This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers, to the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code, step on my toes, I'll post a million game pegs
of you in a fag pose, in your digital stance, getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the
net in my six foe, I was a dick with my 56, now with my cable I'm able to get that stable,
on the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo, on the digital highway, my name is Neo and I'm
a hero, in a flash, I'll screw you on burning dream caps, you need some ISOs, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, and a digital hug, you just caught
the love bug, I bootlegged your CD, I caused a fight between Un and Jay-Z, your CG, it's
all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely, you feel that rattling
your bones, when I tell you we just hacked out Jones, and NASDAQ, leave you flat on your
back, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers, serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs,
SIFs, this is dedicated to the hackers and the crack.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to Binary Revolution Radio episode 12, I am
Stank Dog with you once again, and I am joined this week by another special guest, not actually
all of our guests are special guests, but we have an extra special new guest today, the
star, can I call you the star of Hack TV, is that okay?
That's fine with me.
The star of Hack TV, the producer of Hack TV, the editor of Hack TV, you know what, it's
pretty much your job now, you are in charge of Hack TV everybody, this is Saito187 in the
house, so we have been working, well, kinda sorta trying to work on Hack TV for a long time
now, and we're getting there, we have the pilot out, everybody saw, which was very very good
work by the way, I have to give you credit for that, a little applause for that, even
though we had to work with a little bit of real media, we had to work with a little bit
of Windows encoding, we had to work with a pretty desperate, a pretty good mix of different
formats, so I know that was tough, so it came out very good, I thought, and hilarious.
I appreciate the kind words.
Yeah, so hopefully we will keep that going when we come out with the regular episodes
of that, and we'll probably talk about that a little bit later, but first, I'm gonna jump
into our housekeeping section, I've got quite a few pieces of email this week that I wanted
to talk about.
The first one, and actually this has been the past couple weeks, I got one from Extreme Audio
who says, or actually asks a very straightforward question, are there any stores that sell your
magazine?
And of course he's referring to Binary Revolution the magazine.
No, there are no stores carrying Binary Revolution magazine.
We are completely, in all sense of the word, independent.
It is very much an out-of-the-basement kind of deal.
We actually had our guest host, Logan Five, who he and I do most of the work in designing,
laying out the magazine.
He has, believe me, he does more of the work than I do.
And we are doing this completely over the web, over the internet.
Our goal, yes, is to eventually get to a publisher, get to a distributor who can carry
this in stores, but we have not gotten there yet.
So right now, you will come to binrev.com, you can go to straight to magazine.binrev.com
and order online through PayPal.
We also have options that you can order cash if you don't have or don't want a PayPal account,
so that's cool.
But eventually, yes, we would like to get them in stores, but we need your support to do
so.
We need people to show that there's an audience for a magazine like this and show a publisher,
a distributor, that people are interested in buying this in stores.
So thank you for that email.
That tells me that maybe there are people interested in buying this in a store.
So that is our goal.
We will move in that direction with your help.
Now, another good email I got, and I'm not quite sure how to pronounce this or if there's
any significance to this name, but it's Lab5AE.
I don't know if I'm supposed to pronounce Lab5AE or something, but he says that he just started
listening to Binrev a few weeks ago, Binrev Radio, of course.
Excellent show.
I've already burned the shows and gave them away to friends.
Well, thank you very much for the support.
I'm glad you like it.
And that's a great, great idea.
I love the idea, the fact that you're burning them and giving them out, spreading the word,
getting more and more people interested.
Hopefully, they will like the show and come back and start downloading it.
And, you know, that's the way we grow.
That's the way we spread.
I mean, we started doing this with just a few people and just for the fun of it.
And, I mean, as many of you know, the show has just blown up phenomenally, very happy with it.
The show hasn't changed.
We're still doing it the same way we have for the most part, having fun.
It's just our way of giving back to the community.
So we're going to keep doing that.
And no matter how many people listen, hopefully we'll keep going the same route we have been going.
He also gave me some good advice or a good suggestion here.
He says there's a site called SPCO-OP that prints small runs of zines.
That's .com, of course, that prints small runs of zines.
I know they do a lot of underground metal and punk zines.
I just thought you might want to check it out.
It beats the hell out of stapling.
Well, yeah, trust me, anything beats the hell out of stapling.
Getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick beats the hell out of stapling a bunch of freaking magazines.
I folded, stapled, and tried to trim the whole first run of the magazine, and it was the most miserable time that I've ever had.
It was horrible.
So, yeah, I've been looking for some places to have it printed, but frankly, we're still too small.
We don't have a large enough print run.
Even this site, and I went to there and checked it out.
It's an independent zine comic book publisher.
Like you said, it prints small zines.
The problem, the biggest problem, A, is that it's black and white.
They only print black and white.
They don't do color, and we very much want and like having the color.
And I think the people who've bought the magazine in the past very much like the color covers.
So we're definitely keeping color at least for the cover.
So it's not really a good option.
Also, even though they're small print, small publishing company, they still, what I saw, said they had 1,000 minimum units.
So regardless of the color thing, they still wanted more units than we can really afford to do.
They want 1,000 units per year, and we don't know how many we're going to need over the next year, how much we're going to grow, if we're going to grow.
So I don't know.
That doesn't exactly define small publishing.
1,000, we must be like tiny microscopic publishing compared to that then.
We have another email that actually, Saito and I were talking about this before we started recording.
This was actually an email to Duel, which he forwarded to me, Duel over at Radio Freak America, from, and I hope I don't, I hope I pronounced this name right.
It's Booth, Booth, I guess is the name.
He had quite a few things to say, but the part that I wanted to touch on is that basically he recommends an encoding like Vorbis, which is an OGG container.
It's not patented, widely acceptable, which is absolutely true.
Almost every player I've ever seen plays OGG.
And he was recommending that in lieu of MP3, which still has a copyright, copywritten compression algorithm.
And actually, I very much agree with this.
I absolutely, 100% think this is a good idea.
And truly, because of this email, I have made the decision that I'm going to start converting past episodes and all ongoing episodes.
I'm going to start putting them up in OGG format.
