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 bone, 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 dreamcast, you need some ISO, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, in 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 Al Jones, and NASDAQ leaves 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, RAM, SIF,
SIS, this is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers.
That's right, once again it is time for Binary Revolution Radio, I am Stang Dogg and we are
bringing you episode number 150 of Binary Revolution Radio, today is May 30th, 2006, and I am joined
this week by Dr. Zygmunt, who's been on the show a few times before.
Hey everybody, what's going on?
And, we have an interesting little format change today, we're gonna try something a
little bit new and see how that goes.
Think so adventurous.
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, we're not afraid to try things here, I mean, yeah, I can already
see the feedback coming from certain people, but that's gonna come regardless, so, whatever.
What do you expect from, yeah, anyway.
Before we get into that main topic though, we have one, let's see, I've got one announcement,
unless you had anything else to go.
No, I think, well, your announcement will do just nicely.
Okay, the one thing we're gonna announce that we have made the decision, that the timing
works out pretty well for this, we're gonna end up doing the first episode of season four
of Binary Revolution Radio, we're gonna film it in front of a live studio audience, well,
the show won't be live, we'll be recording it and streaming it Tuesday as normal, but we
will record it in front of an audience at the 6th Hope in New York City, so, yeah, so,
it works out, the timing works out almost perfectly.
Basically, we'll probably take one week, we're probably gonna miss one week.
The last episode of season three will be episode 156, and 157 we're gonna do there at Hope, I
don't know what the, where we're gonna do it, or what the situation's gonna be, whether it'll
be an actual talk there, I don't know, we talked about that, whether it'll be something
down on the second floor, some bootleg thing, hell, we'll do it in the hotel room if we have
to, but we will be doing an episode from New York City that weekend, so, um, the weekend
before that we might not do an episode, because the timing is off just by one week, so we might
have a one week void, um, so, other than that though, it's gonna work out pretty well, I
think, and we will, uh, do some cool things, probably talk mostly about that conference,
the 6th Hope, and, uh, have some cool special guests on, we hope, and, uh, big announcement
for the future in the direction we're heading with season four of Binary Revolution Radio,
ever-changing, evolving, it sounds good, everybody should, uh, if you're gonna be at Hope, they
should try to make it down, and, uh, maybe we can get, uh, a quick couple of words from
anybody, yeah, I'd like to, yeah, we've still gotta work out the logistics, all we know for
sure now is that we are going to do it, um, and I guess I'll be hosting it, I'll bring
all my equipment with me, so hell or high water will do something, what, a tape recorder?
Yeah, yeah, I'll just do it, I'll do it, like, on my iPod, like a real podcast, oh, can you,
I don't think you can, you can't record on an iPod, I don't know, can't you, I thought
that's the whole point of those podcasters, is they take their iPods and record themselves
on them, I thought you could, I don't know, I don't actually have an iPod, so I'm not
really sure, yeah, I wouldn't admit if I did anyway, um, alright, so I guess, other than
that, let's jump into some email, email, radio at binrev.com, alright, so email number one,
this week, why does that song get stuck in my head, and I want to sing the song, even
though there's really no song to sing, I don't know, it kind of is a song, I think it's still
after hearing it time and time again, I just, it kind of makes me think it's email binrev
time, da-na, da-na, da-na, radio at binrev.com, bin, bin, bin, bin, bin, okay, yeah, it's pretty
late tonight, alright, email number one this week comes from knowledge01 from an anonymous
throwaway account, how mysterious, uh, knowledge01 says, this is knowledge01, and I was wondering
if any of the Binary Revolution members are going to give a talk at DEF CON, and what it's
going to be about, thanks for all the great topics you guys cover on the show, well, knowledge01,
I'm going to call you K for short, because I'm down like that, so K-dog, no, I, well,
let's clarify real quick, Binary Revolution members, I don't know, we've got like 4,000
forum members, I don't know if any of them have been accepted, or have even put in talks,
I don't think they've accepted any, they haven't published any list of talk speakers yet, I think
I saw one name up there was all, so I don't know that they've done accepting all their presentations,
what I can say is that I don't think any of the DDP members have submitted anything to DEF CON
this year, but as far as Binary Revolution members, members of the forums, and stuff like that,
I don't, I don't know, I'm sure there's probably a couple, because there's a lot of bright people
out there, and someone's bound to be presenting at DEF CON, um, from our forums.
I know that we're going to have a, we're going to have a following there, there's definitely a bunch
of people from IRC are deciding that they're all going to get together at, uh, DEF CON, but I, I don't know
how many of them are, are planning on presenting, but there's definitely, uh, because last year
we did a dinner, and hopefully, uh, they'll do it again this year for any, uh, any of the
members who do get the chance, or just anybody who wants to hang out with, with people of
like-minded, uh, or a similar interest.
There you go.
Yeah, we're definitely, I'm definitely going to be at DEF CON this year, you're not going
to make it, right?
No, I, I, I just, I can't afford to go to two this year.
Right, and actually that's kind of the point is, um, most of us who are looking at talking
or presenting or whatever, we're looking at doing it at HOPE, because this is the year
for HOPE, which is every two years that they have HOPE in New York, so we're all looking
at that for our primary conference for this year.
Um, however, I will be going to DEF CON and attending, but, um, yeah, I don't know that
I'll be presenting at DEF CON again, I don't know, I just didn't really, I don't know,
just didn't do it for me.
Well, maybe you'll just, maybe you should put together just a little something, something
informally, like, uh, the hotel room lectures, as we like to call them, maybe, uh, record
a quick, uh, hack TV or something like that.
Well, I've always got on my laptop, I've always got my presentations that I give at, uh, local
bin rev meetings and such, but, um, so we may do something impromptu in a hotel room or
just sit and hang out and chat.
That would be cool if we actually did some swapping of, uh, of different local presentations,
because, you know, something that might be hot down here in Florida, you know, might
be, uh, interesting to those of, uh, a number, uh, of another area code.
Um, maybe, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, we've always got them.
See, you and I always do presentations at our meetings, so we've always kind of got material
around.
So, hey, yeah, maybe, maybe that's what we'll do for DEF CON.
Actually, I'm glad I, I'm glad I got this email.
Yeah, it makes me think, maybe, um, maybe we will do, like, an unofficial fourth track
or something in a hotel room somewhere.
I don't know.
Something small for the bin rev members only, but, anyway, yeah, as far as Binary Revolution
members, I don't know.
I'm, I'm sure that we will hear about it in the forums and talk about it on the show,
because, of course, we want to support everybody that are producing and helping support the Binary
Revolution.
Go out there and do things, less talking, more doing.
So, um, yeah, we'll, we will let people know on future shows if we hear anything, uh, about
somebody being accepted for DEF CON.
Sounds good.
So, uh, yeah, hope this year we're going to focus on that.
We got a couple other events we're working on, trying on, but one of them for sure is
going to be the radio show, and, uh, we'll see what else comes besides that.
But also for that, it's going to be a lot of hanging out, meeting people there, so there
will definitely be several Binary Revolution members, forum members will probably get
together for a dinner or something up there, and, um, DDP members as well.
It's that hanging out that, that really makes the conference, you know, because a lot of
the lectures will be interesting and a lot of fun to see, but really it's just that chance
that you get to, to, to meet all the people that, you know, you know them by a series of
characters in an IRC room or something like that.
It's, you know, that face-to-face and, you know, getting to hang out, and, uh, I really
think that's, just, the informal exchanging of ideas is where I get the most benefit from
any conference.
Well, and it's more personal, it's more on a, you know, face-to-face, you can talk to
somebody like a real person, you're not listening to them through the global interweb and whatnot,
so, puts a face to the name, to the voice, I should say, puts a face to, well, to both,
I guess.
So, alright, email number two.
Face to the keyboard.
Exactly.
Email number two comes from Enyo, from over in the UK.
Enyo says, hey, Stank, enjoyed your show on digital forensics, a great topic to cover,
so I'm glad you gave it some time.
Just thought I would drop a mail to you to mention the digital forensics wiki at www.forensicswiki.org,
which covers all the tools you mentioned and more.
It also provides excellent information on the whole digital forensics field.
Like any user-contributed wiki, it needs input, so I hope you can mention it on the show
and help the site out.
Keep up the great work.
It's so good to have you back.
I've missed your insane rants.
Yep, that's me.
Insane.
Insane in the membrane.
Now all we need are some voices.
Oh, man, you used to laugh.
Just like old times.
Oh, man, you missed your setup.
So greets to the Hacker Voice radio crew in the UK, and yes, I'll second all of that.
Yeah, any user-contributed stuff, I mean, that's the whole point of user-contributed
is users have to help out and hope they'll have more luck or more help with their wiki
than I have with dock droppers, but we won't go there.
Hacker Voice radio crew, yeah, we support them a lot.
