bicycle – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Thu, 22 Dec 2016 18:37:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png bicycle – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Best of 2016 | TechSNAP 298 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/105646/best-of-2016-techsnap-298/ Thu, 22 Dec 2016 10:37:02 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=105646 RSS Feeds: HD Video Feed | Mobile Video Feed | MP3 Audio Feed | Ogg Audio Feed | iTunes Feed | Torrent Feed Become a supporter on Patreon: Show Notes: Links Virtual Private Surveillance | TechSNAP 248 Internet of Threats | TechSNAP 249 Pay to Boot | TechSNAP 260 Insecure Socket Layer | TechSNAP 265 […]

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]]> Virtual Private Surveillance | TechSNAP 248 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/92441/virtual-private-surveillance-techsnap-248/ Thu, 07 Jan 2016 19:18:51 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=92441 We break down the Bicycle attack against SSL, the story of Brian Krebs’s PayPal account getting hacked & the scoop on the Juniper Saga. Plus some great questions, our answers, a news breaking round up & much more! Thanks to: Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean Direct Download: HD Video | Mobile Video | MP3 […]

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We break down the Bicycle attack against SSL, the story of Brian Krebs’s PayPal account getting hacked & the scoop on the Juniper Saga.

Plus some great questions, our answers, a news breaking round up & much more!

Thanks to:


DigitalOcean

Ting

iXsystems

Direct Download:

HD Video | Mobile Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | YouTube | HD Torrent | Mobile Torrent

RSS Feeds:

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— Show Notes: —

The Bicycle Attack against SSL/TLS

  • Security Researcher Guido Vranken has published a new attack against all versions to SSL/TLS
  • “While the sound configuration of both endpoints of a connection is understood to prevent the decoding from ciphertext to plaintext without having access to the private key(s), transactions conducted over a channel embedded in TLS leak various types of information.”
  • “A lot of research has been performed on how to stack up these different ‘knowns’ in order to meticulously reconstruct the user’s actions, given that the encrypted streams are known to an observer who is or has been listening in on the ‘secure’ transmission between two endpoints.”
  • “In this paper I will show that for a presumably large subset of web applications, it is easy to infer the length of parts of the plaintext, or certain attributes thereof, from a recorded stream of encrypted messages. Having access to the private key is not necessary. In fact, the actual ciphertexts embedded in the stream are irrelevant to the deduction, and entry-level arithmetic suffices.”
  • The attack can allow a passive listener to determine the length of your password, significantly reducing the effort required to brute force crack the password
  • The attack takes advantage of the known characteristics of HTTP transactions (although it could be used against other protocols), to determine the length of a specific field
  • In a regular HTTP form post, when a user is logging into a website, the post data consists of the form fields encoded as a string
  • Something like: username=allan&password=correcthorsebatterystaple&sub=Login
  • When the form is submitted over an encrypted connection (HTTPS), the text is not visible, however the length of the payload is known
  • If the length of the form field names, and the username are known, then the length of the password can be determined
  • So, this attack requires knowing the targets username, although that is not a problem during a targeted attack
  • Most of the other information can be determined by the attacker by logging into an account on the site themselves
  • The attack requires knowing things like the target user’s browser user-agent string, but this can be determined by them visiting any unencrypted website.
  • The lengths of other headers, like user-agent and cookie, can be calculated by looking at requests to other known assets on the site, like an image or css file that is loaded by the login page
  • With all of this information, the length of the packet, less the lengths of the known fields, leaves you with the length of the targets password
  • This significantly reduces the complexity of a brute force attack
  • If you know the password is exactly 12 characters long, you do not have to try every possible combination of 10, 11, 13, 14 etc character long passwords.
  • Because of the nature of this attack, it also works against previously recorded sessions, even from years ago
  • “It may also be executed on a larger scale on TOR exit nodes, VPN’s, proxies and other Internet traffic conduits in order to detect weak or short passwords susceptible to a brute-force or an attack based on a dictionary of often-used passwords”
  • The name “Bicycle Attack” was chosen because: if you wrap a bicycle in giftwrap, you can still tell it is a bicycle
  • The research then goes on to look at how this same concept can be applied to GPS coordinates, and IPv4 addresses. Just by knowing the length of the IP address, you can reduce the possible search space to only ~30% of the total. Some lengths cut the search space even more.