Now, I'm not going to only do OGG format before any of you out there get mad.
I'm still going to put up the MP3 format as well.
I'm going to offer it in both, kind of like our friends over at Game Radio, C4 over there, HWAQ.com.
I'm going to put up both versions because I don't want to alienate people.
I don't want to alienate new users from listening to the show.
And some of our users are not the most deep, technical people, and they don't want to have to deal with the hassle of unusual formats and players and stuff like that.
Yes, the majority of players will play OGG fine, but just to play it safe, I'm going to put up both.
I think that's a good short-term compromise.
And if someday, by some whatever, MP3 goes away, we'll be moving on, we'll be into a new format, and we should be fine.
But I don't see MP3 going anywhere anytime soon.
Do you?
Well, personally, not here, but getting back to the OGG Vorbis, I don't know if you noticed, but I think it was in Red Hat 8, could be 9 also, that most players like XMMS didn't support MP3 anymore because of some type of copyright.
So a lot of users were kind of saying, you know, what was going on, they couldn't play their music anymore.
They had to go out there and get either an OGG Vorbis plug-in, or I think they had some freeware MP3s, but I'm not sure where that's going right now, though.
Yeah, and that's exactly his motivation and exactly his point in saying that it's time to convert if this is what it's going to start coming to, and he's absolutely right.
It also has some cool features, which I saw the other day, a friend of mine, which is into anime also, he was playing when it had dual audio format, so on the fly he was able to switch between English and Japanese, which was kind of cool.
Interesting, so we can have somebody translate our show into Japanese and Spanish and any other language we want, all in the same container?
Yep, multilingual.
We actually have, you'd be very surprised at how many different visits from different countries we get.
We have a lot of people all over the world that listen to the show, so joking aside, that might actually be an option.
I certainly can't speak, I can't even speak English properly, and Lord knows how butchered my Spanish is, so maybe in the future we'll have some volunteers to translate it over into other languages.
That would actually be a really, really cool thing to do, but down the road, down the road sometime.
I have one final email we're going to talk about this week, and this one is from G.I. Joe.
Great name, gotta love the old 80s throwbacks.
He says he's currently listening to the MP3 of Binrev Radio 11, and are listening to us, we were joking about Pringles cans and stuff like that, and like they show it in the movies.
I was definitely referring to, he was questioning, was I talking about that movie Antitrust, which was the kind of Microsoft jab where the person playing Bill Gates was always eating Pringles.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I had in my head when I made the joke, but not only that, but just generally, that people have this thing that hackers are sitting around drinking jolt cola all day, popping cans of Pringles, you know, in between skateboarding ventures.
Nobody wants to see my fat ass on a skateboard, trust me, and I don't do the jolt cola thing.
I might have the occasional Pringles, but no more than anybody else out there, so it's kind of just a jab at the general, you know, idea that people have of hackers that they get from the movies.
Saito, do you go skateboard after work every day?
Personally, I don't, but speaking of the skateboarding thing, the first time I saw hackers, I was totally disgusted by the way that one guy was portrayed skateboarding.
I mean, it just kind of, it was just bad, bad taste.
You're talking about Mr. The Plague?
Yeah.
I know.
I mean, it was kind of funny, but...
Exactly. See, I took it as humor. I just kind of let it go as being funny, but yeah, they intended it to be kind of serious, I think.
Yeah, it's like, I don't go rollerblading either, even though I own a pair of rollerblades foot.
Oh, I own a pair. That doesn't mean I use them or I'm any good at them.
Oh, man. Yeah, there's just a lot of stereotypes out there that, you know, we work, we are professionals, we have full-time jobs, go to school, we live normal lives.
You wouldn't be able to tell most of us from anybody else on the street, you know.
I don't wear a bunch of leather and have all the stereotypical clothes and the style that you see in the movie, so, you know, that was really just kind of joking about how they portray hackers in the media, which, again, that's a horse we've beaten to death on the show many times.
But, yes, thank you for that email. That is exactly what I had in mind, so, yeah, you got that.
And I think that's, I had quite a few emails. I'm going to go ahead and close up the mailbag this week, though.
We'll touch on some more next week. Some of them are a little bit more, take a little bit more time to discuss, and I want to move on to some other topics this week.
And, man, I don't know about you, but I had, last week was just a phenomenal week.
Even Monday of this week, I had so many things going on at one time that I just, you have to shift gears from one thing to the other so much that I just didn't even, couldn't even keep my head straight.
I was writing C code, Pro C, I was writing PLSQL, doing a little bit of shell scripting, which, as you know, is very limited for me.
And you and I had worked on some PGP. Then I got to come home. I'm working on moving the sites over to a new host, finally a host that I will have some control over.
I won't, if anything goes down or anything needs to be modified or changed, it'll be my control now.
So I like having it back in my hands. So I had to come and do a lot of rewriting of my HTML, redoing a lot of my links.
So I've just been coding, like, non-stop lately.
How many times was it so far, the moves?
This is my fourth or fifth. Fourth or fifth. I've kind of lost track. And that's, like, total amongst the two sites.
And that's another thing, is I'm also trying to merge all of these sites under binrev.com, keep that the central place, and kind of move the stank dog.
I don't know, I've always, from day one, felt very, not, I guess paranoid's not the word, but self-glorifying or something, because it's very much, I don't know, it feels like I'm tooting my horn to make stankdawg.com the site that everybody goes to.
I don't want that. I'm going to move that and just make that my own little personal storage.
And, you know, I'll put my articles up and stuff like that.
But I'm going to kind of put everything over to binrev.com.
The binary revolution idea itself is more important to me in pushing that out.
So I'm trying to move everything over there in addition to recoding and putting some new projects up there, the hacker gallery we talked about, and putting the forums over there.
So there's going to be a lot of changes, so bear with us soon.
Actually, as we speak, as this is streaming, I am probably coding and moving some of this stuff over.
I'm joining all the sites under one registrar.
They were scattered under a couple different registrars, kind of putting my hand back in to get all these a little bit more organized and kept together.
So all that, and I did somehow, I don't know how, but over the weekend I did find time to install KazaaLite on my system.
