Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

This morning I decided to begin work on a lot of little things on my website.  The greatest change that has taken place so far is a simplification of wording used on my Virtual Dave page, so it’s now easier to read, and some excess crap was cut out.  I also modified my Services page to reflect a few new products that I now offer, namely Dave’s Custom Ubuntu Linux PCs and Web Development for small and medium size businesses;  I’m creating new pages for each of these new services at the moment.

Another idea I had of writing up storyboards and scripts for short promotional videos I’d like to make came into mind as well.  One idea that has been on the back burner for a little while now is a new Ubuntu Linux video for the FAQ, which would showcase Ubuntu 8.04.  It is a low priority to me for the time being, mostly because new users can’t see much of a difference between 8.04 and 7.10 in a short video.  What I’d like to focus on first is a video that demonstrates Virtual Dave.  And hopefully after that another video that will focus on my made-to-order Ubuntu Linux PCs.  And then finally something more along the lines of a very clever, funny commercial (it’s already been written, but won’t be shot for a while).

Ok, time to relax.

I came across a funny screenshot today that provides a pretty clear example of how social engineering is used to con people (in this case, Windows users) while browsing the Internet (click for full size):

Clearly, this user is not running Windows XP but Ubuntu Linux.  Yet with their pop-up blocker disabled in Firefox 3, a malicious website presents a window that mimics a “real” warning.  But it’s actually a trap.  This is probably the most common reason viruses find their way into Windows systems — by exploiting a users lack of expertise and susceptibility to intimidation on a technical level.  So fair warning to you Windows users out there.  Fortunately for our Linux user, he’ll just laugh and close this window.  If you’re a Windows user and you see an alert like this, you should close it too (but run a virus scan using something like AVG immediately afterwords).

Well shit (see the comments).  Looks like the deb file I was linking to was taken down at the request of Real.  However, there is another way to install Real Player.

Step 1:

Visit this link and copy/paste the correct line of text (depending on your version of Ubuntu) into a terminal window to add the third-party repositories to your software sources list:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#Adding the Repositories

Step 2:

Visit this link and download the appropriate deb file for your systems architecture (i386 or AMD64):

http://packages.medibuntu.org/intrepid/realplayer.html

That’s pretty much it!  Enjoy!

Here be old, out of date instructions with timeless joke: 

You probably remember Real Media Player from back in the hay days of the middle and late 1990s while browsing the Internet using Netscape Navigator (at least I was) on a dial-up connection.  Well it seems Real is still alive and kicking.  Just recently, I was shocked when I discovered that a torrent I had downloaded actually contained files in Real format.  I really thought everybody had gotten with the times by now and switched over to Divx/xvid codecs.  Then again, Real Media was originally intended to be a format that could be streamed over a network, and not downloaded first to be played later.  Which means if you really do remember actually using Real Media for anything in the 90s, it was probably from a video chat with a stripper.

Bandwidth was not the only thing squeezed in the 90s (ba-dum ching!).

Let’s get on with this post, shall we?

There are guides out there that show you how to download the binary executable (a *.bin file) of a Real Media Player installer, aimed towards multiple versions of Linux, but this requires you to open that dastardly terminal window and type a bunch of greek.  Instead, you’d probably like a deb file that you can just double-click on and be done with it.  Well, I’ve found one originally posted here on Ubuntu Forums.  You can download the file here from this link and either run the file right out, or save it to your desktop first and double-click on it to get the ball rolling.

Once its installed, you’ll find a new shortcut for it in Applications>Sound and Video>Real Player 11.

But you might encounter an error; something along the lines of “cannot execute child process (realplay), file or directory does not exist”… I’m paraphrasing.

If this happens, here’s how you fix it:

System>Preferences>Main Menu

Select the Sound & Video category on the left side, then Right-Click on RealPlayer 11 and click “Properties”.  This will open up a little window that looks like this:

In the above picture, the Command: line says “/opt/real/RealPlayer/realplay”.  This is what yours should say, but it might not.  If it doesn’t, make it as I have it, and that should do the trick.  Then click Close twice, and you’re done!

Now, I wonder if CBS’s Big Brother still does the SuperPass deal where you can watch all the contestants live 24/7.  I can still remember the live feed of those babes who fashioned bikini’s out of peanut butter during Season 3…

In my previous blog, I wrote about staying at Holiday Inn and attempting to use their wireless networks to give my girlfriends’ Nintendo Wii access to the Internet.  Gateway access to the Internet is not typically granted until you click on a button that binds you to terms of usage.

