If you’re into open source, you’re probably aware of the different kinds of free, thanks to the expressions “Free as in beer” and “Free as in speech”.
If you’ve dealt with some particular open source codebases, you’ve probably also internalized a third kind of free: Free as in mattress.
From 2000 to 2001, I lived in San Francisco, where I took advantage of opportunities to hang out at Def Con, and I got to know a lot of the dot-com-bubble/bust-era cybersecurity/hacktivism community. I kept those connections and as a result, ended up working on a project that the Cult of the Dead Cow originated: a little hacktivism project called Peekabooty.
Peekabooty was a peer-to-peer proto-VPN (remember, Napster was still in its original P2P file-sharing form back then, and at the time BitTorrent was just a concept that Bram Cohen was working on and telling us about) that was meant to circumvent the Great Firewall of China and provide Chinese dissidents with access to sites banned in their location. Paul Baranowski did the real back-end work, I was the front-end developer as well as the technical evangelist, and because it was a Windows desktop app, we did it in Visual C++, as one did back in those heady days of the early 2000s.
Here’s a couple of snapshots of the user interface, which acted like a screensaver — it used cutesy bears (which I illustrated) to show nodes in your particular P2P network:
We presented Peekabooty at CodeCon 2002 (you can listen to our presentation here). It’s still one of the proudest moments of my career, and we got to hang out with friends from our P2P days at OpenCola, as well as with new people:
And, of course, I learned so much!
I miss doing that sort of thing, and I think participating in The Undercroft’s UC Baseline program is an important step towards getting back to that kind of work.
Here I am in 2020 — laid off, but with a couple of side gigs to make a little extra money and prove that I haven’t been idle. Then last Thursday, I heard about the UC Baseline program and a scholarship. I decided to apply on a lark, figuring that they’d never pick me.
They did pick me, and between the greatly reduced cost of attending and my not living paycheck-to-paycheck, I’m able to attend. I’m willing to play the gambit of not taking a full-time job for the next five weeks while ramping up some dormant security skills, because I think it’s a worthwhile one.
At the same time, I think that I can also be useful to The Undercroft by writing about my UC Baseline experiences and promoting them.
I’m looking forward to the experience. It’s an exciting course being taught in an amazing space by interesting people.
Here are some articles about Peekabooty:
Remember that scholarship to the “UC Baseline” cybersecurity program that I wrote about last week? In that post, I also wrote:
(I’ll admit it: Although I’m not likely to qualify, I applied.)
Well, I applied, and I qualified. The combination of a promotional bonus and an I-got-laid-off scholarship gave me a deep discount on the standard $6,500 price tag for the inaugural cohort of the UC Baseline course, which starts tomorrow and runs until Wednesday, August 19th. Class starts at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow.
Based in a gorgeous building in Tampa’s historic Ybor City neighborhood, The Undercroft could be described as a security startup incubator and coworking space, but they prefer to be described as a security guild and guild hall.
Here’s what Undercroft CEO Adam Sheffield has to say:
What we offer here is secure workspace for startups and medium-sized businesses in the security field that either want to start their businesses here in Tampa or make Tampa their home.
They’re also the home of a lot of interesting presentations, as this gallery of graphics for previous ones shows:
This isn’t my first exposure to information security culture, but it’s been a while, and I’m overdue for a refresher.
The first week of the program is Hardware 101, where we’ll spend five days covering the background and basics of the components that comprise modern systems. This should be fun.
For the next five weeks, I’ll be at The Undercroft (masked up, in a small cohort), learning. I’ll write about my experiences as I progress through the program.
I always keep an old computer or two around “just in case,” and it often turns out that they’re useful for all sorts of things. In an age when online access is a necessity and in a line of work where being able to put together a quick web page, application, or server is important, a spare computer — even one that’s a little bit backward by today’s standard — can be a handy resource.
Enter “tinymint,” a Compaq 610 laptop that Anitra got from her old workplace a couple of years back for $50. (You should be able to find a used one, or one with similar specs, for about $100.) We originally got it to give to her parents so that they’d have a half-decent machine on which to surf the web, but we’ve since replaced it with a Chromebook, which requires less maintenance. They gave the Compaq back to us, and I’ve since boosted its RAM to the maximum: A whopping 4 GB, which was pretty respectable in the Windows Vista era when it was manufactured.
In case you’re curious, here’s a quick rundown of the specs of my particular Compaq 610. Remember, this laptop is almost old enough to get its own YouTube account or Bat/Bar Mitzvah:
There were a few variants of this machine, and I’m a little surprised that this turned out to be one of the better ones — normally companies go with the bottom-of-the-line configurations, especially for computers whose primary purpose was probably producing cover sheets for TPS reports.
I like to think of “tinymint” as a Raspberry Pi with a built-in monitor, keyboard, and battery (although I need to pick up a replacement battery; this one no longer holds any charge). This means that it’s still got some years left in it, where it could function as a server, a runner of automated tasks, or as a budget Python programming machine.
I’m scheduled to teach an “Intro to programming with Python” course in July, and I may actually use this as my demo machine, just to show what’s possible even on a limited budget.
In order to get the most out of this machine, I replaced the Windows with something considerably more lightweight: Peppermint.
Peppermint is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, and it’s designed to run on systems with limited resources. To this end, it uses a desktop environment that’s a mix of LXDE’s lxsession session manager and Xfce’s panel and applications menu. Simply put, it’s not going to look as slick as commercial OSs or even other Linux distros, but it’ll be reasonably good-looking and run quite well.
Since Peppermint is a Linux distro, it has all the command-line goodness that a developer needs. I wanted to make “tinymint” a lean mean Python machine, so immediately after Peppermint finished installing, I installed Anaconda Individual Edition and Visual Studio Code, both of which installed and run without any issues.
I’m going to make regular use of “tinymint” and post the occasional report about my experiences with it. If you’re a developer with an older computer and a limited budget, you should look into Peppermint — you might find that it’s exactly what you need.
The current version is “Peppermint 10 Respin,” which came out in December. It’s based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and if you want to know more about this release, check out their announcement.
Want to know more? Here are a couple of recent video reviews of Peppermint:
Thanks to Renoir Boulanger for the find!
