Category: Hardware

I will edit this over time but I wanted to have the thread up to start with.

Overview objectives:
– Stop camera from saving GPS to photos.
  – This is in your Camera App Settings, not System device settings.
– Device Settings:
  – Lock Screen and Security:
    – Set lock mode and passcode to unlock device.
      – Password, PIN, Pattern, Swipe, None.
      – Biometrics. Face, Iris or Fingerprints
        – I do not use or particularly like any of the biometric means for device locking.
        – App Shortcuts: Define what apps can be used while phone is locked (IE Phone calls and Camera)
        – Find my mobile. Anti-theft and traacking options for your phone.
          – Remove controls: Allows phone to be remotely controlled via your Samsung account
          – Google location service.  Allow GLS to give more accurate location info to where your mobile is.
          – Send last location.  Allow your phone to broadcast last location when battery hits a certain level of charge.
        – Encrypt SD Card.  Your files on the SD card will only work with your phone.  If phone is reset to defaults, you will not be able to read the encrypted files anymore and would have to re-format the card.
  – Secure Lock Settings
    – Secured lock time
    – Auto factory reset. After 15 failed passwords (will also erase all your data on phone)
    – Lock network and security. Prevents disabling Wifi and mobile data when your phone is locked, to make someone stealing your phone easier to track by device.
  – Notifcations.  Choose to hide notification messages on lock screen.
      – Define what apps can put notifcations on the lock screen.
      – Hide content of message on lock screen from displaying. (Highly suggested to be on)
      – Notification icons only.  Just show app icon without details, on lock screen.

– Device Settings
  – Location
    – Turn GPS on or Off.  Besides privacy and tracking being less accurate, this can save a large amount of battery life.  Turn this off when not needed for directions.
    – Google Location History.  You can disable this from saving where you have searched and have been.
    – Google Location Sharing.  Can share ‘Real-time location’ with someone of Google.
    You can turn both of these off and GPS maps will still work fine.  The sharing and history are not needed, just GPS being turned on.

– Device Settings:
  – Apps.
    – See installed apps
      – Review and define App-specific system-level Permissions granted to device.
      – Decide if you wish to disable some apps completely or uninstall them.
      – Review battery usage and mobile data use, per app.

– Device Settings:
  – About phone.
    – Shows phone number, model, serial number and IMEI.
    – Software Information.
      – Show Android version
      – Android patch level
      – Various system level information.

Raspberry Pi dd imaging guide.

Preface:
This guide is for sharing a forensic approach to imaging a hard drive or solid state device.  I tend to not see many forensically tooled guides, so this one covers imaging from the perspective, that you need a verifiable image of a drive you will be working with.  I am writing it will full intent to be useful without needing to have a Write-blocker or needing to run and wait for the sha256 signature checks to be run.  In effort to be accessible I will cover the imaging of a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and getting that running.  If you are familiar with that process, please jump ahead to the Action section.
My logic for using a Raspberry pi is because they are some of the cheapest functional computers one can get.  My logic for imaging the Pi fresh from an ISO, is to be sure no extra data is left over on the Pi from any previous projects you might have been doing in the past.

I want to add a side-note that you can follow the steps under action for almost any Linux distribution on various hardware.  I have done similar on a current era laptop running Tails before.  Your CPU heavy tasks like sha256sum will likely run much faster than on the Pi 2 I used for this guide. USB hard drive performance may also run higher based on your USB drive connectors and laptop, versus a Raspberry Pi 2.  Just for point of reference, I wanted to mention this.

Preparation:
Tools needed:

• Raspberry Pi
• SD Card
• A USB to MicroSD reader (to image your Pi)
• Power Supply
• HDMI Display
• Keyboard and probably a mouse
• Post-It notes to label your drives
• A USB powered hub (you want this for use with the external drives)
• A USB SATA Dock
• USB Write-blocker to prevent making changes to source drive. (or you can use a second USB dock but cannot count on the full unchanged integrity of the source USB drive.)

As I mentioned the Write-blocker, that will increase your cost quite a bit. Roughly $300 if you are going to use a Cru ComboDock 5.5 that I use.  You are still fully able to follow this guide without one, but minor changes to your source drive may happen while you read data from it (especially if you browse the drive contents and it generates thumbs.db files) and that would cause a problem in the sake of capturing a forensically sound image of that source drive.

With that noted, let’s get the Raspberry Pi ready to go with a fresh install of Raspbian OS.

Download latest Rasbian to your main computer you are reading this from.
Install to sd card with etcher imager (resin.io is the imager I used to write the .iso to MicroSD Card)
Put sd card in your Pi and boot it up.
Bring up a terminal and set pi passwd (default password is: raspberry)
Raspberry Pi Configuration can be found under Preferences on the menu of Raspbian Desktop.  On this first tab of System you can change the bottom options:

• Disable auto login
• Boot to CLI

Now that we have the Pi booted and setup, let’s jump into the Actions portion of the imaging.

Actions

Hook up source drive (If no write-blocker, use a USB drive bay / or external drive).  Follow the below steps to identify your source drive.
No gparted on Raspbian anymore, so use Parted in the terminal.

sudo parted -l

Typically the first usb drive will be /dev/sda.  Also cross reference the output to make sure it matches to the size of the drive you just hooked up. (500 GB source drive in my case)
You can also  type ls /dev/sd* in a terminal to see what drive is connected.  Now that we know what the source drive is, go ahead and hook up the destination drive you are using to be the clone of your source drive.
In another terminal, type sudo parted -l again.  In my case I now see a /dev/sdb.  This is my second drive I will be using to write the clone of the source drive to. (1000 GB destination drive in my case)

For your sake, this is where I recommend using post-it notes to write a note to put on each disk, stating what one is the source and it’s /dev/path.  Also doing the same for your destination and it’s /dev/path.

