HP Printers on Fire. Oh My.

I been seeing these sensationalist headlines about Hewlett Packard printers being able to be hacked. The ultimate danger is stated as the HP devices being overloaded and catching on fire. Makes for a great headline indeed. I thought this was just crazy talk. Turns out it probably is.

Here are the details. Apparently the printers look for software updates during each print job. It is possible to sneak in an unscrupulous update as part of a print job. The theory is that one could overload the printer, causing it to heat up, and eventually catch on fire.

HP has already come out and said that in the rare scenario where this happens and the printer does heat up, a hardware governor will kick in and shut the thing off before things heat up too make. Did anybody actually test out the theory and cause an HP printer to catch fire? No. Hell. They might as well said that HP printers would explode if they are hacked too much. Hehe.

Spammer Pwned

I had a weird spam message in my email today. The spammer made it look like the email came from one of my other email accounts. I sometimes send myself email to transfer stuff quickly between machines. This spammer must have determined my email address and forged it to fool me. This reminds me of a situation that Mike from Attack Vector ran into. His solution was to track down and call out the spammer.

Mike checks out the email headers. He gets the spammer IP and email address. He uses whois to get a phone number. Then he finds a postal address and bamn. He can now spy on the spammer's house with Google Maps. Turns out the spammer is Steve Nicholas of Spokane, WA. Mike goes on to determine the spammer's wife name, some social security numbers, and all kinds of other private info. Eventually the spammer contacts Mike and begs him to take down the info. What an unlucky day to send email spam. Hehe.

Hacking YouTube Views

I got a friend that produced a video and uploaded it to YouTube. Some other friends did the same. Now they are all seeing who gets the most hits on YouTube. My friend wondered if there was anything I could do to help increase his views. No problem.

I want to make it look like a user is viewing the video. The video is just a URL that gets accessed in a browser. I could just write a program that keeps launching the browser to start watching my friend's video. Perhaps I could have a small delay between viewings.

Let's say I want to try and fool YouTube into thinking it is a real human. I could mix in access to some other videos from my program. My program could also launch one of the many different browser available on my machine.

Let's think about taking this up a notch. I could write some hot software and release it for free. Then that software could quietly "watch" the video on some hidden screen. Makes it much harder for YouTube to detect something fishy. Let's see how far I need to take this.

Dennis Ritchie RIP

Dennis Ritchie passed away this week. In case you were unaware, he was the creator of the C programming language. He also was one of the creators of the UNIX operating system. Damn. That is some resume. Dennis was one of those early pioneers of computer science in the 1970s whose work affects a lot of us coders.

Have you ever heard of the K&R book of C programming? The R stands for Ritchie. Yep. He invented the language and wrote the seminal work on it. I measure all programming books against the K&R book. The rest usually do not even compare. How can you get so much info in such a small book? Elegance.

Hats off to you Dennis. Rest in peace.

Simpletron

I have been taking a community college class on advanced Java. The instructor is experienced in Java and that helps. However our text is a Deitel book that just can't seem to explain these advanced concepts to me successfully. I feel ripped off because the book cost me $130. Now I still read the chapters each week and work through the exercises. But I find myself googling around to figure out what the heck is going on.

The latest chapter was on common structures like stacks, queues, and lists. We got into the internal implementation of these structures. I worked through almost all the exercises in the back of the chapter. I was pleased with a calculator app that used a stack to convert math expressions to a format the computer could read. I was amazed that such little code could figure out complex expressions.

The last exercise in the chapter was to build a compiler for the BASIC programming language. Damn. That's a tall order. The problem was that this task relied on you finishing some exercises from previous chapters. Our advanced class had skipped over those chapters so I did not do them.

The crucial exercise was to implement a computer called the Simpletron. This thing has its own set of assembly language instructions, registers, memory, and so on. I started hitting those Simpletron exercises hard. I wrote out some small programs in Simpletron assembly language. This was fun. The real challenge was to build a Java program that would implement the Simpletron computer. More about that grand task later.

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.