Progressing into the year the March Irvine Underground meeting showed to be yet another success. Since the group was established we’ve been implementing all of our goals over time, the key addition shown at March’s meeting was the group project and presentation last month. As each month progress we’ll continue to expand on our goals and work with what everyone wants to learn about.

Our second meeting at Zanzibar was a success in itself; these past two months we’ve had the highest turnout for people and longest stay time for the individuals. People started gathering around 7:15 at Zanzibar outside.

From our IVU message board we’d expected Daman to bring a projector but we weren’t for certain what it would be, and were we’d project it upon. When Daman got there, Freaky assisted him in bringing it in, to everyone’s surprise this was a nice top of the line Mitsubishi projector with a self standing, non-tripod full projector screen. Miss Turtle brought her Toshiba laptop and it was then connected to the projector. They tested the Video output by playing S.I. Swimsuit Edition DVD – everything tested fine.

For the first portion of the night everyone was sharing their toys and gadgets with each other as technology owned the night. Everyone came inside Zanzibar after the food was setup. Tonight’s dinner was a six-foot Italian sandwich, dinner plans coordinated by FReCKLes and Miss Turtle. We gathered in a smaller group where everyone could hear each other. Freaky introduced the group, himself and announced the plans for the night. The group then went around introducing themselves to each other as we always have new faces.

FReCKLes and Miss Turtle planned out blackwave’s birthday also, a surprise to everyone in the group. While everyone was talking and eating a cake was brought out from the back for blackwave and Freaky’s sexy voice led everyone in the Birthday song where blackwave was presented with a cake with his Avatar on it. Look at Cake!

Everyone stood in awe of the cake and blackwave cut the first piece then cake was distributed to everyone and congratulations were presented to blackwave.

Technology was presented all throughout the night and discussed along with security and hacks for different OS’s. Freaky peddled tickets to an upcoming event called MacGathering where he’s giving a presentation on Mac OS X Security at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. Everyone is welcomed to come to the speech and should contact Freaky for the tickets at the discounted price of 3.00 each or 10.00 at the door for this three-day conference.

After the free-form discussion and food we gathered in the second portion of Zanzibar where the projector was setup and Blackwave gave a presentation and did Q&A on the Linksys wireless router that was to be part of the group project. Everyone asked their questions about security with the wireless access point and the group discussed each question leaving everyone with a positive informative view on the subject.

Freaky and blackwave went shopping a few days before hand, the group project for the night was to build and test the strength of different sized cantennas to be used for wardriving. Cantennas are antennas made from cans. Blackwave presented the project to the group and got everyone setup on building their Cantennas. We had six unique cans and obtained the pigtails and connectors for a low price from fab-corp, this is the place where everyone gets their wardriving equipment, from connectors, pig-tails, to antennas and amplifiers. Thanks to Sean from Fab-Corp for the great turn around and the Cantenna kits. Our can selection for the night included:

– Pringles
– Pepridge Farms
– Cheez Poofs
– Potato Sticks
– Slim Jims
– Coffee Can

We used the Access Point purchased for Zanzibar’s network connection that wasn’t yet in place to do testing on for the strength of the antennas. Each group who constructed the antennas had their unit tested and the activity/strength was turned into statistics. The Potato Sticks cantenna had the best results when tested. The complete write-up from start to finish of the Cantenna Project will be available shortly including statistics, dimensions of cans and results.

We continued to talk and test the units throughout the night and people checked a few out to borrow and test them on their own time. We announced and set the date/time for the Medieval Times Gathering, details can be found here. KeLvin visualized this event and turned into an official IVU gathering happening on Saturday, March 29th, get details here.

Throughout the night we continued to talk, as Zanzibar closed down we continued discussion outside on many different topics. Kept everyone entertained, involved and excited about the next IVU meeting. We thank everyone for coming to this IVU meeting and hope to see everyone at the Medieval Times event as well as April’s meeting. We had many different topics and presentation ideas discussed for next months meeting.

March Attendees: Freaky, Miss Turtle, Bartender, Korben, Blackwave, FReCKLes, Nick, DayJay & Friend, Joe, Jae, Astcell, Jsyn, Daman, Steve, petr0l, Jigsaw, KeLvin, Pyrophite, Cyb3RSoldi3R, Kallahar, Jeff, Jrl, Rain & Friend, SirCryptic