Alexbobp’s Blog

Cumulative Excuses

Posted on September 2008 in excuses

It’s not even worth it anymore to make an excuse post everytime there’s downtime, but if there’s three, well that’s a different story!

1. We were moving a new desk into the room which resulted in me having to unplug and move the server
2. I was attempting to change the modem to one that would be better (that didn’t work out so well)
3. …the people at home had unplugged the phone line from the back of the modem

I can’t be bothered to figure out the exact dates, so just pick one for the last time you were annoyed by the “page not found”.

Phone Number Verification with Trusted Third Party

Posted on September 2008 in alex shares wisdom, nerd stuff

Here’s an idea that I think would be a cool service for someone to make.  It might even become widely used and make money due to advertising on the site.  But I don’t feel like making it myself, so go ahead and make money off it.

Commonly some people might meet in some way, such as in-person or online, and want to talk via phone (the particular case that brought up this idea was two people who met in an IRC chatroom and realized they attend the same university).  But, some complexities arise in the exchange of phone numbers if the parties cannot trust each other.  A common bitch move (and one that, in fact, got pulled in this situation), is to give someone someone else’s phone number, or even a random phone number, to basically trick them into annoying random people and probably making a fool of themselves.  How to defend against this?  Lets analyze (tee hee, that has “anal” in it) how phone number relationships are established, first of all.

There are identities, known commonly as “phone lines.”  References to these identities, called “phone numbers,” can be passedto people, who can then use them to bug the owner of the phone number in a way that is completely blind to whether the phone number was actually given out by it’s owner.  In other words, there is no way to make sure you are calling who you want to be calling except by asking after you have already annoyed them.

I have two ideas for tackling this problem.  One is a trusted third-party service that could easily be implemented and used by people, and the other is a complete overhaul of the phone system I came up with afterwards because I am a starry-eyed idealist who can’t help but think about how the world *should* work.

So here’s the idea: The Trusted Third Party (herein referred to as “Ph0ve”) runs a phone line (recieve-only) and a website.  You can call the number and punch in a number with the keypad.  Ph0ve will post a page to their website, with a random URL, that contains the phone number you called from, and the number you punched in. The phone line you called would read you back the URL for that page.

Here’s how you use it: Alice and Bob want to talk.  Bob want’s Alice’s phone number (and not, say, Eve’s phone number, which Alice is inclined to give him because she is an asshole).  Bob makes up some number, and gives it to Alice as a challenge.  Alice then calls Ph0ve and keys in the number, and sends Bob back the URL.  What this in effect proves, is that somebody with control of the phone line in question wants that number to be called by someone who has presented the number.  It is a big step forwards, and certainly makes getting people to annoy other people over the phone non-trivial.

There is one attack I can think of on it, though: Our old friend, man in the middle!  Alice could just IM Eve and get Eve to verify her number to Alice, but the challenge Alice presents is the one from… you guessed it, Bob.  Then Alice can pass Bob Eve’s URL, and Bob will call Alice.  This is a very minor vulnerability, since Eve is expecting some sort of call anyways, but it might be an issue.  I can’t think of a way to solve it, though.  Please leave me a comment if you have an answer!

My other idea, which would be an overhaul of the system, would allow people to leave eachother messages, but that would only be seen if the the other person also leaves you a message.  So they could exchange phone numbers and message eachother, and if someone messages a random third party, the random third party will never notice.  Of course, ideally messages should time out after a while.  This system would rely on third parties (the phone providers) to withhold messages, of course.  A system could be devised that does not require trusting a third party using cryptography, but that’s outside the scope of this post because I am le tired.  G’night.

Blog Rename

Posted on August 2008 in metablogging

Quick note: I changed the name of this to “Alexbobp’s Blog” (from “Alex’s Blog”).  By now more people know me by alexbobp than Alex, so I figured I might as well.

In a bit of other metablogging almost-news, I’m considering whether to make my blog SSL by default.  I wish WordPress would just see whether you connect via SSL and keep all the links the same way, but sadly it doesn’t, and it makes me choose.  So going SSL will be annoying for readers unless I can get my certificate signed (which costs money), or get readers to import a new root CA, or at least set a browser exception for my cert (which is awkward and unlikely).  Perhaps if I buy a domain I will also get a signed cert for it.

