Centroid.EU Blog

How not to succeed (in trojan programming)

September 3rd, 2012

The german BKA seeks a trojan programmer. The BKA is the german equivalent of the american FBI. Let me brainstorm for you why this job is a dead end job, with no chance to grow.

• Programmers seek hacker culture. I believe you can't take a single programmer and have them create 0-day trojan successfully. The programmer will always be a step behind virus makers and anti-virus gangs who enjoy a networked (perhaps even dark) underground where information is freely exchanged in form of malware.
• It's likely a dead-end job with no job security. With that I mean the demanded results will never be fulfilled until the BKA seeks another rock-star programmer
• This is a cyberwar attempt. Cyberwars require enourmous people resources which develop a "hacker culture" (as mentioned above), only these gangs can be successful in creating the tools they require, a single person can only dream of having the time (on the factor of 100) to do anything similar.
• Job experience is a problem, there is likely a slight conflict of interest for the best people for such a job. One is working for the police, c'mon you can't likely feel good for a new piece of art that makes the rounds.
• They'll likely use a programmer only to spit him out again. I've seen it happen in this world. And while an applicant is being used for their hard gained knowledge there is no return of knowledge back to them.

And a multitude of ethics come into play. Whose side are you on anyway? I know this job isn't for me judging by the job-ad.

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Steganography: It doesn't have to be criminals using it

August 29th, 2012

This BBC article caught my attention. If you take a close look on my website (probably under private) then you may notice steganographic content. I've been doing this for a while now. If you can't see it, that's the point :-).

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Goodbye Moon-man! RIP.

August 25th, 2012

Neil Armstrong has died. For many an inspiration!

I'm a firm believer the USA landed on the moon not just once but six times. Unfortunately back then the lunar program was not sustainable and they had to cease going there. Pity still.

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Four more weeks of summer

August 25th, 2012

Summer is coming to an end...slowly.

Can't wait for Fall!

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Pictures from my Fire-aftermath

August 19th, 2012

Here are some pictures:

No fun!

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6-8 Weeks

August 17th, 2012

Unfortunately the fire that ran through my building caused my apartment to be unliveable. It will be restored in 4-6 weeks. Since this affects uranus which is off now, I have moved all dns and mail operations over to io.solarscale.de and goldflipper.net. This is the downside of doing email at home I guess, but fires didn't happen for a long time and are in all in all a rare event. I'm just glad I got a bit of time off work to get everything organized again.

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Fire in my building, Uranus is off

August 15th, 2012

There was a fire in my building. But I'm OK. Also my computers survived other than getting a coat of soot. The fire department said I had to shut my servers down until everything is settled after they let me into my apartment. However my newly migrated sources (from sourceforge) are offline for the time being. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Left Sourceforge

August 14th, 2012

I left sourceforge.net, as I was playing around with viewvc and realised I can have my own repo served from home. The advertising on sourceforge also made me a bit mad, but what can you do it's their business model. They did agree to be targetting their ads less on my pages but it was too late for them. I have the capacity to be serving my projects without advertising and thus I'm gonna go for it. If you're looking for my projects based at sourceforge check out my cvs repository that includes commit history of everything dating back to 2002. Also the project pages that I created over the years are now found off my open source site here. That's the big news for now.

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Public letter to Sourceforge

August 11th, 2012

Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 20:40:37 +0200                                           
From: "Peter J. Philipp" 
To: sfnet_ops [at] geek.net
Cc: me
Subject: advertising a bit too much                                             
                                                                                
Hi,                                                                             
                                                                                
Take a look at this: http://ipv4.goldflipper.net/private/ad-trash.jpg
                                                                                
Where is there room left for my project?  Please tone down 1 of those           
ads (preferably the one on the bottom) or I will move my project offsite        
which is a shame since I've been a member for 10 years now.                     
                                                                                
I intend to make this a public letter by placing it on my blog.                 
                                                                                
-peter                                       

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The distance of mars today

August 7th, 2012

With xephem and gimp I managed to get the angle between mars-sun-earth and with a bit of trigonometry I solved how far Mars is currently from us. I used the cosine formula from this page to help me. Here is the manpulated image with gimp. I determined the angle to be 78.25 degrees.

Then I got the mean distances between sun and earth (151.7 million kilometers) and sun and mars (229.7 million kilometers). So then I had a,b and C and want to solve for c (so c^2 = b^2 + a^2 - 2ba * cos(C)). And the distance I calculated was 248.1591965 million kilometers. So then light speed between earth and mars would take 827 seconds given that lightspeed is approximately 299,792 km per second. That's 13.79 minutes!

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