Tired As Hell

Discount Man stopped by last night. He brought his bosses laptop with him, which happened to be a new Thinkpad. It was a lot nicer than the junkers that the State of Ohio got stuck with. For the record, the model they had was the G40. It's uber-shitty. The model DM's boss picked up is a T41. The T41 was impressive. Thin, lightweight, decent processor, etc. My only complaint? It's just as ugly as any other Thinkpad. I know that the average PC user is not concerned about appearance, but I mean ... come on. You could at least try to make a new laptop look appealing. Look at any other manufactur's laptop and it will look "sleeker" or more attractive. I am not down with the "flat black look". DM complained that his boss kept leaving 'greasy marks' on the wrist rest area. This was a complaint that the State users had too. Any kind of smudges, or greasy hand marks gleam like mad on that flat black matte colored plastic. Crap, crap, crap. I would still buy an iBook. :-) Go on, flame me.

We had a decent night of exchanging music, bullshitting, and the usual basement activities. At one point, my Pet Monster came down, and sat down with DM. They get along most of the time, but my Monster was a little grouchy from being couped up in my car all day. Some words were exchanged. I think DM said something about my Monster's mother, and they were on the floor fighting like children. Rather, DM was on the floor being beaten like a child. I snapped a few pictures of the event, and you can see them in my Monster's Blog.

I got a hold of two albums that I didn't have thanks to packetnews.com. After sampling them, I was glad I hadn't run into the record store to buy them. Robert Miles latest album was just sad. It makes me mad because his second to last album (Organik) was amazing. I also picked up an incomplete copy of Death In Vegas's latest. Horrible. Simply horrible. Thanks to file sharing, I saved a few bucks on two awful albums. :-) And so, the only good music I have picked up lately is the Daft Club album, and some "Scissor Sisters" tunes that DM gave me. This group is bizarre. You need to go download some.

I also learned something interesting about Access Points today. Every once in a while I come across a "Hidden SSID". I hear that if you are watching when a client connects (which is rare) you will see the SSID exposed over the wire. Kismet claims to pick up on the SSID probe, and report it. KisMac, aparently, also does this. The chances of being around when a client associates to the access point are slim and none, so I asked the KisMac mailing list if it were possible to spoof a "de-authenticate" frame to the Access Point, which would effectively disconnect the client and force them to reconnect (which you could then watch and pick up the SSID). It sounded a little far-fetched. But it turns out that this has all ready been thought of, and is a feature built into KisMac. So now I need to go find a hidden SSID and crack it for documentation purposes!!

Okay, I need to go clean up the mess I made making dinner for the kids, and then crash out a for a bit.

Ancient History

So around noon the other day, my wife says "wanna go see a movie? I need to get out". I was a little stir crazy too, so I recommended we check out the Ohio Historical Society (the museum). We haven't been there in years and the weather was perfect for the outdoors "Ohio Village". The village is a small town constructed to mimic the later 18th or early 19th century. It has actors wandering around their shops or homes in character. Some of them were restuffing their matresses, washing their clothes, mowing the yard, etc. Others would tell you all about their course of business, and how miserable life was. The kids were bored, but I found it pretty interesting. At the "Doctors Home" we were greeted by a Butler who explained that it was common courtesy to give him a calling card so that he could let the Dr know that you had arrived.

Calling cards, as he explained were like the modern day business card. It was a heavy stock card with your name on it, and maybe something decorative. But that's all. When you visited your friends, you would hand the servants your "calling card" and they would take it to the home owner. The person would then turn up, or "turn down" corners of the card and send it back to you to let you know if they wanted to see you or not. It made me want to print up some "calling cards". I have business cards, but I hate them. The address is wrong, my e-mail address has changed, and they are pretty worthless. Since I hand write everything on the back anyway, I am thinking about having some printed up. Nice ivory cards, with simply my name across the middle. Classy, right?

The Forums Die

Just as quickly as they appeared, thebroken forums have vanished. We don't have to wonder why. Certain parties found the need to register dozens of names, and create endless retarded topics. The moderators were aparently not ready for such a rush of moronic activity, and could only stand back and watch the forums go to hell in a handbasket. The end. It's unfortunate, because this kind of reaction may have just delayed the release of "the real forums", if not cancelled the release all together. Time will tell. Hopefully next time they do something with the forums, they will send out a newsletter like they promised. ;-)

Another Book Idea

After working on the Gloop website a couple of hours, I decided that I should write up a cook-book section in my Home Invasion book. The recipes? Home-made Cantennas (that work better than store bought), and how to alter a network card for an external antenna (without breaking your card). I have modified a couple of cards now under different brand names, so I can include lots of pictures in the book. In fact, I did a short video with my buddy Discount Man that was never released by "thebroken". I may just make that available on Gloop.net, and use some footage as illustrations in my book.