I thought, you know, I want to try to get the show out there, get more people to be aware of it.
So I installed KazaaLite and shared out all the episodes of RFA, Radio Freak America, as well as Binary Revolution Radio.
So I put that out there and let people come and download it and see if they can check it out.
I haven't actually seen or watched it to see if anybody's taking me up and actually downloading them, but it's there and minimized down there.
You did sign up with the RIAA website.
Well, I, of course, wanted my amnesty.
Of course.
Oh, wait a minute. I own the copyrights to these shows. I have permission to air these shows.
Not everything is about copyright, RIAA.
Fucking assholes.
See, damn you. Even when I have a new guest on here, you got me cussing and we're not even, what, 15 minutes into the show.
I'm sorry.
I know. I try to control my, everybody listens every week and I try not, I'm trying my best to not, to not use foul language.
But every time, you know what, it's always the RIAA that brings it out of me.
Those bastards, I swear, suing a 12-year-old girl.
All right, I digress. I'm going to, you know what, let's jump off of that.
Let's jump off to that. Let's jump back to Hack TV for a few minutes.
Because I know you and I have been putting a lot of time analyzing, discussing, thinking what's the best direction to go.
So, I do think, I feel very good about the ideas that we've come up with.
How about you?
We've definitely come up with some good stuff.
Whether or not others will like it, it's up to, you know, we'll see.
Well, it's kind of like the show.
It's like, we're going to come on and we're going to have fun and put it out there.
And I'm sure some people will like it and some won't.
You know, you take the good with the bad, but I think most people will like it.
It's going to be, it started off, I didn't think we were going to make it this way.
Well, I don't know exactly how to word it.
It's going to be funnier than I was expecting, I think.
Yeah, if you like office space and you watch the old Batman stuff, you know.
Yeah, it's, especially if we go through with that skit we talked about yesterday,
the office space will be very relevant reference.
Oh, yeah.
And really what we've been spending most of the time on in the beginning was encoding and formats
and trying to decide on resolution, screen size, what's the best way to get this out
and not completely rape our bandwidth.
And that's what really most of your time has been spent on.
Have we come up or decided on a couple, I think if we, last discussion we decided we were going
to make two versions of it available, is that still the way you're thinking?
Possibly.
I know, believe it or not, Windows Media actually comes out pretty good.
The size goes extremely tiny and the resolution is pretty good.
So is the quality.
Now, I know a lot of people don't have Windows machines.
They run a few Linux machines, Seuss or whatever.
They don't want Windows machines.
They hate Windows.
Right.
So, I mean, there's a chance of going DivX also and possibly AUG, like we were talking about before.
Right.
And that way, you can play it with MPlay or whatever your favorite program is out there.
Yeah.
Now, and the other thing that I like about this is that the WMV is a much smaller file size
because, believe it or not, I mean, well, there's no believe it or not.
I think we all know that not everybody is broadband.
Not everybody is going to be able to download.
I mean, do you have an estimate of how long do you think this, how big do you think the AVI,
the DivX AVI in high quality is going to be?
Right now, we plan maybe like a 512 by 384 resolution size, maybe 15 to 25 minutes.
Well, we'll probably make it around 30 even unless we go gung-ho and make a full hour,
but I don't think we're going to do that right away.
Right now, that might actually come out to be maybe 100, 150 megs.
It might be more depending on which codec is available at what time and all that stuff.
I've seen different versions of DivX, you know, have a range of maybe 50 megs, you know, same size, same quality, and everything.
Wow.
It's kind of pissing me off because DivX, they just can't, they keep changing every week or every two weeks.
Yeah, I know.
That does get kind of annoying.
And like, I've had cases where I downloaded it one day, and then two days later, I try to watch a video, and it's been changed again.
And I have to go re-download the latest one.
It's changed within the last couple days.
That's really annoying.
Plus, is it just me?
Am I just getting bad versions, or am I going to the wrong place to download it?
Because mine is loaded with spyware anymore.
I just want the damn decoder, and that's it.
Don't give me the player.
Don't give me the plug-ins and all the extra crap.
Just give me the fucking DLL.
Well, DivX is starting to do that now.
They've got a couple different versions.
They've got the professional, which you have to pay for.
And then you've got the regular decoder and player, but supposedly that has some form of adware built in.
And they say it doesn't put any spyware in there, but that's yet to be determined.
Yeah, see, I'm pretty sure they do.
That's why, you know, adware itself, I run that, like, weekly now, because...
Excellent program, by the way.
Excellent.
It's just an absolute necessity anymore.
I run it weekly because there's so much stuff out there that just flat-out lies.
You know, that's why I install Kazaa Lite, because Kazaa, as everybody knows, is loaded with spyware.
And, ugh, and every time I see Gator, I just want to spit on the screen.
I hate that program so bad.
For those that might not know what adware is, you can go to www.lavasoftusa.com and get that.
Totally removes all kinds of spyware on your system.
Yeah, highly, highly recommended.
And now, unfortunately, that's a Windows-only product, is it not?
That is correct, but you won't really have to worry about spyware if you've got some type of Unix variant.
Exactly.
Oh, very good advice, very good advice.
Well, let's move into some actual news topics this week,
because I've had a very bad tendency lately of just ranting and going into stories and laughing.
I want to actually cover some real topics this week.
And the first one is something I actually mentioned on RFA last week,
and that is that Microsoft's new OS Longhorn, codename Longhorn, Long Dong, whatever they're going to call it,
has been delayed once again.
It reminds me of back in Windows 95.
They pushed this back and pushed it back.
And, you know, Windows 95 was originally supposed to be Windows Chicago in, like, 1993 or something.
They kept bumping it back.
They almost didn't even get it out in 1995.
And that looks like the same thing is happening with Longhorn here.
Are they going to call it Longhorn when it's actually released,
or are they going to have another name change?
Probably going to have another name change.
Yeah.
Yeah, Longhorn doesn't exactly...
Yeah, there's too many Long Dong jokes just waiting to be Long John Silver.
There's too many jokes for that one.
Last I heard it was coming out 2005, but now it looks like it's, what, 2006?
Yeah, that's what they're saying.
