DeadBeefCafe

http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping/

A lovely little paper about a couple methods of defeating wiretaps. The easiest way was to play a low C tone, the wiretapping device would think that the phone had been hung up and stopped recording.

See, it doesn’t have to be complex to beat a complexly designed machine.

It finally happened, someone put one in my hand for me to use. I think I’m hooked.

I was at some friend’s place for Thanksgiving, and I was making the pies. My kitchen is currently being remodelled, so it’s kind of hard to cook in (the cabinets are currently going in, so really I have no way to cook in my kitchen). If I had a kitchen, I’d have made the two pies a day or two ahead of time, both Pecan and Pumpkin work well a day or two after, as long as you can keep from eating them. But this isn’t a story about my kitchen.

This is a story about a hand wand, with a whisk attachment, and the joy I had using it. Also, they had a chopper attachment for it, so I got to use it to chup up some nuts as well. It’s like one of those old two- hand mixer but tons better.

I’ve seen these tools used for lots of things, pureeing soup, sauces, and tons of other things in the kitchen. I think I’m sold, I’ll be adding one to my kitchen gadgets once the kitchen is done.

I wonder if my mom has one or would like one for xmas… hmmm.

I used to live in Rochester, NY, right down the road from Buffalo. While there for a couple years of college I distinctly remember the wings. A bunch of us would get together and get a few dozen of medium and hot wings and chow down with some beer (yes, you read that right). Well, since I’ve left Rochester, I haven’t been able to find wings, and I seem to crave them once a while. That finger licking goodness, the gooey blue cheese dressing to keep the hot manageable (I’m a hot food wuss). I don’t miss the beer though.

Last night I was going to a low stress pot luck (cook or buy and bring) dinner and I decided I wanted to take wings. The place I thought I was going to test turned out to be more of a sit-down restaurant, so I had to revise my plans and ended up with a box of wings from “Original Buffalo Wing Restaurant” in San Carlos. I called them to place the order and when they gave me the time estimate of 15 minutes I knew I had a good chance of having found real wings. The place was curiously non-crowded, but when I got the wings to the car and could smell the vinegar coming off of them through the box and plastic bag I knew they were very close. And when I finally tasted them, truly original buffalo wings, exactly what I’d been hoping to find.

Now I’m down to searching for a gyro that matches or exceeds Chris’ Charcoal Pit in Annapolis, and Bay Blue Crabs with old bay and I’ll be able to recreate all my happy good food memories.

I admit it, I’m a porn hound at times. There’s always more out there that’s interesting to see, and I like to try to find it. But I also have a very weird quirk that since I started looking at online porn by decoding the pictures off of net.news, I can’t talk myself into actually paying for online smut.

So what’s a porn hound to do? Well, it’s simple really, I just snag it when I can. I don’t break into sites per se, I just don’t necessarily enter through the doors they expect me to use.

It’s not hard, I’m sure you’ve done it yourself at some point… someone sends you a link to something interesting, and you wonder what else is on the site.

What’s the first thing you try? Remove the filename from the URL. Do you have any idea how many sites allow directory listing of their content? Tons and tons of them, it’s great. In fact, one place I ran into, once you got the link to the “member” content, you could see that they protected it by putting it in a subdirectory called /member/ . But I could, from a single picture someone sent me, walk through most of the rest of their content, even though I’d never been near a member of that site (to the best of my knowledge).

But, not all places are so lax. Some places won’t let you get a directory listing page. No big problem, let’s try altering the name a little bit. For instance, someone sends you a link to a picture, and the url ends in pict003.jpg, my immediate thought is “I wonder what 1 and 2 were”. Yup, it can be that simple. “I wonder how many more there are.” “Oh look this one goes from 1 to 11.” And it’s not just numbers, some places get a little tricky and go with letters instead of numbers. But we all learned our abc’s as well as our 123’s, right? I’ve seen some get tricky and do only evens or odds, and the most complex one I ran into (and managed to figure out) was counting by 3s.