Would you all want to see Gloop videos? I'm not trying to make my own "thebroken" following. In fact, if we do a show, I plan on appealing to what I consider the "technically inclined". A while back I put together a rough 'script (?)' for the show, and passed it onto Discount Man (who would appear in the show) and Chuckman (the producer). Chuckman recently called Discount Man and asked when we were shooting. I guess I kind of dropped the ball on the project, because I didnt have the time to spend on it. I would rather be working on my book. I'll see what you all have to say (leave me some comments). Would you be interested in "the Gloop Show"?

The Broken Forums Return

At some point, thebroken brought it's forums back. I missed the release, because it doesn't look like they sent out a newsletter as planned. Someone picked up on it pretty quickly, and registered all the old forum names. So now there are dozens of imposters, such as "Ray" who is not me. And there are all ready thousands of "how do I hack posts" to boot. I'm glad I am no longer a moderator. It looks like those new moderators have a lot of work to do if they plan on turning the forums around into something useful. I registered a new account "Ray Haque" and then decided that I really didn't want to put myself back into that chaos. I think I will just stand back and observe.

I also learned that TechTV was sold! I hadn't heard. I will keep my fingers crossed for Kevin. I'm sure G4 will keep him on board, and continue to run the Screen Savers show. It was TechTV's best show, and for many folks it was the only thing they watched. But now Kevin will experience a "merger" first hand. I'm betting it's the same kind of merger I am now part of. They call it a merger, but it's really an acquisition or a "buy out". The advantage of a merger is that employees who are kept on board will not lose things that they need like 401k, health insurance, etc. It also generally means "no pay cuts", which is nice. My heart goes out to the staff of techTV. They really have a family atmosphere around there, and that may be something they lose with G4.

Lastly, I forgot to mention some good news I got on Friday. I will be getting a new company laptop. From what I hear they are 2Ghz Pentium machines with some nice upgrades. Such as 512MB of RAM, and an 80 gig hard drive. These are a result of the complaints we had about not being able to set up classes easily. So now we can build our classes quickly, and store PC images on our 80 gig drives. It ought to be nice.

I also like that news because I had planned early on with my 'Home Invasion' book to demonstrate OS X as well as Windows hacking. I don't really have a decent Windows notebook around, so I have never done much with that plan. Having a PC with Windows XP ought to provide me with some new fun, and new material for the book. Time will tell though. I am not holding my breath waiting for these laptops to fall into my lap. Although, I heard one rumor that they laptops were all ready purchased, and had arrived. They just needed to be set up. Now, do Instructors such as ourselves really want someone setting up our laptops for us? First thing I'm gonna' do is wipe the partition table and make room for BSD. ;-)

A Long Friday

I hopped out of bed Friday morning and rushed to work. The plan was to pack a van with PC's and drive them to Cleveland for a class setup. Naturally, I get to work nice and early, and the van hasn't been rented yet. So by the time we ripped the seats out and hit the road, it was all ready about 11 in the morning. We drove to the old office to pick up duct tape, network cabling, etc. and find that we also have to take the student books for the class with us. We had all ready packed the van *FULL*. So we ended up taking the microsoft kits and whipping them overtop all the packed in junk. We made it fit.

Then we hit the road, me and Dustin. Dustin was the last instructor hired onto eKnowledge Concepts before we were merged with the larger company we now both work for. We typically work at different ends of Ohio so we have never really hung out. Seeing how we had a 3 and a half hour drive ahead of us, we did a lot of talking. Once we arrived, it would take us a good two hours to set up. And by then it was almost 4:30 in the afternoon. We still had to drive to another location, and set up another class.

So I asked Dustin, "do you ever expense your meals?". And he says "not really ... what did you have in mind? Hooters?". I didn't really want to go to Hooters. And I can't imagine expensing a check for Hooters anyway. So we hit Don Pablos. I went straight to the restroom to wash my hands, and he went straight to the bar. When I came back out Dustin was sucking down a tall dark mexican beer. "I'll have one of those!". It was nice to sit down and take a break. And drink a beer. When the check came, we suddenly realized that you can't expense a beer. The bartender was nice enough to take our drinks off the check, and split the bill. Good call. Nothing like a good meal, thats free.

Onto the next spot. We headed into Warrensville. It was only about a 45 minute drive. And then an hour or two to set up. And then a 4 hours drive home. In the end I walked in the door at about 10:30PM. I was supposed to hang out with the Discount Man, but I fucked that up. He ended up going frat party hopping, and I ended up going directly to sleep.

