jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • Hacking cars and fixing them

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    A few years ago, I read an academic paper on how to hack cars. Today news came out that what was previously demonstrated via direct access is also possible over the air. I thought it would be fun to look at the firmware update file that fixes this, to see what format it is in,…

  • The “Listen Up” Pledge

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    Thanks, Dave, for speaking up for what’s right. I’m with you, buddy. I also find harassment offensive, and I pledge to do the same as you. We need to draw a line in the sand, and organize ourselves so that healthy, respectful teams are on one side of it, and trolls are on the other…

  • Building Go 1.4 when the linker doesn’t know about build-id

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    Today at work, on a Redhat 5.5 machine, I tried to build Go 1.4. This happened: $ cd go1.4/src $ ./all.bash …snip… # runtime/cgo /usr/bin/ld: unrecognized option ‘–build-id=none’ /usr/bin/ld: use the –help option for usage information collect2: ld returned 1 exit status The solution is to retry without the “–build-id=none” option: diff –git a/src/cmd/go/build.go b/src/cmd/go/build.go…

  • AR.Drone 2 camera access

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    There is lots of information out on the net about how to access the camera in the AR.Drone, but it is all for the original model. In the AR.Drone 2, the cameras have been replaced and upgraded. So settings for v4l that worked to get data out of the camera need to be updated as…

  • Dual scheme URLs

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    I just made this blog HTTP and HTTPS, thanks to Cloudflare. But that made me realize that lots and lots of internal links in the HTML output of my WordPress point back to the HTTP version of the site. Part of the solution to this is to install the HTTP plugin in WordPress which fixes…

  • Cloudflare Universal SSL totally, completely rocks

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    Cloudflare was already my favorite non-Google internet company because I’m a Golang fan boi and Cloudflare is vocal about their love of Go. So when I heard that Cloudflare was willing to help me, for free, put SSL on my website (which I’ve been meaning to do since like forever), I was ready to go for it.…

  • Unzip -c is a thing, and it’s good (as long as you use -q too)

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    I just fetched a Raspian disk image via bitorrent. It is a .zip instead of the .gz I would have chosen myself. If you have a .zip and you don’t want to do a temporary uncompress of it to get the .img to use with dd, you can use “unzip -q -c foo.zip” to get…

  • Strange characters in IP addresses

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    A long time ago, I worked for WebTV. The part of WebTV doing filtering for parental control was comparing IP addresses as strings. I managed to evade the parental controls when I noticed that the IP address parser was using an atoi that treated leading 0’s as octal and leading 0x’s as hex. By converting…

  • Dell and the NSA

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    While I was reading this blog about how NSA’s bad-BIOS malware probably works, I was struck by a “coincidence”: Dell does significant amount of government contracting work. In fact, Ed Snowden worked for Dell at one point. NSA’s bad-BIOS targets the RAID cards in Dell servers. Now, Dell servers are widely deployed. I’ve used them…

  • Medium, what’s up with comments?

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    Medium.com, why do you require me to use Twitter or Facebook to comment? With all your respect for language, ideas, and design, is it really possible that you think people who choose not to use either of those services don’t have anything useful or interesting to add to your conversations?