Track Cars with Wireless Tire Pressure Sensors, Hak5 1511.1 .

[Details Summary]

“Wireless Packet Sniffing!!! Tracking vehicle Tire Pressure Sensor data with Jared Boone and open source software defined radio. Plus, eavesdropping on Verizon CDMA phones with a hacked femtocell – Doug DePerry and Andrew Rahimi of ISEC Partners. All that and more this time on a very special Toorcon 2013 edition of Hak5.”

Project Highlight – Replicant

I have been having some critical thoughts about Android and Google in the past year, and I am not alone.  If you are one that is on the sidelines and uses an Android device in the most basic sense, you probably haven’t even noticed, and may never for quite some time.  Google has been slowing taking control of core applications though some sneaky methods, and here is why you should care, and why Replicant may be the answer for the nerd and geek-alike.

Linux Gaming: The Dark Mod

A fan of the Thief series on PC? This will be right up your alley then. Open Source meet Stealth at its best. Check out the video above for an insight into what the game can deliver. Source link is below. Enjoy!

Source: http://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads/

Video Reel: Blender

Blender is a well known, awesome Open Source 3D computer graphics application used to create all sorts of fantastic animations, visual effects, motion video, 3D models and more!  What is sweet about blender, is that it also has a built in game engine.  Supporting tons of effects and features, Blender is one amazing Open Source project that helps bring us all together and collaborate like never before.  Above is just some of the amazing examples of what Blender can do.

Be sure to check out the contributors listed on youtube (posted here for posterity).  There are some amazing open, full movies, on display.

_professor

Head on past the break for some other neat blender videos. One of my more favorite Blender 3D shorts (edit: I’m a huge Tarantino fan):

Soapbox Stand – Going completely “free” with Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0

Not often do we enter a Linux Distribution and truly mind the “non-free” software that is included (Linux Mint, cough).  Although this non-free, and proprietary software is great and often does what we need to do, it is against the vision of GNU/Linux, namely Richard Stallman.  Whether or not you agree with this philosophy, is entirely up to you.

So really, what is “free software?”  I’ m sure you can google around, but I’ll brief you in short.  “Free” software is devoid of proprietary code, allowed to be shared freely, modified changed, to allow collaboration and betterment of the software at hand.  This not necessarily means 100 people commit horrible changes to a piece of software, rather it gives any developer, or user, the ability to change the software on their machine, and if they think it is worthwhile, suggest the code changes to the upstream developer (the original creator), to modify it permanently.

So what is “Open Source” then?  As GNU puts it, ““Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.””  With Open Source, sure you can get the source code files, but often carries restrictive licensing, or restrictions on “freedom.”  Free Software’s philosophy aims to break those chains, and allow a sort of “1st amendment right” on software.

The Free Software Foundation maintains a good list here of such “free” distributions.  The spotlight right now is on Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0.  Feel free to give it a try!  Essentially, it is a stripped version of Ubuntu, with only “free” software.  The joy of Linux is you are not confined to one “OS.”  There are so many to try!  Choice is power folks.

-ProfessorKaos