So I haven’t been keeping up with the blog as much as I’ve planned. But that seems to be the norm around here. As most of you are aware, I have been using twitter a lot more. Most likely going to delete the “Latest dodge coming soon” thing on the right hand side. Maybe get a new theme setup on here as well. Not sure yet about that, a lot of things are coded into this one now. :\

Changes in the past few months include:

Working nights now, 1am to 9am, instead of normal days.
Moved into a new apartment. Much nicer and better view.
Working on a few new projects, but this time with friends instead of alone.
Been driving a bit more.

Otherwise, I don’t have to much else to say. In about 2 weeks, there should be a post about one of the projects. Some of you know a bit of the details, but the one’s that don’t should enjoy it. I will also be doing a new presentation at the next 2600 meeting in June. You won’t want to miss this one.

To start out, I have been busy for the past few weeks and actually have been traveling a bit. Last weekend I was in Indiana for umm *cough* business and this weekend I was in our nations capital, Washington D.C. for Shmoocon.

This was my first Shmoocon as well as the first for many members of Chicago 2600. As we did at Defcon, many of us participated in a few of the contests. The main one that many of us were excited about was the Shmoo crypto. It was a lot of fun when a few of us completed it last year outside of the con. So we figured it would be even better if we competed during the con. Oh man, were we right.

Not only was it a lot of fun, we managed to place 1st in it. We completed the crypto at about 30 minutes after midnight on Friday. It got pretty easy near the end, but it was still a lot of fun. We not only won 1st but after that, we decided to try and win one of the other contests that a speaker was running.

GMark, was running this contest. For those that don’t know GMark, you can find more info about him at his site http://www.gmarkhardy.com/. Anyways, his contest was a lot of fun as well. It had us do a bit of running around to try and find different colored beads, and calling a few special numbers. It was a bit more complex than the Shmoo contest, but that only made it a lot more entertaining. We ended up placing 1st in that contest as well. Infact, I think we might have been the only team to even complete it. But I’m not 100% certain on that, I’ll be emailing GMark to find out about that. The prize for winning this contest is pretty freakin sweet if I do say so my self, we all won round trips to Las Vegas for Defcon.

After being 2 for 2, we decided to try the 3rd and final contest that we would enter. It had to do with the Shmoo badges, and was using a punch card system. This proved to be the most difficult of the 3, and none of us had was was needed to complete the contest. Infact, no one at the convention did. We got pretty far, but never dealing with punch cards was a big pitfall for the competition. Perhaps, I will take the time and try to learn a bit more about punch cards, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do that.

I’ll post about some other crypto challenge that appeared on the 3rd day of Shmoo later in the week. That one deserves it’s own post, but I don’t feel like writing it all up at the moment. Stay tuned as I’ll update more about that and others soon.

This isn’t really a hax or anything but it’s kinda funny.

I got a WoW trial yesterday from a friend at work, and so when I got home I figured I’d try it out. I played no more than 49 minutes when I got banned. I didn’t get banned for anything I did, I got banned for something an “associated” account did. However, my friend that gave me the trial, isn’t banned. So I don’t see how that would work. So I figured I would call to try and get this fixed, as I was actually having fun for those 49 minutes. I wait on hold for 50 minutes before I get connected with someone and talk to them for no more than a minute. All they can tell me is to email the email address I got in my Inbox about the ban, and they might be able to reverse it. Nothing can be done over the phone. Also he tells me that it can take up to 3 weeks for them to even reply. o_0

So, let’s see, I played for 49 minutes, was on hold for 50 minutes. I was on hold longer than I played. Thats neat. However it gets better. Since I am on a 10-day trial, I have 10 days to play, but wait, it takes 3 weeks to reply back. Thats 21 days, my trial will have been over for 11 days before I even get a reply. That is just awesome.

I can now see why they call it WoW….

Moving from one server to another wasn’t bad at all. Had very little downtime, and was able to do a few things I was putting off doing anyways. Either way, site should load a bit faster for people in Chicago, which is good. Because 90% of my traffic is from Chicago or Chicago areas.

Let me know if you find any errors or anything like that.

I should have really though of a better title when starting these blog posts. Oh well.

So yesterday the app was finished and working pretty much exactly how I wanted it. A few things were left out but overall it is working. Well, that is if it has the MAC address of the router that it found while searching. And right there is the flaw. Without a huge database of MAC addresses this app is pretty useless. I’ve been working on adding MAC addresses that I find to my database and geocoding them, but that won’t really be fun for people not in Chicago, and even then people in Chicago wouldn’t have fun with it either. So that is why I contacted WiGle.net, who actually was a bit of help but not as much of a help as they could have been.

Also I was just informed that the server that HaxbyJaku.com is currently on, might not be up much longer. So I am going to end this post now and backup all my stuff and then move it.

K thx. Bye.