And how convenient that that's happening.
I mentioned this before, and I was going to go into more detail today.
How convenient that the antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice expires five years.
Well, guess what?
Five years, that would be 2001, 2003, 2006.
How convenient is that?
So, the agreement which said that they would not be bundling and taking advantage of their monopoly
to force software onto people and to integrate things into their operating system.
Because, again, most of the listeners know this, so I'm not going to rehash the history of this whole deal.
But the long and short of it is that when Microsoft released their operating systems,
they were bundling MSN already on it and installed.
And it was not fair to the other ISPs at the time, as well as Internet Explorer,
which was, quote, integrated into the operating system.
Yet, when you tried to put Netscape or any of these others on there,
it was nothing but problems and headaches.
Yes, you could install it, but Internet Explorer had a tendency of taking it back over.
It had a tendency of causing errors in any other programs you put on there.
So, they were told that that was illegal.
So, they were taking advantage of their monopoly to push their other products.
Well, a lot of good it did, because Internet Explorer is the top browser.
Netscape is just, do they even put out new versions?
I mean, all you have now is Mozilla, the Mozilla project, which is great.
But, you know, Microsoft just pretty much, once again, killed off the competition with that.
I think Netscape is still putting stuff out, but not as often as they used to.
Yeah, see, they've turned into more like a, they remind me of IBM.
They're going more into the service area, and they have really, like you said,
they're not doing much with the browser anymore.
Well, I'm not trying to say much they're going into service,
because I know at one point AOL and Sun and Netscape had an alliance called iPlanet,
and that just recently dissolved about a year ago.
Everything kind of went back to Sun.
And so all the products that Netscape had, like mail and web servers and all that stuff,
now belong to Sun.
Very interesting.
So what is Netscape doing these days?
It's me.
I don't have Netscape installed, do you?
Well, no, and I have to say, unfortunately,
it's terrible that they were put in this situation, possibly, debatably,
we won't go into a debate,
because of the situation with Microsoft pushing them to a side.
But frankly, their product was not,
the later versions of it were so bloated,
and just frankly, they weren't very good in my personal opinion,
so I stopped using it because the functionality was not there,
because it didn't do what I wanted to do as well
and as quickly and efficiently as I wanted to do it.
So that's the reason I stopped using it.
That's probably the reason a lot of people stopped using it.
Right now, I think I'm starting to use Mozilla Firebird,
which is pretty nice.
It's kind of clean, stripped down.
I have the same thing.
I had that working on my laptop,
and I was starting getting used to that and liking it.
But the irony there is that is built off of the last code
that Netscape released to the public,
and people started running with that source that was released to create it.
So it's based on the same thing.
How is there so much better than what Netscape was doing?
I guess it's just all the open source.
Yeah.
Go in there and just take out Bloat.
Yeah, just better programmers, I guess, more efficient.
Because that's what it is.
It was Bloat, and I mean, Microsoft is the king of Bloatware.
But anyway.
Right.
So anyway, they've bumped that back to 2006.
Of course, it's yet to be determined
if they're going to start integrating again,
if they're going to start putting this stuff together.
I know for a fact that they have purchased
a couple different antivirus software companies.
So, hey, they start integrating that,
then, you know, Symantec and Norton and all these,
what's the other one, McAfee,
you know they're going to be pissed
if Microsoft is now going to integrate virus scanning
into the operating system.
You know, they're going to be out of luck.
Who's going to pay for it when it's built into Windows' operating system?
Right, and I didn't even hear about that one.
That's new to me.
Yeah, they bought a, I think I talked about it
on one of the first couple episodes of BinRev Radio.
They bought an antivirus company,
I think it's from Norway or somewhere in Europe,
and bought their technology,
and yeah, that's what their speculation was
that they were going to integrate that into the new OS.
So, you know, same old Microsoft.
And, from one company I hate,
well, actually, you know, I can't say that.
I actually kind of like some,
I like Microsoft products, I just think,
well, some Microsoft products, let me clarify that.
I don't like their business practices too much,
but I actually think Microsoft makes some stuff that's really good.
A little bloated, a lot bloated, but still.
But one company I do hate from the ground up is Sony.
And I know you probably disagree with me on this one,
but I just cannot stand these hypocrites.
So, today's anti-Sony is the how to hack your dog section.
Sony iBow.
Of course, you know the iBow, right?
Of course.
The little robotic dog, cute as hell, blah, blah, blah.
Well, the latest version of Sony's iBow
is going to be built with a wireless connection built into it.
So, hackers of the world, time to hack the iBow.
Actually, hacking the iBow is actually a little underground kind of thing
that's been going on anyway.
People love to reprogram their iBow to do certain tricks and stuff like that.
So, hacking the iBow is not exactly new.
But with this wireless connection, I'm trying to say,
we're going to see, well, we could possibly see hijacking people's iBows.
I'm sure it's not going to be an easy thing.
It probably will never happen.
But it's a funny concept.
Can you imagine these people walking down the street with their iBows
or even just around the house and all of a sudden the iBow gets dog-jacked
and runs out the door down the stairs to somebody?
No, I've personally never seen one in person.
Have you?
I saw a demo of one like in a mall or in a, I don't remember, was it a Best Buy or somewhere?
I saw a demo of one and it was actually really cool.
They're sort of pricey, aren't they?
I think this one, this one is, hold on, I have it right in front of me.
This new model is $1,600, $1,600.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, exactly.
How many real dogs can you get for $1,600?
Well, then again, you don't have to clean up after the iBow.
That's a bonus.
That may be worth a couple hundred right there.
I don't know about $1,600.
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah, and with $1,600, people are going to be keeping a close eye on that dog.
He's not going to get out the door and run out to somebody.
There's not going to be any dog jackings going on, I don't think.
Like, there's going to be, like, this underground civilization.
They're going to be, like, instead of roosters and cockfighting,
they're going to have these little iBow fights going on with hacked versions.
These new versions of the iBow also have, I forgot their terminology,
but basically a little brain, a little, I think it's called iBow mind,
where you can put in a memory stick and reprogram and teach the dog tricks
by inserting a new memory stick.