  • #missioncomplete

  • https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/

Merry Christmas: We stole your paypal account

  • Alternative link, Krebs appears to be under a DDoS attack
  • Krebs’ PayPal account was compromised on Christmas Eve
  • “The perpetrator tried to further stir up trouble by sending my PayPal funds to a hacker gang tied to the jihadist militant group ISIS. Although the intruder failed to siphon any funds, the successful takeover of the account speaks volumes about why most organizations — including many financial institutions — remain woefully behind the times in authenticating their customers and staying ahead of identity thieves.”
  • “On Christmas Eve morning, I received an email from PayPal stating that an email address had been added to my account. I immediately logged into my account from a pristine computer, changed the password, switched my email address back to to the primary contact address, and deleted the rogue email account.”
  • “I then called PayPal and asked how the perpetrator had gotten in, and was there anything else they could do to prevent this from happening again? The customer service person at PayPal said the attacker had simply logged in with my username and password, and that I had done everything I could in response to the attack. The representative assured me they would monitor the account for suspicious activity, and that I should rest easy.”
  • “Twenty minutes later I was outside exercising in the unseasonably warm weather when I stopped briefly to check email again: Sure enough, the very same rogue email address had been added back to my account. But by the time I got back home to a computer, my email address had been removed and my password had been changed. So much for PayPal’s supposed “monitoring;” the company couldn’t even spot the same fraudulent email address when it was added a second time.”
  • “In my second call to PayPal, I insisted on speaking with a supervisor. That person was able to tell me that, as I suspected, my (very long and complex) password was never really compromised. The attacker had merely called in to PayPal’s customer support, pretended to be me and was able to reset my password by providing nothing more than the last four digits of my Social Security number and the last four numbers of an old credit card account.”
  • “Let’s leave aside for a moment the reality that all of this static information about Brian Krebs has been posted online by various miscreants over the years (and probably remains online): Any company that authenticates customers with nothing more than static identifiers — address, SSN, DOB, phone number, credit card number, etc. — is vulnerable to these takeover attempts.”
  • “I asked the PayPal supervisor why the company couldn’t simply verify my identity by sending a text message to my phone, or a special signal to a PayPal mobile app? After all, PayPal has had the same mobile number of mine on file for years (the attacker also deleted that number from my profile as well). The supervisor explained that the company didn’t have any mobile authentication technologies, and that in order to regain access to the funds in my account I had to send the company a photocopied or scanned copy of my driver’s license.”
  • Not exactly something hard to fake, because I doubt they check it very carefully
  • “When I pressed the PayPal representative about whether he had any other ways to validate my identity short of sending a copy of my license, he offered to do so “using public records.” Now, I understand that what he actually meant was that PayPal would work with a major credit bureau to ask me a series of so-called “out of wallet” or “knowledge-based authentication” (KBA) questions — essentially yet more requests for static information that can be gleaned from a variety of sources online. But that didn’t stop me from playfully asking the representative why a security challenge should rely on answers from public records? He responded that someone probably would have to go down to a courthouse somewhere to do that, which made me laugh out loud and wish him a Merry Christmas.”
  • Krebs had a PayPal two-factor authentication token, but it apparently was not required to access the account
  • A user in the comments points out: “A dynamic identifier, such as a temporary code sent via SMS to a user’s mobile phone, isn’t any better if the provider of the mobile service is also vulnerable. I had my bank accounts emptied after Vodafone UK allowed someone to walk in off the street and transfer my phone number to a new Vodafone account in store. Hugely frustrating that they could ever allow this.”

The Juniper Saga

  • “On December 17, Juniper announced that some of their products were affected by “unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen® devices and to decrypt VPN connections”. That sounds like an attacker managed to subvert Juniper’s source code repository and insert a backdoor.”
  • “Juniper followed up with a slightly more detailed post that noted that there were two backdoors: one via SSH and one that “may allow a knowledgeable attacker who can monitor VPN traffic to decrypt that traffic”. Either of these would be very interesting to a nation-state attacker but that latter—passive decryption of VPN connections—is really in their neighborhood.”
  • “Dual-EC was an NSA effort to introduce a backdoored pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that, given knowledge of a secret key, allowed an attacker to observe output from the RNG and then predict its future output. If an attacker can predict the output of the PRNG then they can know the keys that one or both sides of a VPN connection will choose and decrypt it. (For more details, see the research paper.)”
  • “During the CRYPTO 2007 rump session, Niels Ferguson and Dan Shumow demonstrated that if the points are not randomly generated, but carefully chosen in advance, the security of Dual_EC DRBG can be subverted by the party doing the choosing; effectively backdooring the PRNG. Namely if one chooses P, Q such that Q=P*e holds for a value e that is kept secret, it will allow the party that generated said P, Q to recover the internal state of the PRNG from observed output in a computationally “cheap fashion” – hence instances of Dual_EC PRNG for which the provenance of the points P and Q is unknown are susceptible to having been backdoored.”
  • “It stands to reason that whoever managed to slip in their own Q will also know the corresponding e such that P*e=Q (the value P was unchanged from the standard) and hence is able recover the internal state of the backdoored Dual_EC generator from the output generator. What is unknown however is what an attack would look like for the PRNG cascade employed by Juniper’s ScreenOS.”
  • In the past, Juniper put out a KB article explaining their use of Dual_EC:
  • “ScreenOS does make use of the Dual_EC_DRBG standard, but is designed to not use Dual_EC_DRBG as its primary random number generator. ScreenOS uses it in a way that should not be vulnerable to the possible issue that has been brought to light. Instead of using the NIST recommended curve points it uses self-generated basis points and then takes the output as an input to FIPS/ANSI X.9.31 PRNG, which is the random number generator used in ScreenOS cryptographic operations.”
  • “However, apparently starting in August 2012 (release date according to release notes for 6.3.0r12), Juniper started shipping ScreenOS firmware images with a different point Q. Adam Caucill first noted this difference after HD Moore posted a diff of strings found in the SSG 500 6.2.0r14 and the 6.2.0r15 firmware. As we can deduce from their recent security advisory and the fact that they reverted back to the old value Q in the patched images, this was a change not authored by them. Apparently Juniper only realised this recently and not when they were issuing KB28205.”
  • “Static analysis indicates that the output of the Dual_EC generator indeed is not used directly, but rather only to reseed an ANSI X9.31 PRNG. Besides the unused EC PRNG known-answer test function, a function we call reseed_system_prng is the only one that references the ec_prng_generate_output function”
  • “Update: Shortly after reading my post, Willem Pinckaers pointed out that the reseed_system_prng function sets the global variable system_prng_bufpos to 32. This means that after the first invocation of this function, the for loop right after the reseed call in system_prng_gen_block never executes. Hence, the ANSI X9.31 PRNG code is completely non-functional.”
  • “if it wasn’t the NSA who did this, we have a case where a US government backdoor effort (Dual-EC) laid the groundwork for someone else to attack US interests. Certainly this attack would be a lot easier given the presence of a backdoor-friendly RNG already in place. And I’ve not even discussed the SSH backdoor which, as Wired notes, could have been the work of a different group entirely. That backdoor certainly isn’t NOBUS—Fox-IT claim to have found the backdoor password in six hours”
  • “NOBUS” is an intelligence community term for “nobody but us”

Feedback:

https://twitter.com/JohnLaTwC/status/682350922710659073


https://twitter.com/JohnLaTwC/status/682352201927294976

Round Up:

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]]> Duh Ops | WTR 35 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/85242/duh-ops-wtr-35/ Wed, 15 Jul 2015 10:12:04 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=85242 Brook is a support engineer at puppet labs. She discusses so many tools used on a daily basis, be sure to check the links in the show notes! Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed […]

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Brook is a support engineer at puppet labs. She discusses so many tools used on a daily basis, be sure to check the links in the show notes!