Good guys over in the UK doing a lot of fun stuff.
I sent a few people over there from IRC recently, actually, so they're doing good stuff,
and they just released their TV show recently, so go check them out.
Cool.
Or their video show.
I don't know if calling it a TV show is proper, but do we call Hack TV a TV show?
It's a video.
Well, it's called Hack TV.
But it's not really on, well, actually, it was on TV.
We mentioned that on the show.
It was actually on TV, so I don't know.
It's a play on words, whatever.
The show, the video show.
Yeah.
All right.
Where were we here?
Email.
Our third and final email this week comes from Yojimbo, who says,
In response to ESD on how to destroy data, episode 148, don't destroy data, encrypt it.
TrueCrypt lets you mount encrypted files as a drive in Windows or Linux.
This gives you a secure workspace.
Your files never touch an unencrypted disk.
You can also hide volumes in other volumes, which look like any other random data.
It also supports encryption with passwords or key files.
Encrypt your data with your favorite MP3 or any file on your hard drive.
And congrats to Black Ratchet.
So I'm sure Black Ratchet appreciates that.
But I'm also sure that we are the last thing on his mind right about now.
So thank you for that email, Yojimbo.
And, yes, excellent, excellent point that we should have emphasized more.
I think I glossed over it or briefly mentioned it, but maybe I didn't, but encryption.
I mean, you can encrypt your data instead of destroying it, and maybe by keeping it in an encrypted state and just logging out in a rush or in a hurry.
The original question was how to destroy data in a hurry or if the feds come busting in your door or whatever.
That's kind of what prompted us to do that episode.
So, yeah, but encryption is something we have always supported and I've always said is really the way to go.
The concern with that is, and I'll admit I'm talking out of my ass here, but I could swear that I've read some articles about people that have gotten in trouble for refusing to give up their password or their key or whatever to some encrypted data.
Yeah, I've heard of people that have gotten...
But it seems like I have heard a few stories like that, so that kind of makes me a little bit nervous.
I don't see where they could force you to give it up.
That doesn't seem right to me because you have a right to privacy even if you're under investigation.
You do the fucking work to investigate me.
I'm not giving it to you.
Yeah, I think the other thing that's kind of important to keep in mind with encryption, especially if you're doing like entire drive encryption where on the fly it's being decrypted, you just need to be sure that whatever's being used to decrypt isn't actually just like stored freely in memory.
I know there was a problem with a lot of the earlier encryption suites where anybody who was going to be running that program or could actually catch you with that program active, they might not have been able to decrypt the data right away, but they could have taken the decryption keys out of memory.
Right, and I think TrueCrypt does not have that weakness.
I would hope that by now most of it's been straightened out, but I just wanted to make it clear that if you're going to do it and you're going to encrypt, make sure you do it right and check up on the solution that you're going to use for your encryption.
Right, and that's true for anything.
Make sure you understand what you're doing, what the program's doing, and whether you're truly protected or not.
Now what would happen if you just didn't remember the password?
Your SOL.
That's kind of a dangerous, slippery slope where they can lock you up for as long as they want until you remember the password.
And that kind of goes back to what I said on that episode where, you know what, unless you really, really, really got something to worry about, it may be too much trouble.
It may be more trouble than it's worth.
I mean, I'm all for privacy and everything, but I don't really feel the need to encrypt my entire hard drive because, yeah, I've got a lot of passwords floating around in my brain, and only half of them work.
So I don't want to lock myself out of my own computer.
That would really, really be self-ownage to the max.
That's right.
You're totally the king of having to reset passwords.
I have so many passwords and so many sites and so many, oh, it's just sickening.
Oh, you know what we should get you?
They have those little handheld password keepers.
No, no, no.
Actually, it's probably a good thing that I forget and have to change them or reset them because it's kind of a self-accidentally self-fulfilling change your password every so many days because of my forgetfulness.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
So it's actually probably a good thing.
But that's neither here nor there.
So is that what we should all expect as we start to get old?
Oh, yeah.
That, and then you have trouble hearing certain tones, apparently, which we might talk about later on.
So let's see.
Before we move into some of the topics tonight, let's do a little show and tell.
I've got a couple quick little things, so I'll stall so you can think of something.
First of all, I bought this game from my Nintendo DS called Brain Age.
I think it's called Brain Age, which is supposed to be some computer program, some game thing that's supposed to make you smarter.
Cool.
Yeah, yeah, right?
I told them as soon as they make one that allows you to work out and lose weight, give me a call that I'll buy that one.
If I can sit there and play a video game and gain muscles and lose weight, that's the one I want.
Uh, it's called DDR.
Actually, you're right.
You're absolutely right, but that's too much like work.
That's too much like work.
Especially, I'm not going to...
It's too much coordination for you.
Well, and I'm not going to do it in front of other people.
See, I've been to those.
I've been to, like, some of the places where the regulars hang out, and they're, like, fucking doing...
No, but they're doing, like, backflips and shit over the fucking thing, and they're, like, they're playing the two-player game, but they'll switch places in the middle of it.
They've got a whole fucking routine.
It's like I'm watching fucking Grease or something.
They're all fucking choreographing shit.
They're all fucking leaping over each other.
They're fucking touching the pads with their dick and their ass, and they're doing all kinds of crazy shit, man.
Well, I'd be really impressed if somebody had enough weight on them, so to say,
in order to actually trigger, like, as if it was a step.
Well, I guess if you get aroused enough, you could probably pull that off.
I don't know.
What am I talking about?
I don't know what I'm talking about half the time.
I told you I pulled this whole show out of my ass.
As long as you're consistent.
Anyway, exactly.
So this Brain Age program, if anybody doesn't have it, I'll do a little mini-review for my show-and-tell.
It is...
Okay, one of the reasons I bought it, quite honestly, is I wanted Sudoku for my DS,
so I could play on the airplanes or stuff when I travel, and it's had it built in.
Plus, it had these other things that are supposed to be brain-building exercises or whatever.
Well, they're nothing, like, that I haven't seen before on the interweb or on different tests here and there.
It's like, they'll show you a color, the name of it, it'll be, say, black, spelled out.
But the actual color of the font is blue or red or something like that,
and you're supposed to say what the color is.
And there's something about the way your brain works that that's difficult or something like that.
Huh, that's interesting.
Yeah, and then there's one where you have to do some math problems really as fast as you can do them.
With a calculator?
No, you have to do it within a...
You have, like, only a few seconds, and it marks it wrong if you don't answer, I think.
So it's just like a speed thing for some basic math.
You know, your basic times tables, et cetera, et cetera.
Your gazintas.
Well, I'm guilty of that, of being a child of the information age where I don't have a calculator.
I still put one plus one in my calculator sometimes.
Oh, man.
No, you got to go practice on your gazintas.
Gazintas?
I didn't know you knew Yiddish.
Oh, yeah, your gazintas.
I don't think that's a Yiddish word.
Oh, I'm self-acclamped.
You're such a mensch.
Anyway, so the game itself, like those brain-building activities, I don't know what the future of that is.
If I get smarter and I feel smarter, I'll let everybody know, but I don't have high hopes for that.
The Sudoku is kind of okay, but the problem with the whole game in general is that, well,
they make you do this setup at the beginning to test your starting brain age so that they can track you over time.
I just want to play the fucking game.
I just want to play Sudoku.
Sudoku, whatever the fucking name is.
Sudoku.
Don't write me and tell me I pronounced it wrong.
It's Sudoku, but I don't like it.
It's too hard to say that, so fuck you.
I just want to play.
They've even got an option that says Quick Sudoku, so whatever.
Why can't I say that word right now?
I don't know.
But it's not.
It goes through all these screens to give you directions and instructions on how to play.
Guess fucking what?
I know how to play now.
Now, the thing is not smart enough to tell me, to tell itself, I should say, he's already
seen the directions, so we don't need to give them to him again.
I mean, it's a brain-building exercise for God's sake.
You think it'd be smart enough to not repeat itself?
Talking about those rants.
Yeah, I guess so.
Whoops.
Yeah, so, if you can get past the crappy programming.
Oh, one other thing is on that one activity I mentioned earlier, where it shows you black
or blue or whatever.
It uses the microphone, the built-in microphone, which is really a cool thing, if it worked.
But the damn thing is, it can't tell when I've said blue or black, I guess, because they
both begin with BL.
It thinks that I'm saying one or the other.
So, yes, there's occasional time when it comes up with a word black that's spelled in blue
letters, and when you say blue, it thinks you said black, and it marks you wrong.
And then, of course, you know what?
My immediate response is, me being the predictable, as soon as I miss it, and it's not my fault,
I say, fuck!
And then I miss that one, and then I say, fuck you!
And then I miss that one, and I end up pretty much blowing it.
I end up cussing at the game and losing, or whatever you want to call it, getting a low score,
because I'm yelling at the fucking game.
