Day of Vengeance

I just heard that Anonymous has declared September 24th a "Day of Vengeance". They plan to launch a collaborated massive set of cyber attacks. They call out certain targets of their attack. It is undetstandable that they are going after corrupt banking institutions. I guess I can see why they would also go after Wall Street. The funny taget is the NYC Police Department.

What kind of malice is Anonymous going to enact? It might just be a bunch of DDoS attacks. Whup de doo. Or perhaps they shall be defacing some web sites. A little better. Given their past activities, perhaps they shall infiltrate systems and share the secret info they find.

I thought the British police had at least some of the Anonymous members locked up. Maybe they got the wrong people. Or perhaps Anonymous is a huge organization that cannot be brought down with a couple arrests.

No Internet Connection

One of my boyz could not get onto the Internet. The thing found my wireless router. Windows kept saying there was no Internet Access. What the heck? I tried to add the computer to my home network. No luck. This thing would not get on the Internet. I was getting desperate.

Personally I blame Microsoft. But Microsoft somewhere game me a clue. It said that McAfee was providing firewall services. Perhaps that was to blame. I fired up msconfig. There was a whole lot of McAfee services and startup items up in there. I disabled all of them. Then I rebooted the computer.

Boom. The computer was browsing the Internet with ease. I was able to set up and print to my local printer. Damn you McAfee. The thing might be trying to prevent some problems. It is the problem. Fail. I might have to write a program that disables all the McAfee stuff itself. I will call this prog "Cleaner" hehe.

Declinge the FBI Interview

I just finished reading a lengthy post about some FBI interview scenarios. It turns out that most of the time, speaking with the FBI can incriminate you. So what is a hacker supposed to do? There is one thing you should not do. Do not refuse to cooperate. That might look bad in a court of law. Instead the golden rule is to say that your lawyer will get in contact with the FBI for you.

You got to have counsel. Now this might seem like a ploy for some high priced lawyers to rip you off. It is better pay these pied pipers than server time in jail for a casual slip up. It turns out that good lawyers are not going to want you to be subjected to an interview with the FBI. They can figure out what is up, and provide the best offense for you. That is a great defense right there.

Do not just trust me on this. I am not a lawyer. I am a coder. Check out the original post by Solomon Wisenberg regarding 18 U.S.C. Section 1001.

Directory Denial

Some time back I must have submitted by blog to an Internet directory. Today I received a message that I had been denied. It has been so long that I have forgotten that I requested that I be added. They did not specify exactly what was preventing me from being added to the directory. I don't really mind.

Here were some of the reasons that one might not get added to this "elite" directory: You don't have your own domain. You blog on a free site. Blah blah blah. I am not going to even state the name of the directory that rejected me. Why give them any fame? I am just going to keep on hacking, and keep on writing.

Perhaps I should email these schlubs back, telling them I don't need no stinking link in their directory. I'm already a champion. Or I could gain access to their root. Muhahaha.

Windows Sleep and Hibernate

I like to keep my computer on all the time. However I want the lights to go off at night so it does not bother anyone. I could shut the thing down. But it takes a long time to boot up. Windows provides the options of both Sleep and Hibernate. But what the heck do these things mean?

Let's start with sleep. This has been called suspend or standby before. The state of the computer is kept in memory. So it does draw some power during the sleep. The good thing is that the transition back on (the resume) is fast. Hibernate writes the computer state to disk. Then it goes to a state that draws no power. The state is written to file "hiberfile.sys", whose size depends on the amount of RAM you have. The hibernate state is slower to resume than sleep, but faster than a whole boot up.

Attacks From the Sky

I have been busy lately with my new Advanced Java college class. However I saw something today that caught my eye. There have been some trials of some futuristic unmanned robots which fly around and jack into your wireless network.

Yeah. Before you knew your neighbor could "share" you wireless network. There could also have been a driveby where some hacker listens in on your wireless network activity. Now the spin is that a drone can fly around and listen in on everybody's wireless network traffic.

This is novel because it brings up images of mini-drone aircraft flying around. But the defense against the drone is no different than the defense against your neighbor. Lock down your wireless networking using security. Know also that whatever you send over the air is liable to be compromised.

COBOL ON COGS

I clicked over to a link from Reddit that got me to COBOL ON COGS. The screen colors were so dim I needed to highlight the text just to see the damn page. Don't you hate when web developers do that? Then I thought this was some COBOL revival site.

I did get a LOL from the "(c) DATE OVERFLOW" at the bottom of the community page. Didn't anybody test test this thing? Then I figured that COBOL was not meant to work past the year 2000 or something. Finally I figured out that this was a prank. They got me. Turns out this was released one April Fools day.

Heheh. Maybe I should code up a lulz like that.