Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

• Gallery: Einstein's Legacy: Inside the Quest for Gravity Waves
  A few months ago I toured a really cool facility at Caltech for Wired.com. The gallery went live this weekend.
  (tags: wired ligo)

• My Jogging Route Today
  A little under 3 miles in about 32 minutes. =]
  (tags: running route jogging downtown.la downtownla los.angeles)

• Encounters At the End of the World
  This looks like it's going to be a great documentary. Set in Antarctica and directed by the fellow who made Grizzly Man.
  (tags: antarctica documentary movie)

Penelope and I touched down in Hawaii today for a friend's wedding. We're staying at the Kauai Marriot in Lihue. Before we left I picked up a waterproof camera, the Olympus Stylus 850, which I'm very happy with so far. I love having a waterproof ultracompact camera. Here are a few shots from today:

Check out the rest of our Hawaii photos on flickr. 

I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas (or a Happy Holiday if you don't celebrate Christmas) and a Happy New Year. I hope you have had a great year and I wish you the best for 2008. Enjoy your holiday and don't forget to send joy and best wishes to your friends and family.  

I ended up falling asleep before these were done uploading, but here is my final set from Saturday:

You can view more photos on blogging.la and flickr.

I want to start this post off with a very special thank you to Eric Richardson and Cartifact for donating the excellent map for the Art Ride once again. Eric went out of his way to craft a great map for the ride and Cartifact very generously donated their wonderfully detailed Downtown map for use on the Downtown Art Ride.

The Downtown Art Ride takes place every second Thursday to coincide with the Downtown Art Walk. The ride starts at Art Murmur gallery on 6th and Main and we try to make it to all of the other galleries in Downtown. If you're interested in joining us on the ride, just show up at 5:00pm at Art Murmur. Bring a bike, lock, and light and optionally, but highly recommended, a helmet.

I will be riding with my camera and photographing riders and artists, you can see some samples from the previous art rides here. There will also be a recent film school grad shooting a spec commercial to promote bicycling in Los Angeles for her director's reel. Shouldn't interfere with the ride much though. We had a really great turnout last month and I've already have a few people email me about this month, so it should be a fun ride. I'll see everyone tomorrow!

Map You can download the new map here: Downtown Art Ride April 2007 Map [244KB jpg]. 

More after the jump... 

After shooting some HDR photos in Vernon, I was heading in to work when I saw an overturned truck. I stopped to take some photos of the truck being turned back over. Note the tow-truck's wheels on the last shot. 

In a way, San Francisco City Hall is partially responsible for me being alive today. Way back in the day, my parents were married there in a civil ceremony. The dome of city hall is really beautiful, it looks like it was restored recently. I took some HDR photos of the civic center yesterday, enjoy.

I love this sign on the playground:

Well, I've been too busy to blog recently due to several large projects that I'm working on concurrently, but I figured I would respond to this 5 things meme, as Siel of Green LA Girl tagged me.

1. I lived in South Africa for a year when I was 6 years old.
2. I only drink coffee on ice (and some times it's not even fair trade!)
3. I make my cats dance, but I think they like it.
4. My first job out of High School was designing rave flyers.
5. I want to retire in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I am tagging: Peneloper, Eric, Celia, Jim and Ed. 

After our most excellent 17 mile bike ride through the fake downtown of Huntington Park which Mack Reed describes so wonderfully, Sean Bonner mentioned that there was a new Borat Trailer before Snakes on a Plane. I found it here on Yahoo, it's nice... I like. 

Where are you man? We were good/best friends in High School. I can't seem to find you on the web except for this photo of you from 1996. If you stumble across this let me know! 

Joanna Rutkowska gave a highly informative talk at Black Hat called "Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit." In the first part of her talk, she demonstrated an attack on Vista's code signing feature that requires any code that is loaded into the kernel to be signed by Microsoft. Her attack did not take advantage of an implementation bug or a vulnerability, but instead used the built in raw disk write access to change a few lines in the pagefile. Once the pagefile was altered and the changed data was read back into memory she was able to load any code she desired into the kernel. She stated that this didn't mean that Vista was insecure, just not as secure as Microsoft says.