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Foo

Show Notes:

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re going to interview Brook Shelley. She is a fantastic support engineer at Puppet Labs which is a great startup out of Portland. And she goes on to tell us about Puppet. About being a support engineer. We talk a bunch about life and her journey from being an English major to a professional in a technology field.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support the network and Women’s Tech Radio specifically by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. Now, it’s today because we have Tech Talk Today which is our thank you show of daily headlines that we do four days a week and it’s kind of like a thank you for supporting us, here’s just a little bit more and different than what we offer in any of our other shows. And it’s specifically for the people that support the network. I mean, anybody can watch it, really, but there’s some exclusive content that you get access to and updates about your network on the inside when you become a patron. So, go to patreon.com/jupitersignal to support Pagie and myself on Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: And we get started with our interview with Brook by asking her what she’s up to today and where she is in her career.
BROOK: My name is Brook and I work at a company called Puppet Labs. Right now I do support engineering. I’ve been doing tech work for around 10 years. Usually in the IT, sys admin supports fields. And so I guess I’m somewhere in my mid-career. I just keep working in different places learning different fields. This is my first job where I’m working with a server automation, whole new thing for me. And it kind of falls under the dev ops worlds, which I think the term is hilarious but it seems to be what people are using these days.
PAIGE: Isn’t dev ops another, another version of the developer designer unicorn?
BROOK: Yeah. Something like that. I mean, it’s just like, what if we got ops people and dev people to work together in harmony. I also call d’ops because I think that’s funnier, but-
ANGELA: Oh, I thought it was Duh Ops. Duh ops.
BROOK: Oh, yeah.
PAIGE: But that’s kind of also true, right?
BROOK: That works too. Yeah, I like that a lot.
PAIGE: That’s good. So what is, for people who aren’t familiar, because i know this is actually kind of a unique position at Puppet and a couple other companies. What is a support engineer?
BROOK: So, for us, what that means is, we sale a product that is an enterprise software, so we sell Puppet Enterprise. And it sort of puts together a bunch of open source components and a few other things to help large companies, and small companies, manage their server infrastructure. So when those people implement it or get their software implemented by — our software implemented by our engineers, our professional services folks, then when they have trouble with it, or if they have questions about it, they usually file tickets via email with us. And then my team is responsible for talking to them about their issues, reproducing them, filing bugs with our engineering team, directly fixing things ourselves. So we’re kind of the glue that holds it together once it’s shipped, because like any other software it works really, really well until you have it configured in a custom way and it’s all these moving parts and then you start going oh, there’s a few things I’m confused about. So that’s what my team does. We’re sort of a 24/7 team. We have people in Malaysia as well. I think there’s like eight or nine of us and we’re all pretty savvy experienced sys admin people. It’s also really rad because my team is, I think just about half women, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh wow. That is super rare.
BROOK: Yeah, especially for an engineering team. Yeah. So I feel really lucky that we have that. Both my boss and my boss’ boss are also women, which is really fantastic.
PAIGE: Oh wow. Yeah, womens’ leadership changes the whole team.
ANGELA: That’s great.
BROOK: Yeah, totally. It was a big factor in why I moved here to Portland and went and took this job, because I was like, oh man, if I can be surrounded by amazing, smart women, that’s my ideal goal.
PAIGE: I like it. So, I think, my understanding, and I would love you to correct me on this, is that Puppet as a product is an awesome wrapper to make a Docker more usable, especially in the enterprise environment? I think some of our viewers here are familiar — or listeners are familiar with Docker. I covered it on a couple other shows, but is that accurate?
BROOK: Uh, no. I would say it’s inaccurate. Docker is a separate piece of software. Docker is a way to bundle up applications and configurations into pendencies. Into little, like, container things and ship those out. But what Puppet does is Puppet installs, configures, and keeps in a steady state a myriad of server software and things. So, let’s say you have one Apache server and MySQL server and you’ve got some load balancers and whatever else. Instead of having to manually configure each one of those, you might set up Puppet and maybe create some modules to set all of those settings for you. And then when you want to launch a new server, you just start that node up, point it at your puppet master, and say hey this node gets this configuration. And you choose like a class or a role or something. It puts that on there and if someone, let’s say your employee, goes on that node and tweaks the configuration themselves, every 30 minutes that node checks back in with the master and says hey I look like this. ANd the master says that’s wrong. You should change your configuration. So, it also does some change management a little bit too. And that’s sort of the real rough outline of what it does, but it’s a pretty robust thing. We have customers that manage tens of thousands of servers with it. Some pretty big name customers too.
PAIGE: So, now you’re a support engineer. Have you always been in tech? Is this something as a kid you were taking things apart all the time? Do you have a degree in computer science? What’s your journey?
BROOK: So, yeah. When I was younger we were pretty poor, but my dad, when we were — I was maybe like in early middle school — my dad got a job in the defense industry and brought home a computer. And we’d had like an Apple 2E when I was really young that we inherited from somebody, but I just got on it a lot. And being a queer woman, I was looking for answers in community, because I was raised in a very Christian household and so I was like, I bet I can find stuff on here. So I started just like surfing around the internet and inevitably the computer would break in some way or I would get confused about how to connect to some IRC channel and so I started researching those things just to connect to find out what the hell was going on with me. And, that was impetuous for me to get started in tech was just fixing my own problems. And then, inevitably, I became the go to girl for my family and my friends whenever something would break. Like, hey can you help me with my computer or hey can you help me with my printer, and I just did those things. I went into the University of Texas at Austin and majored in English Literature.
PAIGE: So that’s not computer science.
BROOK: Not at all. I started working at the laptop help desk for the education department while I was there and — because i just fixed computers. And I was like, well it seems like people want to pay me money to do this, so I might as well take the money. I write now, but at the time I was like oh I want to be a novelist. I’m not going to try to do this tech thing. This is just temporary. ANd somehow temporary turned into ten years of doing this. I mean, it’s definitely something that’s always interested me. I think it’s fun to solve problems and it’s fun to sort of learn about new technologies. A lot of times my passions lie elsewhere and to some degree what I do as a job is a job. I didn’t necessarily get into tech as goal to become a programer and I don’t necessarily build servers or set up software on my free time, but it’s a job I’m very good at. It’s something that interest me and I kind of stumbled into it and kept going. But I’m actually also a college dropout. My situation was very bad when I was in college and for various reasons my dad stopped sort of filling out my financial aid information and so I couldn’t get loans anymore, which meant I had to drop out. And i was lucky enough that by that time I was already started in tech, so I’ve been able to continue with my career ever since then. I think my grandma hasn’t forgiven me about not finishing my degree yet, but at this point it’s been a while, so.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s paper, right? At the end of the day.
BROOK: Yeah. And, I mean, I would love to go get a PhD in English, but it’s expensive so.
ANGELA: I know a lot of tech professionals that don’t have any college at all. You know?
PAIGE: Yeah. I even know a couple high school dropouts.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: And all the stuff I learned that I use every day are things that I picked up on my own, on the internet. And through friend and through mentors. So, my college classes taught me a lot about the socialist interpretation of Dostoevsky, but not necessarily the things that I do every day.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think one of the biggest values in education is learning how to learn. Especially once you mastered that, the internet is such an amazing worldwide resource. It really is changing lives. We have these stories of children in India who are ending up as millionaires because they’re teaching themselves how to build apps on the app store online.
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Totally, yeah. It’s amazing. And I think this is one of those — I have a lot of friends who are involved in things like Pi Ladies and other types of organizations that help women in other, like oppressed and minority groups in tech get involved with it. And the biggest thing I see a lot of times is just people not knowing that they can do something. Kind of feeling tentative. Well, I don’t know, that’s for somebody else. And it’s so amazing to see people kind of be able to in a more caring and free environment feel like they can succeed. And then when they feel like that, all of the sudden it’s like oh man you’re writing so many cools things and doing things I would have never thought of.
PAIGE: It’s like, people should have a podcast about that.
BROOK: I think so. Yeah. It turns out.
PAIGE: It turns out. Obviously, it’s a big passion of mine. I think that it’s just, you know, if you know that you could do it, you can do it.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: It’s the biggest hurdle.
BROOK: Exactly.
PAIGE: So, Brook, you’ve mentioned that you kind of actually are one of the few people in technology who manages to leave their job and tech at work.
BROOK: Yeah.