There's something wrong with me.
You know, I'm surprised they didn't take that into account while they were coding it, so
that they never had a color and a sound, or a color and a word that sounded similar.
Like, they'd be dissimilar enough, so that you'd be able to tell if it was one or the
other, even if you weren't using, because I'm sure there's not too much power behind that
to really be doing too much crazy voice recognition.
I guess I recommend to the programmers, the developers of Brain Age, that they actually use
their own product first, before writing it.
Maybe they need to build up some brain power.
Well, maybe they're taking a hint from Microsoft, and they're going to release a patch.
Oh, that's, how do you patch a DS game?
Uh, they're going to come up with a way.
Yeah, right.
Not these guys, not based on this.
That's rough.
And, like, you turn the thing sideways, it's got this, um, I mean, it's like ten times worse
than Max Headroom, this little avatar of the guy that supposedly invented Brain Age or
something.
It's got this little polygon graphics of, um, you remember that game Sinistar, the old
arcade game Sinistar, with that robotic head thing?
It's even worse than that.
This little guy over there, like, giving you directions and reading, and it's just awful
graphics, it's just, it was only 20 bucks, but, you know what, I still feel like I kind
of got ripped off.
I'd recommend buying a-
You should have gotten Zelda.
Yeah, I'd recommend actually buying a real Sudoku game instead.
But, anyway, I also bought the Mario, Super Mario Brothers or whatever, the new DS, and
that just made me so mad, I chucked my DS across the room and slammed it against the
wall, so.
DS for sale.
I need, I need anger management, that's what I need.
Uh, isn't that what this radio show is?
Yes, it is.
It's therapeutic.
A very special episode of FinRev Radio.
And it's not even court ordered.
And we haven't even got to a topic yet, so let me move on quickly.
Um, let's see, what else was I going to, oh, kind of a side, just a quick aside, I noticed
that there are some new sites that have been registered by Google, I noticed this, I read
on a couple blogs that mention this, GoogleCheckout.net and GoogleMasterCard.com, and I think Google,
I think .org.com of most or all of those are also registered, but Google Checkout and Google
Master, MasterCard, which is, well, I guess their version of PayPal, Google Checkout, I
guess that's going to be their version of PayPal, which I think we've heard rumors and
rumblings about, so GoogleCheckout.net and GoogleMasterCard.com, that's going to be interesting,
and that ties into my, well, I guess I can't go there.
Yeah, that's a whole can of worms.
Yeah, some more research I'm doing on Google, we can say that.
Some more research I'm doing on Google.
I think that whole, the whole them wanting to get into that, into that market, I think
it's, I think it takes some guts.
I think Google might be a little full of themselves thinking that they can just control it all,
and they're going to try to take, they're really looking to replace PayPal.
How hard could it be?
Well, you know, PayPal's pretty ingrained.
They've got Google Base, so they've got the eBay knockoff in there.
They need a way to pay for it, so they mark in, they go into Google Checkout.
Everybody still, for some reason, loves and trusts Google.
I don't know why, a lot of people still, some, more and more people are starting to catch
on, but I'm not going to go into a Google rant, let's move on to a new topic, how about
that?
That sounds good.
My last thing is, again, going to bore most people, but Lost, the season finale of Lost,
one of my favorite shows, was on last week, and why does that tie into this show?
Only because at the very end of the show, there were a couple computer screens that they showed.
There's a computer involved in the story, the ongoing plot, but they don't do a whole
lot of, it's a very small point.
They have to enter in this code, and they don't make a big deal out of the computer and what
it is and capabilities, they don't show you much.
Well, on the season finale, there was another computer that was tied in a different way,
and I'm not going to give anything away.
But basically, on the screen, you could see a little bit more detail.
There was some text and some stuff scrolling on the screen, so of course, being the geek
that I am, I was TiVo-ing it, so I rewind it and freeze-frame it with the high definition
and try to decipher what was on there.
And long story short, there was a bunch of IP addresses that showed up.
Unfortunately, they were all 10.x addresses, all internal addresses, non-routable, so nothing
there.
But it was interesting, like, they had, it was kind of interesting, I saw the phrase
SMTP header, and then you could see what looked like actual mail header scrolling past.
Of course, mail headers are a bunch of gibberish, you know, random, not random, but an ID to
uniquely identify that email and stuff, so there were some mail headers and an IP address.
You didn't actually see a message, but you saw headers.
And you also saw, I think I saw the word HTTP server, or HTTP packet or something on the
screen as well, scroll by, so it was kind of interesting, but yeah, as it turned out,
it was all unroutable addresses, so.
Now, wouldn't that have made for an interesting little twist to, because don't they also do
a lot of stuff where they kind of, I guess they break the proverbial fourth wall, and they
do, like, commercials that, like, they're fake commercials, but they're part of the show
and stuff like that, is that Lost, or is that a different show that does that?
Well, Lost has done it the last couple of episodes, yes, and I've mentioned...
Wouldn't it have been cool with that IP address that they were showing, if they had a website?
That was why I was excited when I saw it, and yeah, it turned out to be nothing, unfortunately,
but they've released a few phone numbers that maybe we'll call one day on the show.
Actually, this is episode 150.
I normally would have done a telephonic craptacular here, but I guess that tradition has gone
by the wayside, but maybe we'll release those numbers, or we'll call those numbers and put
them on a future show.
Cool.
So how about you?
What have you been working on quickly?
Quickly.
A quick little thing, I do have a new job.
I do support tickets, system administration, and stuff like that, and something that I
had to face was there's an exploit that's being used for the Envision Powerboard.
I'm pretty sure it's version 1.3, so it's one of the dated versions, but some people are
still using it, and what it is is it's a meta redirect, so what happens is it's a cross-site
scripting kind of vulnerability.
When they put in this, what they do is they change one of the forum names to have this
meta redirected in it so that your original site that you're supposed to go to will load,
and then as soon as it's redirected, you know, the refresh comes up, you'll get forwarded
to this other site, which is, oh, you got hacked, and some virus, and on and on and on.
Long story short, all it was doing was it was just adding that record to the database,
so we had to go in, and we found, I used phpMyAdmin, which has a really cool functionality that you
don't, you can't, you know, I tried to think of a query to do this, and I couldn't do it
from the command line, but phpMyAdmin can search all fields, all columns of all tables
for a specific string, so what I did was I loaded the page, you know, I pressed stop so
it didn't redirect me, viewed source, I took out the actual text that was being used for
the redirect, and searched for that, found the one instance of it, deleted that one entry
from the database, and bam, the redirect was gone, so they were able to load the page normally.
There were also, I mean, there were some also side effects, like they had deleted the admin
username and password, so that had to be restored, but, you know, in the short term,
they were able to stop that redirect, and that was something a little cool that I decided
I'd pat myself on the back a little bit for figuring that one out.
Well, what's to stop them from doing it again?
They could absolutely do it again, if not for the fact that these people did upgrade their
Envision power board.
I was getting ready to say, I think Envision 1.4 is the latest version, the free version,
I should say, and I don't think, well, I wouldn't swear by it, because we use the more advanced
version of it, so, but I think the 1.4, I think they've stopped development on it at 1.4
for the free version, and they're not going to do anything but make an occasional security
patch if necessary for that.
So, if you're using that old Envision, I've seen quite a few vulnerabilities pop up for
Envision for that old public free version.
If you're using 1.3, you know, you definitely have some issues, because I think this is actually
some sort of worm.
I think it was not directed at these people.
I think they just got caught in the crossfire.
That may be the case.
Yeah, and another, I also seem to think that 1.4 was when they switched to only giving you
the binaries, you don't actually get the open source anymore, and 1.3 was released still
under open source.
Really?
So, 1.3 made that.
I know the 1.3, you can actually see the PHP source.
Yeah, 1.3, I think, might have been the last one that you could see the actual source that
they released on 1.4.
I wouldn't swear by that.
At some point, they cut it off, and it was no longer released as open source, because they
were finding a lot of people that were going out and changing it and stealing parts of
it and using it for other things, so I guess they decided to do something about that.
Now, when you say they give you the binaries, does that mean they use Zend, and they encode
it that way, just so that it can't be read as plain text, or they do some sort of...
I obviously don't know.
I didn't need to, because it didn't affect us, so I really didn't read too much into it.
I saw it come in a bulletin, an email, or something they sent out a long time ago, so...
Hmm, I'll have to check into that, because now I'm kind of curious to see exactly what
they're doing.
Yeah.
All right, well, so what do you think?
You got anything else?
Uh, I think that, uh, that just about wraps that up.
All right, well, we kind of mentioned earlier that we were going to do a little something
different with this episode as far as the format of the show, so...
Uh, what we're trying to do, again, I mentioned before, we wanted to kind of get more people
involved in the show, and get more, uh, get more closely aligned or tied with what's going
on in the forums, because there's a lot of great topics and good stuff going on there,
so...