Well, it turns out the Wii itself is causing quite a bit of mystery.  Spoofing it’s MAC address, I was able to get the agreement page to re-appear on my laptop.  But after shutting Backtrack down and trying again, the Wii still couldn’t gain access to the Internet for some odd reason.

I went ahead and contacted their IT department and within a couple minutes, they had granted the MAC address of the Wii access to the Internet.  Yet it still doesn’t work.  Which… doesn’t exactly surprise me, especially after the IT guy told me I was the first person to attempt to connect a Wii while staying at a Holiday Inn.  We sat on the phone for about 15 minutes testing and testing, power cycling and testing again, but the Wii wasn’t doing anything except giving up.  It would seem that the IT department and myself are both stumped about this.  So for the time being, the spoofing tutorial is useless.  But still, it was a fun experiment.

In the meantime, I’m going to sit down with Google and see if I can find an alternate solution.  If I find one, I’ll be sure to write about it here.

My girlfriend works as a manager for a major restaurant chain that has a catchy theme song about ribs. About a month ago, one of the restaurants located in a city about 50 minutes west of where we live lost three managers. I’m not very clear on the details, but I understand two walked out without giving advanced notice (why oh why, I wonder) and a third was fired for breaking a serious policy (I mean a federal law, but its been dealt with). As a result, the place is essentially in a state of needing emergency life support. They’ve called upon my girlfriend to help pick up the pieces (hopefully with the intention of letting her go someday, and not use this as an opportunity to coerce her to stay permanently). So far, she’s been scheduled to stay through till the end of July, and this was a very recent revelation on the part of her boss. I would not be surprised if “the end of July” becomes “the end of August” sometime soon.

Fortunately she is being put up in nice hotels (which I would imagine is coming out of her bosses bonus checks this year, and that sort of makes me feel a tad bit better about the whole long-distance relationship mini-drama). But there are many days I can’t stay with her, and spending time in a hotel alone can get really boring after a month or two or three (hopefully not four, but I’m a little pessimistic at this point).

Holiday Inn’s WiFi Meets Nintendo Wii

One of the things my girlfriend purchased before this stretch of work was delivered to her was a Nintendo Wii. I showed her at my house how to configure the wireless network connection settings and talked her through it over the phone when the time came. But for some reason, it just wouldn’t connect. By “connect”, I don’t mean wireless association followed by authentication (which, in this case, means nothing because the network does not use encryption). What I mean is, you’re not granted gateway access to external IP addresses until you’ve clicked on a link indicating that you agree to certain legal usage terms. Once you click the “I agree” button, you are then given full access to the Internet.

What the Nintendo Wii is trying to do is phone home (access Nintendo’s servers) immediately after it’s assigned a default gateway with the assumption that the gateway is not blocking traffic to external IP addresses. If it were to ping the gateway, it would likely get a reply. Any other site, nothing. The Wii assumes your router to be working, but the cable modem is broken, so it gives up and asks you to try a different network.

Since I’ve already agreed to a certain group of usage terms I shouldn’t be required to click “agree” again so as to personally access the Internet. But it’s the MAC address that acts as my identity, more like a name-badge, and the MAC on the Wii will be different from the MAC on the laptop. Your MAC address is a hard-coded number used to uniquely identify your wireless networking adapter. No two MAC addresses are said to be the same. So at first, it would seem there’s nothing I can do with the Wii to get it to connect to the Internet… Or is there?

What can be done about this?

There are a couple solutions. The first is to contact customer service and see if they can get their IT guy on the phone. I would then ask him if he could manually add the MAC address of the Wii to their routing tables and grant the device access. For some, this would be the simpler solution… though your mileage may vary. How long do you think it would take? Because I really don’t feel like placing bets on them being immediately available. I’m just telling you right now that the IT people at this particular hotel are not very advanced. The reason I say this is because the channels they picked for their 3 routers are all within the same frequency range (channels 1, 2 and 3) instead of spread out (channels 1, 6 and 12). In other words: They’re not very professional. Bandwidth is being lost because the routers are overlapping each others frequencies, and this is basic wireless network design technique we’re talking about here.