So, I can just picture people teaching the dogs to fight to the death or fight.
There's going to be little dog pits going on.
Actually, here's the scene I pictured.
This would be the most hilarious thing for Hack TV.
It would never happen, you know, but I can just picture driving down the street,
war driving, you've got your laptop in the car,
just cruising along, low riding, bouncing,
and right behind you you've got an army of iBows trailing along behind,
like 20 to 30 iBows, just running along behind the car, chasing it,
where you've just dog jacked every iBow in the city.
That would be hilarious.
I'd pay to see that.
That would, we can Photoshop, we can fix that or something, just to be funny.
That would be hilarious, but no, that's going to be tough to do.
We're just joking around.
But it is, you know, there is a wireless connection in there.
I'm sure people are going to play and hack this iBow just like they have all the others.
So, another article I read, this kind of, I don't know what to think about this one.
I kind of got a little bit pissed off at this, but at the same time, I kind of agree with this.
So, you know what, this will be, let me see what you think about this.
And this is an article I read on vigilante justice on the internet.
And that there are increasing numbers of acts of vigilante justice going on,
mostly against spammers.
There are even open source programs being written and developed to out-spam the spammers,
to hack the spammers.
Obviously, filtering spam is a great thing, but these are actually aggressive software
that are supposed to turn the spam back at people.
Now, I absolutely agree with this.
I have to say it.
I don't know if it's a bad thing for me to say that.
It's kind of destructive.
I don't really like putting the negative out there too much.
But, you know, this is one of those, I feel like they deserve it kind of situations, you know.
Vigilante justice, there's no laws, they will not pass laws against spamming,
or not good ones anyway, that you can sink your teeth into.
You know, our judicial system doesn't care.
I mean, look how long it took us to get a no-call list for God's sake.
Right, and it's only if you're a big-name company like Amazon or Yahoo or Microsoft
where you can actually do something about it, you know, fighting spam.
I think there was a few lawsuits that were settled a while back.
Yeah, I think it was Amazon got maybe $50,000 out of a company in California
that was spamming under their name.
Yeah, and I wonder how much they had to pay their lawyers and everything fees
just to get that $50,000.
It probably ended up in the hole after the whole thing was said and done.
But, yeah, I personally agree with you.
I hate spam.
I get tons of it.
I told the listeners a couple episodes ago about CloudMark SpamNet.
I don't know if you used that, a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.
And I checked my numbers.
This is as of a week ago.
It keeps a running count.
And I had about 13,000 emails since I installed it.
And out of that, 9,000 were spam.
9,000 out of 13,000 were spam mail,
which automatically got filtered out for that program.
That's what got filtered.
Of course, a few extra slipped through,
so probably closer to 10,000
since I installed this earlier in the year.
That's just ridiculous.
It's not even...
I mean, it's a joke.
It's just so sickening.
And this is my work account.
This is my work email account.
This is not Hotmail.
Everybody makes the comments and jokes about Hotmail and Yahoo.
Yeah, they get a lot,
but this is my work account,
and I get that much there.
How am I supposed to...
Your work?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, luckily, this thing helps me out tremendously.
It filters out most of them,
and I can concentrate.
I can just delete a couple of the others out.
And we're actually going to have an upcoming episode with detail.
I actually have an article right in front of me
called Stopping Spam,
and it's an IT pro who talks about the trick spammers use
to evade anti-spam filters and countermeasures.
So I'm going to talk about that on an upcoming episode,
some detailed technical aspects of how this works.
We've touched on some in the past on the show,
but I'm going to go into that in another episode,
so we won't spend too much time here.
The other thing about this story, though,
that actually kind of pissed me off is,
again, like I said, I agree with it.
I'm all for vigilante justice,
not only on the Internet,
but in, you know...
Anyway, we won't go there.
But the thing that really pissed me off,
and the article didn't say this.
This is just in my mind.
And I find it incredibly convenient
that when it's the hackers taking on the spammers
or the hackers that are taking down child pornography sites,
stuff like that,
we get articles written in magazines about us.
You know, we get articles about how people are coming...
Vigilante justice articles,
not good hacker artists.
They call us vigilante justice.
But they write articles,
and everybody kind of turns a blind eye
because it's a common enemy.
We're all, you know, out there.
But when, you know,
somebody like Adrian Llamo or anybody
publicly comes out and says,
hey, New York Times website has a vulnerability
or, you know, Amazon.com has this vulnerability
on their site they need to patch,
all of a sudden,
here comes the fucking FBI wanting to swarm
and put this kid in jail for something
that all he did was tell...
You know, how convenient is it
that there's a double standard there?
You know?
Those kind of stories make me mad.
I get on a soapbox every time I hear one of these,
so I'm going to back off of it once again
because I have a tendency
to really get pissed about stuff like that.
But that's a double standard.
I mean, if you want...
Everybody complains about hackers are bad guys
and they all do this and do that.
Well, look, here's an example
of some of the stuff that people support
and that we do good, you know,
and again, good and bad, right and wrong,
is very, very...
In line.
Yeah, and, you know,
and everybody has their own opinion
on what's good and bad, et cetera, et cetera.
But, you know,
here's a lot of good stuff
that hackers do,
and I've said before,
if it wasn't for good hackers
or real hackers, as I call them,
I mean, Linux itself is built by hackers.
It's a bunch of open source people
working together,
developing an alternative operating system.
How great is that?
Anyway, I digress.
I'm going to move on.
Another topic.
You know, I'm going to skip this.
I'm going to go into this.
I have a little timeline here
that I think is kind of neat.
I thought I'd share with the listeners.
This is...
I already ruined a couple of these
because I told you before we started taping.
But I have this little timeline,
and this is from this month's
Popular Science magazine,
one of the many that I've subscribed to.
It's a timeline about the RAA,
MP3, CD,
just general music topics.
And I thought I'd read a couple of these dates.
And, you know, I'll bounce a couple off of.
You already know the answer to this one.
But in 1982,
Sony Music released the first commercial CD.
And if you remember correctly,
it is, of course...
Mr. Billy Joel.
Billy Joel's 52nd Street, 1982.