Source drive is /dev/sda
Dest drive is /dev/sdb

With that out of the way, we are ready to jump into the long haul of running  a dd command.  This will copy the data from your source drive, block for block to the destination drive.  dd is quite a serious command and can result in data loss if you do it wrong.  Here is where a write-blocker is especially useful to prevent overwriting the drive.  Also this is where the notes on the physical disk are helpful.  Below is the command for the setup we outlined.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=16384k status=progress

Let’s break this command down.  I look at the if= being equal to Input file.  That’s our source drive.  of= being Output file.  This is where our destination drive is being overwritten.  bs= is Block Size.  I go with 16384k as it is a block size I have seen around good for imaging.  status=progress is a nice add-on so you can see the results of the dd command.  Otherwise you would be waiting for the progress to output once it is done.
This will take quite some time. 500 GB source to a 1TB destination drive.  Easily took about 8 hours as the finished results state:
27184.1 s, 18.4 MB/s.  Divide that by 60, then again by 60 and I got 7.55 hours to image a 500 GB drive to a 1 TB drive.
Hurry up and wait as you are doing a block for block image, so it even will copy the blank space to the destination drive.

Once done, verify each drive matches (Especially for forensic sake and use of write blocker).
Drive to drive sha will not match, so you want to do it for the partitions specifically.  Once again, be warned that it took around 7 hours on this Pi setup to run sha256sum against each one of these partitions.  Below are the commands I ran to generate the sha256 signature, followed by their matching results.

sha256sum /dev/sda1
sha256sum /dev/sdb1

813dcb6470f62c7c12623a0ef092551965b83e501e70dff4e01e1220cebf0129  /dev/sda1
813dcb6470f62c7c12623a0ef092551965b83e501e70dff4e01e1220cebf0129  /dev/sdb1

Bingo!  Image is a success and the source partition is a match to our cloned partition.  For conversations sake, if you were to run sha256sum against the entire disks, they would not match up.  Keep in mind the destination drive I used is a 1TB disk, so it has more free space than does the source drive.

Here are examples of mismatched checksum, because we compared the entire disks where one was larger than the other.

83b3b53d577d0ae793c947220b4ef3aa3d323e8349e0d3615b77964ec5baeb80  /dev/sda
f24189b6160b9a91bf5037ade4d4ab2f45a9bad9ebe254c0a349688f8987bc10  /dev/sdb

That concludes this guide.  If you have an questions or feedback, reply in this thread or hit me up online.  Thank you for reading and visiting. :)
Original thread

Pi Rasperry Pi-Hole config quide:
Howdy and welcome to another thread.  I have a history of not being a fan of advertisements and do not run those banners on this site.  Besides a security concern, I think advertisement gets really creepy online.
Pi-Hole is an Operating System with dns capabilties and use of adblocking lists.  The added benefit of the request being denied even without plugin-based web browsing, is pretty handy.

Before you install, be sure if you are using a RaspberryPi or whatever device, that your user password is one of your own.  You do not want to go default with your LAN traffic.  If you wanna log a fun time, you can use one of these for short-term logging a little CTF monitoring style.  Logs are configured to purge after a few days on your standard Pi-Hole install. Please be sure to update your OS image with latest patches via said package manager.  In my case I set the primary network connection to a static address.  I have the service connection IP address details to use the actual router as DNS server.  Since all your other network DNS will be set to the fixed IP Address you bound to your Pi-Hole installed device.
SSH is likely disabled.  I like to administer my SSH session by serial to usb in the case of my Raspberry Pi installs.

Follow the install guide and advisory on their site about the bash | pipe install.  Quick comes at a trade off when you do not review the install process part for part.  If you go for the easy install and read the disclaimer, you can run the single line install:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

This thread is for administering and keeping yours updated, as with my configuration I ran into update issues using just the one connection.  Details ahead cover enabling a second connection to fetch updates, since you will have the primary network connection with a set IP address that handles DNS requests handed off from your router / main DNS device on your network.

To do updates to the OS and Pi-Hole local web services device / OS, I disable the service network connection to resolve conflicts of web requests to get out locally.  All the LAN clients will be fine getting pages.  In this case, I suspect the localhost calls in the Pi-Hole logs relate to my network layout and the device being bound to serve back to itself.  When logged into the [deviceIP]/admin configuration page I would also get failures to resolve list update servers.

Having plugged in a second USB NIC or using Wireless as an update connection, I ran the following commands to handle my network adapters.  Turning off the static address service NIC. In most cases likely eth0 as shown below

sudo ifconfig eth0 down

Do some pings and the like to see they should now resolve.  Do your updates etc for the OS.  In my case, Raspbian on a Pi 3.

Once those finish, load up the Web Admin panel for your Pi-hole install. Get your ip address for the active network connection with:

ifconfig

Connect to that IP address in a web browser and add ‘/admin’ into the address bar at the end of the IP Address without the quotes around the path.

Login with your admin password to the admin panel and you should now be able to see updates are pending.  You need to start with the FTL update.  To do this, return to your SSH session.  As I mentioned I am working with serial over USB, but you can enable SSH over network if you so desire.  One more service for a network heavy component, so choose of your own accord in concern to security to conveinence.
On that SSH console, run:

pihole -up

Wait for the updater to get and deploy the new FTL version.  You will likely also be treated to the Web Interface and Pi-Hole version also being to current revisions.  Great!  Almost updated and running live AdBlocking again.
Still on your console, seeing the update completed you want to turn back on the main network connection we disabled for updating.

sudo ifconfig eth0 up

Overviewing network setup above:
Main Internet router will be your DNS server on the Pi-Hole device.  Manually set client DNS or change your DHCP server to set client DNS to the static address of your Pi-Hole install. (192.168.0.1 default-ish router)  Check your current IP config to get details if you do not know current network base configuration.
On the Pi-Hole install, set the primary network adapter to an address in that subnet (say 192.168.0.10)  Make sure DHCP server /or/ router will not also try to assign that address in it’s pool.  The Pi-Hole DNS primary will be set to your local router (as above default-ish router 192.168.0.1)

I hope to have avoided huge gaps or inflected confusion in this thread. Jolly adblocking.  Even if you like making money from it, you have to know it is a vulnerable vector and kind of a shaky market.  I’m not here to tell you what to do, I’m sharing details to help block them on places that run them without respect to visitors.