Been busy at work so wasn’t able to invest as much time today on the app as I was the past 2, however. I did get past the point that I wanted to reach by tonight. I had Jeff and Josh help look at the code. Maybe, I should just name it JGPS or JPS, since so far most of the people that have helped have names that start with J. Either way it’s almost ready for a public beta, I really need to get a bigger database of data, I have asked the administrators at Wigle.net for assistance with using their database, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Anyways, the app does look ups of the MAC addresses that are around it. Which is what I wanted to do. The next step after this is to make it not open Safari first, this would work already if the ? in the url didn’t get changed to the hex value. But whatever, I’ll try to find a way to call the Maps.app directly with the GPS coordinates. If I can’t figure that out, it’s not a big deal and I can let the community figure it out.

After I get the MAC lookup how I want, I’ll add the cell tower lookup. I’ll try to add that on the weekend or Monday. But don’t promise anything. Anyways, the app is at the state I wanted, the app looks like an official app or at least an unofficial 3rd party app, and I hope after I finish it that people will want to use it. No screen shots or anything tonight, as the only difference in the app is the code, nothing cosmetic has changed. Anyways, I need to sleep.

Another day, another post. So I got a little bit further than I was yesterday. Still a few annoying things that I need to figure out how to do. But by the looks of it, I got about 2 more real things left to do and then I can release as a beta or alpha. After that I might try to get the cell triangulation implemented in it. I found some code that I could use, but I’d rather focus on my first idea for now and work on that later. Anyways, here is a video for your viewing enjoyment. It is recorded sideways, so umm tilt your head.

I have hit a roadblock of sorts at the moment. The app that is currently working, doesn’t update how I want but at the moment it “works”. Right now, even though it can detect the MAC addresses around it, I can’t figure out how to have it send that information. I’m sure it is rather easy and I’m just over thinking it, but it has been a long time since I programmed anything like this. So hopefully if I just stop working on it for a bit, I’ll come back to it with a fresh mind. Here is a screenshot of the app, I would show a video but I can’t find my firewire cable and the other cameras all make the icons blurry. It is the cool looking map one.

After working all night on getting xCode and the iPhone toolchain to work correctly. I managed to get a wifi scanning app working at about 3am. It is very basic, and all it will do is show the MAC address and the SSID. It’s nothing special, but it is one of the first steps I needed to complete for this app to be useful.

Now that I have if spitting out MAC addresses, I need it to contact my database of known MAC addresses to GPS coordinates. I don’t really know how I’m gonna do this but I hope to have something semi working soon. After I get to this point, I’ll be almost half way done. I will need to design an easy to use interface, because all iPhone apps need to be easy to use and since I suck at design, how about someone send me some mock ups? Thanks.

Here is a screen shot of the wifi scanning in action. It’s basically just a wifi scanning utility at the moment.

I was bored last night and started working on some code that would update my location on the site again just like it used to. The only difference is before it would get updated by a GPS phone that had internet using the Mologogo software. So the way that this is different is that it will currently use the IP of the location that is in a list of known IPs and GPS coordinates. This works on a non-jailbroken iPhone as well, since it is only a lookup by IP and not a MAC address or anything like that.

The first version was written in shell code and would have to be ran from the iPhone, and everyone that wanted to use it would have to install it to the phone. It didn’t take me too long to get it working and tested. It was ugly, it needed a jailbroken iPhone, but it worked. I then decided that it wasn’t practical to have the iPhone store the code, when all it would have to do is connect to a server with the code and update from there. So I set off to make a PHP version of the code and host it on my server.

I got the code on the server, and decided that, the best way to make it iPhone friendly was to use the iPhone web app template at located here. I still have a few things to add to the template and a few other feature I need to add to the code. But this is app will work on a non-jailbroken iPhone as all it needs is an active wifi connection. It needs wifi because the IP from the Edge network wouldn’t work for the type of lookup we are doing.

I don’t want to do an IP lookup and match it to known GPS coordinates, but currently that is the only way I know of to do it on a non-jailbroken iPhone. So now, I am working on a native iPhone app, that will do the GPS lookup by IP, MAC address of the router, and hopefully cell tower triangulation. The 3rd part I am not really sure how I will pull that off, but I know it is possible because of the other apps out there. The two big differences between my program and the other one, is that mine will be free, and will let you update your location on your own website like what I do here. The nice thing about the native app, is that you won’t need a wifi connection as long as you have Edge service. Also I know that the new iPhone firmware 1.1.3, is suppose to have the triangulation built into google maps. But I doubt it will let you use that information to update your site location on a blog or such. Also I know many people won’t be updating to that version as they like to use native apps and updating to 1.1.3 will break all apps again.

The main goal after I get the native app in a semi-beta build. Is to allow users of the native app to go out and find access points and IPs, and update the database so that users of the web based version, will get better and more results. This will be nice for users that don’t want to jailbreak their phones for whatever reason, but still get to use an awesome app such as this.

Depending on how far I get with the coding in the next few days will decide if I present my application at the Chicago 2600 meeting or not. I am fairly confident that I will at least get enough done to show off the complete web app. The native app will be a bit tougher but if I run into any problems I’m sure someone there would have an idea on what I could do. It would also be great to get suggestions and comments from others on what they would like to see. I should also note, that since the web app, is a web based app, it can be used with any device capable of connecting to the net. So this won’t just help iPhone users, but anyone with a wifi card can get GPS coordinates from their web browser.

Here are some pictures of the work in progress on the web app.