PAIGE: So what else do you do with your free time?
BROOK: Well, I live in Portland and so that means I bicycle a lot between different places. I absolutely love food. Like, sort of, maybe too much. Right now I’m on a ramen kick. I didn’t do gluten for like five years so every opportunity I have to ramen I’m doing it.
ANGELA: Okay, wait. So are you like college student ramen’ing it or are you adding like sarata and egg and green onions? How are you?
BROOK: Yeah. I’m going to like ramen shops. like fancy ramen shops that do like, they put their own pork belly and do like a bone broth.
PAIGE: You have to help me on my quest then, because as you know, I recently moved to Portland.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: And when I was in San Francisco I found this ramen joint, because I am definitely gluten intolerant.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Where they would sub cabbage in for the noodles and it was amazing.
BROOK: Okay.
PAIGE: So if you see a place in Portland that subs cabbage for noodles, I’m there.
BROOK: There’s a place in Portland that does like a yam noodle instead of the-
ANGELA: Wait, you don’t like sweet potato?
PAIGE: I love sweet potatoes.
ANGELA: Oh.
BROOK: This is like a shirataki, so it’s like a white yam. It’s actually, it’s weird deal, it’s like all in, it’s all in soluble fibers so it’s like celery, so you don’t really digest it, but it’s good. I don’t know. It’s strange.
PAIGE: It’s called a high resistance starch.
ANGELA: Better than a cheeseburger, probably. Better for you, I mean.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: Possibly, yeah. I mean there’s some cheeseburgers.
PAIGE: There’s actually some interesting nutritional research that we need more highly resistant starch in the diet to act as prebiotic to host bacteria in your intestines properly.
ANGELA: Holy moly.
PAIGE: Which is why people are encouraging things like the shiratakis and plantains.
ANGELA: Interesting.
PAIGE: And a couple other things.
ANGELA: I wonder if there’s going to be then a movement to support adding more of that — I think it’s called — no cellulose — yeah, I think it is.
BROOK: Yeah.
ANGELA: Like the wood pulp that’s in a filler in a lot of our food.
PAIGE: No. No I don’t-
ANGELA: Because you can’t digest that either. But it could host something, I’m sure.
PAIGE: Yeah, probably not the right things though.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: I just eat a lot of rocks. No, I’m kidding.
ANGELA: Let us know how that goes.
BROOK: I travel a lot for fun and to go see friends that I know through Twitter and various other places. So when I’m traveling I eat a lot of food. I also read pretty constantly. I’m in a book group here in town that’s like a lesbian book group. And then, I don’t know, I have a Goodreads challenge that I’m trying to complete this year of like, I think 60 or 70 books.
ANGELA: Wow.
BROOK: When I was kid that was really easy, because I never stopped reading. I was always like hiding and reading or walking around and reading. But now that I have a job it’s like oh I have to stop reading this novel so I can go to work. But I do that a lot. I used to make music. I haven’t done that recently. But it’s something that I –
PAIGE: How do you make music?
BROOK: Uh, I grew up playing bass and so I played in some bands. And then I also used to make electronic music, which is something I want to start doing again. And I write. I write a whole lot. i do sort of a daily meditative prompt thing. There’s this website called hellloprompt.com and they send you a daily prompt. Like yesterday’s was I think on like wedding proposal or something like that. And then the day before that was like a story about a bully or something. And so it’s just a bunch of different small prompts and you can write a few sentences or a few paragraphs and send them in and they all get collated anonymously. So the next day you see the previous day’s stories and then a new prompt. It’s really fun. I do that and then I write for The Toast occasionally. I just had a piece on a tarot website about why tarot is important to me as somebody who grew up as a Christian and also as a lesbian. And, yeah, just stuff like that. I’ve got a couple different things coming out and some books this year too, and writing is a big deal for me.
ANGELA: That is really awesome.
PAIGE: Very cool.
BROOK: Yeah, thanks.
PAIGE: So, if people want to follow you for this sort of stuff do you tweet about it?
BROOK: Yeah, I definitely do. Yeah, my Twitter account is probably the best place to see things like that. And I think the books is like orbooks.com/lean-out. So the book is called Lean Out and it’s a bunch of stories about misogyny in tech.
PAIGE: I see what you did there.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: We will not lean in.
BROOK: Yeah, you want to lean out.
PAIGE: So what is your Twitter handle?
BROOK: It’s BrookShelley, so B-R-O-O-K-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y. And that’s kind of the name I use for everything.
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: Awesome. And that will be in the show notes.
BROOK: Awesome.
PAIGE: For sure.
BROOK: Yeah, and it’s fun. I mean so many people on there too. Like, I say a good amount of my friends these days are people I met through Twitter, which is kind of fun.
PAIGE: How do you meet people through Twitter? This is one of the, — I’m not going to lie. This is one of the fascinating — I’ve actually had several people recently be like oh I met this person through Twitter. And I’m like, it’s just a, it’s tiny microblogging platform.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which has sort of messaging, but not really.
BROOK: Yeah. I mean a lot of it is just like friends of friends. So some people I know through real like things. We’ll follow each other on Twitter. We’ll be chatting about something. Maybe one of their friends will pipe in and add something or make a joke. And I’ll sort of follow the people that my friends retweet, sometimes. And then I’ll make a joke or respond to something. Inevitably if we’re both funny and kind of enjoying each other’s company in the sort of microsphere or Twitter, then we’ll like DM each other or say like hey we should grab a drink sometime. Yeah, especially when I’m traveling. I was just in New York and I was just in LA and while I’m there I’m like, hey if I have any friends on here who live in this city and you want to show me something or go get a drink, let’s do that. And then I often meet up with people. New York was super busy because of that. And I stay with people that I meet through Twitter too. LIke people I’ve never physically met in real life.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. It’s super weird though, because it’s like, I’ve never met you but I guess I’m going to crash at your house when I come there. ANd they’re like, yeah rad. It usually goes well.
PAIGE: That’s like couchsurfing but with more knowledge.
BROOK: Yeah. And you can also date people from Twitter. That’s the more-
PAIGE: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, now.
ANGELA: Her mind just blew. It’s all over the wall.
PAIGE: Angela, I think we’re going to have to have like a teach Paige Twitter episode. We’ll do a video this time.
BROOK: It’s the best. And it’s so much better than like OkCupid or Tinder because where that’s like static information that you say about yourself-
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Twitter is what you care about. What you’re talking about. So you can see what somebody actually is like to some degree.
ANGELA: What their passion is too.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah. And then also who their friends are. So, you’re like oh that person follows Ron Paul. Maybe I don’t want to hang out with them or whatever.
ANGELA: Caution. Caution.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: What if it’s like an ironic follow.
BROOK: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they just follow to make sure that he’s not getting more dangerous or something. I don’t know.
PAIGE: So you can, whenever he says something stupid you can do that thing where your snub him or sarcasm back.
BROOK: Exactly. Yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. This is funny. What I’m — all I’m hearing in this conversation is like, Paige you’re social ineptitude via text will get you killed, but — or not killed, but you know. This will not go well.
ANGELA: Smited.
PAIGE: Yes. Smitten.
BROOK: I mean, you8 know, there’s a whole bunch of different ways to do stuff and I have — I — for me, I had a lot of people that I grew up around who are not really friends anymore. A lot of it due to my queerness and a lot of it due to me moving. ANd so, I’ve had to rebuild a chosen family and rebuild a group of people in my life in the past few years. And so it made me a lot more apt to try new things. I have a lot of people i know who, you know, they have the same friends from college or high school and so they’re impetus for making new friends isn’t as high. But yeah, it’s pretty fun.