The New Gloop

When I completed the Gloop flash page a few months ago, I was pretty pleased with it. But it loaded very slowly, and it was a pain in the ass to update. Also, my interface sucked. People didn't like it. I decided my next website would be very simple. So simple, that I built it in Front Page. I'm not a big Front Page fan, but it lays tables out really nicely. And I can get back and forth to the actual HTML code pretty easily. The result was a quick, simple, and slick looking design that I can easily update.

This morning and this afternoon I rushed to finish it, so that I could replace the outdated flash site. Check it out. I wanted to put something out there with information about my projects and such.

I also got pretty bored, and made a new Blog for my Pet Monster. Rather, my Pet Monster made his own blog. You can find the link off to the left in my "friends blogs" bar. Enjoy. :-)

And now, I think I shall go to bed. My kids will be dragging me out of bed at 7:00AM to make them breakfast.

I've Been Probed (repeatedly)

As I sit here, typing to you, I am getting probed by ten different sources. As painful as that sounds, you can see no signs of penetration. I am teaching a Windows XP class all week. My students are learning XP on their new laptops. These Thinkpads all have internal wireless networking cards. So out of curiosity, I fired up KisMac and found ten different active probes. Neat.

Thinkpads suck though. I mean ... really. I think IBM gets FAR too much credit for these thick-ass paperweights. They have a good chunk of RAM in them, and Pentium 4 processors .... oh, and a DVD/CD-RW drive ... that's about it. What I don't like is the OVERSIZED power supply brick. It's huge. Or the sticky thing that they call a mouse. That thing is retarded. You have this tiny out of control erasorhead in the middle of your keyboard, and the buttons for it are under your palm. Who the hell designed this piece of shit?

In general, these laptops are UGLY. Big, thick, black objects. The only color on these junkers is the ugly IBM logo stamped into the corners. This is why I will never buy a Thinkpad. In fact, I think my next laptop will be an iBook. OS X and an iBook is just better in so many ways.

All you Thinkpad fanboys can bite me.

Daft Clubbin'

Last night I went out to see if any of my favorite artists were releasing anything new. I always start with Daft Punk. To my delight there was an album out that I don't have yet. It's called Datf Club. It's actually just a whole album of remixes, but they are GOOD remixes. It might as well be a brand new song collection because the remixes are so different than the originals. This album had been released before to anyone that bought the "Discovery" album. If you have that album, you get some magic key and a URL to go download the songs for free. For everyone else you will have to order this disc ... or "acquire" these songs. ;-) IT ROCKS.

Okay, lunch over. Back to work. *smirk*

Current Mood: Content
Musical Inspiration: Daft Punk - Daft Club (album)

Thanks!

First, I want to thank everyone for leaving me some comments about my book. It definitely drives me to keep working on it. I have some doubts about it ever getting published by a "real publisher", but what I am finding is that I can put together a pretty nice "on demand" published book for around (or less than) $20. That would be a black and white book, with a color *hard bound* cover. So if it comes to me having to publish my own book, it will still cost about the same to those who purchase it.

In the meantime, I am still learning, documenting, and recording my findings.

New Findings!

I had to drive up to the grocery Sunday night. I decided I would bring Audrey along (the laptop) and we would do some adventuring on the way there. It's been a while since I cruised my local neighborhood looking for networks, so it appears a few new ones have popped up. I was really interested in some classy apartments up the street from me because of the parking lot design. You drive into the middle of the complex, and apartments completely surround you from all directions. Its the perfect place to park and have fun. Although, I only found about 3 networks, and two of them were WEP protected.

I jumped onto the unprotected network which must have belonged to Shawn. How do I know? Because he named everything after himself.

• The Access Point - Named "SHAWN'S WIRELESS". Thanks Shawn.
• The Shared Items - Shawns Documents, Shawns Music, etc.
• The Filenames - Shawns Report on ... (you get the idea)

Shawn was sharing his entire C drive, and yet, had nothing interesting to share. I spent a good five minutes poking through his stuff, and even his music collection bored me. Did you know that some people actually like Tori Amos? I ought to have a talk with Shawn. Shawn, I will e-mail you later so we can talk about this. Or maybe I should message him through AIM. I have his screen name too.

NEXT! I started driving up the street and decided I would go to Krogers and get my food before doing any more snooping. As I drove along the store fronts of the strip mall connected to my grocery store, I found an access point. I parked my car to check it out. I had seen this unprotected access point before but from the other side of the parking lot. I had always wondered where the signal was coming from, and couldn't pinpoint it. It turns out I had found an Access Point belonging to a "C.D. Warehouse" store.

