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Alex's Weblog

Thoughts from the Professor

01/17/08

Media Defender Gets its Ass Kicked

Media Defender is a company who is in bed with the RIAA and MPAA to try to crack down on piracy…so obviously I don’t have a whole lot of love for them. They were having a reasonable ammout of success until in September, when they got their asses handed to them on a plate. A lowly 17-year-old high school kid hacks their servers and taps their phone calls, emails, downloads some prototype anti-P2P software, and sits collecting information for 6 months. Their security breech was only realized when the kid simply got bored and posted the entire gigabyte-worth of ’spy’ data online and started a virtual shit storm. Who knows how long he could have gone.

Suffice to say, Media Defender has been reeling from this amusing incident since September, and has had to cancel many of their projects and go back to the drawing board. The code for their anti-P2P technology is currently being used to develop new and improved P2P technology which will probably make BitTorrent look like Napster. Anyway, for a very interesting read the article below is an interview with “Ethan” the 17-year-old kid who singlehandedly brought down the music and movie industry’s greatest anti-piracy asset.

The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family’s suburban home…Ethan and I had first started talking over an untraceable prepaid phone that he carried with him. He eventually agrees to speak in person, as long as I protect his identity. (Ethan is a pseudonym.) We meet after school, in a bookstore that he says is near his house… He also pulls out a well-creased sheet of paper bearing my name, the first five digits of my Social Security number, a few pictures of me, and addresses going back 10 years. “I had to check,” he says.

(From Conde Nast’s Portfolio)

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/01/14/Media-Defenders-Profile

12/12/07

Fuck MySpace Bandwidth Leechers

After examining my web stats a few months ago I noticed that I was getting a lot of random hits from shitty sites like MySpace. They were hotlinking several images, but one in particular: pentagram.jpg. It was a pentagram shape thing with glowing lights which used to be in my gallery but it was lame so I deleted the links…but not the images. As a result emo teens found it via Google or AOL (more probable) and hotlinked it. Well, I taught those wrist-cutting, snot-nosed little bastards needed to be taught a lesson. Instead of removing the image or whatever, I simply replaced with something a little more fitting: pentagram.jpg

Amusingly enough, some have yet to change their image so it is still up on their page. I just might have to change it to Tubgirl (don’t Google that, seriously).

See below for what damage I did to some shitty kids’ band webpage. I think it is an improvement. (I guess they got bitch slapped this time).

10/17/07

I Should be (Legally) Able to Download ~5 Movies Free Each Year

Why? Because they insist on showing commercials before movies in the theaters. A few years ago people were really pissed off, but eventually we have been pacified into just accepting that pre-movie commercials are just part of the modern movie-going experience even though they really shouldn’t be. We are alreay paying to see the movie, why do they need to make more money? Commercials and advertising should be used excusivly for recouping money for free things, like TV. Movies alreay cost over 8 bucks in both Madison and Milwaukee. It is simple greed on the part of the movie theatre owners and movie producers. Since they waste several hours of my time every year thanks to commercials, I should be justly compensated for my wasted and irritated time in the form of free movies.

Since I figure they won’t agree, and to cut down on the paperwork, I am going to go ahead and help myself to a few movies of my choice. No MPAA, don’t get up, I’m not worth your time.

Inspired by this article.

09/19/07

Police Brutality at its Finest

Don’t get me started about police acting illegally. I have encountered that second-hand. Now they are tasering students who ask legitimate questions at a political rally.

I have said it before and I will say it again: fuck the police.

09/10/07

Huge Password Faults

Read via digg today: a new program uses a list of pre-processed hash tables to match encrypted passwords with vaules. Holy shit! This method, called “Rainbow Hash Cracking” can crack passwords with amazing speeds. The program is intended to be used to determine windows passwords and such, and it only works with reliable speed on something called LM hashes (Windows Vista uses a better method which can still be cracked but takes significantly longer). The secret I guess is to have all the POSSIBLE hash combonations determined ahead of time which can somehow lead back to the original characters.

Anyway, sparing the technical stuff it is a significant breakthrough for determining passwords under 14 places, so I guess I am going to be using at least 16 places now…

For a technical read into how it works, something that I wasn’t able to fully comprehend, read the whole article.

Download the program for testing Note: the largest table is about 9GB in size, and I guess you still have to have a pretty fast computer (or multiple) to determine passwords in a matter of hours.

Also amusing are the Ten Laws of Computer Security.

09/09/07

Damn Leechers

So I have been noticing a lot of traffic from MySpace and other shitty sites. Strangely, most linked to an old image of a pentagram I had from professorcornbread.com v3.0 which I never deleted. So I took care of that situation, but not before replacing it with a kind message to those who steal my bandwidth for their shitty pages: pentagram.jpg.

It is not as if I can’t spare the bandwidth, I have probably 10 times what I use…but it is the principle of it. Lame teenagers on MySpace should not get to use images they hotlinked from others for their wannabe band page for free without consequences.

07/12/07

Recovered Mysterious Data?!

My efforts to recover my disks have taken a mysterious turn. Two bizarre things have happened:

1 - I recovered MORE data than can phyiscally fit on the disk
2 - Some of the data that I recovered IS NOT MINE! I have never seen or created some of it.

And I don’t have any explaination for why these two things happened.

