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Chaos Over Coffee

Friday night the notorious Discount Man paid me a visit. He had been visiting with his girlfriend, and came right over afterwards so he didn't have a laptop or any other form of entertainment. After about an hour, I handed him my Dell, picked up my iBook and said "let's go". Rotary Girl has been quite ill lately with her anual upper-respiratory sickness. So we made a stop to the grocery up the street and made the liquor store just before closing. The remedy: whiskey, thera-flu, and honey. Rotary would tell me later, "it worked for a short while". After the quick stop, we hit the road for the coffee house.

Stauff's (the coffee house) was THE place to be on a Friday night. It took us a while to find a parking spot, and we worried about finding a seat inside. Once we made it inside, we found that there were plenty of places to sit down, and one of those vacant areas was next to a six plug outlet! Jackpot! The downside to sitting here, is that we had to share the area with a strange little hunchbacked hermit who was dressed like Johnny Cash. He was all right though, and offered to watch our laptops so we could go get some coffee. After getting some java, I went to work. Naturally, I had to answer the question that I get all the time ... "what the hell is all that crap on the back of your laptop?".

I was definitely not prepared for this "invasion" at the coffee shop. My collection of compiled tools were a wreck. I had tried to install a newer version of ettercap, which hadn't gone well. The result was that I had a new and an old version of it installed, and neither one worked. I was really wanting some material for my book, but it was not going to happen. So instead I thought I might just "play". It's been a while since I just aimlessly screwed around.

I went back and forth between driftnet, ethereal, and Terminal. I was determined to get ettercap running before we had to leave, but it never happened. Discount Man was anxious to get back to his girlfriend and was counting the minutes until she called him. I teased that she must be out with another man. And she was actually going out with an ex-boyfriend (out of kindness). Woops. I had to open my mouth.

Driftnet didn't catch anything too interesting, and neither did ethereal. Although, I have a few logs that are several megs each of "un-explored" packets. Maybe I have some juicy stuff, and it just hasn't been found yet.

Here are some shots of my various drifnet findings. What you are seeing is pictures that were loaded by the visitors of the coffee shop (and Discount Man for that matter). You can click on these small pictures to see the full size screenshot.

Nothing too interesting here. It looks like someone was browsing an online photo collection of some kind.



It looks like someone was surfing for a new wireless card.



Here is a business man of some sort (I passed him on the way to the bathroom) who was looking for his hotel. He was using a nice new Powerbook. Way to go, dude! At some point he was accessing his .Mac iDisk (online storage from Apple). I catpured it in Ethereal, but I haven't check it out yet. Here is what he was seeing ...



Here are some more "personal" images. It looked like we were getting close to seeing some proverbial "booty pics". But, it's a busy coffee shop. So I doubt we were going to see anything too juicy. About this time Discount Man got the call from his girlfriend telling him to come get her. He had the Dell packed up in seconds.



I stalled him as long as I could, and got one more screen for you. Again, nothing really juicy here. I'm not sure who this dude is, but I saw a lot of him that night.



I had also planned on some shots of Ethereal, but I was caught up in trying to get ettercap running, and we were only in the shop for about 40 minutes before we had to dash out.

Here is one shot anyway. It's someone visiting BBC news sites.



When I got home, I was pretty frustrated with my trashed operating system. I had made such a mess with the OS I decided to blow it away. I spent the rest of the night fishing out files and backing everything up. Saturday morning, I began the long process of reinstalling.

Apple Presents: Tiger

I have been pretty anxious to try Apple's new Tiger OS, and I have had the OS in a DMG file for a week or too now. I decided that this time, I would install everything I would ever need. So, first I installed OS9, and then I installed OS X Panther. That way, I could run shitty old "Classic Mac" applications if I wanted too. I was sure to leave behind 5 gigs of space on my hard drive for Tiger!

Once I got all that crap installed, an updated I went to install Tiger only to find that I couldn't create a partition. I had left behind the space I needed, but the installation wouldn't make use of it. Sure, I could use the disk utility to make a partition, but it would blow away everything else. Damn. So I started over installing OS9 (and making TWO partitions this time), then Panther, and then Tiger. The second time around, I was able to install Tiger from the DMG, to my 5 gig spot. By the way, a big thanks goes out to Wardriver who sent me a URL explaining how it's possible to get OS X installed from a Disk Mounted Image. Neat. Here is a shot of my "About this Mac" window ...



Tiger is not all that different from Panther from what I am seeing. There are several fixes, and a new version of Safari which seems pretty cool. The first thing I found with it was an option called "Private Browsing". What the hell is that you may ask? Private Browsing lets you surf the wab without really caching anything, or putting anything into your history. Teens who share PC's with their parents will love this feature. Because they can surf porn and nobody will ever know! Thanks Apple! :-)

I goofed around with the new DashBoard feature too. I guess it's neat and all, but nothing I am interested in using. I was in a hurry to get back to work, and leave Tiger alone. I have decided that I will do my work and experimentation in Panther, and leave Tiger alone as a failsafe. So next time I have utterly ruined my OS installation and I want to invade a coffee shop, I can boot to a working OS!

Back to the drawing board!

Getting back to the task at hand, I have been installing Ettercap-NG since yesterday. That's right, since YESTERDAY. Installing the new version of Ettercap on linux was cake. But putting it onto my Mac has been a real mess. The dependencies range somewhere in the 50's (and still counting). As 1:00PM approaches I may be getting close. I have to get the remaining GTK+2 libraries installed and I should be good! I am thinking of trying to get all the libraries and binaries together in the end, and put it into a package. The idea there being to save others my pain.

Speaking of which ... I think I will go check on my progress. In the meantime, why haven't any of you signed up for an offer to get your free iPod? Now look, I WANT my free iPod and I am waiting on 5 of you to help me out. So click here and get to it! I don't know how many of you read Kevin Roses' Blog, but he just got his $250 gift certificate last week from this site.