That was the first one.
Just a little interesting tidbit.
But here's something I didn't tell you yet.
This one...
Let's see if you can guess this one.
In 1989...
Okay, this is a technical...
This is a technical.
1989, the first consumer CD recorder.
Denon, D-E-N-O-N.
Is that Denon or D-N-N?
Denon, yeah.
D-N-770-R was released.
The unit costs how much?
Hmm.
Here, I'll give you a little hint.
Okay.
Blank CDs, blank discs in 1989,
$40.
I'm going to say maybe $6,000, $7,000.
Triple it.
Wow.
$20,000 for the first CD burner.
1989.
That's not that long.
I mean, I guess it is long ago,
but it doesn't seem long ago, does it?
Well, something that I'm not sure if you might know,
is that computer generations,
the way technology goes,
each generation today is, I believe, 18 months.
Oh, yeah.
So, I mean, if you look at it that way,
that's, I don't know how many generations old,
and I guess you can maybe double or triple the price
as it goes back compared to today.
Well, and look, even right now,
I think that's even shrinking.
I think it's a faster than 18 months nowadays
because it was only at the beginning of this year,
January of this year,
when DVD burners started to really come out.
I mean, of course, they started high, too.
Right.
But not like $20,000 high.
And, I mean, here it is.
It's not even...
By Christmastime, I'm not going to...
I bet you by Christmas,
you will be able to get...
It'll be maybe after rebates
and maybe on one weekend-only sale,
but I bet you can get DVD burners for $150.
I'd probably say even less, maybe $100.
You think you...
I was going to say $99,
but I wasn't sure if they're going to go that low.
You might find your no-name brands down there.
Yeah, I mean, you can find those for $199 now.
Now, as of September 20...
What are we, it's 23rd?
September 23rd, you can find them for $199.
Again, it may be after rebates or something, but still.
So, yeah, that just blew my mind.
$20,000?
That's more than my car.
The Stankmobile did not cost $20,000.
That's sad.
Yeah, it's a small fortune there.
And then $40 for the blank disc.
I mean, you know, back then, it wasn't cost-effective to do anything with it, so...
I think I remember the most paying for a CD back in the day.
It was like $10.
Oh, yeah, but...
$40, yeah.
Wow.
You're lucky if you can get a CD single now for...
You get two singles for $10.
Here's a...
You might be able to get this one.
In 1998, college students Justin Frankel and Dimitri Boldyrev...
I hope I'm not mispronouncing that...
Created this first mainstream MP3 player.
At the Rio?
Uh, no, this is software.
Software player.
Oh.
Winamp.
Winamp, 1998.
I was gonna say Winamp, but I could've sworn there was something out before that, that went mainstream.
Well, maybe...
Well, this says, uh, first mainstream MP3 player software and offer it for free on the net.
Maybe it wasn't a free...
That's possible.
Yeah.
Um, okay, here's an easy one.
Here's a very easy one.
Uh, Northeastern University student Sean Fanning.
1999.
What piece of software?
Pretty much the one that started it all.
This is the one that everybody has in the news and still to this day...
Is the...
The Napster?
That would have to be Napster.
The Napster, well, I'm saying the Napster is...
I don't know if you've seen, uh, the Italian job, but it kind of pokes fun at Napster.
No, I haven't seen that.
Very, very humorous.
Uh, let's see.
2001, Napster dies.
Uh, blah, blah, blah.
Let's see, what's another interesting...
Uh, 2003, which is current, they mention the Apple iTunes Music Store.
99 cents a song.
Um, five million downloads at 99 cents a song in its first eight weeks of operation.
Five million.
That's a lot of cash.
That's...
And I said on the show before, that's the closest thing to a happy compromise, a happy medium
that has come out of all of this, this whole situation.
That's not bad, but if you think about it, 99 cents a song in most CDs today have, what,
maybe 12, 15 tracks?
Eh, probably 12.
I mean, that's the other thing that they jab you on, is they don't even fill the CDs up.
Right.
I mean, maybe if they dropped it down to 50 cents, it might be pretty good.
And that's what I think, too.
I think 50 cents would be a fair price, and I would actually buy a lot of music that way.
You know, and then you can pick and choose the singles you want.
You're not stuck with one good song and 11 songs that suck, you know?
How many times has that happened?
A lot.
Oh, here, you know what?
Here is something about the Rio.
Let's see.
1999 also.
Recording Industry Association of America, our good, good friends, sues Diamond Multimedia
to stop sales of the Rio.
$200, 32-meg MP3 player.
August 1999, the suit was dropped, and opening the floodgates for portable MP3 player manufacturers.
So, you did.
You had the right year for the Rio, absolutely.
Okay.
Okay, here you go.
This is also a current, 2003, World Ride CD-R Disc Sales.
Blank CD-Rs.
Worldwide.
Estimated at how much?
By today's prices?
Yeah, you know what, and there's not, I won't even make you a guess on this because it's
just too vague of a question.
This blows my mind.
World Ride CD-Rs.
Now, first of all, if there's this much of a market for CD-Rs that tells you what people
think about the high prices and the RAA in general, the fact that this is how much demand
there is, again, I won't go into a whole rant, but worldwide CD-R disc sales are estimated
at $5.7 billion, with a B, billion dollars.
Billion.
You know, a stack, a spindle of 100, you know, breaks down to what, five cents each?
That's a lot of blank CDs, man.
A lot.
A lot of happy burners out there.
Yeah, I'm sure they're making perfectly legal backup copies of their own desktops and software,
though.
I'm sure that's what they're using them for.
Of course, that's what I do.
Well, that's whatever you, that's what we all do.
We just want our right to make backups, that's all.
Oh, anyway, that's enough of those.
I thought those were some, just, the $20,000 thing was my favorite.
I can't believe how much that cost in the beginning, and $5.7 billion, excuse me, those
were just some mind-numbing numbers.
Well, Den, not to go back on that, but Denon actually makes very high-quality audio equipment,
even some of the stuff today, is very expensive.
Dude, for $20,000, I better get personal, one-on-one concerts in my living room from the
artists in question.
$20,000?
Put it back into perspective.