Starting with the first…the disk is a Western Digital Caviar 250 GB drive. I have two identical disks, and one got the file table corrupted, hence the recovery operation. Even though it is 250 gigabytes, it formats out to somewhat less than that, and Western Digital used a base of 1000 for the powers instead of the standard 1024 (just for ease of numbering, and so they can sell a disk that appears to have more data)

So, to be precise the disk can hold exactly 250,056,704,000 bytes, or 232.88 gigabytes. After formatting to NTFS it is about 232 even. Somehow, I recovered 273,609,744,384 bytes, or 254.82 gigabytes. 9.4% more non-duplicate data than was originally on the disk, and how it did that…I am flabbergasted. My only theory is that due to the way that the data was overwritten, the hash could be partially rebuilt and the ‘blanks’ filled in.

But, more bizarre was what the data was that was recovered. Because….it wasn’t all mine.

Most was. There were the complete seasons of Star Trek DS9, TNG, Enterprise, as well as the Simpsons and That 70s Show and a massive DeviantART collection. In total this comprised most of the disk with a few gigs free. The disk had been used in the past to store other TV shows, such as Family Guy, Cappelle’s Show and Star Trek Voyager, which bits and pieces of both were recovered. Also were the corrupt NTFS file tables and some other misc shit.

And then there was what I am calling the ‘immaculately concieved data’, data which I have no idea as to the origin, data which I have never seen. Yes, it is not as if I know every single bit of data, but I do know that I have never posessed:

Pictures of someone holding small Lego Models
A picture of the inside of a computer that I do not own
Scanned sketches on graph paper with handwriting not my own
Castles scanned from a book it appears
A Zebra
Some pornographic images
A jet engine with a Peace Sign
Assorted random avitar/thumbnail images
Microsoft Age of Empires readme

These blew me away:
A homework assignment for the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute?!
Instant message conversations about designing a Storm Trooper outfit, a holiday trip to South Africa, Dungeons and Dragons, keyboards, any many others which I didn’t look though. I found an email address in the conversations, but it was dead.

My only explaination, and it is rather dubious, is that this disk was returned to Western Digital for some reason, such as a interface failure, rebuilt and resold to me. I will have to do more research to get to the bottom of the immaculately concieved data!

07/09/07

Computer Woes

I have been having some recent computer problems stemming from what I assume to be a virus, though I could find no information about the bizarre behavior of my computer, or the misspelled program names that spawned duplicates of my problems (like I need 12 instances of svchost?). Anyway, I decided not to fuck around with a scalpel to try to repair the damage and just get out the big ol’ sledgehammer and reformat the damn thing and start over.

A relatively normal procedure, right? No…not for me! Partly it is my fault for having 90% of my 1.1 TBs of disk space filled with DVD rips of my favorite TV shows and therefore no wiggle room to back up data. So I had to pull out one of my old 100gb disks to use as a temporary ‘bypass’ to shuffle shit around. Of course I was given grief by my CD rom which decided not to properly read the recovery disks and the seemingly endless task of finding the appropriate device drivers.

Now things got strange. For no reason one of the SCSI disks took a shit. No mechanical failure or anything, but its index was corrputed. It knew it was there, but it couldn’t determine its format or if there was any data on it. I looked for a while online, but eventually broke down and actually BOUGHT a recovery program after using the demo to grab a test file. Yeah, I looked online, but there was no crack.

It works in much the same way as the old disk deframeter in Windows 98 did, with the little blocks as a graphical representation of the disk. It examines the disk sector by sector and rebuilds a temporary index such that the files can be saved off it it. I have recovered everything, and then some (see my following post for some very bizarre discoveries).

So if anyone has a disk that failed that they need saved…this program works quite well and I am willing to share. This is a rare act of generosity from me…so take it while you can!

07/06/07

It’s Confirmed, we Americans are Idiots

This unfortunate reality is already something that I have come to terms with, but a new article in the New York times interviewing a political scientist who has spent years studying how much American people actually know about what they are voting on.

While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are “scientifically savvy and alert,” he said in an interview. Most of the rest “don’t have a clue.” At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people’s inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.

Here are some of his abysmal (but hardly shocking) finds:
American adults in general do not understand what molecules are.
Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity.
Only about 10 percent know what radiation is.
One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Obviously, people don’t even know the science behind what they are voting against (i.e. anti-nuclear, anti-stem cell research). We’ve known this for a while, since generally less educated people support the ideas of creationism and the higher educated people (usually college) understand the reality of evolution.

These fundimental scientific ideas need to be engrained in kids before they graduate high school and are allowed to vote. Otherwise, we will continue electing morons to office from the presidency to the school board.

Link to the times article here (New York Times).

05/16/07

Good Riddance to Jerry Falwell

Yes, it has been a while since I wrote last but I am here in studio, waiting on a rendering, so I decided to make a comment about some recent news.

Yesterday Jerry Falwell, the most famous misguided televangelist who has corrupted so many, was found unresponsive on the floor, taken to the hospital and pronounced dead. Hallelujah.

How often is someone’s death celebrated? We celebrated the death of Hitler, Sadaam, Timothy McVeigh and we anticipate celebrating Osama’s demise because these are all terrible people who murder hundreds/thousands/millions and preach hatred and moral superiority. So even though I don’t think Jerry Falwell killed anyone, he is responsible for spewing some of the most vile hate speach on homosexuals, women and others.

Here are some of his ‘zingers’:

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

“It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men’s movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.”

“The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.”

“AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah’s chariotters.”

Too bad there’s no hell for him to go to, but if by some wild chance there is, let him rot there. Good riddance.

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