Personal RSS Feed Generator

Posted on August 2008 in masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver, software development

So as we all know, having a webserver is a wonderful thing.   One of the primary things that can be done with a webserver is to make things pass information over the HTTP protocol.  One thing that often passes through the HTTP protocol is a substance called “webcomics.”  I don’t produce that substance because I can’t draw.  I produce software instead.  Now, it seems many webcomic artists have the opposite problem.  They can draw and write quite well, but when it comes to making it accessible, they run into some hitches.    Note that I have utmost respect for the authors of (good) webcomics (and all webcomics mentioned here are good), I’m just saying they could use a little assistance in the giving me their webcomics department.  Errant Story has no RSS feed whatsoever.  Dresden Codak has an incompetent RSS feed which explicitly marks the links as not permalinks (even though they ARE), causing desktop feedreaders (thunderbird, at least) to ignore them.  Questionable Content has an RSS feed which is updated BY HAND, which meant that before I had the below tool, my friend Ben (who would constantly, obsessively, check webcomic sites for updates*) would get comics faster than me (who would use Thunderbird like the Internet is for), and that’s just wrong.  So what I set out to do was make a PHP script which would scrape webcomic sites for updates, store them in a database, and provide an RSS feed.  The fruits of my labor was rssgen.rss.php, and I don’t mean the kind of labor that involves a lot of grunting and screaming and rss feed generators popping out, thank goodness.

Anyway, it just occured to me today (nearly a year later than it should have) that I have neglected to share this with the world.  I’m no genius, but in my opinion it is a fine piece of work, and with input (both patches and feature requests) from da peoples, it could become even finer.  So I’m making this post now to describe what it does and link to it.  I have also set a darcs repository, which will be useful for anyone who wants to work on the project, and can put up with the best damn revision control system I’ve used (ie, the only decentralized one I’ve used).

So here’s what rssgen does.  It operates in three modes, based on getdata: The first is web interface mode, which gives you a nice little form that you can use to easily make your queries to send to rss feed mode, and has a link to quine mode.  The second is rss feed mode, which checks a webcomic for updates, updates the tables if necessary, and then prints out an rss feed for said webcomic.  The third is quine mode, which merely prints out the source code and exits.  It’s a utilitarian quine (in other words, it cheats by reading it’s own source code in), because anything else would at least double the size of the script.

The full source can be found here (and yes, that link is served by quine mode :P).   This script is on this particular webserver just so it can serve it’s source code, so don’t bother trying to use it form there (it doesn’t even have a mysql login).

If you want in on the hawt action, then the darcs repository url is http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/rssgen/.  To clone my repo, make sure you have darcs, go into a fresh directory, and do: “darcs init; darcs pull http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/rssgen/”

Have fun!

* Ben now uses Thunderbird, so please don’t send him hate mail for that.

Cable Select

Posted on August 2008 in masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver, story time

You may have noticed that my server as down for a while last night.  Okay, who am I kidding?  Nobody ever notices, except apparently DGM.  So just so you know, it did, and if you’re a huge geek, you might already know why (by the title).  Anyway, if you for whatever reason care for anecdotes about the joys of having your own webserver, read on.

The scene opens with my sister asking me if I messed with her computer.  Obviously, if computers malfunction, it’s my fault, since I’m the one in the family who’s competent with them.  Anyway, after I explain that no, she asks me to fix it.  It is in a rebooting loop where it turns on, BSODs, and repeats.  After further probing, I find out that Windows has been giving disk errors on occasion for about a week now, but she ignored them since *those* files weren’t critical, and it couldn’t possibly be symptomatic of something.  Anyway, I start to run SpinRite (a decently good disk recovery tool), and it says something to the effect of “this disk is so fucked you should get what you can off it first, and maybe try to fix it later.”

So, you can’t rescue the data without a *destination*, so my dad starts looking on ebay for new hard drives.  But my sister is probably not going to want to wait a week to use her computer again, and it’s her birthday, and I’m a nice guy, and my server has an extra hard drive… the backup hard drive*.  So I figure I can go without backup for a week,or maybe backup over the network.  I power down the server (professional web hosts are expected to have five nines; I have one), and take out the extra hard drive, and power it back on.

In five minutes, it is not responding to ping, so I start to worry and connect a monitor and keyboard.  I see a busybox.  For those of you not in the know, busybox is a godaweful shell that Linux boots to for recovery when something is horribly wrong, such as the kernel is sitting there in RAM but completely unable to mount it’s partitions.  If anyone has actually successfully *used* the busybox for recovery, I’d like to hear about it.  Anyway, I did what actually makes sense: I booted the Kubuntu LiveCD and apt-got gparted.  What I saw after running it was rather disturbing: no hard drive.  I rebooted the computer without the CD to see what it’s booting from, and as I was doing so, I noticed the bios screen and bootloader were being insanely slow.  It booted up the kernel, threw a message about not finding the partition, and went into busybox.  So I basically concluded that the computer was forgetting about hard drives as soon as something boots, and therefore effectively fucked.

I went up to my room and lugged another, very heavy, and even older and less good, computer box downstairs.  I put the hard drive in and plugged it in.  When it turned on, the monitor did not come on, a problem which is easy to debug: this happens when things are connected wrong.  The solution, of course, is to take all the stuff out and then put stuff back in until it stops working again.  Of course, the first thing to go back in was the ram, and after a few tries I got it to boot with the monitor (apparently TWO of the three ram sockets are bad in that computer).  So then I connected the hard drive, and it wouldn’t show the monitor, so I knew the probem was thereabouts.  I checked the jumper configuration, and realized that it was set to “Master with slave present.”  I instantaneously felt stupid for just now realizing the problem.  I set it to “cable select,” and turned on the computer and turned on the monitor.  I unplugged it and put the hard drive back into the proper server, and it booted right up.  At this point it was 3 AM, so I drank some alcohol and crashed.

