“Trash carries dystopia within” - Maite Zubiaurre The Future of Waste is a workshop for imagining no-waste futures, dystopian and otherwise. slides Why Technotrash? In technology-adjacent sustainability circles, often (not always!) the futures in which humans have solved their great ecological crises - garbage, energy, climate change - are depicted as a utopia at best and as a slightly better and more equitable version of the present at worst.…

Welcome! This is a list of resources to supplement my “Basic Hacking in 2019 with Shodan” workshop. First it’s very important to take care of yourself out there when you start poking around. I recommend a VPN to hide who you are a bit and some kind of browser tools to prevent someone from running malicious code in your browser. My favorite VPN is Nord, and I use the uMatrix browser extension in all my browsers to control what code my browsers are running.…

Today I saw someone’s search for BusyBox’s, the query was “port:9000 ash”. BusyBox is a kind of GNU-lite system for embedded boards, allowing you to telnet into a shell that has most of the usual tools you get in Linux. It seems like it gets used in modems and stuff. A BusyBox on 191.186.195.10 I picked the very first result, in Brazil. So it’s not very interesting in some senses, it’s just running a telnet port on 9000.…

Today I just went looking for AWS servers. AWS EC2 Instance on 35.154.190.199 The first one I found, in India, seemed pretty interesting. It had ssh running on port 22 and on 80 a webserver that just hosted a login. But this login page had a 15 second video loop with a giant watermark saying POND 5 on it. Turns out that POND 5 is a stock image/footage company and the fact that this video still has a giant watermark means that it certainly was not paid for.…

I’ve been feeling exhausted the past week, so I decided to take a couple of easy days reaching out to some webcams. I was hoping to see some people, looking at chiller stations all day can make you feel you a little lonely. Internet Camera on 122.117.120.153 I found an IP in Taiwan that had two different cameras, one on 8000 and one on 9000. It seems to be in an internet cafe.…

About a week ago I saw a search for “dgraph” and I thought today I would take a look. Dgraph is a kind of graph database, which is a kind of NoSQL database with a graph-like structure of nodes and edges. The search was for “Dgraph Ratel Dashboard”. Dgraph Server on 13.210.169.101 There were only 5 results, all either in China or Australia, and so I picked one in Australia because Dgraph is based in Sydney.…

There’s been a flurry of interesting recently shared searches on Shodan recently and I’m just catching up with them. Today I looked into one for Raspberry Pis running SSH that was just “port:22 “raspbian””. There are almost 100,000 results which I think goes to show just how popular these tiny computers are. A Raspberry Pi on 178.12.106.221 I picked a result in Germany because I saw that in addition to SSH it was also running a webserver on 443.…

Today I saw a search for the Microsoft Remote Desktop protocol. The search was for “\x03\x00\x00\x0b\x06\xd0\x00\x00\x124\x00”. ] Microsoft Remote Desktop on 124.146.236.44 There were several hundred thousand results, showing just how popular the remote desktop protocol is. I remember using it quite often in a job I had several years ago. Initially I thought of looking for my old company’s system but that seemed kind of like a weird thing to be doing.…

Saw a search today for “Modbus Gateway”. I wasn’t sure what that would be exactly so I thought I’d take a look. Modbus Gateway on 82.143.179.14 Modbus is a protocol for communication over serial developed in 1979, originally meant for logic controllers, but now with wide use across industrial electronic devices. A modbus gateway is a device for connecting modbus devices into IP networks (sometimes the internet), typically so that they can be remotely monitored.…

Today a search for “unprotected WiMAX towers”. The word tower was pretty tantalizing. The actual search was for “OX253P”. WiMAX Tower on 117.244.48.33 WiMAX is a communication standard meant to give last mile wireless access to the internet to homes and businesses using microwaves. This would be a wireless alternative to DSL and cable internet, not requiring any cabling to the home endpoint, only a receiver antenna, much like LTE. It works much in the same way as cell towers, and frequently WiMAX and cell towers are bundled into one.…