is and how much it has changed from those benign “I’m d bEsT HaX0r” type of attacks. We are now in a world of professional fraud with real money to be made in gaining access to your most sensitive information online. There are a number of ways you can protect yourself, but at the very least make sure you are running Anti-Virus software…and make sure your parents are as well.

There are a number of free anti-virus tools out there that you can use. Take advantage of them. I currently use Norton and ZoneLabs, although I have had to repeatedly shut down ZoneLabs because it is a resource and attention hog.

For many years, I have carried a number of these books around with me (to this day) for reference. I have read many of these books cover to cover and I would upgrade when a new edition came out for some of the latest greatest technologies. Oreilly books used to be the de facto standard in tech, but in the last couple of years their lead has slipped. This is both because of the lower quality of their books as well as stiffer competition on the market today.

There’s now a site where you can access man Oreilly reference books for free online! Ok, so this isn’t an official site…but at least it will serve as excellent reference until it gets shut down. Now you can review sed & awk on the Kourne shell building a web application on L A M P, all the while using CVS to store your PL/SQL source files.

Update: apparently this site got taken down…oh well, back to using good old paper.

There is a test that I perform on all of my multimedia gadgets. This includes phones, pocket PCs, and any other device that is out there. The test is the “Street Fighter 2 Test”. Yes, Street Fighter 2 was the game that many of us old farts grew up with and hence have a special place in our hearts for. Back in the day, no single arcade game swept through the country’s schools like this game did. I remember there were entire arcade centers with rows and rows of Street Fighter 2 and all of its variants: Championship Edition, Hyper, Super, Alpha, etc etc. Then when I went to college, my buddy ODJ brought his SNES and we battled nonstop for 2 years. I was ultimately crowned champion and everybody feared playing me(that’s my version anyway)

It doesn’t take a lot of hardware these days to run Street Fighter 2, but if you get a device you better make sure it meets this minimal standard. I’ve had my Samsung A920 phone for some time now, and YES, it has passed this test as you can see here:

Ok, I watched AI a couple of times in the beginning this season and it’s been awful. I turned it on again recently to see that the Asian dude is still around. Upon closer inspection I realize that this dude sings with his shoes off. Why do the Asians on TV always make us look bad?

Update: Apparently this dude got booted…thank goodness.