A few months ago, Gabe asked if I wanted to be a part of the Tamper Evident Contest at ToorCon. This type of event was first held at DefCon this year. Not knowing at all what I was getting into, I said “yes”.

The contest challenges whether “tamper evident” devices are as secure as they claim. Such devices include stickers that leave a layer when ripped off, envelope seals, and zip ties. Furthermore, it is not only necessary to defeat the security measures, but also to conceal everything as if nothing was done (which is the harder part).

We received this box at 10 am Saturday morning and had until 1 pm the following day to return it fully intact. And so the hacking began…

Turns out most stickers can be taken off with isopropanol and will remain sticky for quite a while. Within the big container where 4 more:

In one paper bag was a chain of various locking devices. All the devices needed to be moved from the metal chain to the yellow plastic chain. This drained over 7 hours of our time and the help of many (and still was not completed fully).

To my delight, in one envelope was the following. This was totally perfect for me!

The small black box was a circuit. Luckily almost everyone else had electric engineering backgrounds.

And of course there were all kinds of codes, including a CD with a passworded RAR file.

By 1 pm Sunday, we had everything sealed back up as if nothing had been touched.

We didn’t crack everything and missed a bunch of bonus points, but ended up getting first place! Our team consisted of Gabe, Brandon, Declan, the artistic Nonie, and pretty much everyone who hung out, gave suggestions, and fiddled with us. It was a great experience!

This event is filled with scientific inquiry and technological manipulation. One must carefully observe the nature of the devices, decide on the right tools, and execute with extreme care and precision. Practice often makes perfect. Our cohesive teamwork and openness to others were highly beneficial. All of these characteristics really appeal to the scientist in me.

Documentation blog: http://covertpenetration.posterous.com/
All photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gebl/sets/

The up-and-coming website About.me is a personal splash and analytics dashboard. I was amongst the first group to check out the site. Check out my profile at http://about.me/jun/.

I jumped immediately and snagged the username “jun” since it’s usually taken early or too short. Although, now it feels somewhat of an oddball since it’s not consistent with my normal username.

The site is pretty basic, as it is suppose to be, I suppose. I do like the excuse to put a gigantic picture of myself on the page. I feel all bold and important, but I need to take a better and more recent picture. There’s limited customization, such as font and placement of the text box, but one can do a lot with manipulating the background. There’s a lot of potential for creativity. The current site connections are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, posterous, flickr, TypePad, and foursquare. I imagine this list will expand. Clicking on the icons open up pop-up feeds.

The second part of their pitch is an analytics dashboard:

Since I don’t use Facebook anymore, it’s only analyzing my Twitter. The number of tweets per week would be fun to watch. Although pure numbers hardly mean much. It would be more interesting to compare yourself against others. Hence I like EngageRank better. Plus, EngageRank uses a fancy statistical algorithm so it must be awesome :)

It would be interesting to see how About.me takes off. Will it replace business cards as the first access point for finding someone? Will it stay in tech crowds and be the directory of who to know in the tech world? Or will it just be pages with pretty backgrounds? There’s lots of work and potential ahead.

As alluded to in the previous post, Jeff and I ended up doing a two-part talk called “Redefining Human” for Barcamp San Diego 7. Enjoy!

Redefining Human – Part I: Biology

Redefining Human – Part II: Technology