Uh, we thought we'd find a few topics from the forums to talk about and to go into some
detail with, and of course, nobody wants to hear me talk about stuff all the time, so...
I thought I'd get some people on here that are actually competent to talk about stuff.
So, one of the things that caught my eye in the forums, and, uh, it's probably been a
little over a week that this was posted, but it was a thread in Old School Freaking about
what's in your freak toolkit, or toolbox, or I don't remember what it said.
Toolkit.
And, uh, I thought that was kind of cool, because, A, I'm not into that kind of stuff, I don't
know so much about it, so I found it interesting seeing a lot of the tools and stuff that people
are using them, and what they're using for.
So, I thought I'd call some people and see what they had in their freak toolkit.
So, if you're hanging out in IRC, one of the benefits might be that I might just call on
you out of the blue and ask you to help me out and talk about a certain topic.
So, hang out at irc.binrev.net, and pound binrev is the official channel.
Oh, yeah.
And there's always, there's always 35 plus people in there, even during a weekday now, I never
see it go much below 35, and on the busy times, you know, it gets upwards of 50.
What's the, I mean, what's the highest number of people you've seen on there?
Uh, actually, I do have a statistic that will compute the highest number, and the highest
number was there were 80 users logged on at one point.
Holy cow, really?
80?
Yep.
80.
Damn.
Were we under, like, a DDoS or something?
Is that where they came from?
It was band town.
No.
Oh, no, you did not.
Just go on.
Oh, no, what a joke.
Anyway, um, yeah.
So, what's in your freak toolkit?
And we decided to ask a few people that actually knew what they were talking about.
So, why don't we hear from them?
All right, so, this week's question is, what's in your freak toolkit?
So, the first person I thought that would be very good to give us some input on this would
be Ponyboy from Belcore Radio.
So, Ponyboy, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
And I shall simply pose you the question, and we need some, like, game show theme music
or something like that, but the question, what's in your freak toolbox?
Well, really, my freak toolkit has kind of fallen apart as of late.
I haven't really gone out and done a lot of field freaking with it, but generally what
I keep in my toolkit is I've got a backpack that I usually store.
I've got a nice Harris butt set that works a lot better, but I also keep, just in case
I need it, in case I should leave my butt set at home.
I do carry a beige box with me, but I've found for legal purposes that it's the best idea
to keep it all in separate pieces.
So, what I'll do is I'll have, in separate pockets in my bag, I'll have a little Southwestern
Bell mini phone, and I'll have some, you know, some phone cord, and a Belkin, I specifically
use a Belkin wall mount RJ11 jack because of the fact that when you open up the jack, you
can just take out the piece that has the jack itself and the cables.
It removes directly out of the rest of the housing, so you've got basically the size
of a, of an RJ11 jack, just a little, you know, maybe like a quarter inch by quarter inch
or half inch by half inch square with two cables running out and two alligator clips.
And, uh, I got a magnetic screwdriver with all the...
Well, wait a minute, before, so you're, you're saying to keep the, uh, your beige box basically
break it down transformer style, so if you ever get questioned or anything, you've got
a, just a phone, and then you've got a few wires in another pocket somewhere, and they
look unrelated.
That way it's like, because if somebody catches me standing there with a beige box in my pocket,
they're going to go, hey, that looks like that thing that they told us that people aren't
supposed to have.
But if they're just like, oh, look, there's a phone, and, you know, he's got all the stuff
in it, the, the, probably the most curious thing they'd get is if they saw some alligator
clips, they'd be like, hmm, this kid must be smoking pot.
Actually, oh, that's kind of funny you said that, because that's not the first thing I
thought when I, alligator clips, I think, phone freak, but I guess, yeah, I guess that
is what a lot of people think.
Oh, I guess I'm out of touch.
Well, yeah, it, it happens after, you know.
Most people, most people who do drugs or police officers who are more concerned,
concerned with people doing drugs, that's their first thought they'd think, so.
Yeah, that's, that's actually a very good point.
And also, you mentioned something else earlier, you actually have a physical, you have a backpack,
I think you said, you have a physical container, like some people posted pictures in the forums,
and actually, I think it was Elf who started the thread, which is a great thread, I find
very interesting.
And they have pictures of their actual, I don't know what you call the damn thing, it's a
tool belt or something like that, with all their equipment and stuff in it, which I think
is really cool.
But you're, you, you opt for the backpack, I guess, for the obvious privacy that is
contained, you don't walk around with the tool belt on?
Yeah, I, I don't draw a lot of attention to myself, but at the same time, I have everything
where I can get to it fairly easily, so.
All right, cool.
All right, what else you got in there?
But, um, well, that's about for my, for my beige boxing, fun stuff like that, but I
do keep a, I got a magnetic screwdriver, which, I, I like this one a lot, just because it's
made by a company, I want to say it's made by a company called Boxer, but, uh, basically
I like it because you can unscrew the back and it's got, like, a huge storage chamber
inside, like literally the entire screwdriver is completely hollow.
So, so I can put, you know, I can put all the bits that I need in there, I can put,
you know, if I have, you know, some kind of little box or something, I don't know, I
can put, I can put stuff in there if I need that extra little amount of storage space, which
I like a lot, and plus it holds the four or five different, uh, different bits that I
use for my screwdriver.
Right.
And, uh, probably the, the most important thing, in my honest opinion, is, uh, what I like to
call decorations, which I, I, Decorations as in flair?
In a, in a sense, yeah, I, I, uh, I like to leave presents and things, if I, if I'm
like in a phone box or something, I'll, uh, you know, you know, I'll, so let's just say
there's quite a few in the Atlanta area that have an old school freak sticker slapped on
the inside, or, or, you know, the, the telco company will get, or they'll go and open it
up sometime soon and find a few CDs with bell core radio on them.
Uh-huh.
I like to just leave things around, because not only just for the fact of phone company
employees, but for the fact of, you know, if somebody else like me happens to go open
something up someday and they're like, hey, this looks cool, let's go check out oldschoolfreak.com.
There you go.
Of course, anybody could put those things in there.
I mean, it's, could be anybody that opens that and puts those CDs in there, just for
the record, in case anyone's listening.
Yeah.
I'm not saying it was me, I'm just saying there are some around here.
Sure, certainly, understandable.
But, uh, and then, I mean, you know, just, uh, general stuff, gloves, of course, just because
if you're going to be touching things that have electricity running through them, first of all,
you want to wear gloves, and also...
Any particular, any particular type of glove that you recommend, or brand, or something
that you're, that you like?
I just got some cheapo wool gloves from the gas station.
Some cheap wool gloves to handle electricity.
It works.
All right.
Well, you got to take into consideration it's not high voltage stuff, so...
Wow.
It's just to prevent that, that nice dull shock that you get if you touch the, uh, touch a
live pair of telephone wires.
Gotcha.
But, uh, and then, you know, I, like, I keep, uh, you know, notebooks and pens, and I like
to carry Sharpies around with me for, uh, for, really for the same reason I was, I, I put
decorations and things inside it for people who might come along after me and need it.
I don't really encourage people to beige box unless it's, you know, absolutely necessary.
Right.
But I had a, uh, a mission at one point in time that lasted for about three days was that
every time that, this was back when I beige boxed all the time, every time I was inside
a phone box, I would check all the pairs and any of them that were active, I'd, I'd put
a mark there with a Sharpie so that people could come in later and say, oh, look, this one's
active and this one's active and this one's active.
But, you know, that way I don't have to test, you know, 25 other pairs just to see.
All right.
But those things change constantly from the phone company as they activate and deactivate
them.
Generally, but, uh, in the sense of, in a lot of suburban neighborhoods and stuff, or, I mean,
especially in my area where people don't really move out very often or cancel their phone lines
very often, it, we don't really run into that kind of problem out here as much, but I can
see where you're coming from there, but.
Right.
And then, uh, I, I like to keep just, this is kind of the, the paranoid part of me, but
I like, I like to keep some smoke bumps if I need to.
It's for the fact of, if I do see somebody walking towards me, I can do something to distract
them while I get away or keep them from seeing where I'm running to, so.
So you're like, like ninja style, you're going to throw the smoke bottle and disappear?
They come in the knees and go.
But like I said, I mean, I, I've never actually come from the point where I've had to use those.
Right.
But I always, I always keep them down there at the bottom of my book bag somewhere just
in case there's a.
Well, it's interesting.
In case of emergency.
Interesting to have just in case, I guess.
Yeah.
What about, um, do you go so far, do you go so far as to possibly dress up, uniform,
hat, that kind of thing?
Uh, generally speaking, what I've found is the best is, I know a lot of people that if
they're going out at night to try and do sneaky things or whatever, they're going to wear black.
And they're going to, or the most common I've found is black or camouflage.