Jack in, it’s cyber-time.  Seriously though if you are still reading, I squeezed on the Rift $399 bundle with touch that went active last week.  I want to describe the experience of moving through a virtual environment and seeing your hands map in that realm, as to in reality, but it’s really something you have to try to get full appreciation of.  I’m going to overview the hours I spent in so far, using Oculus software, enabling SteamVR and also some games and titles.

2017-08-17 Edit:
I wanted to mention Oculus Tray Tool and setting Super Sampling.  I have since upgraded my GPU to a 1080 Ti and am running Super Sampling @ 1.5.  Oculus Tray Toll will also let you disable USB auto power save in one click and also give you access to Visual HUD Overlays / debugging options.  The super sampling really cleans up the image quality to try and mitigate screen door effect / seeing pixels obviously.
/edit

Primer here.  You need a computer of comparable performance to drive the display of your Rift headset.  I see a recommended spec of an Intel i5-45xx series processor / CPU and Nvidia 970 or higher for your video card / GPU.  I recently built up an i7-7700k w/ 980 GTX build and it has performed extremely well in VR, without frame rate slowdown.
Your VR headset uses 1 HDMI and 1 USB connection, with the HDMI going directly into your video card.  In my case, I already had my external display on DisplayPort.  As the 980 GTX (and most recent cards from what I have seen) have 1 HDMI and the rest of ports are DisplayPort, you want to make sure your primary monitor is not using that HDMI output on the GPU / Video Card.

Additional hardware setup will be calibrating your spacial sensors, syncing any controllers and of course installing the Oculus software.  Fair warning that Windows 8.1 seems to be the baseline and there are some games that require Windows 10.  I’m on Windows 10 and wanted to warn you in advance, especially if you are still main-lining Windows 7.  Most important of all, you need physical space to play the Rift.
There are a few sitting compatible games I have found, but the more explorational titles are going to need you to have at least a 3 x 3 foot area clear.  From the center of your area, you will need to fully extend your arms to the side without being restricted.  Movement depth is less relevant but also important.  Some titles actually need you to be able to move back significantly far (as in around 7 feel away from the sensors).  I have so far tested in a 3 x 3 area, as I would need to use the living room for the deeper dimensions.  Since I picked up the Rift and Touch combo, I have 2 physical sensors installed.  1 came with the Oculus headset and the other came with the touch sensors.

I mentioned some of the contents but what you can expect to unbox are:

• 1x Oculus Rift headset
• 1x Sensor bar.  It looks like a small camera.  I suspect it works off Infrared similar to the Wii and Kinect devices.
• 1x Xbox One gamepad, USB dongle and extension cable.
• 1x Oculus remote.
• 2x AA batteries for the Xbox gamepad.

• 2x Oculus Touch controllers.
• 2x AA batteries. 1 for each Touch controller.
• 1x Oculus sensor

Once you clean up a space for you to move in VR without falling IRL, your first step after trying the tutorials (FYI: you can repeat these @ any time by clicking them in the desktop Oculus application, under your Library tab.), will be to get used to recalibrating center.  This will be most appropriate when changing from standing or sitting play.  In Steam you will get to the system menu by Right controller Menu button.  There you will see a re-center calibration.  If you are sitting, set your height to approx where your head is from the ground.  I find 42 inches (3 ft 6 inches) works well for sitting.  Some of this will need you to interact with Windows desktop for the height adjustment.
If you load SteamVR and are below the ground, you need to change your height settings.
Similarly in Oculus VR, the Right controller Menu button gives you a similar option to re-calibrate center.  For height adjustment in Oculus, you’ll want to go to Settings | Devices | Configure Rift to change your height.  You should be able to pick the re-center option without taking your VR goggles off, as with Steam as well.

Next post will cover some applications run in VR.

Most of these are on both the Steam Store and Oculus Store.  I started in the Oculus store, until I was able to get SteamVR ruining.  To get SteamVR to work you need to click the Gear icon for Settings on the desktop program, then click General.  On this screen, enable the button for Unknown Sources.  Once you do this, SteamVR will be able to interact with the Oculus gear, as before setting this option, Steam will say it cannot find your headset and accessories.

You will need to load SteamVR from your desktop, until or unless you enable the following mod to create a steam icon.  In that guide, you are downloading a VR film, replacing the executable with a batch modified exe that loads SteamVR and also replacing some image files to show the tile in VR.  Hack fun hacking up some custom icons with the info from that guide.  It’s fairly easy to follow and you will then be able to launch SteamVR from within the Oculus VR environment.

I’m starting a little backwards describing my exploration but one of my main objectives was to interact with my desktop OS in VR.  Steam handles this by selecting Desktop when you press the left menu button on a Touch pad.  This will get you back to your actual (likely Windows) OS.  I was browsing the twitter and reading email in VR.  It’s a wild way to have a huge super desktop, while also letting you interact with VR games that launch from Desktop.  Steam has a few of these but I have not encountered any in Oculus VR yet.
Kickass.  Speaking of interacting with my desktop, I also wanted to try to see if I can open and manage files in a 3D realm.  I can indeed open images, movies and music by using AVOlight.Space (Multi-Screen Media Player).  The free download lets you load one screen and puts a watermark on each additional screen you load.  This can be removed by buying the $9.99 DLC content to unlock the program.  Seeing how it worked made it a no-question for me.  This app has slideshow support, music and video controls, image rounding options along with depth perception to toggle zoom and placement of your displays.  If you want to view some files in multiple windows, this is the jam.

