halcy.de v4 » Version four-point-oh and counting.Two weeks!

Recently, there has been widespread hysteria about the Chinese government, like the governments of the United States of America and Israel and Russia before it, possibly endorsing or supporting people breaking into other peoples computer systems. In the light of the panic being spread by people for whom a general state of fear about foreign people breaking into your computers might be advantageous, it is important to remember one thing:

There is no Cyberwar. Cyberwar is not a thing that is happening anywhere or at any time, nor is it a thing that has ever happened. It is not a thing that is likely to happen in the near future.

Lets break the word “Cyberwar” down into parts. It is made from the word “Cyber”, a prefix used by people who are not competent with computers to mean “Computer things we do not understand”, and “War”, which is generally understood to mean “violent conflict between nations”, or at least “violent, armed conflict”. The kind of conflict where destruction is widespread and people die.

You might have noticed that we haven’t really seen anyone dying from supposed “Cyberwarfare” - at best, there has been economic damage from IP violations, and some breakage of Iranian centrifuges - arguably the most war-like “act of cyberwarfare” to date, and funnily enough perpetrated by the people who are now crying the loudest about it.

That there is no cyberwar does not, by any means, mean that there is no computer crime. There is stealing of industrial secrets, there is mass spamming and scamming, there is all around virus writing and breaking into computer systems by criminal organizations.

Which brings us to the actual, important point: Computer crime is a real, existing, hard to solve problem. Which is exactly why the panic about “Cyberwar” is so harmful - it distracts from the problems we actually have, in lieu of problems that are for the most part made up or actually created by the measures that are supposedly taken to prevent them.

There is no Cyberwar, but if a general and a bunch of politicians on a power trip create a “Cyberwarfare Division”, there suddenly is a whole lot more people writing malware and doing things that destabilize the internet and hurt the network as well as society as a whole. There suddenly is pressure on security professionals to let some malware slide and to build backdoors into their systems, which invariably get abused or introduce new security vulnerabilities. There suddenly are people selling “security consulting” to scared companies, making sure they are protected against a threat that for the most part just doesn’t exist while leaving their systems open to the more everyday, less sexy security problems that cannot be solved by applying quickfixes at 90USD/hr.

It is 2013, computer security is not a thing that is solved or can be solved easily, and the “Cyberwar” hysteria is making it worse. So please: Stop. Stop panicing about Cyberwar. There is no Cyberwar, and the panic about Cyberwar is harmful and in the way of making actual progress towards getting more in control of problems we actually have.

The 2012 edition of Revision, a demoparty held annually in Saarbrücken (Germany), has come and gone. SVatG was there with record attendance (4 people!), and for once, we’d actually prepared something before the party, which is not something that usually happens - and this time, two releases!

Please enjoy:

Peridiummmm (A demo for the STM32F4 ARM-based µC)

[Pouet]- [Binary (Arm Cortex M4)]- [Source Code]

Blockparty 5 Non-Invitation

[Pouet]- [Binary (Windows)]

Meeting up with everyone (esp. Saga Musix) was great, of course, but this time, the best part was going to the party with people from my actual demo group, especially nrr, who flew over here just for the party! (Also, Mithaldu, who was spontaneously recruited at the party place).

Left to right: Mithaldu - nrr - ryx - halcy (with las^mercury sprinting in back)

Having finished up before the party, we of course didn’t party code any super dumb party prods filled with ridiculous jokes, a practice we at SVatG despise.

Finally, my favourite release from the party:

Boogietown by Ghostown & RNO

Overall, kickass party, hope to be there again next year. For me, the next party will most likely be Evoke, though I would really, really like to go to Assembly this year and see WAHa_06x36.

<halcy> Oh I know what you should make
<halcy> WAHa_06x36: Make a STALLMAN BOX
<halcy> WAHa_06x36: Like a buddha box except it displays cool 
        saint ignucius effects and it plays the free software 
        song

And then I went and made it myself.

It is, of course, free software. You can find the source code on github. Users of GNU/Linux are assumed to be capable of compiling it themselves (It pretty much works out to “run make”, needs SDL and freeglut and glew). GNU/Linux graphics drivers are usually proprietary and sometimes terribly buggy, so it might or might not work.

For Microsoft Windows, there is a binary version.

Download:

• Source code
• Binary [Win32]

(It requires a relatively new version of OpenGL to actually run, sorry about that)

Some audio and png code taken from WAHa_06x36 - thank you!

halcy.de was down due to unforseen motherboard breakage. Suprisingly, some people actually noticed this. The motherboard has been switched out, so halcy.de is back in working condition now. Welcome back. :3

So I got a 3DS, and after noticing that it uses an open format (“mpo”) for storing 3D photographs, I needed to play with that, of course.

As a result, I now have a version of my simple raytracer that can render a left and right image, which can then be combined into one stereoscopic 3D image for viewing on the 3DS with software such as this (It runs under wine).

I’ve rendered two small scenes, a 4D julia set and a trefoil knot of spheres! They look kind of neat, so if you have a 3DS, put them on your SD card in the picture folder and have a look!

(If you don’t have a 3DS, you can still look at them as if they were normal jpeg images, because they really are jpegs with some added exif data)

• Image 1 - Julia Set
• Image 2 - Trefoil knot
• Raytracer
• Program for converting left/right images into mpo files
• Bonus: WAHa_06x36 took pictures of his bismuth crystal, which I cropped and converted! They look neat, also!

P.S.: My friend code is 0473-7758-5435~ feel free to add me~

Four new entries and live videos have been added to the “releases” page, amongst them my favourite SVatG release thus far, “It’s 1975 and this man is about to show you the future”!

Check them out!

In the same vein as the fake twitter pages: Automatically generated pro-guttenberg facebook comments: Find ich Gutt!

(If you don’t know what this is about: Germany’s scandal-plagued defense minister must step down)

Source code, horribly inefficient.

(P.S.: The design of that page is the greatest work of art I have ever created.)