imchris.org

chris grier’s web site

Jun 1

Climbing at Jackson and Cedar Bluff

I have recently started climbing outdoors. As of June 2009 I’ve been to Jackson Falls and Cedar Bluff both in southern IL. I’ll try and post pictures of climbs here when I have them. There’s a lot of good resources already online for Jackson and other places in IL, so I’ll try and link those too.

Jackson directions and routes online.

Cedar Bluff directions and routes

Vertical Heartland, A Rock Climber’s Guide to Southern Illinois by Eric Ulner looks like the best resource for climbing in IL.

Cedar Bluff - Saturday May 30, we went to Cedar Bluff. I had never been there before. The directions found on the link above are right. Park by the church and hike up a short trail to the bluff. It was raining when we got there, but the first few climbs were dry. At the bluff we climbed:

Africa and detention

Africa (left side, 5.8) and Detention (right side, 5.10a) at Cedar Bluff

Detention (5.10a lead, right where the trail meets the bluff)
Africa (5.8 top rope, directly next to Detention)
Fear of Flying (5.9, off-width crack, coming up from the trail go to the left)
Dos Equis (5.9+ lead, coming up the trail go to the right.)

off width crack - Kurt

Fear of Flying (5.9, off-width crack) at Cedar Bluff

Jackson Falls - Sunday, may 31 we drove to Jackson. I had been there once before but for the most part climbed new routes. This was the second day of lead climbing outside for me so we took it easy and did some great routes.

Yosemite Slab area - Fun routes, good to get going. Two out of the four of us had never climbed outdoors before, so this was a fun start.

Pete’s Lead (5.7, top rope)
Smidgin (5.6, lead)
Tina’s Soul Food Kitchen (5.7, lead)
Easy Gully (5.6, top rope)

Royal Arch wall - I had climbed here the one time I had been to Jackson before, and done one of the routes next to Deetle Dumps (maybe Archangel, 5.10a, or The Meanest Flower, 5.9)

Deetle Dumps (5.8, lead)

Wave Wall - This route was difficult, either I was tired from the previous day and other climbs or something, but doing Fine Nine really made me tired for the day.

Fine Nine (5.9+, lead, right side picture)

pete's lead and rope

Pete's Lead (5.7, crack on left) and part of Smidgin (5.6 right side of the picture) at Jackson Falls

Fine Nine

Fine Nine (5.9+) at Jackson Falls

Mr. Jimmy - A  tall free standing boulder, the easy climb was fun and fairly long. The camera battery died before we got here, so there aren’t any pictures.

Big wall Greg’s Chicken Shack (5.6, lead)
Venom (5.10a, lead)

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Apr 29

more papers!

Two more publications: The Gazelle paper is going to be at USENIX Security and a short paper at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy on plugin security. See my research page for more information! PDFs should be online as soon as I’ve finished the camera ready versions.

Also, I did a talk at Stanford for the Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380), the video should be online here. There were some technical difficulties with the projector, but for the online version that might not be visible.

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Mar 13

unFriendly - looking at personal information

SigMIL participated in this year’s Engineering Open House with a project called unFriendly. The goal was originally to see if we could infer, with some degree of success, information about people on Facebook based on their friends’ profiles (we can).

After we had that, the goals changed some to a tool that creates profiles with different sources of information. We had Facebook data (from crawling), campus phone book data (also has a LDAP version), voter records (for Champaign County) and we put it all together in nice google-knockoff web site that lets people search and see what data we can gather and infer about someone. Right now our dataset is limited to people at UIUC, but it wouldn’t be difficult to extend it to larger groups.

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Feb 19

Gazelle - MSR tech report

The project that I designed and developed at MSR last summer was tech reported. It’s available as a PDF here.

Simply put, Gazelle is a browser with an OS architecture that provides greater strength against different types of attacks than other browsers. By adopting OS principles the browser is able to provide the same type of isolation that OP did for different-origin content, with additional control over display and user generated events. There’s a lot more to it, and full details are described in the TR!

Some of the design goals might be ported into OP2 when I have some free time!

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Dec 20

Death Valley

During Thanksgiving break I went to Death Valley National Park. Flew into Las Vegas and drove to the park. It’s an amazing place. I started to write a short page about the different things I ended up doing and there’s pictures on my flicker feed. I joined the pro flickr club so they won’t be disappearing. The trip was pretty long though a lot of fun.

The rest of the fall semester is going to be working on another project, my thesis propsal and setting up prelims. I might even have to start interviewing for jobs.

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Nov 2

Fall 2008

Fall 08 started a quick and is already half over. I’ve been continuing my project from Microsoft Research, working with a security group there lead by Helen Wang and working on a couple other security projects at school. I’m almost done with the first part of the MSR project and we will be writing a paper soon. Until that’s written other projects are on hold.

It’s looking like I will be graduating sometime in the spring/summer of 2009 but nothing is final yet. I also want to get a little more research published before I get out of Urbana.

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Apr 14

Illinois Malicious Processor Paper

The Illinois Malicious Processor (IMP) project I worked on was written up by InfoWorld! Its a great read: Read it here - That is in addition to it being published at LEET and being awarded a Best Paper Award! The title is “Designing and Implementing Malicious Hardware” and its available online in HTML and PDF formats.

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Mar 5

Secure web browsing with the OP web browser

Sam, Shuo and I have had our paper accepted at the 2008 Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) conference this spring. Here’s the PDF.

It was also written up in the news! “Secure web browsing with the OP web browser”, was featured in an article on eWeek in an article titled “Is There Room for a Security Browser?” By Ryan Naraine and the. The eWeek article was also Slashdotted (slashdot).

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Mar 1

Summer 2008 - Seattle and research

I’m going to Microsoft Research for the summer after I present at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. I’ll be out in Redmond, WA at the end of May through August. I’m going to be doing some pretty interesting research this summer (and some implementation). Once my slides are done for Oakland they will be up here.

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Jan 10

Winter break and spring ‘08

Christmas break was fun, I ended up going to New Hampshire’s White Mountains and staying at an AMC lodge. Did a lot of snowshoeing, survived a blizzard, and generally got to be in lots of snow. I’m looking forward to some camping this spring though I’m not sure where or when yet.

Spring semester started too, I’m taking a course called “Design of 4G WWANs and Their Building Blocks: Intelligent Routers”, its an ECE598 taught by Constantine Polychronopoulos. No other courses, just continuing the web browser research and trying to get going on some new ideas.

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