Google Earth VR is a free download that allows you to browse Google Maps in 3D.  If you ever switched visual modes and saw the tracking of depth for images, you will certainly see how the landscape is mapped as a rendered world with relative height and depth.  This is pretty impressive to zoom and fly around in, granted I was moderate in controlling well the little I played in it.  There are also area tours you can load up and enjoy, in the event you do not have any good ideas on where to search and visit.  I wonder how restricted areas map.  I’ll let you know on that one, since they are normally blurred out.  Hopefully it doesn’t clip us out of the map.  In this case, I was using the touch controllers as my primary input.  Sitting compatible.

Lucky’s Tale. Included platformer game with some good level design.  Graphics are cutesy like a Spiro-like game.  You have height obstacles world maps that surround you.  I was playing with the Touch controllers but this one appears to be designed for the gamepad / Xbox controller.

Oculus First Contact. This is likely the demo you play upon configuring your Rift.  A very immersive interactive demo.  I was mind blown in there and immediately suggested someone else try it too.  Great demonstration and interactive guide on using Rift and Oculus.  This is also listed in Tutorials as Touch Tutorial Complete.

Oculus Dream Deck. A video demo of a few oculus applications.  Be sure to spin around and enjoy the world map, as the case with anything else you play.

Makebox. A slick pixel editor.  I watched a video of someone giving a tutorial and was sold.  I have to try and make some dank pixel art as well.

Darkness Rollercoaster. Sitting rollercoaster ride.  Cool immersion and depth objects used.

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality.  Very cool game that is a little difficult but rewarding.  The VR design and implementation is quite good. You may find yourself restricted in a 3×3 foot space but can re-calibrate center to accommodate this.  Crude humor and interesting use of environments.  I have been playing this for a few hours and it is a standing title, as you are doing quite a bit of exploring and reaching down.  I bought it on Steam, largely to test streaming functionality.  I can say the streaming rooms do work in SteamVR.  I finished this tonight in about 5 hours of playtime.
Be warned this game is designed for a Roomscale setup.  That being a deeper area to walk around in.

Oculus Medium. Very robust  image editing and world tool.  You can save and export materials.  Fun object creation and manipulation or a clay-like substance.

Mission ISS. This is a VR space simulator.  You can pivot around the spaceship and enjoy the view.

Blocks by Google. Another image editor in a 3D space.  Easel is your right hand where your drawing tool is the left one.

Preta: Vendetta Vising. This is a dungeon crawler game with multiplayer either coming or available after you complete the chapter 1 missions.  I have an hour or two into this game.  There are 3 character classes to pick from at start and some tutorials that keep you in a level environment.  I was reserved on the quality of until I got to see some of the actual dungeons.  The level design layering and depth is pretty impressive.  Town is pretty close to most MMO-like RPGs.  Quest NPC in Town, Skill up trainer, shops, etc.  You get a bonus for early pre-release stuff but there is also a RMT item system.  That’s a flag for performance down the line on growth. In other words, it may get very grindy of a game to encourage buying into currency boosts.

Sketchbox. VR prototyping platform.  Really cool for prototyping a 3D environment.  I’m going to try and import some 3D videos and do a mock-up environment.  Especially if you want to make a VR application, mock it up in here on the swift.

EVE: Valkyrie .  This is a flying space game.  The controls seemed tight but it was fun for a space shooter.

Sports Bar VR. Standing game that I played last night.  Darts, Air Hockey and Pool are available.  I only played single player but it does feature online and lobbies.

The Climb. Standing game that I played about 2 minutes of due to sitting at the time of night when I tried it.

I will add more info about the last 2 games when I play them in a standing mode.  This is what I got to explore so far.  Some content is free and steam also appears to have some demos on there,  I purchased the following or got them in a sale promo:

• Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality: $30
• AVOlight.Space. Free single display.  Unlock multiple for $10
• EVE: Valkyrie. Free with Summer of Rift Promo.  Typically $40
• Makebox. $10
• Preta: Vendetta Rising. $35
• Darkness Rollercoaster. $2
• Oculus Adventure Pack: Includes for $70
  The Climb
  Raw Data
  SportsBar VR
  I Expect You To Die
• Lucky’s Tale. Included with your Rift purchase.I also decided to pickup a 3rd sensor for better tracking when playing roomscale games. This is especially relevant when turning around and away from your desktop / front sensors. Adding the 3rd sensor will wrap you completely in motion tracking. I saw this when playing Rick and Morty and mitigated it using the recalibrate center steam menu option (that also is in the Rift menu).

  I forgot to mention I got the $399 bundle by going to a Best Buy store and getting the Rift and Touch packages.  When rung up at the register, it will be at the Promo rate and you’ll get the Oculus store coupon for your free copy of EVE: Valkyrie on the receipt.  I have heard and seen that Amazon is pending more inventory, so head to a store and grab a kit if you don’t want to wait.  Make sure they actually have ’em in stock, as I got the next-to-last headset last Saturday at a local store.

  I did not see anywhere with the stand-alone sensors in stock so I ordered one from Amazon.  They are also out of stock with no indicated restock date.  I’m looking forward to setting up roomscale with 3 sensors to cover me when I turn around.

