14 Sep 2002 mjcox   » (Master)

I can't believe Bryce is leaving the US, he was one true friend who I really enjoyed spending time with when I was over in Raleigh - we'd always spend my spare weekends going shopping, driving around, or eating.

We were expecting someone to write an exploit for the OpenSSL issues (the problem is fairly straightforward to exploit as exploits go), well it started appearing with vengence in the wild on Friday 13th. Now everyone who didn't patch OpenSSL needs to run around like a headless chicken patching and making sure they didn't get exploited. Of course the only way to be certain you are not 0wn3d is to reinstall from scratch since loadable kernel module rootkits are pretty comprehensive these days. Quite a few folks were confused because they'd updated their Apache (but not their OpenSSL) and some others got exploited who upgraded but didn't reboot (or restart OpenSSL-based services) so never picked up the new OpenSSL shared libraries.

I put the baln S/PDIF idea on hold as it's getting cold now in Scotland; instead I spent a couple of evenings finishing off a heating controller. A PIC chip controlling a relay sit next to the central heating system connected across the thermostat inputs I wasn't using. The PIC is connected via the CAT5 network to my home automation PC. The PIC is designed to stop silly things happening if the computer dies in a bad state (heating on for 24 hours is bad) or if hackers get into the HA system. It makes sure you can't cycle between on and off too often and other stuff. Anyway now I need to write something to actually control it, and get some temperature sensors. Yeah, I could have gone and bought a $30 thermostat and wired that in instead, but it isn't as much fun and being able to turn on your heating whilst sitting in the living room on the wireless network.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!