Leeds2600

Come one, come all, to the next Leeds2600 meeting, aka “Return of the Agenda-Hating Hackers“, this Friday @ 7pm in The Grove Inn, Leeds.

Bring your friends, bring toys, bring an open mind, or just bring yourself.

Yet another venue disaster as it turned out the Brewery Tap had their entire second floor rented out for a private do, with all the pub customers crammed into the main downstairs bar it made a little difficult to have a meeting, with loudness and general lack of space getting in the way.
After an hour or so we ended up yet again in The Grove Inn, or rather outside the Grove Inn enjoying the night air.

Attendance was the same as last month, with 2 new faces. @digininja came all the way from Sheffield for the phun.
One of the main topics of the night was up coming cons, including Infosec, toorcon, and OpenHackDay, GoodHack, as well as cons past like shmoo and brumcon.

Other topics of discussion:

• Leeds Hackspace
• Conficker – scanning massive networks for, and the likelyhood it was probably professional made for organised criminals
• Hacking netbooks
• AlertMe alarms and interesting uses/hacks
• Of course venues came up again, we generally decided on just coming straight back to The Grove Inn next month
• Protocol level and MITM SSL attacks

As ever if I’ve forgotten anything leave a comment or leave a link on Delicious for:leeds2600.
Look forward to seeing everyone at the next meeting.

Normally I’m not into having agendas for 2600 meets, just not the way it’s been done at any I’ve been to, but I’ve been encouraged to put a few things up for this Friday’s meet.

• A few people are going to give talks..
  • One on various security techniques by @tamonten gleaned from his OSCP and more.
  • An embedded hardware talk by Paul.
• Jonny would like to have a discussion about a Leeds hackspace, and meeting up in the future around this.
• Possibility of an outing to Good Hack.
• Going to try recording the meet to make getting links etc. easier, if anyone has any objections I won’t record, chances are it won’t work in the pub environment anyway, but worth a shot.
• Usual open-house fun and frivolities..

See you all there.

Quick reminder that the second ever Leeds2600 meeting is this Friday 7pm @ The Brewery Tap, Leeds. As usual any and all welcome, look for geeks with toys. See you there.

For those people who suggested an Upcoming event would be handy, vuala!

Being the lazy sodhacker that I am, I decided I’d automate the display of the next meets date on the sidebar, after struggling with PHP’s strtotime and trying to get it to do what I wanted it to, I gave up and nabbed a bit of code off PHX2600, but it irked me that it used so much looping to do something that strtotime should be easily able to do, at least in theory.
I revisited it again last night and came to the conclusion that my difficulties were in the way strtotime handles date strings as being “from the current timestamp”, even when trying to get it for the next month.
So the answer to this was to generate timestamps for the very beginning of a month and then pipe this through strtotime.
With this out of the way, I present getNextFirstFriday():

<?php
/**
 * Return a unix timestamp for next "first Friday of the month", e.g.
 * either the first Friday of the current month or if that date has already passed
 * the first friday of the next month
 * @return int unix timestamp
 */
function getNextFirstFriday() {
        $firstFridayThisMonth = strtotime('first friday', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('n'), 0, date('Y')));
        if (time() < strtotime('7pm', $firstFridayThisMonth)) {
                return $firstFridayThisMonth;
        }
        return strtotime('first friday', strtotime(date('Y-m-0', strtotime('next month'))));
}
?>

As you can see it’s obviously a PHP function. It doesn’t use any version-specific features so if you’re absolutely crazy you should be able to run it under PHP 4.x.
You’ll probably want to use it with something like date() to output a meaningful string from the unix timestamp it outputs, e.g. echo date('Y-m-d', getNextFirstFriday());

Although it’s such a small snippet that most would normally consider it trivial and thus needing no copyright notice, I’ll just say it’s licensed under The Simplified BSD License for prosperity.

The first ever meeting of Leeds2600 was to be held in The Elbow Room, despite many people telling me it wouldn’t work very well having it there on a Friday night due to loud music and many-many-peoples..guess what, it didn’t. The moment I and Jonny walked through the door we realised you could never hold an actual meeting in there as you couldn’t hear anyone, and finding a table to sit at was next to impossible.

However people were going to go there first so we hung around at the back of the balcony, I tweet’d where we’d wait for people to come with the idea being to move on to somewhere more appropriate after a while.

In time Channon, Paul and Neil turned up, and we all agreed on moving on to a small place called the Grove Inn, not far away from station.

Once in a quieter (and friendlier) environment we all had a “get to know each other” round-table-esque session and the night finally got off to a good start with some chatting about the hacking we each get up to in our daily lives, and the kind of things that interest us.
Topics on the table for the night included:

• Getting the word out of Leeds2600
• Other geeky meetings in Leeds/WY
• Embedded hardware hacking, and the the Arduino for hobbyists
• Big-arse servers like the Sun Origin series, making use of them, and how to send your power bills sky high
• Remote aerial war-driving, e.g. War Ballooning (video)
• War-dialling revival, using VOIP
• Hackerspaces, including a hackerspace in Sheffield and the possibility of forming a Leeds hackerspace
• A suitable location for next months meet, in the end we decided upon trying out The Brewery Tap
• Joe McCray’s talk on advanced SQL injection, video and slides

Anyone remembers anything I haven’t mentioned here, including links, leave a comment and I’ll redact.
Or alternatively you can bookmark any links on Delicious with for:leeds2600, and I’ll roll up any bookmarks on here.

The first meeting went pretty well last night, met a few cool people, after a rocky start involving a crappy venue.
I’ll get a full report put up later, for now just thought I’d let everyone know there’s new a Flickr group for photos of Leeds2600 meets, feel free to join and add any meeting photos to the pool here.

Just a general reminder to everyone, the first Leeds2600 meeting will be tonight 7pm @ The Elbow Room, Leeds.

See you there.

For those of the Facebook persuasion, there is teh event and teh group.