CD Warehouse is a shop that buys and sells music, video games, movies, etc. Their computer is apartently on a wireless network. This computer is the one behind the counter that contains all of their sales data, and inventory. I have always been curious about how the store does business, so I snooped a little.

I was able to easily locate their database (in some odd format) and many transactional records with Amazon (the online bookseller). It looks like Amazon and CD Warehouse do quite a bit of business together. Amazon will sell used items from their website, for which CD Warehouse has the inventory. It's not a bad business. What I found is that Amazon has a much higher cost per item than CD Warehouse does. What a racket. From looking at their sales records, I would say that CD Warehouse easily makes five to eight bucks per item, and doesn't have to maintain an online store.

I also found transaction records with items bought and sold for the past few months from online customers. Nothing to do with payment methods (no credit carrd numbers, etc) which was good. If I ever run into credit numbers,
I'm splitting. I do not want to go to Federal prison. :-) What I did find though was customer names, addresses, e-mail addresses, how they had paid, and what they wanted in the way of a CD, movie, etc. The data was a tab delimited file that was probably output from some odd database application. You have to love Microsoft Excel, which was able to import the data and arrange it very neatly into columns. What could I do with this information? Nothing. But it does give you an idea of "what people want". You see what you think. Below is an example of the unorganized mess of data. Some personal details edited out with *'s

cancelled 2002-02-24 14:16:31.0 700807248581 Eight Arms to Hold You [Audio CD] Veruca Salt 0207H565152 607703000124 6.99 2.29 1 9.28 02-24-2002:14-16-31 805613 b***@cfl.rr.com Bre-elle Ishtar Bre-elle Ishtar **** Harmon Ave Winter Park FL 32789-5420 United States 607703000124 standard
cancelled 2002-02-26 22:35:38.0 700104269601 The Secret of NIMH [DVD] (2001) Bluth, Don; Jacobi, Derek; Hartman, Elizabeth... 0125A712902 027616703729 12.99 2.29 1 15.28 02-26-2002:22-35-37 785376 h***@hotmail.com h*** **** **** 21st ave san francisco CA 94122 United States 027616703729 standard
cancelled 2002-02-27 17:55:16.0 700907212751 Insane Clown Posse: Big Money Hustla$ - The Movie [DVD] (2001) Cafiero, John; J 0227T055532 044005380996 8.99 2.29 1 11.28 02-27-2002:13-30-46 837835 b***@rocketmail.com Charles J. Day charles j day **** lowry rd indianapolis in 46222 United States 044005380996

Did you notice that they had cancelled the order for the Veruca Salt album? Good call.

I also found a ton of uninteresting items. Documents created on accident, a hundred folders named "New Folder", and zip files with random character names (that were empty). It's the sure sign that a fucktard has been using this computer, and repeatedly makes senseless mistakes that leave behind empty files.

Other than satisfying some of my curiosities, I didn't find anything of interest and I moved on. It was a short adventure, and a bit unfilfilling. I think my next adventure is going to be heading into a better populated area. I have been wanting to get back to the local University campus. But for that, I should wait for my buddy The Discount Man to heal from his recent eye surgery. The last time we went Wardriving on campus, he was upset that he could not locate any "booty pics" as he so desired to steal.

Yet, the most interesting items I have found have been from business parks. I ought to head out this weekend and just "gather".

Work, work, work

Writing a book is real work. I sat down this morning with my laptop and a full battery charge. Here I am about 5 hours later, and 27 percent of a charge left. Oh, and I have some material to show for it. As I write sections to this book, new ideas keep popping into my head and I am writing them all down.

My first thought is to devide the book into two equal halves. One half will be strictly for entertainment value, while the other half will be a "how to" on invading networks. From there, I have a pile of ideas that may or may not develop into sections of the book.

This morning I sat down and wrote a chapter on my iBook. I want people to see why I bought this laptop, why it's a great Wardriving tool, and how I modified it to make my Wardriving results better. It's also packed with pictures of my laptop as I have modified it over the past few months.

What I am missing now is the actual Wardriving. I need put aside some time that I can go out with my laptop and a couple hours to blow so I can gather some fun new material. In the meantime I will organize the educational stuff, etc. It's certainly a work in progress.

I was planning on putting together a mailing list for those who are interested in this book. But then, I don't really need one. This Blog serves that purpose. Once this book goes 'live' I will set up a website for those who have bought the book (or people that have followed my adventures in the past), and they can continue to get free updates, and new adventures as they happen. Sort of a free update to an ongoing book of adventures. That's the idea anyway. Then I figure I could always print a new copy of the book, but if you bought the book from a year ago, you could just go read the new stuff online.

So what do you all think? Leave me some comments beyotches.