Neighborly greetings and kind thanks to all of your who attended Neighborcon in Knoxville and in Vegas. As as the world’s first traveling hacker medicine show, we’ve distributed plenty of circuit boards to the world, the most recent being the special GoodFET20 board that you see above. Construction details can be found at the GoodFET20 website. Eagle schematics, source code, and all that jazz can be found within the project’s subversion repository,

svn co https://goodfet.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/goodfet

If you managed to scoop up more than one board, consider ordering an MSP430F2618, as I should have support for those chips working very soon. (They are pin-compatible.)

Like all Goodspeed&Gourneau creations, this one is in the shape of Tennessee, but to facilitate the USB connector, we had to annex parts of Arkansas. No changes are expected in the newly annexed area, except that parts of I40 will very soon be repaired to meet Tennessean standards.

There’s also a somewhat undocumented feature of this board, which is that it optionally holds a 74HC4053 for glitching the power supply of the target board to a voltage set on one of the MSP430’s DAC pins. This is a technique that is somewhat effective at breaking smart cards, but which is very effective at bypassing the access controls of microcontrollers. Expect articles the subject to appear at my blog in the near future, but feel free to play with it yourself before then.

To all those whom I’ve promised GoodFETs by mail, please be patient. More panels have been ordered, and until then, I’m short-stocked myself.

Your neighbor,
–Travis Goodspeed
Engineer of Superior Buckles

Neighbor Marlow, pictured above, is a typical Neighborcon goon. He’s neighborly, enjoys belt buckles, and he can dance a jig when properly intoxicated. If you are similarly neighborly and would like to be a goon, please send and email me with details. If we find ourselves to have a shortage of goons, neighbors will be deputized on the spot.

We will also be having GTFO (Get The Fuck Out) sessions around the neighborhood, as a means of keeping the Yacht Club from getting too crowded. If you’d like to organize a session on a particular topic, send an email my way.

Neighborliness abounds!
–Travis Goodspeed
<travis at radiantmachines.com>

Last month, NYC Resistor manufactured a fake pink unicorn badge for Shmoocon. Kingpin’s Defcon 14, 15, and 16 Badges have been electronic, replacing a boring piece of plastic with hackable electronics. Neighborcon, Knoxville’s most neighborly conference, continues both of these traditions, but I’ve decided to publish some details on the badge well in advance of the conference, for those hoping to counterfeit one rather than pay the entrance fee. (Be a neighbor, do both!)

The badges will be a variant of the TV-B-Gone Kit, an open-source design by Mitch Altman and Lady Ada. (N.B., Defcon 16 badges had TV-B-Gone firmware.) It’s also a Tennessee Belt Buckle. Grab the CC-licensed Eagle Source, and expect a final revision to be posted when I have the badges fabbed. Counterfeits badges will get you in the door, and a contest will be held for the best of them. (Be creative, but all entries must be in the shape of a state with no income tax and a constitution-enforced $50 cap on municipal court fines. No exceptions.)

Full Disclosure: There’s no mounting mechanism or battery holder on this revision, and the border shape isn’t very accurate.

I will, of course, be counterfeiting my own badge. Perhaps I can get my Tennessee CMOS-inverter design fabricated by MOSIS?

The winner of the contest will be given a Bus Pirate kit, with which to do all sorts of neighborly things.

Neighborliness abounds!
–Travis Goodspeed
Engineer of Superior Buckles

Knoxville, Tennessee is the world’s capital of neighborliness. This fine city offers $2 sushi on Mondays, $1.50 pints on Tuesdays, and $2 sushi again on Wednesdays. Everyone is friendly, and even the street evangelists don’t mind a differing opinion. It is for these reasons that the city will be hosting NeighborCon, the world’s most neighborly hacker conference on June 27 and 28 of 2009 at the Fort Sanders Yacht Club.

If that weren’t neighborly enough, the badge of this conference–to be worn with pride for years to come–is an extra-neighborly Tennessee Belt Buckle. Further, a prize will be given for the best counterfeit badge, but only so long as it’s in the shape of Tennessee.

The conference itself will run in a single track from noon to six each day, breaking for dinner and the local bars afterward. We are looking for short lightening talks as well as a few longer lectures. We are not able to reimburse speakers for expenses, but we welcome them to panhandle the audience.

Neighborcon will be small and neighborly, but it’s as good as reason as any to meet with all of our friends, and all of our friends’ friends. Tactics will be hatched, plans will be mapped, and we’ll all learn to believe in a more neighborly future.

Space is limited, so please email travis at radiantmachines.com with your most neighborly request to speak or attend. Put “NEIGHBORCON” in the title, to help me organize things. Add “SPEAKER” or “GOON” if you’d like to help out. Costs will be minimal, just twenty or thirty bucks toward the belt buckles and the bar tab.

Your neighbor,
–Travis Goodspeed
Engineer of Superior Buckles

The first round of prototypes is due to arrive tomorrow morning, and we will reorder as soon as we verify them to be functional. Then, this Friday, we’ll take them to Shmoocon in Washington, DC where we’ll repair the nation’s economy by holding a table at the HacDC party. We will speaking Saturday afternoon at 15h00 in the “Build It!” track.