And I've come to the conclusion that those are the worst colors to wear if you're out
sneaking around at night, because if you're out sneaking around at night and somebody calls
the cops on you, and even if you're not there anymore, if the cops see you while you're
walking down the street, they're going to go, oh, look, there's that guy in the black
trench coat they told us about.
Hmm.
So what I, so what I, what I've found is the best thing to do is to wear stuff like, uh,
you know, dark green.
Don't, well, first of all, don't wear a solid color for everything.
Wear, you know, dark greens or browns or, uh, like really deep maroon colors.
So it looks like you're just wearing something like, hey, I'm just a guy wearing normal colors.
It's not, it's not like a, it doesn't look like you're going out of your way to, you
know, look like a shadow, but at the same time, you do kind of look like a shadow.
Right.
No, and that's great advice from the social engineering aspect of if you do get picked
up or if you do get stopped on the side of the road, you know, if you're, if you are
wearing the black trench coat or the camouflage or whatever, it's going to be more difficult
to talk your way out of it as opposed to you acting, if you try to act stupid in an outfit
that they're looking for, that's one thing.
If you try to act stupid and you look normal, you're wearing some dark jeans, a dark shirt
like you described, you can say, hey, I don't know what you're talking about, dude.
I'm just walking down the street here.
Yeah.
I think that guy went over the bear.
Yeah.
And then throw a smoke bomb and run like hell.
Or not.
Once they leave, you book it.
Or not.
Yeah.
No, don't throw smoke bombs or anything else at the police.
Anyway.
All right.
You got anything else in there?
That really about covers it.
I mean, I'll keep, at one point in time before I kind of got stepped on an accident, I had,
you know, the classic Radio Shack tone dialer red box thing that was, you know, it was my
hot item and I really regret taking it out in the field because it was kind of a collector's
item in my opinion.
But that broke, so I've had to kind of resort to using things like, like I've got an iRiver
that I'll hook up my big monster audio editing headphones to and use that to kind of send
tones anytime I need to.
But other than that, you know, just, just simple little crap like busy boxes if I, you know,
if I feel the need to use one or random bits of RJ11 cable and crimpers and stuff like that.
But other than that, I don't really do a lot of, uh, field freaking anymore, so.
Yeah, I think it might just be a dying art, unfortunately.
Well, it's not, it's not so much that it's dying, people still do it a lot, it's just
that it's kind of one of those things like you have, well, I guess it's what you, what
you call field freaking, you've got field freaking like, you know, beige boxing and going out
and red boxing or whatever, and you've got a lot of people who do that still or attempt
to do that still, but after a while, after you've been involved with the freaking scene
enough, you start to like, eh, that's really not that cool anymore.
It's like, yeah, I can go out and I can, you know, hook up to somebody's phone, get a free
phone call, woohoo.
Yeah, but it's, it's more of learning, it's more of learning that infrastructure of how they
work is the more important aspect of it, not so much the free phone call as, as you've
said many times in the past.
Exactly, I mean, and you still have a lot of people that are interested in it, but once,
it's, it's kind of like, that's, that's kind of the beginning stages of it, is you're
like, wow, this is really cool, and this is really cool, and then after a while you're
like, okay, so now I know how that works, so I don't really have to go out anymore.
It's like you've kind of, for lack of a better term, you've kind of grown up in the scene.
Well, there's still always that adventure of, if you go someplace new, visit someplace
new, move, you always want to kind of check out and scout what your new situation is, so
that's always nice to, to do that for the adventure and for the knowledge of it, but
yeah, you know, if you don't move a lot, and then, yeah, you pretty much know how your
local setup is, it pretty much loses its steam.
Yeah, and I must say, a lot of times, when, you know, when places, when the, like, like,
they just recently started building more strip malls and things in my area, and I find that
that's a really fun time to go field freaking, is right when they get those phone boxes set
up, because generally, if you go inside those at that point in time, there's going to be
a lot of cool stuff in there, because they're, they're still working in that area, the phone
company is, so they're going to leave a lot of the documentation there, they're going to
leave, you know, potentially little fun tools or toys for you to get and play with,
but, I mean, that's, that's the best time to actually, not, not so much go to beige box
or whatever, but just to go to open it up and see what's there, and say, hey, cool, this
is like, you know, I, I found, uh, documentation on actually installing the big, giant phone,
uh, TNI boxes that they put on the back of strip malls, so.
Right.
And, and, and, every one is different, too, that's the other thing, every single one of those
boxes are set up differently, older technology, newer technology, there's so many differences
between them as well, so that once you've done it once and kind of understood it, there's
always something interesting in every other box you want to go look into, they're all
different in some way, shape, or form, and there may be some similarities, but there's
always something there that's, that's interesting, at least from what I've seen in my very, very
limited experience.
Yeah, for Hack TV, too.
There you go, there you go.
All right, well, I guess we'll wrap it up here, Pony Boy, thank you for being on the
show.
For having me, man.
Everyone, listen to Bellcore Radio.
That's right, Saturday nights at 8 o'clock on DDP Hack Radio.
There you go, and we are out.
And next up, on our review of Freak Toolkits, or toolboxes, or whatever you want to call
it, is a person who's been a friend of the show for a good while, Livin' Dead, star of
Freak Factor, one of the many stars of Freak Factor, so welcome to the show, Livin' Dead.
And tell us what's in your Freak Toolbox.
In my Freak Toolbox, I have my pickup coil, my 16th inch to 8th inch recorder.
Now, that is used for what, exactly?
The pickup coil is for picking up?
Well, you put it on the back of a phone receiver, and it will pick up the vibrations coming from
the receiver, and you can plug that into a recorder.
I used to use a mini disc that went broke, so I'll see the new one, but you can record
phone calls with that.
A Sony product broke?
Is that really possible?
A Sony product actually broke?
Is that possible?
Well, this is about five or six years old, also.
Yeah, it was made by Sony, that was the problem.
But anyway.
Well, they're pretty good, actually, but I've dropped it enough times.
Anyway, so you recorded on anything, then whatever you have available, whatever you want
to record it on?
Yeah, I actually fried my sound card using it one time, which wasn't a good thing, but...
How did you manage that?
I'm not sure.
It was actually the other recorder, not the pickup coil.
It fried my sound card, and I've had some bad luck with that computer since.
Hmm.
But anyways, so I have my other recorder, which you can plug in a headset to, and plug that
into the headset spot on a regular phone.
Some have, and some don't.
And then plug the other end into a recording device, computer, mini-discplayer, microperset,
any other kind of recorder, and you can record phone calls from that.
It doesn't require the kind of receiver that the pickup coil can use, but I use it with
my cell phone a lot.
Then I have my tone dialer.
Well, actually, before we leave the pickup coil, is that something that people can build
or buy somewhere?
Can they go to Rat Shack and get the parts for that pretty easily?
It's about $6 at Radio Shack, I think.
And it's already pre-built?
You just go buy it off the shelf?
Yeah.
They're pretty small, too, man.
Like, $6 there.
Cool.
Good deal.
All right.
And you were getting ready to say?
I have my tone dialer in there, which I really don't use all that much.
I use it more for my VoIP stuff when I'm trying to pass tones and a bridge is blocking them
or the soft phone won't pass it or my cell phone won't pass it.
But you do find yourself actually still using that today?
Oh, yeah.
All the time with VoIP.
Interesting.
So tone dialers are not dead.
That's an interesting point to make.
Yeah.
And what else?
Well, my cell phone and some paper, a pad of paper in there, pens.
I've got to have a freak notebook.
And, of course, a cell phone is just, you know, I think everybody overlooks the cell phone
for its, you know, freak capabilities, if you will.
I mean, besides the obvious.
But some cell phones, you know, actually you can download and run software on it.
You can run, you can save quarter tones and all that kind of good stuff.
We won't go into whether that still works or whatnot.
But there's a lot of stuff that you can do if you have one of the higher end
or one of the newer cell phones as well.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of new stuff coming out, especially with Bluetooth.
It's going to be pretty fun.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Now, do you have it?
My other stuff is just my laptop, which I use for more VoIP stuff.
So I don't do as much POTS stuff as I use VoIP now.
So I don't really have much in the way of the toolkit.
Well, and that's interesting, though, because that's kind of a good segue to our next guest
on the show because he's even more so along those lines.
A lot of people are going, and I guess this is kind of a new school freaking
as opposed to the old school freaking.
A lot of people are changing with the onset of VoIP,
and I'm finding that things like the laptops and cell phones and stuff like that
are more common than people still using the old punch-down tools
and the old, old school stuff.
I mean, I'm assuming now, I don't mean to put words in your mouth,
but I'm assuming you're not walking around with a physical pouch attached to your hip or anything.
No, I don't have that, but I think Strom does.