  I have about 20 hours in VR so far and I am really enjoying it.  I have been scouring the app stores for interesting free apps to check out too.  Plenty of movies and some games to be found.  Largely you have Oculus store, SteamVR store.  Also a good resource is the Oculus Reddit page.
  If you turn on Spectator mode in Rick and Morty but forget how to disable it, you need to do it from the in-game menu.  Open the entertainment center right cabinet and toggle the switch. :)

  These are items included with your equipment purchase.  EVE being an add-in for the Summer promo.

  • Lucky’s Tale
  • Medium
  • Toybox
  • Quill
  • Dead and Buried
  • Dragon Front
  • Robo Recall
  • Eve: Valkyrie

  There are some good threads for applications and games on the Oculus forums. Medium has some real quality artwork and posts in there to explore.  Lots of artwork to enjoy in this thread.

  I turned off the tracking grid shortly after getting used to how much physical gaming space I had.  Seeing the block grid was wrecking my immersion.  You can turn off the floor grid indicator as well.  You can do these in Oculus VR from the right touch controller settings menu.  I’m guessing this is what people mean by ‘screen door effect’?

  I should have a 3rd sensor hooked up early next week.  2 should be fine for most everything, but if you are playing a roomscale heavy game like Rick and Morty.  I’ll be following this Oculus guide for configuring and placing sensors for roomscale. Edit with 3 sensors hooked up.  It will have you re-run the configuration wizard and welcome tutorial when the 3rd sensor is plugged in.  You really want all 3 of these sensors at the same level height. Otherwise your FOV will be highly skewed to the highest sensor.
  Recalibrate your height to confirm your standing height (or change it to your head from ground while sitting (42 inches / 3 foot 6 inches in my case)).  The avatar editor has a background with a ruler, if you take a selfie from the customize screen.
  To change your standing or sitting height, in the Oculus desktop software, click the Gear | Settings.  Along the left you will see Devices | Configure Rift | Floor Position.  If you are playing a sitting or gamepad game, this may be helpful it adjust your field of vision.

  Respect to the Overclockers.com.au community for tipping me off to running Oculus Tray Tool.  ASW mode will help with performance and you can also disable power-saving for the usb ports to keep your tracking active while playing.  There are some Virtual HUD overlays that are helpful for debugging and performance monitoring.

  Also of note from the forums is that switching to the Beta version of Oculus Home, it will detect your SteamVR titles on launch and add them into the Oculus app.  So you don’t have to side-hack an icon for SteamVR using this method.  Once you load the Steam title, it will pop into your Oculus applications menu.

  Your headset has a microphone and it is on by default.  If you wish to disable this as I did, jump into your Control Panel | Sound.  In your list of Recording devices, right-click on the Rift Audio microphone and select Disable.  If you want to turn it back on, be sure to check the ‘Show disabled devices‘ option so you can see the microphone to re-enable it.

  Speaking of Steam, The Lab is a 15GB or so VR platform you can give a try to.  I played around with it briefly in the lab and some of the other mini-games.  Pause to note your standing height absolutely matters for this, so if you have your Room Config in steam set to a sitting height, you need to change that to your standing height.  This varies from game to game, but is especially dominant on steam from when going from a standing to sitting game.  Oculus seems to better accommodate sitting or standing, without needing to re-adjust your height, but by using the ‘reset app position’ from the main oculus home menu.

  Stand-out applications have to be Google Earth VR.  It’s really wild to see the area topography and be able to fly around in spectator-like mode around the world.
  Dactyl Nightmare has been re-made into Polygon Nightmare.  This is a re-creation that is pretty wild and fun as a single-player bot deathmatch.  You may get ill from the movement, but I played for about 40 frags, enjoying the strafing with my upper body to move around the map.  Both Google Earth VR and Dactyl Nightmare are free apps.
  I have put some hours into Chronos as well.  It’s a good exploration / puzzle game that keeps me drawn in.  The leveling mechanic is interesting and has me getting a little angry when I die for sloppy reasons.  The level exploration is really rewarding in 3D.  Worth the $40 if you ask me.

  In respect to demo’ing VR, people really need to wear the headset.  If you watch the on LCD output, it will be super bland without the depth.  I had my GF try a few things and so far the immersion hit hard with Google Earth VR.  She was off exploring the world, juggling views and continents.

  I have also dabbled in Rock Band VR as a local store had one of the Xbox One guitars in the back.  Apparently those things are going for $90 on Amazon, despite being $40 new if you can find one in stock.  I did chuckle at having to flash the guitar firmware for it to work with RB VR.  It did indeed work and when playing, I was reminded that I am not a rhythmic person.  I only got an hour or two into that game so far.  Considering the price of game ($50) and the Guitar ($40 with Xbox One Rivals Rock Band pack), this is a more costly game to get into.  I have to say the use of the touch and the add-on mount that came with your controllers, is pretty cool with showing the Guitar on your person in VR and the crowd around you.

  Darknet is a puzzle game about hacking computer networks.  It uses a cluster honeycomb design where you pick insertion points for various vulnerabilities to spread to nodes, allowing you to seize the network and obtain root.  Really cool graphical design and addictive gameplay.  A good score for the $10 asking price.

  Thanks for the feedback on your time with it.  I wear glasses of 1.25 or so prescription so that may play a factor in my not being as bothered by the pixelation.  I don’t wear my glasses in VR.  Glad to hear you were able to work a refund out too.

  I saw some people are bumping up the image quality using super sampling (via Oculus Tray Tool), similar to playing FFXI with better looking textures.  A few of the VR games I played have some native graphic options, namely Chronos.  Bumping up that IQ makes a huge difference, as the default in that is definitely a pixel show when you get close to your character.

  I forgot to mention you are right about the length of games for VR.  Many of them seem to be a few hours.  Hopefully the surge of headsets gets more content out there.  I think a big part of the challenge will be quality to performance cost, as top-end video cards and most other PC components to go with the headset, will make the barrier of entry even higher.

