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 jpegs of you
and a fag pwned.
In your digital stance, getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the net in my six-fold.
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 out 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 criminals.
Serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs, SIFs.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crack.
And hello to everybody who is now joining us for the second of our doubleheader episodes here.
This is episode number 189.
It is airing on March 6, 2007.
And it is going to be hosted by our good, good friend Droops,
who did a great interview with the guys from over at Hack 5.
So I'm going to let Droops take it away.
Welcome everyone to Binary Revolution Radio.
My name is Droops and I have two special guests.
It's special as in Ed, not special as in, hey look, they're cool.
And they're from a show called Hack 5.
Why don't you all introduce yourselves?
Hey, I'm Wes from Hack 5.
And my name is Darren from Hack 5.
And Wes and Darren are some guys that came up to a BINREV member, or a DDP member,
and said, hey, we'd like to be on your Hacker Media site.
At which I then proceeded to contact them and say, you have to be on this show.
And we want to talk to you all before we're on the Hacker Media site.
Because we've been doing some thinking about Hacker Media and what it means
and what we need to allow on the site.
And the more I talked to these guys, the more I liked them.
Because they have really, really good heads on their shoulders, even if they're idiots.
And I say that in the nicest possible way.
I'm just joking, guys.
But you're in short.
So why don't you all explain a little bit what Hack 5 is,
in case a couple of people don't know what it is,
to kind of give yourself some credibility.
And if you have anything else you want to explain of why you're a cool guy
and people should listen to you, just go right ahead.
Well, we kind of advertise ourselves, for lack of better terms,
as tech television with a twist.
And we enjoy trying to bring kind of like the underground,
like certain kind of underground shady things.
And I'm not saying completely illegal.
But we like to show people how to hack.
And hack in the most general term, as far as hardware, software.
Darren's turned his cellular phone into the epitome of universal remote control.
He's definitely the software guy.
I'm a hardware guy.
I've built an arcade cabinet, a DDR pad.
I started off showing people how to do like, you know,
like kind of custom modifications to their case.
You know, like the classic painting and stuff like that.
Most recently, I built a liquor cabinet with LEDs in it just to make your liquor look cool
because liquor looks cool enough, but it looks better with LED.
And so, you know, that's what we try to do.
We try to bring good quality, technologically based content
in a very light, humorous, and entertaining manner
so that it's not like sitting in your science classroom
and banging your head against the textbook.
Well, I watch a bunch of these Internet TV shows.
And that's what they have, not a radio show.
But a lot of the IPTV is one guy sitting there talking.
And I really enjoy that you all have, you know, at least two people in the studio
that are interacting with each other and can ask questions.
On my radio show, we had this guy named Cotton that came on.
He didn't know anything about computers,
but he would ask questions I wouldn't even think about asking.
And you all do a really good job of explaining things that way
instead of a, here's how you do it.
Listen to me.
It's, well, how do you do it this way?
And then you all explain it.
I really enjoy that.
Thank you.
I mean, one of the things is we try to take it rather than doing the step-by-step thing
because if we're going to do a step-by-step on something like, for example, Synergy,
which is kind of a virtual KVM piece of software, you know,
there's so many ways to do it because it's multi-platform
that you could spend an entire 40 minutes on that.
So we try to do kind of like the high-level overview with links to other resources
and kind of get people familiar with it.
And that usually makes for good white hat stuff.
And then, of course, there's the black hat side of it too.
But, you know, we try to reach a general audience when it comes to all things geekery.
What kind of audience are all targeting?
Or do you all find that's watching the show at least?
I guess when we started making the show, our target audience was ourselves.
We were thinking, hey, what would I like to watch?
And, you know, we're in our mid-20s and we're into all things hacking and geeking
and modding and stuff like that.
So, you know, I guess we are the perfect example of our audience.
Awesome.
So, do you all get a lot of, like, fan email, things like that?
Fair amount.
I'm not going to say that our inboxes get flooded by it.
But, you know, we have a lot of people that, you know, are part of our community.
And I do call it a community because we really, really enjoy, you know, talking to our viewers.
And we have an IRC channel and we have a Hack5 hotline where people can, you know, like, voicemail us or whatever.
We have a game server that we host a different game on all the time.
So, I mean, we pride ourselves on that.
But, you know, they don't really flood us because we hang out with them so much.
And so they'll send us questions and we'll answer them on air if they're really cool and stuff like that.
Or they'll just say, hey, you know, nice job.
Really enjoy the show.
Mm-hmm.
That's something I do enjoy about the community of a show like this is that, you know, I'm in IRC all day talking to people in Benrov.
And I'm, you know, on the Benrov forums all the time.
And it's not that, hey, it's some guy that's the awesome guy that's actually on the media.
It's, hey, he just happens to do that while he's part of the community.
And I enjoy that.
Exactly.
And we do, too.
And I kind of feel like, you know, if you just watch Hack5, you're only getting half the experience.
Because really the other part of the show is the community, whether it's on IRC or the forums or wiki or game servers like Wes said.
There's, you know, a lot more to it than just watching.
Because you can really participate.
And I love the fact that we get developers interested in some of the stuff we show off.
And we may show off something that's, like, console-based, you know, in Java.
And, for example, we did a hack that allows you to rip music off of Pandora so you can time shift it, put it in your iPod,
and then listen to it on your way to work.
And that started off as kind of like a little console app in Java.
Next thing you know, the community really, you know, takes to it.
And now there's a web server that runs a beautiful interface, integrates with Last.fm.
And does all sorts of great things.
And this is because we introduced something general and gave a good overview of it and put the code out there and allowed it to grow.
So it's kind of an open source aspect of the show.
That's awesome, guys.
I was watching some of y'all's videos.
And I'm trying not to talk too much about your show, but I have a bunch of questions about the show.
So we're going to get them through real quick.
And there's a lot of IPTV shows out there.
And you have a really, really high video quality of your show.
And when we first saw it, we thought, oh, these guys are getting paid to do this.
You know, they're not doing all the video work.
They're just standing in front of the cameras.
And, you know, obviously I'm completely wrong.
And y'all are doing all the grunt work, too.
So what do y'all use to do your video stuff?
And can you give some tips to people that want to make their show better?
And my house phone is ringing.
It's here.
Hold on.
I'm going to cut this part out.
Hello?
Wes, go grab another beer.
May I ask what this is about?
I'm not interested, man.
Thanks.
They want a donation.
We want donations.
Doesn't everybody?
So talk about, like, your video quality and where y'all learned how to do that.
Give me just a moment because Wes is done to get a beer.
And as soon as he gets back, he can just cut from there.
Oh, beer.
That's what I forgot to do.
I'm going to go grab one, too.
You can't do it.
Okay, cool.
We'll wait.
All right.
Oh.
Get that one on audio.
Okay.
Trying to get a beer, as well.
As y'all can tell, a very professionally done show.
Yes.
It sounds about like a filming of an episode of Hack 5.
A little editing to hide all that stuff.
Stop the cameras.
Wes needs another beer.
They put beer off camera.
Start the show again.
We've been renovating our office.
And we exposed the brick walls.
It's a really old historical building.
And then I was watching your show today.
I was like, damn it.
They have brick walls behind them now.
They're not real.
Oh, I know.
They're not real.
They look good.
They do look good.
But now I'm going to just be copying.
I'm going to put plaster all back up on the walls again.
Okay.
So do you want to ask the question again, since it rang halfway through your question?
Sure.
Okay.
Well, we noticed y'all have very high video quality.
And we thought that you guys are just getting paid by this.
And someone else is doing all the grunt work.
But when I spoke with y'all, I found out that y'all are doing all the grunt work.
There's no money y'all are really making.
And one of y'all has been to film school, maybe?
Yes, I've kind of been to film school.
And that is because I was dating a girl for a long time that was in film school.
And as such, I was going to her classes and picking up everything I could.
Of course, I couldn't afford to go to film school.
So I was enjoying doing the projects and learning the tricks of the trade.
And I wish that I could say that if you watch our latest stuff, that's how it's always been.
But it's definitely not.
If you go back and watch the pilot of our first season, it's pretty bad.
But, you know, the more we do it, the more we learn.
And, you know, it's one of those things where, like, if you have a dream and you, you know, put it off and put it off,
you know, it always seems like it's going to be so much better.
But if you go and do something, well, the first time you do it, it's going to suck.
But at least the next time you do it, you're going to suck that much less.
So, you know, it's all just been trial and error.
And also, we've been fortunate enough to work with some people that do terrestrial television.
And by doing that, we're able to pick up some of the tricks of the trade
in the television industry, if you will.
And that's allowed us to really, you know, beef up our production quality.
Well, you all just use standard DV cameras, I assume.
Right.
We're using a trio of Sony DCR-HC85s.
Does anyone man those during the, like, the shots?
Or do they just sit on tripods and then you all edit them?
Well, it's kind of a mixture thereof because we do have Paul the camera guy.
He's a good friend of ours who's also a pretty hardcore geek.
And he'll come in and he'll do a lot of the close-up shots and stuff.
And anything kind of freehand, he'll take care of that.
But we did originally start off with Mr. Tripod and a remote control.
Ooh.
Sporty.
Yeah, Tripod's really good.
He works for Peanuts.
Awesome.
How do you do your little titles and fanciness?
That's all done in a combination of Vegas and Photoshop.
Okay.
Sony Vegas is the non-linear editing system that we use.
And, you know, it's great for rapid development.
I mean, you can just jump into that program and in just a few days totally grok it
and, you know, have a good feel for it.
Good deal.
So you're using Windows to do all that mess.
Well, if you can point me to a commercially supported or open-source alternative
for the Linux or Unix platform, I would be very pleased.
Well, I thought you guys were the ones that knew things like that.
I don't know.
I used to use Windows Media Maker or whatever it's called.
Windows Movie Maker?
Yeah.
And it's pretty bad.
Hey, you know, you can't knock Windows Movie Maker
because anybody that's going to get into this, go ahead and try it
because at least it's free.
At least it comes with your copy of Windows.
Well, I guess if you want to call that free.
And, you know...
Or iMovie with your Mac.
iMovie's about the same.
Yeah.
iMovie's actually a lot better than Windows Movie Maker.
You can do some pretty powerful stuff with iMovie.
Yeah.
But there's certainly no Final Cut Pro or anything.
No.
Which you probably have to...
I don't think you need that.
Huh?
You don't need something like Final Cut Pro or Avid or Premiere Pro
to do a show like we do.
You could get by with Vegas or iMovie.
I don't think you could do it with Windows Movie Maker.
I believe Jason Scott used Vegas to put together the BBS documentary.
Oh, I cannot wait to see that.
Have you all not seen that?
No, I haven't.
I grew up with the BBSs.
I love the scene.
But I haven't...
You know, I just need to go and buy it.
So what's your first computer since you grew up with BBSs?
My first computer was a IBM PC XT 4.7 MHz with 512 RAM.
It had a 1200 baud modem.
And as for me, I came into the geek scene way much later.
Like by the time I was on the geek scene, 56K modems were generic.
You know, like broadband hadn't been out yet,
but everybody had a 56K internet connection.
And I started off playing Counter-Strike piggybacked on EOL as I hang my head.
I had a Commodore 64,
and I had a modem for a little less than a month
before my dad got the phone bill.
Oh, boy.
Took care of that problem.
I hear somebody was maybe war dialing out of state?
Little Andrew was being bad.
Wow.
You know, there's a little blue box that might have helped you back then.
Yeah, I had no idea about all that mess at the time.
Yeah, that's right.
That started off with the red box anyway, so.
And then I got a fancy IBM 286.
Ooh, envy.
And I remember going down and buying Windows 3.1 with my dad.
He bought me a mouse, and I was like,
how the hell am I going to use this?
That's where he turned to the dark side, folks.
You already hear.
Yeah, yeah.
The 3.1.
Yeah, I had my 3.1.1 because I was cool.
Slackware 1.0?
Huh?
Yeah.
Well, I was saying, like, what was Slackware at at that time?
Slackware 1.0, which was kind of a three-week install.
Yeah.
I'm exaggerating, but.
Little kid Andrew didn't understand such things at the time.
Ah, yes.
And now big kid Andrew wouldn't dare try to install that on that old hardware
because that's a waste of time.
Yeah.
My first machine was actually an AMD Athlon, 900 megahertz.
I had a, what was it, a 3D Savage 2000 64 meg AGP card.
Like, I custom built it.
It was like my first machine ever, and I was so proud because I custom built it.
But, and, you know, like, so I budgeted where I could,
but I had to make sure I had plenty of gaming machine available.
And, but before that, let's see, the first computer I really remember us having in the house
was, like, I don't even know what it was.
I think we bought it at, like, Sam's Club or something.
And it was some horrible IBM clone running some kind of, like, it was running DOS,
but some, like, nasty, nasty, like, I can't even remember what it was
because I was, you know, like, young and dumb.
Like, some weird GUI interface that was, like, all DOS, like, five colors.
Awesome.
And then from, oh, yeah, dude, it was, like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, all, like, through and through.
And then from there, that's basically what it was.
So that or, like, Norton, whatever the hell it was back then?
No, it was some kind of weird proprietary thing.
I mean, that's how far, like, far away it was.
The Sam's Club OS.
What's that?
Yeah, the Sam's Club OS.
Yeah.
But, and then that was, like, 286, I think, and, like, I was just, like, so stoked
because I could, like, start playing, like, Doom and Doom 2 with my friends.
And then from there, we went to some other machine that had a Cyrix chip in it,
a Cyrix processor.
And, like, that kept having borked bits.
Like, we couldn't figure it out, dude.
Like, that thing would just, like, die and then die and then die.
We're, like, what the hell?
So we finally traded that in on, like, a gateway.
And it was, like, a gateway, like, oh, God, what was it?
I think it was a P1.
It was a gateway with a P1 in it, and we sat on that thing for a while.
And then that's when I finally got my own box.
I invested the money into it, and I was so happy.
And then the box looked completely different, like, six months later
after I got a hold of it with a Dremel and a can of spray paint.
Oh, yeah.
Dremel and spray paint.
That's just a recipe for disaster or genius.
It depends on how it's done.
But we don't let...
It's a recipe for using up all those little discs.
Yeah, really.
Like, crazy.
Oh, I found out that you can't, like, if you try to cut sheet metal
with the regular, like, sanding grinder discs, they don't work.
You have to get the reinforced one.
You know, the easiest way to cut sheet metal is just with a jigsaw
and a metal-cutting blade.
But that's not nearly as fun as doing it with a Dremel.
It's so much safer and faster.
But it's not as sweet.
Let's see.
I heard sheet metal will cut you if you punch it.
I've heard that as well.
I wouldn't know too much about that.
Yeah, I've been cut by a roofing tin.
It's not a fun cut.
You wouldn't think it'd be that sharp.
Oh, dude, it's razor sharp.
And then on top of that, you get that nice zinc galvanizing inside the cut, too,
and it burns so nice.
You know what else is fun?
Tetanus shots.
Those are great.
And Vicodin.
Vicodin with Rickards Red.
That's where it's at.
Kids, don't do drugs.
Yeah, I heard Vicodin and Red Bull really mix as well.
Oh, it didn't?
Well, it's good to know.
Well, keep that in mind.
You have to experiment, you know?
I'm going to file that under stupid.
Yeah, you have to file most things I say under stupid.
CD slash stupid.
We have a whole room for that file at the house.
No, slash home, slash user, slash Andrew, slash stupid.
Yeah.
CD pub, more beer.
Yay!
Okay.
So what kind of beer are you all drinking?
I'm drinking a Rickards Red.
It's just brought it down from Canada last weekend.
Fancy.
I'm drinking a Sleeman's Honey Brown Lager, also from Canada.
What's great about Canada is, like, the lowest alcohol percentage you find in their beer is what I'm drinking right now, which is 5.2%.
Hmm.
But their liquor, on the other hand, is another story.
Where their liquor's still weak, you're better off drinking liquor in the U.S.
Yeah.
The Canadian cocktails are, like, one ounce of liquor, whereas our cocktails are three ounces of liquor.
Yet, their beer is so much more potent.
Hmm.
But you can get absinthe up there, as I found out on one trip.
Yeah, I'm drinking a Miller Lite Tony.
I live in a dry county.
I have to drink what I can find.
They still have dry counties?
Oh, yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, come on down to Mississippi.
It's called the Bible Belt.
Ah, yes.
And you probably live in the Belt and Buckle.
Yes.
We live right, actually, next to the Buckle.
Ah.
Yeah, yeah.
Good times had by all.
I'm sure.
Yeah.
You know, the drinking your beer on the way home from the other counties.
You know, where you had to go get it.
Let's see.
Where are we at?
So, you guys started off, one of y'all started really early in the computer thing, and then, you know, a while back.
How did y'all get your start deciding to do, like, video?
Were you nervous?
Were you like, hey, you know, we're not as cool as we think we are, maybe?
This was a dream that Wes and I had back, you know, years and years ago.
This goes back to when we first met in high school.
Seven years?
Yeah, it's pretty long now.
And, you know, when we met, our first project together, you know, as we were becoming good friends,
we had a project for a government class where we had to do some creative project for one of the elections.
And we decided to do a video because I had experience in, like, stop motion with Legos and other little videos like that that I really enjoyed.
And I was like, hey, let's do a video.
We got to edit that thing on a linear editing system, a piece of crap called a Casablanca.
I mean, it's no way you're even near a toaster.
It's pretty bad.
But that's how Wes and I got started in video.
And from then, we started doing, like, short movies that have never been published online and probably never will be.
Are they erotic movies?
No, they are not erotic movies.
Damn.
Yeah, I'm sure you wanted to watch that one.
I'm always in the market for some tasteful porn.
I bet.
I'm not going to find out on Hack 5, unfortunately.
No, ours is completely tasteless.
Well, we have a blonde Vonshell.
She's not blonde anymore, though.
Well, she's naturally blonde.
That is Allie, and she's featured so much more now in the episodes.
And she does a wonderful, wonderful job, and we don't know what we'd do without her.
You're supposed to save that for the shouts at the end.
Oh.
That's okay.
I'm just thinking.
At the end, though, I thought I did not know.
I expect Nick.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Where do you get y'all's ideas from?
Do y'all ever maybe use someone else's idea without giving them credit?
Or do you always give credit?
Or is this a lot of original content?
We always give credit.
Okay.
About that.
When we first started, it was all original content.
And that all came from grilling food for dinner, sitting on the back porch, having a few beers,
kicking around some ideas, writing it down.
I was going to say you're from a dry county, so you're probably unfamiliar with the idea of grilling and swilling.
I'm not from here.
I just live here now.
So that's how things started off.
And then on a few episodes, we've done a handful of segments where we've actually taken content from the community.
We'll send us some code or send us some proof of concept stuff, and we'll try to take that and demo it,
and hopefully it'll evolve through our community.
Most recently...
They send their code to our code and make some shit happen.
Exactly.
And, you know, through that, we always credit.
And I think the first time was with the Pandora time-shifting hack, and then most recently the USB switchblade.
And those are always credited.
And, you know, the people in the forums love that because then we can develop it further.
And that's just our philosophy.
And I guess most very recently we've even started letting people that are really interested in the show, you know,
the hardcore fans that want to, like, help us out and help us develop ideas since it's a full-time job,
and it takes so much, you know, time and effort and money and everything to get this done.
So we started kind of open sourcing a bit and started what's called the Hack 5 Development Team,
or, as they like to call it, Dev.5.
And that's where they kick around ideas.
And if something sounds good, we're like, yeah, dude, let's totally do this on the show.
And, you know, we'll develop some code on a special place on our forums that anybody can sign up to get in on.
And that's where we come up with ideas, and they come into the show.
Awesome, guys.
Where do you record this thing at?
It looks like, I don't know, someone's garage, maybe?
It's actually our apartment.
We threw out the kitchen table and all the chairs.
And, like, when we first started, we were like, hey, you know what?
We're going to release once a month.
It's not going to be a problem.
So you know what?
We'll slap a poster on the wall.
We'll keep our dining room.
We'll rig up a couple of lights.
And you know what?
We'll shoot.
We'll break it down.
We'll have our room back.
No big deal.
Well, as the show has progressed, and we've tried to strive for a much higher quality
in both video and content, we discovered that the whole collapsible stage idea,
the whole collapsible set, was a no-go.
So we had to throw out the kitchen table, throw out the chairs.
You know, we have no place to eat except for the living room couch.
And then just completely overtook the, what would be the dining room of an apartment
and built a set there, slowly but surely.
And you can see, you know, on the end of season one, you can see where, you know,
like, we've got, like, sheets pinned to the wall.
That's where the nice red walls come from.
It's just sheets.
It's, like, king-size bed sheets, just thumbtacked to the wall nice and tight.
And I love the lighting.
The lighting consists of, you know, scoop lamps that you can buy for $6 from your local
hardware shop.
And using valence curtain rods into the ceiling, we've kind of rigged up a little place
where we can clip on lights.
And it's a mess.
And if you actually go to the Hack 5 group flicker, you can see some of the photos from
the development of the season two set, which is just a blast.
That's awesome.
So y'all have an apartment together.
Y'all have known each other for a while.
Would you describe this as, like, a cool apartment or more like a hacker apartment?
This is a bachelor pad.
Bachelor pad with a recording setup.
Yeah, pretty much.
No, I'm not going to lie.
You know, we do have, like, the wireless access point and, you know, like, Cat 5 cable running
all over the place.
Darren's got a switch in his room.
I've got a switch in my room because we have, like, seriously, like, 20 functional computers
in the apartment.
Awesome.
I think we tallied it up the other day, and it was, you know, a little over three terabytes
of computing.
I don't know how many flops it is, but we've got a lot of disk space.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we've got a terabyte just for the show, and then we've got a, like, 320 gig, uh, is
that a Fujitsu?
No, no, no, that's a, uh, a Seagate.
It's one of the, no, it's the perpendicular drive.
I thought that was a Hitachi.
No, it's a Seagate.
Nah, anyway, anyway.
Well, we have, like, a 320 gig, uh, free NAS, uh, NAS storage computer.
You're, I've got, uh, two desktops in my room.
Darren has two desktops in his room.
We both have, what, two laptops.
Now we've got a laptop.
Oh, yeah, it's just, you know, if you walk into our place and you want to get online,
it's, like, wireless, or there's a network jack somewhere.
Just turn to the left to the right.
There's a network jack in front of you, behind you.
There's some way to connect to the Internet.
Like, if we could actually, like, Beowulf cluster all of our computers together, we could
crack any hatch.
We could probably, we could probably, uh, take over the world, Wes.
Isn't that on our, uh, on our business plan?
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Well, I don't know, Brent.
How are we going to get the monkeys and the rubber pants?
Oh, boy.
Well, I'm just curious about it.
Um, we're setting up an office in our little town, and we've rented out this massive building.
And it's mainly just for two of us and our servers and all our crap.
Because I'm having a baby, and I have to get a lot of my shit out of the house.
Just as it goes.
And I've only got, I'm counting them up, 12 or 13 computers in this room right now that
are on.
That are on and running.
Nice.
Yeah, I've got a 1U server sitting on my desk with a Mac Mini on top of it.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
So what you need to do now is Beowulf cluster all those together and join the Hack 5 Folding
at Home group, which our community set up for us, which is awesome.
Well, most of them are going to be for work.
We're doing the drywall at the office, so we only have one computer down there.
So I have one server that's just eating drywall dust.
Nice.
And let me tell you, it actually makes them run better.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you can actually hear them running.
You know, it's a lot better than the quiet operation.
Yeah, you can hear like that fan grinding, all that nice drywall.
Well, you know your fans are on that way.
Oh, yeah, because you can hear them running.
And if that noise goes away, you're like, oh, the fan broke.
And that's much better than if it was quiet.
Definitely.
And it's better than paying all that money for the enterprise server software that tells
you when the fan broke.
But, you know, it's interesting, actually.
We did a survey for these last two episodes at hack5.org slash survey to find out more about
our demographics and stuff like that.
And one of the questions was, how many computers do you have, you know, in your house?
And the answers were like, zero, I'm doing this on an abacus, all the way through six
or more, I live in a knock.
And, you know, the majority of our viewers actually have a knock in their bedroom.
So, I think that's awesome.
Well, what operating systems do you all run?
Well, I run just Windows and most recently Ubuntu.
Okay.
And I also run Windows for obvious reasons.
And I've actually been toying with FreeBSD, which has been a whole lot of fun.
I actually have to go through and do a reinstall of it because I got, like, I tried to get
ahead of myself and I was like, hey, you know, it's going to be really cool if I can dual-boot
my laptop with two completely different free, or excuse me, open-source operating systems.
I was like, and it's going to rock and I'll be lead.
So, I already had FreeBSD set up.
And when I formatted for the FreeBSD, I left a partition open to install something else,
some kind of, one of the, like, five million different distros of Linux.
And a friend of ours came over and he's a big Gen 2 fan.
I was like, hey, do you have your Gen 2 CD with you?
And he's like, yeah.
I'm like, well, let's do the dual-boot on my laptop.
It'll be great.
And Gen 2 ate my BSD.
Awesome.
No, it wasn't.
I was pissed.
Dude, and I think Paul's got a BSD in the world.
Yeah.
I think our camera guy, Paul, is running Windows Vista, Mac OS X point whatever the latest flavor
is, and FedoraCore, I believe.
So, he's running all the three major ones.
Well, I'm going to spin around in my room and point them out.
I've got OS X, I've got FedoraCore 5, I've got CENOS, CENOS, Slackware 10.2, is that the
last one?
BIOS, which is really cool.
I was about to ask if you had BIOS.
That's awesome.
Debian.
Spin around.
Mac.
What are these?
I don't know.
Some Slackware and Red Hat stuff.
I don't know.
They're not mine.
Do you know what you're missing?
What?
I know what you're missing.
You've got to get some OS 2 and some Amiga.
Once you get that, you'll be totally elite.
You know, I've been really looking at Amiga, thinking about how cool that would be.
Amiga's awesome, man.
You'll get mad chicks with Amiga.
I've never actually had an Amiga.
I've got an original Apple Mac with the square around the Apple.
Ooh.
Nice.
And all the signatures inside.
We're putting together like an obsolete computer room at the office.
A museum of sorts.
But they all have to work is going to be the kicker.
Oh, you need a Trash 80.
I have a Trash 80.
And it worked, but then we gutted it.
And we're trying to put another computer inside of it so that I have something functional in the Trash 80 case.
Nice.
I mean, that's awesome.
Yeah, the keyboard, it seems, is going to be a little difficult.
We thought, I have a friend that's an electrical engineer, and he was, oh, yeah, I can convert that over.
Well, he couldn't.
And he gets online, and he finds a guy that helped design the original Trash 80 keyboard.
And it's more of an Apple keyboard than an IBM-esque keyboard.
And the guy was like, you could do it, but I couldn't.
You know, I mean, it's going to take you years to figure that out.
So he kind of gave up.
Wow.
And I think I'm going to take...
What did you get a Dremel for?
Well, I think I'm going to take like an IBM Model M keyboard.
Uh-oh.
And I'm going to take all the keys off and just solder the wires from the keys on the Trash 80 just straight into where the keys should be on the Model M.
Wow.
And I think that'll make it work, because the Trash 80 doesn't have a detachable keyboard.
It's all built in.
You have to use that old one.
You know, it looks really stupid.
Yeah.
So I think that's going to take me a lot of soldering, but I have a feeling in my mind it'll work.
It probably won't, and then I'll just cry and cuss and throw stuff.
Yeah, because geeks never do that.
Then I would have ruined a Trash 80 and a Model M keyboard.
Well, I got accused of ruining a Model M keyboard from another video podcaster who's a very good friend of ours, Jen Cutter, who does OpenAlpha.TV, which is all about gaming and gamers and stuff like that, and it's pretty cool.
And I painted a Model M keyboard, and I wanted to add a little extra to it.
So, one, I made WASD a different color from all the other keys, so you knew where they were.
And then, like, but you couldn't see any of the letters, though.
That was the thing.
So I wanted it to be like that, oh, what was that keyboard?
DOS keyboard.
Yeah, DOS keyboard.
Yeah, because it's like the Uber Elite Hacker keyboard.
You know, I have an old Model M that I had that was on my original 286 from IBM, and I had painted all the keys black.
And then I'd written, don't panic, on the top, and tried to teach myself how to type.
Nice reference.
Now, was it a Lexmark or a true IBM?
It's a true IBM.
I've never actually run across a Lexmark one.
Oh, really?
I've seen a few now.
They're kind of common.
Have you seen the Model M2?
No.
It's a regular-sized keyboard, not one of those big, massive things, but it's still got the clicky.
I love the big masses.
Well, it's still got the clicky, and there's no Windows key.
Is it, like, steel?
I mean, could you, like, if somebody broke into your house, could you beat them over the head with it?
No.
Could I bludgeon them to death?
No.
You can't bludgeon them to death with it.
Well, then it's no good.
But it still has the clicky.
That's a wonderful Model M keyboard.
No, the whole point of a Model M keyboard was to be able to bludgeon an intruder to death,
not to actually be able to type on it and be all cool and clicky.
Is that why that long cord is there?
Yes.
I was about to say.
You don't even have to connect.
And if you do, it's got, like, the cool little, like, phone jack kind of deal-y on the back,
so, like, if they're really, like, on the other side of the house, you can just detach it from there.
You don't even have to actually physically detach it from your computer and go bludgeon them to death
and then take your blood-stained keyboard and plug it back in and act like nothing ever happened.
We made this spoof video called Bubba Hacks.
I don't know if you all have seen it.
But it was this redneck guy.
I played the character as it would be.
I was a theater major for a while because there were hot girls in theater.
Oh, right on.
And lots of gay guys.
And the girls weren't interested in those guys.
They would be interested in me.
It was my plan.
It didn't really work.
But we had all these little redneck ideas.
And now I'm envisioning a pistol built inside of a Model M keyboard so I could beat you to death or shoot you.
Nice.
Whatever seems to fit the bill at the time.
Yeah, you know, you have options.
Options are good.
We're working on a stress test of the old IBM PS2, you know, personal system 2 computers
because they're very resilient to things.
Like, you can, you know, run over them with your truck, we think.
And maybe it still works.
So we're going to try that.
Shoot it.
Great video.
Do you think I could shoot it and still run?
I think a bullet would go through the case.
Yeah, I don't know.
Depends on what gun you use.
I don't think I have a pussy gun.
Like a .22 might just piss it off.
But if you're shooting it over with, like, a .44 Magnum, then you might have problems.
If you shoot it with a .22, it might actually come after you.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Maybe I should do that.
Well, I would definitely shoot it with some DV tape and put that online because I would
love to see that.
My luck.
The bullet would bounce off the case into my camera and then into me.
Nice.
I'd like to see a bullet going into a camera at, like, high speed.
It'd be great.
Send me a camera.
Like, we got a Canon ZR-80.
We need to auction that off or something.
Oh, yeah.
So, did anybody ever see the video clip of the guy that, like, wanted a G5 or something,
like, really, really bad and he had a G4?
And he's like, if everybody donates enough money and I can get my G5, I will blow up my G4.
And then he got enough money to get the G5.
And he actually released the video of blowing up a G4.
And, like, they used, I don't know what they used.
I think they kept the recipe a secret.
I can't remember off the top of my head.
And then they shot the explosive with a 12-gauge slug.
And the thing just went, boom!
Like, bits and pieces were everywhere, but the Apple emblem was still intact.
Wow.
Built to last.
It was so cool.
But, of course, me, I like seeing things blow up.
Who doesn't?
I'm into blowing up stuff.
Nice.
Well, I got my wife a new pistol,
so I'm looking forward to using that in the next Bubba Hacks video.
All right.
She has a bigger gun than I do.
Hicks and firearms.
Sounds good to me, man.
Yeah, man.
It's nothing like it.
Nothing like it.
Let's see.
What other questions do we have here?
I'm drinking beer.
Now I'm not concentrating.
Let's see.
We've gotten through punching sheet metal is a bad idea.
On your show, are you all characters or are you all real people?
Do you like exactly the same in real life?
My name is actually Drew, and Wes' name is actually Derek.
We're actually funded by a company in Redmond, Washington called Microshaft.
Awesome.
And we get the scripts in the mail about a week ahead of time,
and then the production crew comes down and we shoot the videos.
No.
I'm sorry.
What was the question again?
Because everything I just said was BS.
Well, I don't really talk like this in real life.
I usually talk a lot quieter.
No, we're completely ourselves in camera.
Everybody that's ever met us in real life that's seen us on the show,
it has just been like, whoa, you guys are absolutely the same,
and that's something that we really enjoy.
Awesome.
I think we actually, it's not even only that we enjoy it,
but we actually pride ourselves on it because, you know,
we want to be ourselves and we want to present ourselves like, hey, we're geeks,
but we enjoy doing what we do, and we're not like, and I'm sorry,
but like the closet basement Linux geek that's like really overweight and smells funny.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, quit making fun of me, dude.
I think you just, you just, you just pissed off like 50% of the audience.
That's great.
Yeah, man, thanks a lot, you fuckhead.
Oh, man.
And the first fuckhead.
Woo.
Feels good to say fuck on the radio.
I love it.
Just because I can.
Well, we've said it like maybe once or twice.
I thought.
We try to keep it kid-friendly.
It looked like you said it when you punched that damn sheet metal.
You know, that was one of those things where when it happened, I kind of had to,
when you do something that stupid, you have to be able to make fun of yourself
or else you're just never going to hear the end of it.
And had we released the episode without that clip, people would have been like,
why all of a sudden does he have a bandage on his hand?
Well, I thought you had hit yourself on the saw.
No, I hit myself on the, the, the, the main set is built with this tile
and then there's sheet metal in front of it and then there's red light behind it
and then a poster and all this other fun stuff.
But I was really winding up to get west because I was just tired of it, you know.
Are you all right together right now?
Excuse me?
Are you in the same room right now?
We're not in the same room, but west just went in to get beer and...
When he comes back, I want you to punch him as hard as you can.
Okay, well, you're going to have to ask me to, hang on.
Oh!
Okay, I got him.
Oh, that hurt.
Oh.
I'm sorry, Wes.
What the fuck was that for?
He asked me to.
It was part of the show.
That's so not fucking cool.
Get me back, get me back on Saturday night at the, uh, cocktail party.
Oh.
Definitely, Allie.
I just had to punch west.
It's okay.
Anyway, so I was watching, I was watching, uh, some IPTV and I heard about this thing called U3.
Action on your hands, sir.
Yeah, would you just punch him?
Yeah, it's just...
No, no, it's just...
Oh, hang on.
Okay.
Did you break him?
I pissed him off thoroughly.
Oh, did you really?
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't give him any fair warning.
He walked out the door and I punched him with my left hand, which wasn't that great.
Shit!
It was the fact that he hit me...
No, dude, he hit me, like, right in the middle of the fucking sternum.
I walked into a punch.
At least you didn't punch him in the neck.
This is bad, though, because I punched him in the sternum and I was aiming for the shoulder.
So, I have a feeling that, uh, um, Vicodin and beer doesn't go well.
At least not for my aim.
Which may explain episode two of season two.
Well, I'm sorry I caused any trouble, but that's what we do.
Um, how about you three?
Let's talk about that for a little bit.
Sure.
I'm getting the stare.
Can you hang on a moment?
Yes, sir.
Don't fucking touch me.
Okay, so, um, by the way, if you're interested in a co-host position on Hack5,
you can send, uh, your resume to Darren at Hack5.org.
No, fuck that.
They can send it to Wes at Hack5.org.
Anyway, I was saying in the episode that, uh, or just right before Wes came out with his beer
that I'm glad that, uh, I'm glad that I did miss.
And that I did pride myself.
So, because I learned a very important lesson there.
And that is, kids, fighting is not the answer.
Well, you're going to find out how much of a fucking answer it is, I assume.
Yeah, I'm going to.
It's going to hurt.
Anyway, uh, what was the question?
So, let's talk about this U3 thing.
Sure.
Explain what it is and go into detail.
I have some questions.
Okay.
Um, there's a couple of basic weaknesses in, uh, Windows that I'm sure your audience is
very familiar with.
Uh, the first being the LAN manager hash and that's for backwards compatibility and we
all know that it uses a weak form of DES to encrypt, uh, Windows hashes, uh, Windows password
hashes and, you know, splits them up into seven byte, bit, whatever, a few characters and
then splits those into two separate pieces.
And anyway, the long and short of it is those are weak and easy to crack with readily available
tools like Rainbow Crack and there's another weakness and that is, um, the fact that when
you insert a CD-ROM, by default, it'll run whatever the auto-run.inf file is in the root
of that drive.
So, uh, when this U3 technology came out, it's basically a, a USB thumb drive that has, um,
a virtual US, I'm sorry, a virtual CD-ROM partition on it and because of that, when you insert
the thumb drive, it reads it as a CD-ROM and whatever you put on that CD-ROM partition will
auto-run.
Now, when you first buy these from the store, they've got some crap software on there that,
that really stinks, but, uh, there's a way to replace it with your own ISO image and when
you do that, you can run a, uh, Visual Basic script which will, you know, run your payload
which is on the read-write partition of that thumb drive and by doing that, you can invisibly
run any payload you want and the current payload right now is a, uh, is basically a batch file
that runs a couple of tools to, uh, you know, namely PWDump to get the Windows Hashes and then
after that, it opens up a back door by creating an administrative user on that system, it downloads
your, uh, product keys, um, there's even a version that gets, you know, ALN's messenger
and MSN and all those instant messenger log files and passwords, it dumps LSA secrets.
It's, the idea is you can hand it to somebody and be like, oh yeah, yeah, I got that latest
patch for Battlefield 2 on this thumb drive.
They plug it in, they run the patch, they give it back to you and you've got a file on
there that's got their IP information, it's got a user created for them now with your password
of choice and it's, you know, got their hash files which you can run against, Rainbow Crack
or any other cracking method and, uh, completely own that box, you know.
That's pretty damn slick.
That's exactly what it does.
Yeah, it's sweet.
It was, uh, originally, it was an idea that I had about six months ago and I talked it over
with, uh, one of our good friends, Mubix, um, and he was like, yeah, let's do this and,
like, we're like, okay, how?
And then, funnily enough, uh, about a month or two ago, I got an email from two individuals
at the same time, both of them with, um, two different, two different approaches to
that exact hack, so we had to air those because it was just too cool not to.
So, obviously, y'all have mounted one of these things in, uh, Linux and taken a look at this
other partition.
Actually, I've yet to mount it in Linux, I'm sure it doesn't do anything in Linux.
Well, no, I mean, I'm sure it wouldn't work, but you could definitely see what's on that
partition.
You could see what's on, on the partition, sure.
Could you, can you see that in Windows, like, like, can I take a regular thumb drive
and just copy this stuff over to it?
There's a, um, there's a hack done by this guy named Amish on our forums that, uh, does
basically the same thing on a regular USB key without the U3 technology, without the
virtual CD-ROM, and it uses a little bit of social engineering so that on Windows, when
you pop it in, it gets that little dialogue that you get in XP where it's like, what would
you like to do with this?
And by default, most people just double-click on the, uh, thing that says, open the folder
and show me the files, bitch.
And when you do that, it's not only opening the files and showing me the folders and all
that stuff, but it's, um, it's running a script in the background, hidden, and, uh, does essentially
the same thing.
Excellent.
Well, I, right when I was watching that episode, I thought, hey, I'm going to play with this,
and I ordered one for, like, 20 bucks off of Amazon.
So, I'm, I'm looking very forward to this.
This is a really cool thing y'all found out about and worked on and did.
Thank you.
I mean, I can't take credit for it.
We just showed it.
It's really the, uh, hard work of Amish and Max Damage.
But, uh, since then, we've released it to the community, given out the source code, and
it developed it further to the point now where it, uh, is immune to semantic antivirus, and
I believe, uh, GFI, or whatever, uh, Gersoft antivirus, and a few others, and, uh, they're
working right now on, um, automatic privilege escalation so that when you insert it, even
if it's a guest account, it will, you know, get it up to administrators so you can run your
payload.
That's really awesome.
Yeah.
Really frickin' awesome.
Well, guys, uh, I think we're, uh, getting about to be that time where it's the end of the
show.
All righty.
Is that good with y'all?
Do y'all have more to say?
No, I think this is about the time where I get hit.
Yeah, you're getting your ass beat, but, uh...
I know I am.
Just blame me.
If, uh, y'all see me at any conferences, you can punch me, too.
Oh.
Both of y'all can just wail on me.
It's cool.
Cool.
Because I've seen y'all.
I think I can take you.
We'll see.
Maybe there will be a celebrity death match sometime soon.
I'm all about that.
I'll have my, uh, my IBM keyboard with my pistol in it.
Oh, no.
Uh, see, that's unfair, man.
If you bring an IBM keyboard, I'm going to bring my IBM PC XT, or at least the monochrome
monitor.
Ooh.
I'm going to bring my full server tower.
So, I'll bring the evil server.
It'll zap you both.
And if you'll ever get on down to Mississippi, feel free to come on by.
Right on.
Oh, yeah.
Sounds great.
All right.
Well, uh, we usually close the show with some shouts, and then, uh, I say, uh, see y'all
same hack time, and then y'all, in unison, hopefully, say, uh, same hack channel, even though
it's not on a channel or at a time.
But that's cool.
Okay.
Anything like the technolist thing?
Kinda.
Okay.
Um, so y'all have any shouts, uh, anybody y'all want to say hello to?
I want to say hello to all of poundhack5 on irc.hack5.org.
And I want to say hello and shout out to all my fellow FPS gamers that like to hang out
on the Hack 5 game server and the noob server.
Those are some cool dudes, and we have a lot of fun.
And, uh, as well as Allie, our just irreplaceable, wonderful co-host, and she does a great job
for us, and she's hot.
I'll second that.
Well, I want to say thank you for you guys being on the show.
And, uh, just like I do every week, it seems, I learn something new from all the shows that
I listen to.
And I especially learn stuff when I'm on the show and having to do research for it.
Like, if I have to talk about something, I don't want to seem like a complete idiot.
And I'll try to learn as much as I can about it.
Only a partial idiot.
And I've watched a bunch of y'all shows to kind of see what y'all are like before we,
uh, did the show.
And I hadn't, I'd seen like a couple, but I kind of fast forwarded through them, and I
wasn't, it was early on, it didn't really catch my eye.
And, uh, going back through and watching them, I really enjoyed.
Y'all are doing a really good job what y'all do.
And, uh, so I've learned something this week.
And that is, when I'm sleepy, don't try to watch IPTV shows and make an opinion.
Because you won't like them.
I'm glad you went back for the second opinion.
Went back for that second opinion.
And I appreciate y'all being on the show.
And I hope some people, I don't know, took some insight away from this.
Because I really had y'all in my mind as greedy little bastards that didn't do anything.
Oh my god.
No.
So far.
No wrong.
So far.
And anybody that thinks that, go back and watch episode one of season one and see what noobs
we are.
Awesome.
Well guys, thanks for being on the show.
Thank you.
And if y'all have anything else to say?
One last thing?
Trust your tech, no lust.
And we'll see y'all same hack time.
Same hack channel.
And it began anew.
A world in front of your eyes
A million ways to realize
A way to make it better
It will last forever
Re-invent and make
Everything you're on
Yeah, come on
In the original
I walk through the street
As my royalties
Set from the poverty
The soul of the city
Rises up to my feet
Procolating through the pavement
Like an unseen force
Yo, this tropic jam is my creative source
Cut and paint
Pretty stars on this urban decay
Represent and represent
Six with double A
Old concepts are new
Not what was intended
Some say rehashed
I say reinvented
I'm a living Leonardo
A modern day Mozart
I create and compose
And compile my own
I transpose
The static
Right through the kinetic
Dynamic
Illerical prose
In my wedding
I speak from the old
To make it new
For this era
Learn from the past
And from my own
Errors
Reshape the world
It won't break
But I'll bend it
Some say revolution
I say reinvent it
Re-invent and make
Everything you're on
Breaking you're on
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Breaking you're on
Hey, slave
Leave it for today
Never do the same thing
Always gotta change lanes
Change brains
Do it for the love, not the fame, not the drugs, not the pain
Never saying, never playing, when we turn up the game
I'm your station, music is my inspiration
No matter what should I be facing
Life is a race, it's a game
Gotta reinvent the style, gotta push, gotta shrink
We can play and make
Everything you're on
Come on, let's move
Everything you're on
Audio, let's go
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I don't know, what do you mean?