I talked to her for a few minutes today about her talk and asked if she was going to be releasing the code, and she said she didn't see the point of doing that. Her goal was not to provide people with a way to hack systems, but to alert the community and Microsoft of a flaw in the system. She also mentioned that she is in active informal discussions with Microsoft and they are aware of the problem and the potential solutions she laid out in her talk, but she didn't want to comment on what they were going to do about it.

The second part of her talk covered a proof of concept root kit called Blue Pill that takes advantage of the extremely powerful new virtualization features in the new 64 bit AMD processors. Blue Pill takes a running operating system and completely virtualizes it beneath a Hypervisor which can then be used to intercept certain system calls and execute arbitrary code nearly completely invisible to the user. As the system is truly virtualized on the processor level and not in kernel and userspace, the virtualized system has direct access to the hardware (except for calls the hypervisor is intercepting) and detection would be non-trivial to say the least. Although she did her research on the AMD processor, she said the same attacks would be possible on the new Intel chips, although their virtualization implementation was not as powerful.

Brendan O'Connor gave a talk called "Vulnerabilities in Not-So Embedded Systems" about how easy it is to take over the computers that run the Xerox Multifunction Devices. Basically he wants people to treat these supposed embedded systems as servers which they really are. Through his research he found that the Xerox systems didn't have the GRUB boot loader locked down with a password so he was able to gain access to the system and basically do whatever he wanted with it. These systems are dangerous because they are full linux systems, but the user doesn't have access to it so they are unable to secure it. As you know services are constantly being found to be vulnerable and relying on a technician to come and patch your copier isn't going to keep your network safe. It would be wise for vendors to allow users access to these systems so that they can keep them safe.  

Alex Stamos and Zane Lackey gave a talk at Black Hat called "Breaking AJAX Web Applications: Vulns 2.0 in Web 2.0". As AJAX evolves from a toy used by teenyboppers to a serious tool used by banks, hospitals and uncle same, it becomes more and more important to ensure bug free code. AJAX has changed web attacks by exposing the use of frameworks used by the applications via included .js files which expose supported calls. Cross site scripting becomes more complicated as you can inject script into the javascript stream. Injection attacks are also more dangerous due to front ends that are exposed in the client side code. Business logic in applications has become more complex so parameter manipulation vulnerabilities are still excellent attacks.

XSS becomes more complicated and more interesting because you can just put javascript right into a running javascript engine, which becomes harder to escape as you're no longer looking for brackets and tags.

Because your browser is running a javascript application, if an attacker sends you rogue code, in say link form in your cool AJAX email app, your browser will run the code sent in the webmail application instead of loading it in a new page and then the attacker would be sent your authentication cookie. The attacker would then have access to your web mail. The speakers used the fictitious company Webmail.com in this example, and when asked about gmail they responded that they have more lawyers than webmail.com, but it was pretty clear the attack they were talking about was possibly on gmail.

Dynamic script nodes allow attackers to embed malicious javascript in a website that would allow a cookie from any site to be pulled because browsers allow cross domain XmlHttpRequests, this is very bad!  

The big vendors are more willing to talk to the researchers and the end users are more apt to work with the vendors. Most vendors are very cooperative about security issues and disclosure. The Cicso incident has made big vendors more willing to work with end users and security researchers, and all in all the incident was good for the security industry. Large customers of big vendors want earlier disclosure information to be shared with them before the smaller customers, but the consensus is that early disclosure for big customers is a bad idea, even to the point of not giving preferred treatment even to internal networks and devices. A very large part of the discussion involved when vendors have a vulnerability and not a fix. There was no clear consensus on this topic, but the vendors felt they shouldn't disclose a vulnerability unless they have a fix for it except in extreme circumstances. Vendors don't want to draw attention to a flaw that people don't know about, so they aren't likely to disclose. One of the best things is that vendors are talking more, talking to researchers and working together to fix problems.  

The other night there was some filming going on atop the ex-million dollar hotel, which is currently the Rosslyn. The film crew erected a giant glowing sphere which looked a bit like the moon balloon from AI. I took some shots of it from my loft window and created this HDR from 3 of them. 

We had the most wonderful honeymoon ever. We didn't want to come back to America, but hey life is about compromise right? We are currently sorting through our photos and our memories and will be posting a complete trip report in the coming days.  

I pay good money for a 6mbit DSL connection. Why can I not stream video from your site in real time? It works great from Apple's quicktime trailer site. What is the deal?