  2017-08-04 edit:
  I installed these sensor wall mounts in my play area and the floor and 360 coverage is MUCH better than when I had them on the included posts at desk height.  The linked 3D print, I had to file the diameter wider for the IR camera to fit in, but other than that it works great.  I used the double-sided tape mounts from 3M, as to not wreck the drywall in my apartment.
  Sensors are mounted roughly 6.5 ft from the floor, aiming downward.  This helped full 360 rotation and ground coverage quite well.  My crude diagram of camera placement is:
  _______________________
  |         <- 02            <- 01  |
  |                                        |
  |                                        |
  |                                        |
  |<- Sensor 03                  |
  _______________________

  Sensor 01 is along the wall where my desk is in the corner.
  Sensor 02 is about 5 feet away from the corner sensor.
  Sensor 03 is about 10 feet from the back wall where 01 and 02 are installed and about 6 feet from sensor 2 to the corner of the adjoining wall.
  I have the front 2 sensors lightly at inward angles to the area I stand, with sensor 3 pointing, basically back to my monitor between sensor 01 and 02.  This also passed my Rick and Morty floor grab test, vastly better than the prior desk height mounts.

  I just received my prescription WIDMOvr lenses last night and have been playing every other night on average.  The glasses insert is excellent.  Great quality lenses that match my glasses prescription, the frame insert fits well into the stock Rift face guard and the elastic for the rift cover also helps keep the lenses in place.  There is room between the rift lenses and the inserted prescription so you do not have to worry about scratching.  I tried using the rift with my normal glasses but did not go that route because of tight removal and scratch threat.  I can still see but my clarity is better with my prescription, for point of reference.

  I also picked up a 3 ft usb and hdmi extension cables.  The HDMi cable is an Insignia brand extension from a local BestBuy, that I found in the television section.  I went with an Amazon basics 3 foot usb3 extension as many people referenced it for working well.  I had some issues getting audio to play consistently over the extensions on my desktop, but then I added an Inateck Superspeed 4 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card as I saw some Oculus folks on reddit talk about the sensors and headset eating up much of the USB bus bandwidth.  I do have to say, my extension issue went away installing this card and putting 2 of my 3 sensors on it, with the Rift HMD hooked to the USB on my motherboard.

  Besides hardware I have been playing some games.  Also a fun program is Bigscreen.  It’s comparable to Desktop mode when running Steam but I think it has better touch button binds.  I find it very nice for interacting with my desktop windows, while still in VR.  Right-click, Left-click, mouse cursor and scrolling are all done on either hand.  You can hat-press to remove the login screen when you load the program up.

  Face Your Fears is a free program that has 2 doors to cinematic experiences.  The city door is pretty intense, while the haunted house door… is pretty damn freaky.  I was suggested to check this out by a friend and we were both scared af by the haunted house.  Lol, you might not want to let kids try this one, because it’s damn creepy or I’m just a pansy. :p  Sitting or standing experience, granted you are really just spectating and adjusting your head to view the area you are in.

  Batman Arkham VR gets review beef for being a short experience, but take note is is also a great one.  The quality of graphics, tools and interaction is top notch.  If you want to see a viable peek into what a full VR game done with high production value looks like, this is one to buy.  It has replay content for re-doing the story and I was well embracing the story it presented and some of the easter egg content.  It’s $20 but looking at the extent of the content, I feel it is worth the asking price.  If you enjoyed previous RockSteady Batman titles, this will show you the new shit coming down the pipes.  This supports sitting and standing play, but lends better to standing play.

  Technolust: Extended Format is a game you can blast through but you will certainly miss most of the relevant story and not have explored the world or options.  I got 20+ hours out of this easily.  It has mini-games too, but the interactions and narrative that go with the in-world are what are to be best enjoyed.  This is an older game (haha so that means 2016 in VR terms) that has touch support added.  Most of your aiming is actually done with your head instead of the gamepad / touch controllers.  I’m on board with any more content released by this team.  Easily one of my best purchases.  Works well for sitting or standing exploration.

  Windlands is something I saw mentioned as a game to try.  It also has a ‘Buy it on steam and you will get an Oculus key’ feature through their website.  I want to pause and say between the 2 stores, if you have an oculus, play the Oculus store version.  The controller config is more likely to be optimized for that platform, as is the case with Wildlands on Steam being configured for a Vive and the Oculus Home version being configured for touch.  There is an option for some games on Steam to ‘launch in home mode’, but this is not the current standard.
  Back to this game, it is an exploration via grappling hook traversal.  The areas are well done to have you figure out what route currently looks viable and how you are going to use your grappling hooks and jumping to obtain the objects on the world map.  Very solid and good looking game.  Plenty of control options between sitting and standing play.

  Nature Treks VR is a collection of area environments.  Woods, underwater and other outdoor areas.  This experience is pretty demanding on your computer, since it renders the entire stage area and surrounding creatures.  Looks very cool to relax in and explore.  You can use locomotion or teleport transportation.  You can plant extra trees and stuff too.

  Serious Sam: The Last Hope is a stationary shooter.  If you played the other games, the enemies and stages will look familiar.  Main take-away being you stay in place and shoot away hordes of monsters until you get to the world boss fight.

  Rez: Infinite is a VR shooter with music note and scoring to your attacks.  It’s a fairly short adventure but it’s done well and has some extra modes as well.  The presentation and levels to boss fights are done well. $20 for this game.  Both standing and sitting supported, as you move by controller and look by head rotation.

  Mountain Goat Mountain is a free game that is simple but fun.  Kind of like a Q-bert game to traverse the map, eat food and score coins.