The other solution is to trick their wireless networks into thinking my laptop is the Wii and click “I agree” a second time, and then disconnect. I would do this by changing the MAC address of my wireless adapter. This is what is known as “MAC address spoofing”, the act of using a networking device to appear to be another (not to be confused with a “spoofing attack”, because we’re not going to attack anybody). Not all networking devices can do this. I happen to be using one that contains an Atheros chipset (it’s a D-Link WNA-2330 to be exact), which can be made to do anything I want it to do in the world of Linux. (Another blog I’m going to write in the future about Wireless Adapter hacking is turning my laptop into a Wireless router, and then share my cellphone’s Internet access wirelessly).

The Trick

I intend to use a copy of Backtrack 3 beta to carry out this little experiment. But it’s late, I’m away from home and have to download a fresh ISO and burn it to a disc first before I can try this out. By the way, spoofing a MAC address can be done in Windows, but I’m not going to write about Windows software that does this in here (because I’m lazy. But if you’re really curious, google can help).

In Backtrack (or even Ubuntu if I install the MadWifi drivers, which is not as easy as burning a Backtrack Live CD) the commands to change the MAC are as follows (reference link):

• wlanconfig ath0 destroy

You can use any mac address you like. In this example: 00:11:22:33:44:55

• macchanger -m 00:11:22:33:44:55 wifi0
  
• wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode managed
• ifconfig wifi0 up

After this, I can just use a plain old connection manager to connect to the network.  I could also use this command to do it manually:

• iwconfig ath0 essid [NetworkName] key [WepKeyHere]

Pretty simple. Note though that if your card uses a chipset other than Atheros, you might not be able to do this with your card, and the first command “wlanconfig ath0 destroy” might be slightly different (like “eth1″ for instance), depending on the device name Linux assigns your wireless adapter.

Isn’t this a little extreme?

If by “extreme” you mean “illegal”, the answer is no. Spoofing doesn’t become illegal until you use it in to acquire private information you’re not supposed to have access to (which requires a lot more work anyway). The Nintendo Wii is flawed in that it doesn’t included a web browser with it by default, and even if it were installed, it wouldn’t believe it was actually able to connect to the Internet. Perhaps I’ll send Nintendo a little suggestion so they’ll release a patch in their next update sweep. Though it surprises me that they’ve not encountered this problem, considering they sell Nintendo Wii carrying cases for smug Wii-owners to take their Wii’s to their non-Wii-owning friends’ house so they can show it off over and over… though this probably doesn’t take place in nice Hotels with moderate network security in place. And Nintendo would probably ignore me because they charge people to buy their web browser (you have to be able to download it from their servers anyway), which is required to agree to view Holiday Inn’s agreement page.

So I suppose the next best place to put the blame is on Holiday Inn….and we know that IT guy isn’t in the mood to revamp company policy (and I can’t really think of an easy solution, other than unblocking the MAC). You see, it becomes this dilemma of, “Just how out of my way should I have to go?” If I had a backtrack CD with me right now, I’d hopefully be able to solve this problem in 5 minutes. To me, that’s the opposite of extreme. I’d call it practical (for me). For most people, they’re either stuck with a design flaw in their game console, or hotel Internet policies that were not designed to accommodate these kinds of dumb devices.  Quite a double-bind we have here.

Well, I’ve got some sleep to get… At least they have nice pillows here and the bathroom sink is to die for!

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted in here.  Having been so long since I last posted, I had to muddle through over 100 comments, 99.5% of which were spam and maybe one legit comment… though it’s hard to say really because I wasn’t paying very close attention when I marked them all as spam.  So, sorry if you actually posted one recently and it didn’t end up on the site.

The Business…

I recently got my apology/bribe money from the government and I’ve been looking forward to investing that money into some business related expenses (such as advertising, because it would probably just offend someone to death if I spent it all on silly things made in China).  I’ve also been waiting on a friend of mine to declare whether or not he would be able to participate in a business venture with me, and it turns out he won’t be available.  The ideal role for him would have been project management and accounting (a boring desk job).  If I were him, I would have said no too (but in truth, he really will not have extra time to spare for it).  He’s going to be working a lot of overtime with a new employer this coming year so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll ever be able to participate with me some time later.

