What is longer than a lightning talk but shorter than a normal talk? This month you'll find out as we have two different speakers giving talks:

Mike Higgins:
Title: "Life without an Evil Cellphone Company"
Summary: Why Cellphone Companies are Evil. How I hacked a 'Droid phone without realizing it. Using Skype and Wifi hotspots to make calls on my Droid phone without a cellphone carrier. Trouble in paradise (things are not working perfectly yet).

Jezra:

In light of February's meeting falling on Valentine's Day. There will be NO MEETING. We will resume NBLUG meetings in March.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

While it is fun to learn how to hack, sometimes it's tough to practice your skills without breaking any laws. It turns out if you have any consumer devices on your local network, you already have everything you need to practice penetration testing. In this talk I will discuss my experience with the Dlink DIR-685 Wireless N router and how with just a few basic skills I was able to find multiple exploits, including one that gave me root, all through the web interface. As I describe the attacks I'll demonstrate the exploits with a live demo.

Have you been wondering what you are going to do with all those high-powered graphics cards you bought now that Bitcoins have declined in value? Why not use them to crack passwords? In this talk Kyle Rankin will discuss the basics of how to use the processing power of your graphics card to crack various types of password hashes.

We will also hold our 2011 NBLUG Board elections at this meeting to be sure to turn up and vote.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

Desktop, laptop, phone, tablet . . . car!  Which OS should we run on
car "in-vehicle infotainment" systems: Windows, Android, WebOS, MeeGo
or a traditional embedded choice like Angstrom?  What are the
associated opportunities for app developers and systems programmers?
Two Chinese companies, Geely and HawTai, sell cars with MeeGo
pre-installs.  The automotive business model diverges significantly
from that of consumer electronics products, giving MeeGo some
advantages over Android.  Who are the players in the automotive Linux

In this talk I'll describe what Bitcoin is, how and why it's used, and how it works under the hood. I'll also show a live demo in Linux of bitcoind, pooled mining, and Namecoin (a distributed DNS). If you are completely unfamiliar with Bitcoin there's a short overview video at http://www.weusecoins.com - if you *are* familiar with Bitcoin, please feel free to speak up during a Q&A at the end!

It's possible to lease a virtual private server (VPS) for as
little as $10/year. I'll talk about what you get, what to
look out for, and how to find a good deal when shopping for
a budget server. Also a discussion about the OpenVZ
virtualization technology.