PAIGE: I mean, it’s no joke that the tools that we have built, like Twitter, like Facebook, and all of these other different social networks can be used in this awesome way to build these intricate connected widespread communities. And, you know, I just happen to be really bad at sharing via text. I’m awesome in Meet Space. I swear.
BROOK: Yeah. There’s always, yeah, there’s always meetups and stuff too that are kind of fun. Although, I’m — I do better online. I do really well in one on one and small situations. If there’s a room full of like 10 or 20 people, I’m usually in the side of the room and like maybe want to read a book.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m exactly the opposite, which is fairly unusual for a geek and I get myself in trouble that way sometimes, because everyone is like well we’ll just talk about it online. I’m like, do we have to? Can we talk about it now?
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: Can I bring a beer? How about pizza?
BROOK: You’re the person who calls people on the phone as opposed to like texting them?
PAIGE: Oh, let’s not go that far. Mostly, I’m actually the person that just shows up at your house.
B; Hey, I like that. That’s good.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Like old school. Like, hey can Brook come out and play?
BROOK: Exactly. I like it.
PAIGE: Awesome. So I did have one other question that I like to ask. I’d love to know what tools you’re using right now to do your job, because it’s always interesting to see what other developers and support technicians and all sorts of things are using in their jobs so that people can get a handle on it. What your job needs for skills.
BROOK: Yeah. My favorite tool of all time is nvALT which is like a — it’s a fork of a thing called Notational Velocity and at its basic level it’s just a plane text editor that does universal search. So the screen looks like, you’ve got a big box for text and you’ve got a left sidebar that lists all of the articles you’ve written or all of the things you’ve written. And then you’ve got a search bar as well. When you type in anything it will find all the notes that have those words in it. And if you press enter on the search it will create a new note with that as a title. So that’s like my brain dump. I found that I’m not very good at story arbitrary information like numbers and whatever else. But my computer is. So I have that synced up to Dropbox and then over to Byword on my phone. And that gets me really far. Other than that, we use Confluence here at work to store a bunch of internal information. We use Zendesk to do our ticketing. I use an inbox for personal stuff and Gmail for work stuff, Google Apps rather. And as far as server things go, obviously Puppet Enterprise, which is something I have to know really, really well. But because I have to bring up a lot of VMs really quickly and test various interpolations of them and be able to roll them back really quickly if I mess it up, we use Vagrant for that. So we have a bunch of different sort of VMs being managed by Vagrant. It’s a cool service. You can like — you template things to YAML and then you say like Vagrant up and create a new VM. You can log into it, mess with it. We have a snapshotting plugin for it, so you can create a snapshot as soon as it’s launched and installed so that if I go misconfigure it and break it, instead of trying to go fix it I can just roll back to the known good state. Let’s see, other than that, we use HipChat to talk to each other. That’s pretty important. And then Markdown, a lot of Markdown stuff. It’s how we write our documents. It’s how we do our ticket stuff in JIRA.
PAIGE: Is nvALT Markdown friendly now?
BROOK: Yeah, it is. The Markdown preview isn’t great, but I haven’t found a place that really has great Markdown preview. Yeah, I like it just fine though. Mostly I use it, especially because it’s very distraction free. It’s just a white box. So I can’t format-
PAIGE: I have used the exact setup that you have on that one and I liked it myself quite a bit with nvALT, Dropbox, and Byword.
BROOK: They’re fantastic. I really like it. I mean, every once in a while I’ll go check and see what else is out there as far tech stops go, but they’re always missing something key that I need, so I’m like all right, I’m sticking with this one.
PAIGE: Yeah. I ended up moving over to Evernote just because i have to deal with so much multimedia stuff with trying to do podcasts and meetups and things, but other than that I would much rather be in nvALT.
BROOK: Yeah, and I like Evernote okay, but for me I’m sort of paranoid and I’m like, well I don’t really trust them to stay around as long as plain text.
PAIGE: Very true. I might, I might be paranoid to export on a regular basis via (unintelligible) to my Dropbox.
BROOK: I love it. That’s awesome. It’s the best way to do it. And then we use like 13’ Macbook Pro retina computers and a second screen. Although, my personal computer that I use a lot when I’m here at the office is one of the new Macbooks. The little 12’ inch ones. And I’m like absolutely head over heals about this computer because it’s so tiny.
PAIGE: I actually was going to ask you that because I saw you had it the other night. And I’m still slightly on the fence because I’m always touchy about first gen technology, but.
BROOK: Sure.
PAIGE: What’s awesome?
BROOK: It’s so light and portable. It fits in my purse. I take it with me in my purse everywhere.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. The retina screen is amazing. It’s not fast, but I don’t need it to be. It turned out that most of what I do is via SSH in a terminal and then things that I don’t do on a computer, sorry, on a server are things that I’m just, like I’m writing text. So I don’t need processing speed. And the GPU is good enough to let me throw game of thrones onto my TV. So it’s just what i need for a machine. And the battery life is a little bit less than I want compared to my old Macbook Air, which had like 14 hours. This one has like eight or nine. But eight or nine hours is still a long time so I’m pretty happy with it.
PAIGE: And one port life hasn’t killed you?
BROOK: No. I don’t plug anything into my computer except for headphones.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: I occasionally — I broke down and got the adapter so I could charge my phone with it, but that’s it. I don’t — I mean I connect to hard drives via a NAS. I don’t use secondary monitors when I’m at home or whatever. So I don’t really need much else. And if I project something onto a screen. Like, a lot of times people have Apple Tvs or whatever else. If I do talks and things like that, I don’t like using PowerPoint so I don’t worry about that either.
PAIGE: Nice.
BROOK: Yeah. I’ve radically simplified it.
PAIGE: Yeah. I really — I kind of did the same thing the first time I went down to a Macbook Air. It was just like, oh wait, I don’t really need, well because I don’t have time to play games anymore so I don’t really need crazy processing power, because mostly I’m just writing text code and it’s brower text code. So it’s not like I’m compiling anything.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah, I’m alway confused when people are like, oh I need a really powerful computer. I’m like for what? But I think that’s like — that was the story of the ‘90s and the early 2000s was sort of like more power is always better and you’re always going to — except for the fact that websites and sort of the way people do Javascript stuff is more and more complex, generally you don’t need much.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the show notes on the YouTube page or go to JupiterBroadcasting.com and from the show dropdown select Womens’ Tech Radio and find the episdoe that you want to listne to or ead about, and scroll down to those show notes. You can also use our contact form on the website, which you can select Women’s Tech Radio or any show on the network to email us about with any kind of feedback.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes. If you have a moment please leave us a review. Let us know what you think about the show. You can reach out to us directly at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com or follow us on Twitter, @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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]]> Multitasking & Tractor Beams | SciByte 79 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/30961/multitasking-tractor-beams-scibyte-79/ Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:12:40 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=30961 We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, and more.

