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Hello and welcome to my world. My name is Simple Nomad and I am a hacker. Sounds like I'm in Hackers Anonymous, doesn't it? Maybe I should be. In the world of computer security, I'm a fucking dinosaur. I started down the Copyleft Hand Path (that's a joke only a geek/pagan would get) a few decades ago. My early days involved running an Apple II (not a II+, the original II) and accessing such fun places as various large corporations, universities, and the phone company. Yes I said the phone company, because once upon a time there was only one.

I somehow avoided Operation SunDevil, probably because the Feds had bigger fish to fry. I was lucky. Now I keep my nose clean and work for a nice company who pays me to reverse engineer UFOs (well not quite but it is still fun). Over my career as a hacker I've done interesting things, from working as a parttime ghost buster to making pizzas to high pressure security jobs in the Fortune 500.

I founded NMRC a few years ago, and it currently has 18 or so "members". I say it like that because it is more of a hacker club, where we chat on a private SILC server and share such things as 0day, pr0n, industry gossip, and technical help for each other. We also on occassion release code and papers.

Some of the things that distinguish NMRC from other groups seems to be:

Most of us work in the high tech field, or at least something closely related
We actually have female members. We weren't the first group to have females, but we at least have them.
We are politically diverse and politically active. Again, we aren't the first, but we are doing it.

Outside of the complete morons in the community, we do not look down on any other hackers. Yes, I'll say it, we have acquaintainces that are what one might consider to be blackhats. Trust me, they don't share hardly anything with us, since most of us work in essentially whitehat jobs, but we truly don't have anything against them. Morality is nothing more than a set of rules for justification, and we don't judge others based upon differences in morality. We don't condone illegal behaviour, but speaking for myself and at least a few other NMRC members, we don't condemn them either. There are things I use to do that when I started doing them they weren't even illegal, and I thought there was nothing wrong with them. I don't do them now because they are illegal and we live in scary and paranoid times (USA PATRIOT Act, etc)

I recently had some email conversations with a couple of female hackers I have come to know, and I stated this regarding how I got along with female co-workers:

 It seems that when you are supportive of your co-workers, and they
 aren't use to it, they respond positively. And when you end up with a
 working relationship with mutual respect, you both get more work done,
 the work is of higher quality. And it is free of that dick-measuring
 pissing contest one usually has to deal with. You both end up getting
 more responsibility, more credibility, and promotions. Imagine that. So
 you see that my ulterior motive is to forward my career without stepping
 on anyone and even give credit where credit is due. It is idiotic for
 anyone to shoot themselves in the foot by dismissing an entire group of
 people based upon simple cosmetic differences. Skillset rules, and that
 should always be the judgement point -- nothing else.

I think that this applies not just to differences in gender, but sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs, political affiliation, and even hacker hat color. I don't think of myself as white or black, nor do I consider myself to be wearing a gray hat. I'm a hacker, nothing more.

Projects

I do code when I have to, I do it mainly to both entertain myself and for research purposes. Occassionally I code or help code up something that actually is deemed useful by others. Here are a few links:

NCrypt - A symmetric file encryption/decryption tool, with secure file-wiping capabilities.
NCovert - A utility that allows for file transfer across the Internet using stealth technology.
silcd.diff - A patch for silc server 0.9.18 that suppresses stats info except to server operators. To apply, untar the silc-server-0.9.18 tarball, cd into silc-server-0.9.18, and patch -p1 < silcd.diff

Other projects I've worked on can be found at NMRC's Project Page.

Papers/Presentations

I've authored or co-authored some papers and done some presentations at security conferences. I'm not listing all of them, mainly because it would be boring, so I'm only listing the ones that seemed to generate some interest.

I co-authored an article with Jitsu-Disk and Irib in 2000 entitled Project Area52. I list it here because it still gets mail and inquiries. The only people that actually wrote an implementation of what we were talking about turned out to be Mitre (not publicly released), hence the only mail I've ever received on it has been from government types. I don't believe it was the first paper of its kind by any stretch, but the government interest was at leasting fairly surprising.
I did a talk at DefCon in 2001 entitled "Widdershins: Devolution and the Politics of Technology" that generated a ton of interest at the time. I've put together a page just for Widdershins stuff.
My BlackHat presentation on NCrypt and NCovert.
At DefCon in 2003, NMRC gave a panel discussion entitled Free Your Mind. For my part I did a brief demo of the NCrypt and NCovert tools, but I also presented a rant which generated a shitload of email.

Non-sequitor Links

Here are some fun links, all unrelated except I'm actually interested in them

My ToorCon 2004 pics are here.
How does a hacker break the "smelly nerd in the basement" image? By using toiletries from the Nomad line at Crabtree & Evelyn. Tell them SN sent you. And for your god's sake, wash up.
Wicca. I am not exactly 100% Wiccan, in fact I have my own way of looking at things that makes me a heretic to both the JudeoChristian set as well as the Pagan set. So I expect to die via public burning or hexing. In the meantime, try this page on Witchcraft basics if you're remotely interested.
Chai rocks. The best chai I ever had was some homemade chai that Weasel made. However if you are too lazy to go to all of the trouble to make chai at home, I've put together a guide to purchasing chai.
As any self-confessed metrosexual will tell you, it is important to keep up on the news. Sure you can read CNN, but don't forget about alternate news sources. I do visit Drudge Report daily, but since it is at times conservative, it should be balanced with The Raw Story.
If you have idle CPU time, join the NMRC Seti Team and help find ET. See SETI@home for more details.

Simple Nomad - [ thegnome at nmrc.org ]
Thu Oct 6 11:55:19 CDT 2005
Prefered GPG Key: 6838F11D
Key Fingerprint: C1B1 E749 25DF 867C 36D4 1E14 247A A4BD 6838 F11D