Yeah, see, and a lot of the old school freaks still, you know,
they still have a lot of those old school tools and stuff,
and a lot of people more recently, I should say,
are switching over to more computerized accessories in their toolkits.
So that's been pretty consistent so far.
Well, Lev and Deb, thank you for being on the show.
I appreciate you coming on and answering the question,
and I would say that we have some lovely parting gifts for you, but we don't.
Oh, the parting gifts.
But you get my thanks, and all right, man, thanks for being on the show,
and we'll talk to you later.
All right.
And to continue on with our question,
what is in your freak toolkit or toolbox or whatever the hell we're calling this segment,
I thought we'd kind of get into the nuts and bolts
and kind of the underbelly of the system a little bit
and talk about some more obscure tools,
and who better to talk about that than a multiple-time past co-host,
I don't know if that made any sense, of the radio show, ZeroDB.
Welcome to the show.
What's up?
Well, you tell me what's up.
What's in your freak toolkit?
Well, I thought about this a little while, and I said, you know what,
I think I'll talk about a little more obscure things of the telephony
and how telephony works.
Anything from the switch down to actually how it actually works into the home
on your regular box line, as far as the old-school style,
as opposed to the new-school Voight style.
Although it's kind of in parallel, the way the whole thing works,
but as we all know, the central office is the main place,
the originating source of everyone's dial tone, or everyone's circuit, no matter what.
Right.
Well, usually everything starts out on a carrier level, say like a T3 level.
Right.
And how does the switch?
Once you get down at a T3 level, you know, it just demultiplics down to a T1,
to a DSO, which is like a regular 1FB or a residence line.
Now, one of the tools that we can use to actually test or maintain and check continuity
would be a tool that most ISPs or telephony guys use, something called a T-Bird,
which is just one tool.
There are many other type tools, but the T-Bird is usually a tool of choice
for testing these pipes.
We call pipes like a T1 or a T3.
And the T-Bird is used, basically, you jack into something called a DSX,
and that DSX is basically one T1 that comes into the office and goes out to the provider.
Now, once you jack in, you can do something called a drop and insert,
which is basically dropping a channel on the T1,
because a T1 is 24 channels at 64K, which will give you your 1.5 meg if you do the math.
So that 64K channel, that one channel, you can monitor it.
You can listen.
You can do any testing you want to do on that one channel.
Also, you can actually test the whole 24 channel or the whole T1, if need be,
providing that there is a loopable device on the other end or some sort of package.
Most ISPs call these packages smart jacks.
And all it is is basically just a card that the T-Bird can place a loop, a hardware loop,
and it has relays in the card.
And you run to that loop and check your patterns,
and whatever pattern you send out, you should get it back.
It doesn't matter if you're testing from Seattle, Washington,
and you're testing to a circuit in Puerto Rico.
Well, it's going to be the same thing.
The carrier is what basically carries the signal, which will be the T3 or at the T1 level.
But, again, these types of equipment are pretty much really high-end equipment.
They're not something that the normal user would use, per se,
but if you're in an ISP environment or a telephony environment,
these tools are like the standard-issued tools.
Now, there are different types, but like I mentioned before,
T-Bird is usually the industry standard thing.
Alcatel.
Alcatel?
Hold on.
Alcatel, yeah.
No, Alcatel.
Jesus Christ.
It's eluding me at the moment.
But, anyhow, T-Bird, they don't call it by the other name.
Mostly people call it by T-Bird.
Down to the ESO level, which would be...
Well, now, wait a minute.
Since you kind of brought it up, you kind of mentioned it,
this is not, obviously it's not something that a normal home user or anything would have,
but this is, I mean, that's definitely a free tool right there for the toolkit,
but that's not even something that, I mean, is that,
that's not something that's easy to get your hands on, right?
Right.
No, it just came back to me.
Acturna is the name of the company.
They brought out the T-Bird name, Acturna.
And they have all types of equipment, digital equipment, for testing these circuits.
But, yeah, that's not something that the normal user would get their hands on.
You know, a person like you and I, it's just a little bit too expensive.
Although, I'm sure they're on eBay, I'm sure they're on, you know,
any other kind of scratch and dent type place that sells telephone equipment.
Now, when you say expensive, are we talking hundreds, thousands?
Oh, a couple thousand, a few thousand, actually.
Over five, more than likely.
Yeah, once you get to your 2309s and 2310, Acturna, T-Birds,
you're talking with the LCD touchscreen and all of that,
with optical, fiber optic connectors, you can test, you know, gigabit.
You can test 10 meg across fibers, and it's pretty expensive.
Yeah, that sounds like it might be a little bit rough for maybe some of our listeners
to take their hands on some of those.
It's nice to know that it's out there for sure.
I mean, some people actually might be interested enough,
or they might have access or a way to get one of those by different methods,
whatever they may be.
But what about something a little bit more, a little bit closer to home?
I think you were getting ready to talk about something closer in the closets.
Yeah, something more down to earth here.
And on the DSO level, which is, when I say mention DSO,
I'm talking about the line that actually comes into your home or to your business.
That one line is just one channel of a T1.
As I mentioned before, everything starts out,
and the carrier lever goes to a T1 and then breaks down to individual DSOs.
Now, at the home, if you leave like in a condo or an apartment-type residential area,
more than likely there's a phone room, and usually the phone room is just open.
It's an electrical room or an electrical room.
And if you look around closely, you'll see, you know, a bunch of wires and whatnot.
That's usually your telephone equipment, telephone box.
They call it a terminal as well as a block, 66 block.
Now, on those blocks is like little metal pins and whatnot that the wires are punched down on.
And didn't we actually show one of these?
Yes, Act TV, yep.
Act TV.
It was shown in that a couple blocks with the punch down,
and this is what the telephony individuals use to actually connect the phone lines
into the specific apartment or condo, and they use something called a punch down tool.
Okay.
The punch down tool is really accessible.
You can get it from any Lowe's, Home Depot, any communications book, any communications store, Radio Shack.
Fairly cheap?
You will have it.
You can get your hands on that.
No big deal.
Fairly cheap?
Fairly cheap.
There are, again, different styles to punch down tools,
but, I mean, you don't need a whole bunch of different things on.
You just need something to punch you down with if you decide to take off with your jumper.
However, most guys would like to mess around with that and, you know, use their beige box or whatever,
clip on or whatever.
Or even if you have a butt set, you can actually clip on to the pins and, you know, just go off hook,
and providing that there's a dial tone there, go off hook on the butt set and you've got dial tone.
Place a call as regular, make a call as regular, receive a call as regular.
But if someone is home at the time and someone's calling that number, if you pick up and then the residents pick up,
whoever line you're on, they want to know what the heck's going on.
But just be careful.
Well, and, of course, that's where, you know, as Ponyboy says, throw a smoke bomb and run.
Yeah.
And a flashbang if you have.
Ninja style, that's right.
Yeah, disorient them and then run.
Wow.
But, yeah, the other tools that can be used is something called a 216.
And, basically, when you think of 216, you think of measurements.
And that's exactly what it is.
It's a tool with a, like a hex end on it, which is 216.
And that's what you can also use to get into certain terminals.
And they're all standard.
No matter what terminal you go to, it's going to be 216.
And it's usually a little piece of plastic with iron on both ends.
And it's about, I don't know, six or seven inches in length.
And one end is usually a little bit bigger than the other one.
But it's still called a 216.
And there's another tool, something called an island wrench.
But it's not just your regular little iron wrench that you buy from, like, Radio Shack or whatever with the whole set.
It's usually, it's a little bit heavier.
It's a little bit bigger.
But actually a lot bigger.
And the end that you open some of the cabinets with is not flat.
It's not all steel.
It's like a little cutaway on the inside.
But when you insert the tool, it actually inserts into this little space on the cabinet where you can actually turn it.
And if that, actually, island wrench on the inside part of it isn't cut away, then you won't be able to open the cabinet.
But that's something special.
I don't think you can buy that in any store.
That's something that you would have to get from some communication, high-end book or magazine or something like that.
Possibly on eBay?
Possibly on eBay.
Yeah, I would think that you could probably find it on eBay.
But that's not something most people would have either.
And that, again, is, and those are used, again, to get into the cabinets that may be locked up or something like that?
Correct.
A lot of cases, the cabinets are just open anyway, so it might not be necessary depending on the situation.
Right, but under normal circumstances, you don't want to stand out on the corner trying to get into this box when you have a meeting room or phone room, you know, that has a door.
Right.
And you can, you know, pretty much just close the door behind you and do what you've got to do there.
But, you know, that's kind of an extreme case.
I don't know if you're going to be, you know, if you're in the dark or whatever, but.
Well, I mean, actually, that's.
But you don't want to draw too much attention to yourself, so I would kind of kind of keep it close to the meeting rooms.
Yeah, and that's actually, you kind of mentioned a good point there.