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We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Multitasking Proficiency

  • The low down
  • Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a new study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.
  • The Study
  • The study participants were 310 University of Utah psychology undergraduates – 176 female and 134 male with a median age of 21 – who volunteered for their department\’s subject pool in exchange for extra course credit.
  • The subjects were put through a battery of tests and questionnaires to measure actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking.
  • Research suggests that people who engage in multitasking often do so not because they have the ability, but because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task
  • The more people multitask by talking on cell phones while driving or by using multiple media at once, the more they lack the actual ability to multitask, and their perceived multitasking ability \”was found to be significantly inflated
  • The Results
  • To measure actual multitasking ability, participants performed a test named Operation Span, or OSPAN.
  • The test involves two tasks: memorization and math computation where participants must remember two to seven letters, each separated by a math equation that they must identify as true or false
  • A simple example of a question: \”is 2+4=6?, g, is 3-2=2?, a, is 4×3=12.\” Answer: true, g, false, a, true.
  • Participants also ranked their perceptions of their own multitasking ability by giving themselves a score ranging from zero to 100, with 50 percent meaning average, 70 percent of participants thought they were above average at multitasking
  • Study subjects reported how often they used a cell phone while driving, and what percentage of the time they are on the phone while driving
  • Subjects also completed a survey of how often and for how many hours they use which media, including printed material, television and video, computer video, music, nonmusic audio, video games, phone, instant and text messaging, e-mail, the Web and other computer software such as word processing
  • Multitasking, including cell phone use while driving, correlated significantly with sensation-seeking, indicating some people multitask because it is more stimulating, interesting and challenging, and less boring – even if it may hurt their overall performance
  • Of Note
  • The data suggest the people talking on cell phones while driving are people who probably shouldn\’t.
  • In fact the people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse
  • People who score high on a test of actual multitasking ability tend not to multitask because they are better able to focus attention on the task at hand
  • Study participants also reported spending 13 percent of their driving time talking on a cell phone, which Strayer says roughly squares with federal estimates that one in 10 drivers are on the phone at any given time
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Automated Operation Span Tutorial | zupef
  • Image Driving simulator they use in some research | David Strayer, University of Utah
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Frequent multitaskers are bad at it: Motorists overrate ability to talk on cell phones when driving | MedXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Attack of the red pens

