S2E5: "Suck my Disk"

Posted 2017-04-24 03:59
Modified 2017-04-26 01:45
Comments 0

In this episode we talk about a tool I wrote (BDisk) that can be used to build LiveCD, LiveUSB, and PXE/iPXE media. We also talk about Python 2 vs. Python 3.

• News
• Notes
• Sysbadministration Award
• Errata
• Music

News

• Inmates at a prison created their own geurilla network.
• Macbook consumer consideration has fallen drastically.
• BBSes are making a comeback!
  • I mention that there is some BBS software out there that will let you serve over ethernet. To my knowledge, this is Synchronet and, for the C64 hobbyists that have an ethernet module installed, there’s Contiki.
• There have been some leaks of the tools used by the NSA for compromising/intel-gathering.
  • Because of course. Who didn’t see that coming?
• A Trump campaign affiliate managed to snarf up 30 million users’ data via Facebook.
  • Manually, from what Paden tells me.
• Mark Shuttleworth has returned to Canonical as CEO, lots of layoffs, and they’re dropping Unity too.

Notes

Starts at 15m30s.

I was drinking green tea. Paden was drinking Irishman Whiskey again. Jthan was drinking Breckenridge Gin.

• We talk about BDisk!
  • You can find the build environment for the ISO I built here (SIG).
    • I cannot stress this enough, this is a PoC and is definitely insecure. Do not run it in prod without auditing and locking it down, especially the rsyncd.conf.
  • As jthan mentioned, it’s available from both git and in the AUR (both tagged and git versions).
  • The “quickstart” I mention is here.
  • I also have a bugtracker/feature requester. More information can be found here.
  • The JOML callback is a reference to S1E20.

• We sort of fly off in a tangent about Python 2 vs. Python 3 (32m0s)
  • We touch upon Python in general a bit in S0E15 and S1E17.
  • The “Learn Python the Hard Way” guy’s rant against python 3 is here (though he does have a python 3 text available). However, there are a multitude of responses and criticisms to his article, not withstanding this one – just because someone writes a widely regarded book on python 2 doesn’t mean they should speak about differences between 2 vs. 3.

Sysbadministration Award

In this segment, we highlight system administration mistakes. Think of them as the IT equivalent of the Darwin Awards. (52m30s)

• MySafeVPN had a total meltdown when it was discovered that they advertised privacy and security on their VPN, and did neither. And there is a lot of terrible PR on their behalf.

Errata

• The intro and outro music for this episode are by Tony Morrison, aka None of the Above. He’s a hilarious nerdy musician from the 90’s. I emailed him asking for permission to use his music and he was quite amenable. He has his entire discography available online, and I definitely recommend giving them a listen if you were around for the early digitial/Internet-published music scene.
• Just for jthan:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
if 2 > 1:
    print('bdisk'.upper())

HAH.

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories Season Two