I don't think we've heard anybody mention a flashlight yet.
If you are out at night and need to be able to see but still be somewhat inconspicuous, a little light.
Actually have a light that wraps around your head or around your helmet or a hat or just around your head.
It's easy.
That way you keep your hands free.
Oh, yeah.
What I usually use is a flashlight but with a red lens.
That way, low intensity light, you know, you know, from afar you can't really see the light as opposed to like a regular flashlight with a white light.
Oh, sneaky.
Or halogen or LED.
Yeah.
You know, I usually have a red, you know, like with a special ops user, military user, have a little red tent or red cover or red film on top of it to kind of lower the intensity of the light.
Look at you all camouflaged in like Predator.
Well, you know, sometimes certain things call for certain things.
You just got to be creative sometimes, you know.
That's right.
Oh, man.
Well, what else we got?
Well, another tool that most people I'm sure have heard about is DATU.
And DATU is obviously just a system that you can call into from anywhere, providing that you have the number.
And this DATU, you can set up, you can find out what the number is to an ANAC.
But if you're ANAC and you already know what the number is or needs really ANAC, you can set up a tone, a milliwatt.
You can actually place shorts on the actual facility or the pair or the number.
Or you can open the number or you can ground it or tip ring short the pair or tip ring ground the pair or ring ground the pair.
It's basically a menu-driven system that you have to listen to if you want this, press that, if you want this, press that, if you want this, press that.
And it takes a little time to listen to all the menus.
So if you're somewhere and you're kind of in a rush, you know, it takes a little while because you have to listen.
And you have to listen carefully to what the menus are telling you, providing what you want to do on DATU.
Usually DATU is basically like a card that's set up in the central office, which is connected to a test system.
And through DATU, which actually connects to the test system, you can actually perform these different tests.
They're pretty much just tests.
You know, it's nothing really to mess up with DATU.
It's just usually testing for continuity, testing, verifying cable facility, verifying pair, verifying number, pretty much.
Right.
And, but see, generally speaking, that's also kind of a good – and we can't go into this too much because it would take way too much time on the show.
But I guess suffice it to say that there are numbers out there, whether they're numbers to a DATU unit, which is – was I correct?
It's direct access test unit, right?
Correct, correct.
But not only that, I mean, there are lots of handy numbers that you can use for testing.
And DATU is kind of a generic term referring to a lot of them.
But, I mean, a lot of other handy numbers are like the – you know, a lot of the 800 numbers are the 8s as they refer to them.
If you could go to like the old school freaking forum at BinRev.com, pimp, pimp.
And there are lots of phone numbers that are going around in there.
There's some pinned things at the top with some interesting and useful numbers that will read back your CPN, your Annie, your et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's a lot of numbers.
I mean, you can set up an asterisk box and do that yourself, but then you're dialing one of your own numbers that's associated to you.
And, yeah, we don't want to go there.
But there are a lot of other numbers out there that you can use for testing.
So if you just go out there and check out sites like oldschoolphreak.com, binrev.com, and many others out there,
you can find a lot of other useful testing numbers that you can dial.
And I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, we're talking tools and we're thinking toolkit.
We're thinking physical tools, and it's not.
A lot of the best tools are just software tools or diagnostic tools and utilities that are simply a number that you dial.
Exactly.
Mostly remote now.
We're getting to an environment all over the world where everything is done remotely.
And it's really beneficial, I think, because you don't necessarily have to be on-site to do any testing.
You do it remotely.
And a lot of the DATU systems are set up now with passwords.
So even if you do decide to get the password, be careful.
Yes, another good point.
Because they are watching.
Another very good point is absolutely, even if the password is easy or on default or whatever, a password is still a password.
As silly as it may sound, they're obviously not trying too hard to put a good password or secure it very, I would argue, that they're even trying.
They're leaving it on default.
I wouldn't even say they're trying to secure it.
But technically it exists.
So understand what you're getting into if you do cross that particular line.
Now, dialing an 800 number or some other things is probably less dangerous, I guess, for lack of a better word.
But it depends on, of course, what you're doing anyway.
You may already be in a danger zone of what you're doing anyway.
But anything password protected, obviously, is a big red flag to say, hey, this is something proprietary information.
This is whatever.
This isn't secure.
If you're unauthorized, you can face some serious actions.
As many have done recently.
Yeah, so just be careful.
I mean, you know, if they have it there for a reason, they don't want you there, then, you know, just move on to something a little bit more easier or unpassword protected.
And you know what?
And we're, of course, just putting this information out there as tools, and we're not telling you to use them or how to use them or to use them at all.
So just putting it out there for what it's worth.
Educational purposes only.
That's right.
Put the little disclaimer on there.
All right.
Well, and actually, that's kind of a good segue.
I don't want to cut you off if you had something else.
Oh, no.
Go ahead.
I think that's kind of a good segue into one of our next people is kind of talking what you mentioned about the changes or the remote administration and stuff like that is, you know, there's kind of this – and this is just me making this up.
I don't know if there is an official distinction, but kind of like old-school freaking versus new-school freaking if there is such a thing.
And, yes, I'm just making this stuff up.
But, you know, old-school freaking, you think of going out to these boxes and seeing how they work.
And that's all well and good and still interesting and still fun, but a lot of the new-school freaking is more VoIP-oriented.
It's more remote where you're just accessing and interfacing with the computers behind the physical phone system.
All right.
Well, even all the phone system and switches are now basically just software-driven, and a lot of ISPs, a lot of providers, cell providers, regular landline providers are going more towards the software, going more towards VoIP, going more towards just IP-based networking.
They're kind of getting away from all the switches, the one-day switch with the relays and all of that jazz.
Everything is really going to be IP-based, I suspect, in the next – within 25, 30 years, I would think, or less.
Yeah, probably.
I would think even less.
Yeah.
But thinking along those lines with the VoIP and the new-school freaking, I think we will move on and let Natis talk about that a little bit,
because I'm pretty sure that's more into Natis' jurisdiction and area of expertise, even though he does run OldSchoolFreak.com.
Right.
So, ZeroDB, thank you for being on the show, buddy.
Hey, any time, man.
Any time.
And I look forward to having some fun up in New York City here in about a month, right?
Oh, yeah.
We'll be up there representing the South.
That's right.
The dirty, dirty.
So, we will see you guys up there.
Thanks again.
And let's move on to Natis.
All right.
So, we've heard from a lot of freaks on what's in their toolkit today.
So, let's let her turn to somebody that's, I guess, a little bit different from your average freak.
I hope that's not a bad thing to say, but a little bit more new school, if you will.
So, I decided to get Natis on the phone to talk about what's in his freak toolkit.
Natis, what do you got for us?
Yo.
So, I don't know.
I feel kind of weird because I'm looking at this right on the forums where this whole thing started.
And, I mean, everybody's got pictures of all their stuff and all these tools, like wire cutters and all that crazy stuff, multimeters and stuff like that.
But I don't have anything like that, really.
I mean, I have, right in front of me, I have a Harris TS-19 butt set that I got from a friend.
His dad actually had it in the garage sitting around.
He got it from work.
I think he stole it from work.
And he didn't even know what it was, so he gave it to me.
So, I mean, I have a butt set.
Do you actually carry that around with you, though, on your freak adventures?
Sometimes.
Certain things in New York City, yeah, it was used for.
Uh-huh.
We'll leave it right there on that.
But, yeah, you're more into more like the kind of the software side of things, the soft phone, that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, you know, you asked me if I carry around like a Supera or an Eeksy when I travel.
But I actually don't.
I know some people who do.
But I think maybe if I was going to, like, Defcon or Hope or something, I would definitely bring one of those, probably an Eeksy or maybe even a Cisco phone.
But that would be in my toolkit.
But, yeah, I'm a lot more software-based, I guess, as long as I have my BlackBerry.
That's my main freak toolkit feature right there with the BlackBerry.
What about a good old-fashioned tone dialer?
I had a couple of them, but I modded them all to be red boxes.
But you don't carry those around with you either?
No, not anymore.
So you carry your laptop.
Yeah, it's kind of funny that you said that, and I thought about the red boxing thing.
Because last time when I was at Hope, I had my power book pressed up against the microphone of a phone.
It's a red box.
You should have got that.
That would have been a good visual there.
Yeah, that would have been pretty funny, actually.
Everybody was looking at me.
They obviously knew what I was doing.
So, I mean, again, you've got the CrackBerry.
I mean, when you're on the road traveling for whatever reason, you don't find a need for, like I said earlier,
my Sapporo box that I talk about or a VoIP phone of any kind.
I mean, with a cell phone, I mean, you already got all the long distance you can eat.
Is there really any need to carry that around?
No, not really.
As long as I have a BlackBerry, like I said, I'm set.
I have a, obviously, everything's hooked up to Asterisk.
And so I have specific web, some custom web pages I made with PHP and stuff that will do certain things for me.