  • The low down
  • Sociologists claim in a paper they\’ve had published that when teachers use a red pen to add comments to student papers, students perceive them more negatively than if they use another color pen
  • The Study
  • The two researchers enlisted the assistance of 199 undergraduate students – each was given four versions of an already graded essay by an unknown instructor
  • The graded remarks were deemed as high or low in quality with some written in red, others in blue
  • Students were asked to read the essay and the remarks given by the instructor and then to rate how they felt about what the instructor had written and to suggest what grade they would have given the essay
  • They were also asked how they felt about the instructor that had written the original remarks
  • The Results
  • After they\’d finished with their opinions, each was also given a questionnaire designed to provide the researchers with more concrete data.
  • The researchers found that the student volunteers didn\’t seem to be impacted one way or another by pen color when they agreed with the instructor\’s comments and grade
  • When they disagreed; however, there were definitely some differences – mainly negative
  • When the instructors\’ comments were written in red versus blue the volunteers judged them more harshly and as a result, rated them lower in \”bedside manner.\”
  • The volunteers didn\’t seem to judge the quality of the comments any differently – their negative feelings were aimed at the person that had written the remarks when they wrote in red ink
  • Of Note
  • The researchers theorize that red ink is akin to using all caps when writing e-mail or text messages – it\’s like shouting at a person
  • Those being graded naturally feel a little bit abused and respond by growing angry or sad, which, they note, doesn\’t really promote the learning process
  • The team suggest instructors stop using red pens and go with a shade of blue instead
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Study shows red pen use by instructors leads to more negative response | phys.org

Tractor Beams a reality?

  • Although light manipulation techniques have existed since the 1970s, this is the first time a light beam has been used to draw objects towards the light source, albeit at a microscopic level.
  • What is it?
  • Researchers have found a way to generate a special optical field that efficiently reverses radiation pressure of light.
  • The new technique could lead to more efficient medical testing, such as in the examination of blood samples
  • The team discovered a technique which will allow them to provide \’negative\’ force acting upon minuscule particles
  • The technique
  • Normally when matter and light interact the solid object is pushed by the light and carried away in the stream of photons
  • Such radiation force was first identified by Johanes Kepler when observing that tails of comets point away from the sun
    Over recent years researchers have realised that while this is the case for most of the optical fields, there is a space of parameters when this force reverses.
  • Scientists have now demonstrated the first experimental realisation of this concept together with a number of exciting applications for biomedical photonics and other disciplines
  • What does it mean to todays science?
  • The occurrence of negative force is very specific to the properties of the object, such as size and composition
  • This allows optical sorting of micro-objects in a simple and inexpensive device
  • Optical fractionation has been identified as one of the most promising biomedical applications of optical manipulation allowing
  • Scientists identified certain conditions, in which objects held by the \”tractor\” beam force-field, rearranged themselves to form a structure which made the beam even stronger
  • Multimedia
  • Image Example of comet with two tails | SpacePlace.nasa.gov
  • First video reveals working tractor beam in action | newscientist.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Star Trek\’s \’tractor\’ beam created in miniature by researchers | phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Bicycle Airbags