That’s it… how much simpler can that be? Sure, they gave me no index, they thought they had that content safely hidden behind some links, some web pages, but the content was there and since it’s a web server, it wants to show it to me, it’s what it does.

To all your purveyors of smut, I thank you, seriously. I do appreciate it, I know it’s a lot of work, and I do like what I see, and I have been known to pay for smut in video form. And a lot of the things I’m getting to are samples to encourage me to sign up for your services, but there’s still a lot more out there floating around than I think you really planned to let free.

I run a DNS server (oooh, aaah) and I secondary a few (200+) domains for some friends of mine. One of them (whom I like, don’t take this the wrong way if you read it and think it’s you) notoriously will not tell me when he’s had new domains added, or when he’s no longer the domain holder of record for a domain.

Sometimes I can be a bit finicky, and I go on cleaning and data purification binges (behold the Information Inquisition! Our primary weapon is vi and perl…). On the most recent of these cleaning binges I realized I wanted to know two things, who claimed I was acting as authoritative for their domain, and who I though I was authoritative for, but was not listed.

A couple of moments thinking about DNS and you will quickly understand that the first of these two questions is ridiculously hard to answer by querying DNS. I’ll have to figure it out from the logs of my DNS server another day. However, the first of these turns out to be pretty quick to answer. Given a little perl hackery, and the willingness to visually scan the output, you can quickly find those hosts that you have listed in your zone files and for which you aren’t actually listed at the root servers as an authoritative server.

I discovered a couple things along the way, and built in appropriate code to solve the problems:

1) The different TLD’s have different root name servers. So I dynamically grab, from the local name server, what the root name servers are for each TLD. (TLD stands for top level domain, e.g. com org net ru to se)

2) The different TLD servers answer NS queries by putting the results of the query in different locations. com and net (run off of Verisigns root name servers) puts the results in the ANSWER section of the response, nice and logical. Everyone else seems to think that an NS query should have the answer stuffed into the AUTHORITY section of the answer. I didn’t go read the RFC to see if either of them was the right way, cause it doesn’t matter to me, I just needed to learn that I had to look in both sections to make sure I got the results of my query.

Yes, I realize that I could have spent another few minutes and actually had it look for my domain server name(s) in the NS records and if I didn’t find one then spew an appropriate message, but I’m good and fast at visual greps on relatively small (less than 5000 lines) of output so I didn’t bother. If you’d like to do that to this script and send me your suggestion, I’ll take it into consideration.

Without further ado, a little bit of perl that will show you who the listed authoritative servers are for a domain (cutting and pasting the script I discovered that this lovely little system replaces all the ” that are in the code with either a start ” or an end “, and you need to go through and replace them all in the code, just so you’re warned it won’t run right off the page):

#!perl

use strict;               # cause I'm that sort of person
use Net::DNS;       # cause that's what we're working with today

my %q;

while (<>) {
    my $result;
    my @servers;

    /([0-9A-z\-]+)\.([A-z]+)/;
    my $tld    = $2;
    my $second = $1;
    print "\n$second.$tld\n";

    if ( !$q{$tld} ) {
        print "New TLD: ", $tld, "\n";
        $q{$tld} = Net::DNS::Resolver->new;
        $q{$tld}->recurse(0);

        $result = $q{$tld}->send( $tld, "NS" );
        @servers = ();
        foreach my $rr ( $result->answer() ) {
            print "\t Adding NS: ", $rr->nsdname, "\n";
            @servers = ( @servers, $rr->nsdname );
        }
        $q{$tld}->nameservers(@servers);
        # $q{$tld}->debug(1);
        print "\n";
    }

    # do the query for the domain
    my $result = $q{$tld}->send( "$second.$tld", "NS" );
    print "   answer from: ", $result->answerfrom, "\n";
    foreach my $rr ( $result->answer() ) {
        print "\t", $rr->string, "\n";
    }
    foreach my $rr ( $result->authority() ) {
        print "\t", $rr->string, "\n";
    }
}