SOME MORON TRIED to plant a fake cash machine at Defcon 17. In case it isn’t obvious, trying to pull off a computer scam at a computer security event is not the brightest thing you can do.
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DEFCON’S TWO-BEER version of Dan Kaminski’s PKI flaws presentation was a repeat presentation of his Black Hat talk. Kaminsky, a flamboyant security research with IOActive, described findings from a team of researchers looking at digital certificates. Digital certificates are the identity protection mechanism inside the TLS (a/k/a SSL) protocol we all use to protect credit card data and other sensitive traffic on the Internet.
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DEFCON, THE ‘HACKER CON’, part of the security conference activities in Las Vegas this week, seems to not have suffered too badly from the economy. Thousands of people – computer professionals, government security folks, frat boys looking to learn to pick locks, and various other flavors of geeks have shown up at the Riviera for Defcon 17.
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THIS WEEK AT BLACK HAT, and starting today at Defcon, the buzz around process control and power grid hacking has been quite noticeable. Mike Davis and Tony Flick each presented talks on power grid security issues, whilst Travis Goodspeed discussed the latest vulnerabilities in the wireless radio networking hardware. Informal hardware hacking tutorials have abounded, so I decided to take a closer look.
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IN A BLAST from the past, a hacker named Dead Addict dragged out a bunch of his memorabilia from Defcon 1. It pulled into focus exactly how far the show has come in the 16 years since that first gathering.
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GLOBAL FOUNDRIES HAS finally announced customer #2, AMD being customer #1. While this is significant, there is a hidden gem in the press release, an unannounced new process node.
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THE VOICES IN our head that talk to us and tell us the secrets of the industry are now saying that Nvidia is going to cut one of their most prominent people. It is going to be a sad day when he goes, working with this man was never boring.
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WHEN YOU DO something wrong, the best thing you can do is come clean and not cover it up. Covering things up only makes things worse, especially if you do it in a panicked way.
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ONE OF THE few things worse than being woken up by an alarm clock at 7am after getting to a hotel well past midnight is being woken up before 7am by a phone call from a very angry Wolfgang Gruener. That was the first time the dirty underside of plagiarism in the IT journalism world directly made my life interesting, but far from the last.
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IF YOU WANT to inspect a chip, there are various ways to do it, from cheap to expensive, easy to hard. If you want to peer inside the guts of a chip package, your options are more limited, but Scanning Acoustic Microscopy is one good way to do it.
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WORD HAS REACHED us that there is an Nvidia prototype crotchtop that the company is shopping around called Firefly. The ODMs say that it will be out in the September time frame, but since Tegra is a year late already, don’t hold your breath.
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WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Larrabee, the upcoming Intel GPU, will not be quite as generalist as they claim. The fixed function parts will be two HD decoders.
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IF YOU WANT to control devices that require precise, coordinated movements, protocols like TCP/IP have too much overhead and latency making life difficult or impossible. Luckily, a standard called EtherCat is aimed at fixing all the things that makes TCP/IP unsuitable while still running over low cost 802.3 Ethernet hardware.
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LETS SAY YOU have a modern far sub-micron fab, and you need to move a truck sized tool from one side of the clean room to the other. Standard construction equipment doesn’t work, it is too dirty, so Carpenter Crane Hoist made a line of hoists that are very clean.
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WOULDN’T IT BE nice if you could stamp out semiconductors like a printing press? Molecular Imprints is making a technology called imprint lithography that lets you do just that, stamp out chips.
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