Doug Smith, Author at Laboratory B

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Altered image — Image with message “One if by land, two if by sea”

Keep up with some of the Laboratory B open source code by joining us on GitHub!

Last weekend Doug whipped together a toy steganography device called “Stegosaurus” [github] — it will take a PNG image, and using a (very very basic) steganography [wikipedia] algorithm stores a payload in the least significant bits of the color definition of pixels in an image. It’s a node.js module, and you can even install it with NPM.

It could use a little improvement if anyone is interested in forking it! It needs some testing with binary files. It needs a way to store the length of the message. And ideally, it’d use a pre-shared key (maybe?) to allow you both: A. define where the payload is hidden in the image, and B. actually encrypt the payload (which is, as of now, unencrypted). Which makes it so it doesn’t follow Kerckhoff’s Principle [wikipedia].

…Unfortunately every single message is decoded as “Drink more ovaltine” [youtube] (…just kidding. it’ll do whatever payload you want)

Life Giving Bazooka – An Ethereum Contract

tldr? “Life giving bazooka” is an example of an Ethereum contract that represents a pyramid scheme. Check out the scheme @ github. It’s called “life giving bazooka” as a knock on multi-level-marketing schemes.

We’ve been having a lot of fun having some nights where we’re chatting up Crytpocurrency, and recently we got together and had a working session taking a look at Ethereum. We got the client up and running, and moments later gdot had a little “banking contract” running, from an LLL (lisp-like-language) tutorial.

Which is awesome… But, I really wanted to write in the “c-like-language” (CLL) — that’s what I tend to get. So, I found Vitalik’s got a CLL compiler, but it’s pretty alpha. Also, it’s made progress to work with PoC4, which isn’t released yet. All the main releases of the clients (which you can download), are PoC3 based. So, I went ahead and fixed a few things in his compiler, and I’m maintaining my own branch @ https://github.com/dougbtv/compiler/tree/poc3-compat.

But, to make it easier, I’ve been maintaining my own pre-processor (inspired by the C pre-processor) that makes a few things a little easier to work with. You can download my cll-preprocessor at github, and it includes submodules that fix the things that I needed to get Vitalik’s compiler working properly, especially with PoC3.

So… Where’s this pyramid scheme!?! It’s also on github! There’s quite a bit more information there for you to read about how it works, and instructions to run it if you so please.

Quick Links

Join #laboratoryb on freenode, and make crank calls with our bot ‘whistler’

d00dz* do you rock out on IRC? If you don’t… You’re missing out on one of the pure joys of geekdom, one of the original forms of the hacker dungeon in cyberspace. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist / brain surgeon / Ada programmer / BIOS reverse engineer — you just have to download an IRC client**, or use one on the web (which is even easier) and for server use irc.freenode.net, and then join #laboratoryb (you do know that the hashtag originated from IRC channels, right!?)

Then! You can make all the obnoxious prank calls you want with our friendly*** bot Whistler! He’s our IRC robot who’s hooked up to our Asterisk box at the lab, and he’s got functionality which does a text-to-speech and originates a call to a phone number of your choosing to harangue your friends, foes, or send an “I love you” to your mom from a robot (moms love that, kinda?)

But, the best part is… He’s open source! You can check out all his node.js code on Google Code. So if you want to, you can set up your own instance, or get your hands dirty and improve your skill with node.js by adding feature and improving him.

* And dud3773s, of course.
** May I suggest irssi if you’re a linux geek who likes the CLI, or Quassel if you’re a GUI person (no shame, of course)
*** He might mom joke you now and again, and we hope he hasn’t become sentient.