Newsletter/2014-02-10

This is the first Newsletter for TechInc and we hope to make it common practice to send out a biweekly newsletter.

Monday, 10 February 2014

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You can find all the back-numbers archived HERE

New Room at Acta

After WG-Terrein decided to take another tenant, the space behind the beamer wall got rented to us. This adds a nice size to the space and opens quite a lot of options on how to use it. Some discussions on how to utilize the space are happening as of writing and some ideas will be sketched out on ActaRoom2 and ActaRoom2_proposal feel free to take a look.

First members meeting in 2014: 9 February

There has been the first member meeting (in the new series of members meetings), see Weekly_Members_Meeting_I#Minutes

New BLACK stickers

Stickers!!

Conclusions from ALV in January

ALV notes

LAOS - Laser cutting things

There is a laser cutter at the space. It's been loaned by Daan for a short period of time. First members got trained on Wednesday, with more training sessions to follow. The cost to use it is 10 EUR per hour.

A manual documenting it has been started.

CTF Team Update

TechInc's CTF team, the notorious Knuffelhackers, took part in the PHDays IV CTF Quals event which took place during the weekend of 25th and 26th January 2014. The fact that the team consisted of a small number of CTF rookies did not stop us from solving a number of challenges and scoring a decent amount of points. We were ranked 110th out of 627 teams world-wide and we were the 3rd highest-scoring Dutch team out of the 10 that took part in the game.

The CTF games we play revolve around the following topics:

• Reverse Engineering & Exploitation
• Cryptography & Cryptanalysis
• Steganography & Forensics
• Math & Logic

If you're skilled or interested in any of the above, you are very welcome to come and join us in our weekly CTF training sessions.

Cerberus 3D printer workshop

Due to holidays and other reasons the workshop has been stalled for the past two/three weeks but the first three printers are nearing completion. Although obviously, we'll have some unavoidable troubleshooting and calibrating sessions ahead. This is how they looked at last workshop day.

Three Cerberii?

Power Automation

We deployed the first of three 21-channel serial-controlled remote power switches. Work is very much under way so nothing definite at this time, but we can already switch some nine different light groups / devices via a simple website. Projected future work includes: laying cable to audio equipment and more lights, deploying a second switch in the new ACTA section, making a switchboard with a number of physical switches to avoid having to use a website for basic functions, and refining the website and the macros therein.

Upcoming Events

at TechInc

• Social: every Wednesday
• Young Hackerspace Day 16th Feb

Other Events

• TA3M: The Amsterdam edition will be held in the maker space ZB45 on February 17 at 19:30.

For this months edition they plan to focus on the rules, regulations, committees, institutes and all other bodies that oversee and govern the workings of the internet. With the internet governance summit being organized by Brazil, 2014 will be an interesting year for this part of the internet. 

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