So a lot of it is software-based, yeah.
So do you do a lot of?
As long as I have web browser access, which I can do right through my BlackBerry.
And that's what I was going to say.
Do you do a lot of remote administration?
Do you use your Asterisk box while you're on the road for many things?
Yep, I would say that's the main accessory in my Freak Toolkit next to my cell phone.
Is your Asterisk box and remote access to your Asterisk box.
Yep.
Good old BlackBerry web browser.
So that's the new school, huh?
I guess so, even though I run old school Freak.
Well, maybe we need to register new school Freak.
Sure.
Kind of put them up side by side.
There'll be sister sites or something like that.
We better do it before this episode airs or somebody's going to fucking gank it.
Oh, shit.
Like, they stole my Freak vids, dumb man.
Oh, that was not cool at all.
No.
Of course, you're a dumbass for letting it expire, but that's neither here nor there.
Yep, exactly.
All right, man.
Well, thanks for being on the show, and we're going to move on.
All right, thanks for having me on.
Thank you.
Later.
Okay, Dr. Zygman, are we back on the show here?
I think we are.
All righty.
So, I'm not going to chime in on the Freak toolkit because I think that they covered it pretty well.
And I had a wide variety of different people's ideas and opinions and preferences from the kind of talking about some of the higher-end expensive tools down to some software tools to VoIP to physical hardware tools.
So, pretty good wide variety of ideas in that.
So, I thought that was pretty cool.
All right.
Well, I think we've done enough damage for this episode.
So, let's wrap it up, shall we?
I think there's no time like the present.
Yeah, right.
Oh, mercy.
Well, I guess for shouts, I'll take the easy way out and give shouts to everybody who helped contribute to tonight's show, to Live and Dead, to ZeroDB, to Natus, to Ponyboy, to our good friend, Dual Parallel, to Dr. Zygman, of course.
Who else?
Oh, I guess that's enough for tonight.
How about you?
Let me just want to do a couple of shouts to some of my new co-workers.
I don't want to say any names, but it's really good to work with a lot of these people, and I'm really learning a lot working with them.
So, I appreciate everything you guys are helping me with.
So, let's keep it up, right?
Cool.
They're not going to listen anyway.
That's true, but then at least if they ever said, well, you don't like us, I can be like, hey, if you listen back to episode 150.
Yeah.
So, you've said it, and you've post-dated it, so that if it ever comes up, you can say it.
Hey, you know what?
As long as Maynus is jumping and telling them that I actually got this job at a BINREV561 meeting.
Oh, yeah, that is actually a really good story.
So, okay, so we've got a quick extra minute.
Go for it.
So, here we are.
You know, we're doing our BINREV561.
BINREV561, we received an email.
Actually, I believe you got the email first, right, Stank?
I got an email from a gentleman who was looking to come to the BINREV561 meeting, which I am no longer able to make.
So, he was nice enough to forward it along to me, and I got in touch with them, and it turned out they were hiring for, you know, support texts and stuff like that.
But they wanted to, you know, stop by and say hello.
So, I figured, hey, if nothing else, it would be nice to talk to a couple of people who are, like, in the real world and be like, well, let's at least hear about it, see what's going on.
So, they came by.
They first, you know, I gave them, like, a minute or two to do their spiel.
And when they finished doing their spiel, I had us all go around, and we talked about some of our specialties, what we enjoy, be it Wi-Fi or encryption or programming, et cetera, et cetera.
And they basically said, so, does anybody want to work?
Does anybody want a job?
And I was like, hey, I can use a new job after the fiasco I just went through.
So, it was cool.
They came down, and that's what, see what your BINREV meeting can do for you.
We can get you employed.
We're getting people jobs.
Jobs?
We're getting people jobs, damn it.
You're hacking the payoff.
Don't expect a finder's fee.
Yeah, well, yeah, we get a cut, right?
Yeah, right.
That'll be the day.
Donate to our server costs or something like that?
I run a server.
Actually, that was kind of, it was actually, it was kind of a fun story because, truthfully, we just invited them, you know, because everybody's welcome to come to the meetings just to hang out or nothing else.
It wasn't anything about the jobs.
That was all secondary, but it's just kind of funny that it worked out that way.
Yeah, it is.
It's very, you know, you never know.
Well, you always got to be, you got to be open to whatever's going on, so anybody's out there, especially for the BINREV meetings, anybody who wants to go, you know, if you're a police officer, you're more than welcome to stop by.
We would love to have an officer of the law there.
Well, love is kind of a strong word.
Well, I think it'd be interesting, you know.
I'm just kidding.
I mean, I don't want them to stay the entire time.
We'd like for them to leave so we can make fun of them, but, you know, it'd still be cool to have them make a quick visit.
Well, I mean, you may be able to get them to, you know, wipe off some tickets, wipe some tickets off the system or something for you, but, yeah, probably not.
All right, let's see, the site of the week this week.
There's a really good site.
Let me see, I do have a tiny URL still.
It's tinyurl.com slash D as in dog, B as in boy, R as in rocket, X as in x-ray, and B as in boy.
And what it is is it's an IPN tester, which is the PayPal instant payment notification.
But what's cool about it is it will actually take you to the web page and will show you, like, output, because I do some debug output usually.
And when you do PayPal testing with the sandbox, it just kind of posts back to you.
You don't get to see how it worked or not.
But with this script, you can actually put in all the information you want to post to your IPN script, and you can follow it along.
So if you want to echo stuff back out to the web page while you're debugging it, you can do it through this site.
And this is a cool little, for anybody who has to do IPN stuff, you don't know how much you needed it until you see it.
So email us, radio at binrev.com.
Closing music this week is from our good friend Zerl, a new track called Burning Sun Will Rise.
So Zerl bringing it down, holding it down for the hackers and the crackers.
I think that is it.
So Dr. Carrot Zigman.
That was my pleasure.
It's always an honor to be able to have a chance to do a binrev radio with Stank Dolls.
But you and I are going to have to be the ones to tell everybody that we will see them next week, same hack time.
Same hack channel.
Later.
My burning sun's the Sunday ride.
Show them now we come off the ship.
Capitalist life is twisted.
No love tight-fisted.
Consciousness lifted.
Paradigm shifted.
Don't be the same to be different.
Every day's the same.
All people feel in pain.
This greed got me drained.
This rage I can't contain.
Happiness I can't feign.
I've gone insane on this train.
We ghost dance, not for rain, but to stop your rain.
System in flames, strung out on greed.
Maybe more suffering than death is what we need.
Maybe worse is better, you see.
Expose the truth to those too blind to see.
Like butterfly I flutter on the tops of the redwood trees.
Come with me.
Population brain dead.
Pharmaceuticals fucking with our heads.
Sound of the underground calls to be down.
Compelled to rebel, deep water and he drowned.
Abolish our hope.
Demolished by the rich vote.
Bishops keep elect.
Just another evil pope.
My burning sun was Sunday ride.
Show them now we come off the ship.
My burning sun was Sunday ride.
Rhythm and my words are like the birds and they may fly.
Working for the system, don't deserve to live.
It's time to die.
How can a young motherfucker throw with no food?
What's the reason why?
Tied to America by birth.
But I'm kin to you because of hunger and thirst.
Fighting the fight that's been the same.
Keeping the light, the flame that keeps us sane.
My fucking brain trained.
I'm gonna kill my boss soon so I never complain.
We laid in wait so long.
One bullet in my rifle and we gone like the Viet Cong.
Receive the way you deceive and weave.
Your lies, the people never believe.
The scraps we plead.
Covered up, dirty deeds, education and ignored needs.
Living off the back of the blood of the dark.
Like the fleas, no place to flee.
The fog of war is all they see.
Death on every channel on my TV.
My burning sun will someday rise.
Situation critical.
My comrades are cynical.
Bourgeoisie, fattened, drinkin' they fill.
Socialism hidden, but for our order.
But for now until we rise from the flames.
That burned up our heroes.
All that remains is ideas and names.
Of those committed to change.
Poverty make a genius deranged.
Trying to feed the kids on a pocket of change.
Lead the kids in the prison.
Breeding selfishness.
Making every fucking decision.
Language is no longer poetry.
But a tool of duplicity.
Stolen from our hands.
Forgotten our ancestors.
Form capitalist symbols and name brands.
Swearin' we can taste this illusion.
Drunk in our cocoon.
Dispollution.
Filling each breath with complicit delusion.
My burning sun will someday rise.
Show them now we've come off the shelf.
My burning sun will someday rise.
Show them now we've come off the shelf.
í see you.
I love you, Sam.
He will constantly rise.
I love you in our NASW,
I love you, Sam.
I love you today.
I love you.
decree I love you, Sam.
I love you, Sam.
I love you.
I love you, Sam.
And I love you.
And I love you, Sam.