HIggs-Boson Twitter Rumors and Following

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 53 | Higgs Boson – To Higgs-Boson or not to Higgs-Boson | July 10, 2012
  • The low down
  • For the first time scientists have been able to analyse the dynamics of social media on a global scale before, during and after the announcement of a major scientific discovery.
  • The model is based on the spread of gossip on Twitter prior to the Higgs boson discovery announcement
  • The Data
  • According to the analysed data, the rumours that the Higgs boson had been discovered started around 1st July 2012
  • That means it was one day before the announcement at Tevatron, and three days before the official announcement from CERN on 4th July.
  • The research shows that rumours started to spread on Twitter firstly in the USA, UK, Spain, Canada, Australia, as well as Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany, all countries with strong scientific connections to the experiments at the LHC.
  • What it means
  • Other researchers on the project are also interested in how information spreads on social media
  • This is really useful for practical applications such as marketing, for example if you want to run a global marketing campaign you can identify key people on social media to help you to spread your message
  • Once you have identified these key advocates, you can change and steer the message in a different direction, potentially modifying opinions of millions of people or keep the interest in the topic going
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip – World View | networkedsystemslab
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Scientists analyse global Twitter gossip around Higgs boson discovery | phys.org

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE —

Opportunity rover still on the move

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 61 | ‘Tatooine’ Exoplanets & Eye’s – Opportunity, Driving Distance and life | September 4, 2012
  • Nine Years of Service
  • NASA\’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars the night of Jan. 24, 2004 PST (just after midnight EST on Jan. 25), three weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down
  • Spirit and Opportunity were originally supposed to spend three months searching for evidence of past water activity on the Red Planet
  • Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010, after getting mired in soft sand and failing to maneuver into a position that would allow it to slant its solar panels toward the sun over the 2009-2010 Martian winter. NASA declared the rover dead in 2011 after 7 years of service
  • Opportunity, after 9 years of service, is currently inspecting clay deposits along the rim of Mars\’ huge Endeavour Crater. Clays form in relatively neutral (as opposed to acidic or basic) water, so
  • Rover road trips
  • So far, robotic rovers have been to the moon and Mars, with astronauts actually driving a lunar car on the moon during NASA\’s Apollo program
  • Soviet-era Lunakhod 2 : In the lead for total distance travelled the farthest is the the Soviet-era Lunakhod 2, which drove 23 miles (37 kilometers) during its 1973 mission
  • NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover : The next rover with the most driving distance is NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover, which was driven 22.3 miles (35.89 km) by astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972
  • Opportunity rover : Next, in a close third, is the Opportunity rover, which has been driving across the plains of Meridiani Planum on the Red Planet since 2004 and has driven more than 22.03 miles (35.46 km) and is still going today
  • This means that Opportunity is a mere one third of a mile (0.4 km) to being the second farthest driven, and a little under a mile (1.5 km) to being the farthest
  • I estimate, barring any delays for science or equipment and based on past mileage, that in the next 2 months it might overtake the distance travelled by Apollo 17 rover, and the distance by the Lunokhod in the next 6 months.
  • The latest to enter the race is Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, which is just getting started with only 0.4 mile (0.7 km) traveled so far.
    the area may once have been capable of supporting primitive microbial life
  • Multimedia
  • Distances Driven on Other Worlds Infographic | Space.com
  • Social Media
  • Spirit and Oppy @MarsRovers
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Distance Traveled, Extraterrestrial Vehicles | Wheeled Vehicles, Moon & Mars | Space.com
  • NASA\’s Opportunity Rover Begins Year 10 on Mars | Space.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Dyscalculia

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 78 | Dyscalculia & the Flu – Dyscalculia | January 22, 2013
  • James Lewis
  • Suggests a concern that there is an overdiagnosis of \’labels\’
  • Could simply be that you could learn differently
  • Response
  • Almost certainly “the system” can over-diagnose students
  • Are you or were you “diagnosed”? If so learn what exemptions, etc, that you qualify for should you choose to utilize them
  • Try different ways of learning outside the classroom that can help in the classroom or supplement

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

THIS WEEK

  • NASA – Day of Remembrance
  • Apollo 1 | January 27, 1967 | Command Pilot Virgil \”Gus\” Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee
  • Challenger | January 28, 1986 | Francis R. Scobee – Mission Commander, Michael J. Smith – Pilot, Ellison S. Onizuka – Mission Specialist 1, Judith A. Resnik – Mission Specialist 2, Ronald E. McNair – Mission Specialist 3, Christa McAuliffe – Payload Specialist 1, Gregory B. Jarvis – Payload Specialist 2
  • Columbia | February 1, 2003 | Rick Husband, Commander; William C. McCool, Pilot; Michael P. Anderson, Payload Commander; David M. Brown, Mission Specialist 1; Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist 2; Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist 4; and Ilan Ramon, Payload Specialist 1

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Feb 01, 1972 : 40 years ago : Hand-held calculator : The first scientific handheld calculator was introduced for $395 by Hewlett- Packard, named the HP-35 for having 35 keys. It was the first handheld calculator able to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke. The red LED display could give scientific notation up to 10 digits mantissa and 2 digits exponent. The price was reduced several times, eventually to $195. By Feb 1975 (when production of the model was discontinued), 300,000 had been sold. The numbers and functions for calculations were entered in “Reverse Polish Notation”(RPN), which used an “ENTER” key but needed no parentheses or “=” key. It ran on rechargeable batteries and had electronics with several integrated circuits in a 3.1\” x 5.8\” x 1.4\” (79 ×147×34 mm) case.
  • Image author : Seth Morabito | originally posted to Flickr as HP 35 Calculator

Looking up this week

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