  I’m looking forward to jumping into some more VR stuff this weekend.  I played a little more Preta: Vendetta Rising after they dropped the price and removed some of the RMT content.  I am currently on mission 5 on chapter 1 but I’m not riveted by it so far.
  I picked up a puzzle game called Dimensional for $5.  One can only play so many gun shooters, both regular and VR wise.  I am also going to try out Karnage Chronicles this weekend.  It sounds like an impressive hack-n-slash game.  I grabbed it on Steam, since it’s not yet on the Oculus store.  checking the steam forums, it should detect and work with the oculus fine / find the controllers as touch instead of the vive wands.

  Nov 14th:
  I took a break from VR, largely due to playing Nintendo Switch games. I also played Karnage Chronicles and got really VR sick, like terrible headaches and all. I know some people claim to be immune to vr / motion sickness, but wow, hacking and slashing in a dungeon wrecked me with locomotion controls.

  I visited my friend and his kids a few weeks ago and did a VR demo. They loved it, especially the older teen, as he is a huge pc gamer. I’m going to hook my gear back up this week and jump back in. I still have some ideas I want to try for creating some content, but in the mean time I’m also excited to try Obduction, from the Myst creator team. I also started Edge of Nowhere and should continue that tomb raider-like platformer.
  Windlands is actually pretty fun but I got stuck within maybe an hour. Short of the issue of knowing where to proceed, it is quite fun grappling around the world map.

  I may pickup Doom VFR but I want to see how it is received and if it gets actual oculus support. I’m thinking I’ll pickup Skyrim again but on the Switch, since it’s a huge game and being able to play it in tablet mode will make it more accessible over time. According to steam, I dropped 202 hours on the PC edition (Level 37 and surely some idle time with the game running). It looks like I played the Dawnguard expansion too.

  Jumping back to VR, I played .Hack in BigScreen. Wild with the giant screen and the map being in the top right of my full view pane.

  If you recently have terrible tracking jank or lag with your head movement tracking, may I suggest updating nvidia drivers. Especially 388.13 in my case. I do note that I had a 3D vision driver installed as well, that I removed before upgrading to 388.31 edition drivers.

  Since I do not use the 3D capabilities I try to uncheck the install via Custom Installation. I’m not a user of Nvidia Experience either and manually put new ones (drivers) in fairly often. I was going raw on troubleshooting by switching cables and distributing across USB controllers, but the driver conditions above fixed me back up.

  My issue was especially visible on the Oculus home menu. My tracking sensor locations were similar to prior sessions this week. I was happy to weed it down to a driver factor after a little ghost hunting on the troubleshooting.

  If you think Windows 10 is noisy, you should enjoy the connections your PC will make to graph.oculus.com. I Blacklisted that for a few minutes to notice none of the store content displayed. I could still view and load my library though.

This is kind of an odd issue, as the documentation for Corsair Hydro coolers will tell you to plug the power into the CPU header on your motherboard.  Having build a new machine recently, I see newer Asus board have a dedicated Pump header.  I like these coolers as they work well and cost less than custom copper water blocks.  The point of this thread however, is for older boards like the Asus Hero VII I had prior.

You want to disable the Q-fan options in your BIOS, as otherwise it will limit the pump output and not cool properly.  For the Windows users, there is a Corsair Link application that will show you the pump rpm.  In the case of a H80i cooler, this is typically running at 3200 rpm when set to the Performance preset.
Default will be around 1900 rpm with the balanced setting.  So long as you are not running in an extremely hot room, that preset should be fine.
In your BIOS, check the following tree: Monitor | Fan Speed Monitoring | Fan Speed Control.
Set those to disabled and you should be good to go.  Also under those settings, disabling the fan controls can prevent the CPU fan error on boot.

For item’s sake, I am using a H115i on this i7-7700k and was previously using an H80i with the i5-4690k.  On the i5-4690k setup after a BIOS flash, the fan settings were reverted and I was feeling significant heat buildup in the top tube coming off the CPU back to the radiator.  Temps were also quite high.  Fixing the Qfan settings resolved the nasty temps on the rebuild.

Hello! I was able to do a fire talk @ Drexel CCI in the Rush building last night. It was fresh to get feedback from people, sharing my presentation and getting to see everyone else present and to chat with people.

If you would like some slides about the use of dd, sha256sum and exiftool, you are welcome to the slides. :)

For fun, you can run exiftool on this ppt, exported from LibreOffice.

For accessibility and ease of access, I added the text contents of the slides below in this post. Also of note, I used photos, because I finished the slides the day I presented them. :p

Text from slides below:

|+| Slide 01

Forensication

A data backup and verification chat.

Backing up and ripping data, making test beds and using equipment.

This fire talk will cover:

Write-blockers (hardware), dd, sha256sum, exiftool.

|+| Slide 02

Disclaimer (01 of 02)

Formal forensics is a wide field and circles around the notion of backing up information, with minimal to no changes of the source data.

Deeper forensic scope also involves analyzing the platform / Operating System, in order to determine OS level access (Example – thumbs.db folder indexers) versus manually viewed files.

|+| Slide 03

Disclaimer (02 of 02)

This talk is based on using your own test data to use analytic tools and to understand how they work, without worrying about client liability. Use some test data you are familiar with, as this makes finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ tremendously easier to find patterns.

Testing with the tools will give you the comfort to provide services for others.

|+| Slide 04

Backstory

Howdy. I got into data imaging over the years from system building and also doing support for friends, family and businesses. Originally plugging a hard drive into another machine, I would target C:\Users and grab profile data. Also including application data and whatever else.

After awhile I got into Linux for file ripping. Some files are protected in windows, even as a 2nd drive.

|+| Slide 05

Tool usage

There are plenty of tools and applications with forms you can use. However they can be quite expensive.

Personally, I like having built-in command line tools available. Especially for the sake of booting up a live cd at any location and being able to work, based on what I’m being asked to do or recover.

|+| Slide 06

Write Blocker Imaging

Using a hardware write-blocker is an assured way to not modify the contents of the source drive.