A car, what kind of quality could they possibly make?
Well, like, let's say your average home theater system, you know, receiver, you might spend
maybe $300,000, $400,000 on that.
I think I saw one the other day, a very high-end Denon was about maybe $2,000, $3,000, you know,
just for the receiver itself.
Wow.
And is it worth it?
It had a lot of features.
Well, I know you're very big.
You're an audiophile.
I know you're very, you get into that a lot.
Do you think it's worth, I mean, you're telling me that you think, yes, it is high.
Is it high quality?
Is it better quality?
It's very high quality.
It's got all the latest features, you know, DTS and Dolby EX and all that other good stuff,
like 50 different inputs.
You know, the thing weighs like 200 pounds.
I'm sure if I had the money, it'd probably be worth it, but if you don't, you'd probably
get away with something that's $200 or $300 and sound just as good.
Yeah.
The average consumer, they won't tell the difference.
Exactly.
But, you know, I've heard many people say that they can tell the difference between them,
so, you know, I don't know.
For me, I'm very happy.
I have a kind of a medium-range system, and I'm perfectly happy with it, so.
Yeah, and I'm sure you don't need to control the audio in every single room you have.
No, but, you know, I guess in a perfect world, if I win the lottery, then maybe I'll go looking
at the Denon products.
Right.
All right.
Well, you know, there's one other topic I want to cover today.
I'm going to skip this.
I'm going to go straight to the IDS stuff, because you and I talked about that in the
past, and you have some experience with it, so IDS, of course, is Intrusion Detection
Systems, as opposed to IPS, which is?
That's your...
Intrusion Prevention Systems.
I've got too much work on the brain here.
Oh, it's all Oracle today.
Yeah, I was going to say, actually, this is another first for radio action.
We probably should have mentioned this at the top of the show, but while we're recording
the entire show, you are doing...
Why don't you let them in on a very general...
Well, the powers that be here have DBAs or database administrators.
Unfortunate for me, or fortunate for me, I've been tasked with now being a DBA, among other things.
So not only do I have to learn Oracle now, and how to set it up, and how to maintain it,
but also have to figure out how to do hot backups, which our DBAs couldn't do... well,
they tried to do in six months and still couldn't do it.
How sad is that?
It's incredibly, incredibly sad, and the listeners don't know how much I can relate to it, and
we can't really give them too much on that.
But, we will move on.
So you're installing, you're actually doing what?
I'm in the middle of an upgrade, and once the upgrade is done, I'm still working on how
to figure out hot backups, I'm sure.
Some of our listeners might already know how to do this, but for me, not really a DBA,
you know, it's kind of new.
But, I'm making progress.
Right.
And, at the same time, recording Binary Revolution Radio.
Congratulations.
A radio first.
We've had episodes where we've installed distros of Linux while we record, or installed or
upgraded software.
I think this is the first Oracle episode we've ever done.
So, you are going down in history as the first.
But, we're going to talk about a little bit, again, intrusion detection system versus intrusion
prevention systems.
And, intrusion detection...
For sake of me not stumbling over the words any worse than I already am,
we're going to say IDS versus IPS, and I think the listeners know what we mean now.
But, IDS has a very bad reputation for, well, for a couple of reasons.
It gets a lot of false positives, which, if you remember back on our episode on spam, false
positives are when they say that something is wrong, or they call something spam, or they
call something a problem that really isn't.
It's misinterpreted.
And, that's the bigger issue, is when you accidentally delete a real email.
If you accidentally turn away a customer, or send...
Basically, the way IDS works is it just kind of sniffs.
It sits in between the visitor and the server, and notifies somebody if there's an unusual request,
or something unusual happens.
Usually, a security officer on the other end of a pager, or just sends an email, or whatever,
saying, you know, this happened, and let the people investigate it after the fact.
So, I always use the analogy for this, and I don't know if you're going to agree with my
analogy, but I always say it reminds me of a car alarm.
When you buy a car, when you have a car with an alarm in it, and someone tries to break into
your car, the alarm goes off.
It's very plain and simple.
The problem is, that if someone parks next to you, and gets out of their car, and brushes
your car, they also set the alarm off.
And, if somebody just happens to walk in the front of your car, they might set your alarm
off.
Or, if a dog runs underneath, or a cat jumps on your car, it sets your alarm off.
If the wind blows too hard, it might set your alarm off.
And, we've all seen and heard those cars in the parking lot, the alarms just go off,
and go off, and does anybody go look and check?
No, we ignore it.
It's what happens when you have too many false positives.
Right.
It's what happens when you constantly, you know, every unusual thing, the way the majority
of them are set up, is they send an email out.
Which, that's even ridiculous.
What, are you going to check it the next morning, after you've been hacked, and see what kind
of, you know, that's just a dumb idea.
Ideally, you have someone at the other end of a pager who can get on and check.
But, because of the number of false positives, like the scenario with the car alarm, people
are going to get so many pages, they're going to be like, forget this, I'm trying to sleep,
you know.
And, it just, it ends up being not effective, in my personal opinion.
Do you agree or disagree with that?
Is that a good or bad analogy?
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
And, even today, you know, where I work, I get a lot of those, I won't mention any names,
but there are some people that come up to me and they show me reports saying, you know,
you've got holes open here and there, and, you know, it's just simply not true because
this software is outdated, or it needs to get better software.
Right.
And, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.
There's also a maintenance point.
You have to update that software any time things change, it has to be updated pretty
much any time another piece of software that it's watching or listening to gets updated.
Right.
Or, maybe they need to watch, you know, CERT advisories, you know, so when they announce
that, they can update their software accordingly.
Right.
Now, along the same logic there, that's going to be the same problem with intrusion prevention
systems, or IPS.
You're going to have the same problem there with updating software, and the difference
between the two is that intrusion prevention, as the name indicates, stops.
It prevents people from coming in.
Malicious attacks, viruses, spam, I mean, to go, again, I don't want to, it's not an email
thing, but it prevents malicious packets from coming in.
False positives are still going to be a problem in that scenario as well, and you have to keep
the software updated, and you have to keep your IPS patched and looking for the proper
things.