On the bright side I have two other associates ready for work — one a web developer/programmer and the other a graphics artist.  My hope is to combine all of our skills to offer a new slew of online and offline services.  One project we hope to take on very soon is designing a new website for a rural K-8 school; it being the first site that shall utilize content management software.  The goal is to have a powerful interactive website that will allow teachers to administer their own mini-sites for each class, with students also able to put content on the site (provided their stuff is given approval by each respective teacher in advanced).  It is an ambitious project and we’ll have plenty of time over the summer to kick it around the sandbox.  We also intend to create websites in advanced and approach small and medium sized businesses with a site that’s more or less been designed for them.  We’ll also combine this with ready-made advertising packages which can even include original logos we custom design.  Toss in Ubuntu Linux-based office PCs custom built and serviced by me and we’ll have an attractive, versatile selection of tools many businesses will probably be interested in using.

No more CCNA?

A while back, I got into this habit of writing about wanting to get my CCNA networking certification.  I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing about this for the time being, mostly because I think it’s really boring (no, really!).  There are many aspects about computer networking that I love, but there’s also a good chunk that I don’t have a practical use for right now.  I’m not desperately attempting to secure a desk job somewhere so I can map subnets in Microsoft Visio, configure VLANs on serial interfaces, setup ACLs to filter network traffic and perhaps occasionally arm-wrestle with some absurdly obtuse/self-righteous HR department.  Computer networking is not an intimidating field of study and understanding the basics is about as complicated as understanding how the Post Office works.  But Cisco seems a little full of themselves at times.  You’ll know what I mean by this after you’re waist deep in the plethora of rediculous acronyms Cisco is continually pulling out of its ass.  Cheap excuses to procrastinate aside, I’m now more interested in web design and Linux.  The diploma I’ve already got and passing the tests necessary to get it is certification enough for now.

What’s new with Ubuntu?

I’ve been meaning to create a new video to show off Ubuntu 8.04, but very little about it stands out when compared to 7.10 (with exception to performance improvements, which are very noticeable).  One of the most hyped features, Pulse Audio, has turned out to be something of a disappointment (though this is just my opinion).  The decision to include it with 8.04 by default was likely made so as to help get the kinks ironed out before the next major release of Ubuntu in October, which is rumored to be sporting a sexy new theme that will compliment the impressive collection of special effects rendered by Compiz Fusion.  By then, the soon to be developed “glitch-free” version of Pulse Audio should already be in place.

What’s new with Dave?

Believe it or not, I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“.  The book takes a deep look at the multitude of mythologies that have existed world wide throughout human history and highlights the similarities between them instead of the superficial differences.  I probably shouldn’t comment on it further until I’ve finished reading (which will probably take quite some time).  Ancient human history is something I’ve been interested in for a few years and the topic of mythology adds an informative and sometimes entertaining layer.  After finishing it, I hope to plow through Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

I might as well take the opportunity to first and foremost thank my favorite musician for being nothing less than awesome by doing this.  “The Slip”, a 10 track album, was released on May 5th on nin.com for free.  This probably pisses Metallica off to no end (but I have to say it, and please excuse my french, but f*ck Lars Ulrich and his RIAA bandwagon). I could legally host the entire thing here for you to download if I wanted (since this was released via the CC license), but you can download the whole thing yourself in either 320 Kbps MP3, FLAC loss-less, Apple loss-less and even 24-bit/96 Khz WAVE format from www.nin.com, completely for free.

If you’re looking for a quick sample of what this CD is like, check out this favorite track of mine:

Nine Inch Nails - Head Down (MP3 format)

I just came across a neat little article on PC Magazine’s website called Vista’s 11 Pillars of Failure.  Give it a look!  It’s very short and to the point.  Now, bringing this stuff to your attention doesn’t make me a hater of Microsoft…. just a hater of Microsoft’s propaganda machine.  I just feel better about myself when I help share the truth about things like this with people who may not be aware of the reality of it all.  The saddest part of all is that Windows XP will not be available for purchase after June 18th of this year, and the only way you’ll be able to get yourself a fresh copy is if you can find a computer manufacture who has downgraded a Vista machine for you.  Dell is one such company that is going to be doing this, but due to a loophole in the paperwork, Microsoft is planing to legally pretend that Dell is actually selling Vista machines.  You can read about that shaddy little plan here.

A good quote to go along with this might be:  Statistics are like a bikini.  What they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital.