Kitsune and Friends

Well, its clear. To me anyway. The best two remix artists in the new electro scene are van she tech and riot in belgium. I can’t really overstate this enough. Go to hypem.com and search for either one of these bands and you’ll see what I mean. My current favorite songs:

yelle a cause des garcons riot in belgium mix
kim – wet ‘n’ wild (riot in belgium remix)
riot in belgium – la musique (van she tech)
foals – hummer
crystal castles – knights (some remix can’t remember right now)
dragonette – get around (midnight juggernauts)
sneaky sound system- i love it (riot in belgium)

Kitsune Maison is a record label of all things wonderful out of Paris, and they released their fourth compilation album last week. I _highly_ recommend it. Every song (except one) is amazing. Check out the promo mix and you’ll get the flava…

Hype Machine

Okay. We all know about http://hypem.net (if you don’t you are living in a cave). But seriously. This is the greatest thing ever. I remember finding out about it a while back, checking it out by listening to songs on the front page and getting disappointed and giving up. Wow, it turns out music that most people think is cool, actually really sucks. SHOCKING. So what I didn’t do is try searching for some songs that I really love, and then listening to other songs within the results, or from the blogs that had posted said songs.

Wow, this changes things.

So I’m working my way through all the van she tech remixes right now. In general, they really are as good as music gets (with some exceptions).

Check out this song!

Kim – wet n’ wild (riot in belgium mix) Holy crapoly this is the best song ever!

w00t

A new era

So I am going to re-purpose this blog into talking about a lot of other things that I previously didn’t discuss. In particular I want to talk about music and keep a record of my stumbling towards being a DJ, or a musician.

So in particular I am very much into “new electro” music at the moment. In particular some of the following bands.

Sneaky Sound System
The Presets
The Klaxons
Mstrkrft

These groups are born out of the electroclash sounds of the early 2000 years (00,01) which is in turned based on 80s electro and new wave. In particular bands like Ladytron, The Faint and Soviet were some of my favorites in the early electroclash years.

My music tastes have finally found a new realm of uncharted territory and it is as exciting as discovering goth + industrial for the first time when I was in college. So I will be delving into this genre with much energy, with the intention on discovering it, DJing it, and perhaps someday actually creating it.

I’ll leave you with my current favorite track:

Mind Radio Episode 1 Podcast Live

So I decided to do a podcast just for the hell of it. This is my first episode and while the music is good, the production quality sucks. I am working on my issues with my faint mic and the big volume differences between certain parts. I apologize in advance for any sudden changes in volume, but all in all it should be fairly enjoyable.

The podcast feed is available at:

http://www.asymmetric-industries.org/rss/rss.xml

edit: This is no longer with us. Sorry kids.

Expiring ACLs

The biggest problem with firewall rules or ACLs is that, even with a default deny policy, over time your network becomes less secure. One way to overcome this problem would be to have policies that can have (optional) attributes to expire after some time. When used correctly this could help this problem. It could also create a massive headache for troubleshooting issues

–

The longer I live the more I realize that the amount of time that you truly understand the world is measured in minutes. Over a lifetime these minutes become no more than hours. After a movie, standing in the shower. You can glimpse, for just a short moment, the condition of things which normally are inascessible. The state of Africa, for example. The full understanding of what it is to be a child in Nairobi. Even as you have this feeling, you know it is leaving you. You notice two african american women shouting to each other as they walk down the street; a group of men walk by with military jackets whistling at a woman. The shields come up, the stereotypes take hold, the dream… is over. You remember the thought processes, but you can never regain the true understanding. This is the failure that is all of our lives. This is the failure that is my life. Africa is still Africa, and we continue to concern ourselves with being overweight, or trying to figure out how not to be bored. The truth is, this is a failure of none other than the human condition.

I went to an exhibit yesterday called “The Universe Within.” A new process was discovered for preserving bodies by using plastic. The exhibit consists of grotesquely carved human beings, all plainly chinese, flayed and presented in ways worthy of a serial killer. One statue shows a man holding his own skin in his hand on a coat hanger. Another is a corpse cut completely in half, and arranged such that he is smiling his half smile, and shaking his own hand. It was macabre and horrendous, and completely without scientific benefit. The cadavers that I saw there I am certain will haunt me for the rest of my life, as I am certain they will haunt the dozens of children I saw there.

GESSUS? :)

You have all heard of j0hnny l0ng by now. The idea is that there are a lot of google queries that you can do to attack a target. The truth is the work he has done is very impressive and it is hours of fun to go through his database and see how dumb everyone is. What some of us that secure places for a living are wondering is, is *my* site vulnerable to any of these? Enter the Google Vulnerability Scanning Engine (Gessus?). This is my idea: to take the list of queries as given by j0hnny’s database, modify them slightly to restrict the search to only your domain or IP space as relevant, and return the results in a form that is similar to Nessus output. The great thing about j0hnny’s site is that the community has ranked each search in terms of effectiveness, which can translate almost directly into severity.

So I visualize the output of the tool to be very much like a nessus run output, an html page ranked by severity perhaps by ip or CIDR block. You click and drill down into one of the ‘alerts’ and you can look at the actual google search results in thier entirety. j0hnny has also taken the liberty of including a description field under each query, and that information would be used to add detail to the output, so that the examiner could quickly determine what the actual search results mean.

Ok the two problems: First, j0hnny, as far as I can tell, doesn’t provide a nice feed of all of his queries. We are faced with having to do an ugly and not very nice site rip to gather the data we need. It would be great if j0hnny would provide his database in an easy to use form (xml?).
Secondly, if we want to play nice with google, we’ll use the google API to do our searching. This is all well and good until we realize that we are limited to 1000 searches a day with this mechanism. To do this legally, we’ll have to batch the queries into several days. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, cuz this data would only need to be gathered at most once per week.

So what do you think?

Ping Triangulation

I was going to join a game of BF2 just now when I started to think about how game servers calculate ping times. As far as I know, they give you a list of IP addresses and you, the client, are responsible for pinging each server to determine how close it is to you. What if this worked in a different way. What if you, the client, pinged serveral servers owned by the gaming company around the world, or perhaps several times each and calculated an average. Then you feed this data to the server and it returns you a list of servers with a rough estimate of the your lag to those servers. This would not be precise, but could be much faster than a manual ICMP discovery of 1000+ hosts.

The problem here is the difference between the physical space and internet space. Routes don’t have to be taken as nearest links geographically. In the physical world we take for granted the shortest path rule: that the shortest distance between you and where you want to go is in a straight line. On the internet, path cost is everything, and there are complex routing algorithms determining which path is the least cost at any given moment. ICMP based triagulation, then, could only give you your distance to the servers on the list in a ’straight line’, an assumed route that likely does not exist. This method would likely be highly inaccurate…

Mail::Abuse

I was reading the latest edition of SysAdmin Magazine (yeah fun fun) and I noticed an article about a suite of Perl libraries to manage abuse email accounts. Since this is a problem I’ve run into before, and it is very painful and tedious to do this manually, I thought it would be interesting to check it out. Here is where you can find some more information. However, as cool and full of potential as this is, I have a very hard time understanding the very terse docs. Anyone used this before, or have other ideas on how to automate abuse account monitoring?

Ethereal per process sniffing

Ok so I’ve been thinking a lot about packet capture today. So a lot of times when we are doing an Ethereal trace, we have to write esoteric capture and/or display filters to weed out only the stuff we are interested in. Perhaps a new way to do this is to add a mode to Ethereal where instead of choosing an interface, it attaches to a process, and dumps all traffic going in and out of that process. Debuggers like Ollydbg can attach to processes in this way, perhaps this feature could be very helpful to a packet capture program?