Not only, kind of like a virus checker, you have to update the IPS regularly so it knows
what to look for, so it can catch any new forms of attack, and the CERT advisories, like
you said, and Snag, and all these different mailing lists to find out, you know, what it
should be watching for.
You have to keep that updated as well, so it's a lot of maintenance.
But, the difference is that it is supposed to stop people from coming in.
It's prevention.
Stop packets from coming in to attack.
The danger here is that the false positive is a potentially, potentially is a lost customer.
If Amazon were to put an IPS on their system, and somebody comes in and, you know, HTML sometimes
loads wrong, or it just brings up a, you know, a bad packet with one letter off, one letter
different, and when somebody clicks on something to try to order it, it's not necessarily malicious
or an attack of any kind, but an IPS, if it's not properly configured, maintained, watched,
set up, it's going to cause you to lose a customer.
It's going to tell this person, I'm sorry, but you can't do that, and they're going to
be, you know, go somewhere else.
They're going to, you know, you're turning people away, and you're, it's not exactly a
solution either, in my mind.
I guess it's, would you say it's better or worse than IDS, though?
There's a time and a place for everything.
You just have to watch your scenario to figure out what you need.
Like, for example, with Amazon, I don't know if they'd want to actually have something
that type, watching HTTP, but maybe they want to watch other ports, you know, like
Telnet or FTP.
It all depends also how much money you have, and you're willing to dedicate to it.
I know, for example, here, a firewall would probably be a good example of an IPS, but it
all depends how well you tune the firewall.
Right.
Well, the difference with a firewall versus an IPS is that they work on two different
layers.
The IPS is actually going to look on software.
Software layer, whereas the firewall is more of a hardware layer.
Exactly, exactly.
So, that's the problem of the software issue of whether it's going to be smart enough to
detect mal packets or bad packets versus normal packets.
Right.
And a lot of it's learning, too, so you have to spend time tuning the software, and that
can take weeks, if not months, at a time.
Again, and as it updates, and the world changes, you have to also re-teach and re-update it,
so it's a constant maintenance.
Right.
Absolutely.
I think it'd be well worth it if you had the time and maybe the staff to do it.
You know, but the thing is, it's even more fundamental than that.
See, this seems like a...
I mean, I guess it's good.
Every attempt that these...
I mean, they're potentially good, but the bottom line is, and let's go back to your
example of Telnet.
Okay, you want to lock down Telnet.
There's no need for people to be coming in during a Telnet, so you put the IPS to watch
for that.
Well, guess what?
There's a much easier, simpler, and better solution.
Turn off Telnet.
Right.
You still turn off Telnet, but sometimes I'd still like to know if people are trying Telnet.
I mean, sometimes I'm anal like that, but...
Yeah, you know, no, I agree.
Actually, I do, too.
You're absolutely right.
I do like to see what people are trying.
They may not get there, but yeah, that's a good...
And that's another point I had put on the notes here that I didn't know if we were going
to go into, but this is where I see a fantastic use for a honeypot.
You intercept these people.
You turn off...
You can either turn off the Telnet, or you can have a redirector or a simulation or something
on there to pretend to be Telnet.
There's plenty of those out there.
Right.
You know, there's plenty of...
You know, people think they're all over these...
What is it?
Back orifice.
They think they found a system with a back orifice Trojan on it, and they're controlling
something.
No, there are back orifice fake Trojans that are nothing but entrapment software that will
watch you, see what you're doing and where you're coming from, and they know everything
about you, and you think you're doing one thing, and you're actually right in the middle
of this big honeypot, and they're watching everything you do.
This is a great example of that.
If someone tries to Telnet into this example we just made up, you can have it redirected to
a honeypot.
They think that they are Telneted into Amazon.com, when in actuality, they're not.
They've been sent to a honeypot.
This is exactly where I think IPS could work hand-in-hand, or even IDS, but not so much.
And the IPS could work hand-in-hand to route things through a honeypot.
So not only are you preventing them from getting into your system, which is ideally the point
of it, but you're also able to watch and see what's going on.
Now, you get into kind of a privacy issue there, but...
And I might get hate mail for saying this on the air, but if you're trying to break into
a server, I'm sorry.
You kind of brought that on yourself.
That's the way I look at it.
I don't believe in that type of hacking and that type of action.
So, you know, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for that kind of...
Right.
You'll probably start up a small crusade with that.
Yeah.
I know.
I'll probably get some mail.
But, hey, we'll read it on the air next week.
And, actually, I think that is a good ending point.
Unless you had any...
Did you have anything else you wanted to bring up?
I don't want to cut you short on the IDS if you had time to say any other...
Because, again, I know you've worked with it quite a bit.
Well, a little bit, right?
A little bit.
And all I say is that you don't have to go full-blown honeypot.
There are other pieces of software out there that will sort of sit there and look at you
and just kind of see what you're doing.
But at the same time, it's not quite as robust.
Right.
All right.
Well, you know what?
We covered a lot of good material today.
A lot of good stuff.
You are very good on the show.
I appreciate it.
Very good.
You know, and since we're at the close of the show and it's time for me to get out shouts,
I'm going to shout out to you coming in and helping me out at the last minute.
We are recording this just before we stream the show.
So as soon as we're done, I've got to mix this, start streaming it up tonight.
So thank you very much for the last minute bailout.
I appreciate that.
Did you have anybody you wanted to shout out to?
You got open air here.
Anybody you wanted to say hi?
Anybody you wanted to shout out?
Not yet.
I'll see what happens next week.
Not yet.
All right.
And for those people who are going to email me and tell me that I'm wrong, we have people
who pride themselves on being black hat hackers.
They want that.
So, you know, if anybody wants to email, by all means, I am not right all the time, wrong
all the time.
And most of this stuff is my opinion.
If you disagree with it, if you agree with it, if you want to tell me to go stick my
head up my ass, letters at binrev.com.
As we always say, you can email me about anything.
And tonight's music is from Rocket Productions.
It's called All Systems Go.
And that's it.
So we close the show every week the same way.
We will see you next week.
Same hack time.
Same hack channel.
Peace out.
Thank you.