Sync's Blog

52WoC Twitter Dashboard Widget

2010-01-22T23:08:00.000-05:00

So I've been playing with a few of the 52 Weeks of Code challenges by DreamInCode.net. Basically every week they have a new programing challenge for the community. My app is a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that tracks the #52WoC hashtag on Twitter, and shows the last 10 uses. It's a fun little app, and for all who want to use it to keep up with the programming challenges, I've made it available for download.

Getting Back

2010-01-18T00:15:00.001-05:00

So I've been away from the blogosphere for a while I suppose. I've been busy with some, self improvement type stuff. In a treatment center. Going to AA meetings. Working on getting my life back together after diving head first into the realm of drug addiction. I've been thinking about starting an addiction blog. I really don't know why I'm posting this here other than the fact that I haven't posted in a while, and it's 12:13 in the morning and I'm just kinda looking for something to do.

TJX Hacker

2009-12-19T01:31:00.001-05:00

Albert Gonzalez is a confessed computer hacker recently making headlines after having served 18 months in prison for the largest identity-theft attack in history. He has a possible sentence of 15 to 25 years in federal prison.
Dr. Barry Roth submitted an evaluation to the court after 10 hours of interviewing Gonzalez. He stated that Gonzalez is "very bright and quick in some ways, but, very slow and ill-equipped in other ways." He went on to state that Gonzalez has had major issues with insecurity as well as social awkwardness and impairment.
Interestingly enough, Gonzalez's obsession with computers started at a very early age. In middle school, he went from being outgoing to being a loner, spending all of his free time focusing on his computer rather than chasing girls and making friends.
His mother tried to take him to a psychologist during this time, but he would have nothing to do with it. She moved the computer out of his room, but that had no effect on his usage. In Dr. Roth's evaluation letter, Gonzalez's father "arranged a fake arrest with friends in the police force" as part of an addiction intervention.
WHen Gonzalez was in high school, he hacked the computers of India's government, as well as NASA. Instead of being punished, the FBI and NASA officials showed up at his high school and simply demanded it not happen again.
After high school, Gonzalez studied computers at a Junior College in Miami, however, he dropped out during his first semester due to poor grades and lack of a challenging curriculum. After this, he worked for a now out-of-business internet company in New York. At 21, Gonzalez had developed a drug and alcohol addiction, and was arrested in 2003 for using cloned ATM cards.
As part of something called Operation Firewall, the Secret Service turned Gonzalez into an informant after discovering that he was an administrator on Shadowcrew, which is an underground forum dealing with selling stolen credit card data and information. Gonzalez also taught law enforcement agencies as well as the American Banking Association the techniques of cyberthieves.
However, during all of this, he was living a double life. While lecturing the law enforcement agencies, Gonzalez was also building up his criminal network contacts, and still inventing new methods for attacking companies. It wasn't until he was arrested in 2008 for hacking into Dave & Busters that they caught on to the TJX hack.
A statement from his mother stated that Gonzalez is "very remorseful and will definitely never commit any crime again."

Image courtesy of law enforcement.

source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gonzalez-remorseful/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Group51

2009-11-07T13:51:00.000-05:00

So I've gotten involved with this new Ethical Hacking/Computer Security group. It's called Group51, and has a very connected community. Upon membership approval, you can get access to their VPN "darknet", their internal network to learn and experiment with. They also have forums, group projects, articles, and a large selection of networking and information gathering tools. I suggest ya'll give it a look, it's a very interesting concept.

Creator of StalkDaily twitter worm -> a 17 y/old kid

2009-04-12T01:22:00.002-04:00

As many people have become aware of, a Twiter worm broke loose on Saturday, April 11th, which became known as the "StalkDaily Worm." The creator of website StalkDaily.com, 17 year old Mikeyy Mooney, came clean Saturday evening, in an interview with BNO News. He stated that he created the worm simply out of boredom, a common theme in malicious computer code. He admitted to having an interest in finding vulnerabilities on sites. He did in fact bring light to a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaw, that could have been used much more maliciously. The kid did a service by letting Twitter see the problem in their code, and he got some free advertising for his own website in the process. He says that the code did not steal any sensitive data, or passwords. Examining the code seemed to support his claim, the script grabbed the user's twitter cookies to make use of Twitter's API, but no computers were compromised, no accounts were used to steal financial information, no one's computer was sending cryptic communications to missile silos.
He started by making several accounts, with the worm code embedded into the Bio section on the profiles, the fact this was allowed was the XSS bug he brought to light. Unlike other worms, where you are safe if you don't click suspicious links, this worm worked by just viewing the infected profile. The script waited for three seconds, before taking the user's cookies. After which, the worm would add itself into the target's Bio section, and send out Tweets linking to Mooney's site. No damage, no ruined finances, just a worm being exposed to the public.

LG phones using linux? Verizon browser is firefox?

2009-03-30T22:54:00.003-04:00

So, today, I used my LG enV2 phone to access my web server. Out of curiosity, I checked the logs to see what the browser identified as. To my surprise, I found the following entry:

128 "http://sync350.dyndns.org/randomfileImadetotest.txt" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 Novarra-Vision/7.3"

On this ebay auction, the same model phone is selling for $255. You cannot tell me that the hardware is worth that much, considering that Linux is open source, as is Firefox. I mean, I'll give them credit that they had to port a linux distrubution onto a phone, I'm not saying its the easiest thing in the world, I'm just saying that these phones are overpriced for the software on them. Then again, I suppose that's a given, considering the prices for ringtones/music/games/etc.

