Category: News

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Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:

Once in awhile a service may get compromised script or item in it – in a recent case, a Zoom link will actually take you to some random site as part of some sort of adware campaign??? However a closer look shows it is very important to test your links on email or sites:

The link I saw recently actually had a very odd looking script – script in a production service is generally minified sometimes, but won’t be oddly obfuscated or base64-encoded. The suspicious part of this script starts out in the <body> with an odd looking launchBase64:

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New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()

This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):

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Linux 5.9

Recently, Linux 5.9 was released! While folks are unlikely to see this in any distribution very soon, it brings some improvements that will be a clear reason that we will hear about it very soon (ok, enough ham radio jokes 🙂 )

Although it’s not something particularly recommended for your main system, but you could install it now – in fact with kernels of Linux you can generally switch it out and if it doesn’t work, just select the old one at the boot screen.

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Better things to do this Oct 31st

This has been a challenging year for many of us, and while it may be tempting to go visit neighborhood houses for parties or candy, the extra sugar and staying out in the cold could possibly be a setback from healthy progress in recent weeks. Some say sugar worsens immune function. Instead you might consider activities including:

  1. Reading, study
  2. Watch some interesting Makerfaire videos, as most areas didn’t get a Makerfair this year 🙁
  3. Build something on the computer and present at a hackathon – there’s a Tmobile hackathon, a Here Maps hackathon, Post COVID Hackathon, hack-or-treat going on.
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Human pose estimation with Python and Gluoncv

Human pose estimation is something useful for robotics/programming as you can see what position a person is in a picture. For last weekend’s Hackrithmitic I did an experiment for fun using computer vision pose estimation. To start with I found several possibilities with available libraries:

  • Tensorflow js has been used to say, don’t touch your face, but it takes a massive amount of cpu.
  • Openpose is a popular one, only licensed for noncommercial research use, and there is a Opencv example for it that doesn’t quite show how to use it.
  • AlphaPose is supposedly faster and has a more clear license and possibility for commercial use – if you want that as a possibility. I checked out the install instructions and worked but for “python3” instead of “python”. It also misses obvious step of installing cuda for your Nvidia system before running.
  • GluonCV is another, which seems more user friendly. This one I was able to get running in a few minutes with their example:
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