Home | News Archive | August 2006

The "Janus Project"
August 31, 2006

The "Janus Project" is the brainchild of Kyle Williams of the Janus Wireless Security Research Group in Portland, Oregon.

Mounted inside an epoxy and silicone-sealed watertight case lives a 1.5GHz C7 powered EPIA EN 15000G motherboard, 2 x four-port PCI to mini-PCI adapters, 8 x 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI WLAN Modules, 2 x 1W 2.4Ghz WLAN amplifiers, a keyboard and a 17in LCD screen. The system can scan up to 300 wireless networks simultaneously, storing and AES encrypting in real time all the data onto its 20GB hard drive.

By focusing all 8 WLAN cards onto an access point and using a combination of common Linux tools, the Janus Project can crack a WEP key in under 5 minutes. WPA and WPA2 encryption aren't far behind - Kyle and his friend Martin Peck are optimising the software to use the Padlock hardware acceleration of the C7 chip to crack those too.

If Kyle gets captured in enemy territory and tortured, an "Instant Off" switch will render the captured data useless until a password is entered and a USB stick containing a 2000-bit passkey is inserted. Presumably during the torturing process.

The Janus Project (Tom's Hardware)

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A Couple of New Features
August 15, 2006

We've let our pet programmer loose from his darkened underground pit for a few hours and added a couple of features to the site. It's now possible to email any story to a friend using the imaginatively named 'Email this' link underneath it. There's also a section on the right of each page showing the most popular projects viewed in the past 24 hours, with a wee explanatory bar graph showing relative popularity. The graph updates every few minutes. Clicking refresh in your browser won't increase its vote though - we're counting independent views here. So now you know. You lucky people.

Update: Our popularity experiment has had an interesting (but perhaps inevitable) side effect. The top 5 projects are now over twice as popular as the nearest competitors...

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The "Leela PC"
August 05, 2006

Jan Erik Vangen wrestled with his conscience before producing a Futurama-themed follow up to his very popular Bender PC, but he figured if nobody else was going to do it he might as well.

Leela is fully Mini-ITX powered, has a working webcam in her eye - and a USB thumbdrive in her... thumb.

Jan Erik Vangen's "Leela PC"

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