They are around $300 USD, so you have some cheaper options to do software write blocking… but if you forget to turn it on, you can contaminate your data source.

(Such as browsing a folder, having windows make new thumbs.db files)

|+| Slide 07

[Picture of write blocker source drive, and output drive]

|+| Slide 08

Imaging Drives

[console]

sudo dd if=/dev/sdf of=/dev/sdg bs=16384k

[/console]

For a 500 GB HDD, it took about 3 hours. (results below)

[output_example]

29808+1 records in

29808+1 records out

500107862016 bytes (500 GB, 466 GiB) copied, 10836.7 s, 46.1 MB/s

[/output_example]

So how do you come up with the device names?

[console]

ls /dev/sd*

[/console]

[output_example]

/dev/sda

/dev/sda1

/dev/sda2

/dev/sdb

/dev/sdb1

[/output_example]

|+| Slide 09

Verifying disk image

Now that your drive is imaged, let’s start verifying with the source drive, hooked up to the write-blocker.

This is for the source drive.

[console]

sudo sha256sum /dev/sda

[/console]

[output_example]

cc73a7aefba01ee7550dab0870b1ef52elf7dc3d7f685357a5712fc5c2c4c7bf /dev/sda

[/output_example]

Unhooking the source drive, plug in the target / copied drive and run the same command.

[console]

sudo sha256sum /dev/sda

[/console]

[output_example]

cc73a7aefba01ee7550dab0870b1ef52elf7dc3d7f685357a5712fc5c2c4c7bf /dev/sda

[/output_example]

In the above, I hooked up the cloned drive, powered up the Write-blocker, confirmed the disc mounted, then calculated the cryptographic checksum.

Boom! It’s a match :)

|+| Slide 10

Cryptographic Checksums

There are plenty of options for generating checksums. While sha-1 and md5 are commonly used, there are some theoretical attacks against their memory space.

Signature based anti-virus seems to have some clashes in the MD5 space.

Tools to get a checksum for a file are:

md5sum

sha1sum

sha256sum

|+| Slide 11

Checksum examples

Here I made a text file, saved it then calculated what the file’s crypto hash is (in sha256).

Making a new file called ‘sampleChecksum.txt’ with the contents of ‘Hello checksum’ and saving it.

[console]

nano sampleChecksum.txt

[/console]

Obtaining the checksum of said file:

[console]

sha256sum sampleChecksum.txt

[/console]

[output_example]

9f8135859f0d32a46093fdf272952fb1133a8995af32f0b3e0f39daacfb78ffs sampleChecksum.txt

[/output_example]

Making a second file with a single character change, I calculated that hash. New file called ‘sample02Checksum.txt’ with the contents of ‘Hello Checksum’ and saving it.

[console]

sha256sum sample02Checksum.txt

[/console]

[output_example]

65762af89d327b44f6b824689cbe7169869ebf054384bab9a699aae25e51fb7f sample02Checksum.txt

[/output_example]

File contents are covered above. The same, short of one having an upper-case C in checksum, with the original file being in lower case. Noting how different the checksum output is for 2 files, with similar names and 1 character different in file contents.

|+| Slide 12

Other checksum examples

ISO downloads and similar downloads tend to use MD5, so here are some extra output_examples using the same 2 base files we made.

[console]

md5sum sampleChecksum.txt

[/console]

[output_example]

9938b398bc883db337fb41431545955b sampleChecksum.txt

[/output_example]

[console]

md5sum sample02Checksum.txt

[/console]

[output_example]

65019593d2acc1e5fb4138dc18facd87 sample02Checksum.txt

[/output_example]

sha1sum displays a similar but unique output for each file. Slightly more ( 8) characters a return value than md5sum.

|+| Slide 13

(Duplicate slide of slide 12)

Reminder that I did add a little more elaboration than was in the original slide show, since I made it pretty quickly after collecting my test results.

|+| Slide 14

BONUS ROUND – exiftool

Here I am grabbing the logo image from my site, then checking the image metadata for extra details.

[console]

wget https://funtimebliss.com/pathToASiteLogo/ftb-logo.png

[/console]

|+| Slide 15

Exiftool (continued)

Now that we have a local copy of ftb-logo.png, let’s see what details we get from the file.

[console]

exiftool ftb-logo.png

[/console]

[output_example]

ExifTool Version Number : 10.26

File Name : ftb-logo.png

Directory : .

File Size : 29 kB

File Modification Date/Time : 2013:05:29 11:45:14-04:00

File Access Date/Time : 2016:09:26 12:20:58-04:00

File Inode Change Date/Time : 2016:09:22 14:26:31-04:00

File Permissions : rw-r–r–

File Type : PNG

File Type Extension : png

MIME Type : image/png

Image Width : 465

Image Height : 100

Bit Depth : 8

Color Type : RGB with Alpha

Compression : Deflate/Inflate

Filter : Adaptive

Interlace : Noninterlaced

SRGB Rendering : Perceptual

Background Color : 255 255 255

Pixels Per Unit X : 2835

Pixels Per Unit Y : 2835

Pixel Units : meters

Modify Date : 2009:10:13 17:45:32

Comment : Created with GIMP

Image Size : 465×100

Megapixels : 0.046

[/output_example]

|+| Slide 16

Exiftool conclusion

Checking the Modify Date we see it was modified on 2009/10/13 around 5:45 PM. This matches up to the logo creation date.

Checking the Comment we see the image was edited in GIMP. I can confirm that as a fact, as I left the comment export option

Looking at the File Modification Date/Time that is consistent to when I uploaded that file into WordPress for my front page of the site.

There are TONS of supported file types for use with the EXIFTOOL and this is only one tool. Have fun and explore!