Just some food for thought I suppose, something I found interesting.

Links of the Week

2009-03-29T22:38:00.003-04:00

I've decided that I will start doing a topic called "Links of the Week" every Sunday, where I will post my favorite links that I have come across throughout the particular week. So without further adieu, here are the Links of the Week:

1. Household Hacker: How to Snoop Security Cameras

2. Astral Voyage - Astral Projection - Science and Astral Projection

3. Elance - Freelance Tech jobs

4. Shareaholic - The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark, save and e-mail web pages quickly

5. Twitter Games To Make Tweeting Fun

Give Your Xbox A Blog

2009-03-28T01:18:00.003-04:00

A group known as 360Voice has put together a way to let your Xbox 360 console write its own blog, with no assistance from you past setting up the blog. Using the Xbox Live connection, it will track which games you are playing, as well as your Gamer Score, allowing it to build blog entries based around your preferences. It will blog about its lonliness if you take too many breaks from gaming, and will boast your score if you show significant improvement.

Random paper for journalism

2008-12-29T01:18:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a happy holiday season. I know mine was amazing :)

Here's a rough draft that I just sent in for my Journalism course. Not the strongest, but I suppose it's alright for a first draft.

There are many possible careers involving art and graphic design. There are opportunities to be a web designer or to work in software development. The skill could be used to design flyers and ads for promotions or events. The possibilities are endless when it comes to art of any sort.
A web designer uses computerized art programs to create graphics and designs for websites. A website that makes use of a professional graphic artist looks much more visually appealing than a site with just text and pictures. For websites that focus on attracting potential customers and making money, visual attraction to the site makes the difference between a hundred dollars and a thousand dollars.
A graphic artist could also do contract work for different companies and groups. They could design anything from fliers to billboards for shows, promotions, or events. The artist would be responsible for developing new company logos, as well as design packaging for the finished products in a manufacturing company.

What's In The Curry?

2008-12-23T22:06:00.000-05:00

Next time you have a problem with your Microsoft Windows software, just know that somewhere, there is a nine year old girl is able to solve your issue. That's right, M. Lavinashree of India is the youngest person to ever become a Microsoft Certified Professional. When she was only three years old, she received an award for memorizing and reciting a 1300 couplet epic that was over 2000 years old. It was after this when her parents decided to test her memorizing skills.

See this blog for more details, including a video report.

The Pirate Bay Turns Youtube ... or does it?

2008-12-23T02:26:00.000-05:00

In May of 2007, blogs all over the world were sparking with news of The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org/) launching a Youtube-esque streaming service, allowing movies to be viewed in the same style as watching a full grown man cry over Brittney Spears. But what happened to it? As we get ready to move into 2009, we still have no such service, which was supposed to be called "The Video Bay".

The website (http://www.thevideobay.org) used to have a message stating:

"only open for beta- and dev-testers. some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done."

Which left a glimmer of hope for a future site, but now it is replaced with a Firefox Page Load Error stating that the site had created an endless loop. All we can do now is wait I guess, as we have for over a year. I plan to get into contact with some of the people working on the project and see what's up. I'll post an update if I find out anything.

Spy on my phone? How dare you!

2008-11-26T02:16:00.000-05:00

So. Barack Obama's phone records were spied on by a group of Verizon Wireless employees. This worries me, I have Verizon. Just how easy would it be for someone to get a hold of my records. My text messages. Call data. etc.

According to this PC WORLD article, not that hard.
An excerpt from the article:

"There is at least some evidence ... there is a little bit of a market in which employees are improperly selling access to private information," said Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That's scary. I mean, the site goes on to bring up that for about $100, an ex-spouse, stalker, axe-murder, or a homicidal pedophile freak with a pet baboon could get all of your information, including call locations, leading them right to your house.

All I have to say is, who's up for better privacy?

IRC over Telnet

2008-08-22T10:01:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to use IRC over Telnet? Well, okay, probably not, but it's still fun, and has some practical uses. Say your on a computer that doesn't have an IRC client, and you don't want to, or can't, download one to the computer. Or maybe you want to expierement for future refrence when making your own IRC client or bot.

Well the writers at O'Reilly have you covered. They have an IRC Over Telnet article that tells you how to do just that. Not just how to connect, but what to do after you connect, for it is much different from using a traditional IRC client.

It will be worth your while to go and take a look at the page. :]

C++ Tic Tac Toe game

2008-08-11T02:57:00.000-04:00

So, for anyone who is curious about coding in C++, here's an interesting link for you. The folks over at XoaX net have come up with a tutorial for making a very simple tic tac toe game. I downloaded the source, and can say that it runs smoothly, the only problem was I had to change the third line from void main() to int main(). I think that's only a linux/unix issue, windows users should be fine, but I'm not sure.

Click here for the article.

The code is quite basic, and intended for beginners to examine and follow along with. So it is multiplayer only, there is no AI.

It also demonstrates the rewarding elements of coding your own game, no matter how simple it is. Because no matter how simple of a game you make, if you challenge your friends to play against you, and tell them you coded the game yourself, they will be impressed.