Now, for the explanation.  These days pretty much any computer you buy uses SATA for it’s hard drives and probably even CD drives (although I have yet to see a SATA floppy drive).  But since I’m cheap, I only use modern computers for my gaming rigs.  So my fossilized server here is using an old standard called “IDE,” “PATA,” or “ATA,” but usually IDE, so lets go with that.  The way IDE works, there are ribbon cables for connecting the hard drives to the motherboard, but two hard drives can go on each motherboard.  So the hard drives need to keep track of which one they are (master or slave), and they do that with what’s called “jumpers.”  These are little plastic with metal things you slide on to some metal pins, to bridge them.  Originally, you would set a hard drive to either “master” or “slave,” and supposedly you should either have just “master” or both, but you’ll generally get along just fine as long as you don’t have two hard drives set the same.  Then someone came up with a setting called “cable select,” which is pretty much great: it will set to “master” if at the end of the ribbon cable, or “slave” if in the middle.  This effectively means you can just stick hard drives on cables willy-nilly and it’ll work out, because it’s geometrically impossible to screw that up.

As it turns out, Western Digital hard drives have an extra option: “master with slave present.”  This option is just like “master,” except it will specifically fail if there is *not* a slave.  I don’t have a clue why this option doesn’t exist, but it was set on my hard drive.  So there ya go.

By the way, jumpers also serve some other purposes.  In some hard drives, the jumpers can be used to limit the disk space (I assume for stupid, aka 16 bit, operating systems), or to write-protect it, or to enable the thermite-trigger tilt-bits.  Or maybe that last one is just for my custom ones.  Whatever.

I have a webserver.  A webserver is a totally great thing to have, and I have one.  Skip the following sentence if you have a webserver.  You could easily have a webserver, and in fact it would make you much cooler, but you choose to be a total noob instead.  Having a webserver is just about awesome, so I’m glad it’s working again.

* I know you can see what’s coming, but you’re wrong; bear with me.

Baldur’s Gate II: Bitch Moves (Volume 2: Minor edge abuse, doors, and cloudkill)

Posted on August 2008 in bitch moves

Looks like I’m overdue for a bitch moves post, and as we know, there isn’t going to be one for robotfindskitten.

So lets jump right in.  Minor edges have one advantage and one disadvantage over major edges.  The advantage is that you can have characters on both sides of the edge at once.  The disadvantage is that enemies can follow you across an edge. However, enemies will only follow you across an edge if agitated (as in, you attacked them).  Doors are even better.  You can open them, and nobody else can (except a few monsters in the expansion), and nothing goes through them.

Cloudkill is a spell which makes a cloud that hurts stuff in it over time, and also insta-kills some things (probably has to do with level, and I think has a save).  There is also a spell Death Fog that does about the same thing but a lot better and a little worse (works on fewer enemies, but also some that cloudkill doesn’t work on, and does more damage).  Frankly, Baldur’s Gate II’s arbitrary rules for what spells affect what are rock-paper-scissors bullshit, so lets just say Cloudkill instakills Umber Hulks and leave it at that, and I’ll use Cloudkill as a generic term for area-of-effect damage-over-time spells.

So, the first thing to know about minor edges is that time will stop passing on a segment if you pull out all party members.  So generally, if you want to screw with something across the edge, it’s best to clock a party member and send it over there as a keepalive, just like how you have to put one of your fingers in the FTP server so it doesn’t cut off your upload halfway through causing you to FUCKING MISS THE DEADLINE*.  So then, you want to mess with the dudes.  But you can’t send somebody over to poison them or cloudkill them or something, because they’ll be taking damage, and thusly coming after the person who did it.  But what you can do is go over and spam summons, or something like that.  More useful-ly, you can attack them with the clocked dummy (and then re-clock), which is useful because it allows you to screw with them with one dude without bringing the rest of your party in harm’s way.

So minor edges aren’t really that great.  One other thing to note is that if you send a few guys at once to an edge, they will wait and all cross at the same time, which is useful for instantaneous spell damage and combos, which will be covered later.

Doors are great.

The most obvious nice thing to do with doors is close them when fleeing, so you have time to heal and rebuff your party, which enemies tend to be less effective than you at doing.

Anyway, lets cut the crap, here’s what you came for:

1) Send a clocked unit up to open the door (and reclock if necessary; opening doors breaks “hide in shadows”)

2) Have however many mages you want (a standard party should have four) cast however many cloudkills you want into the room, from out of sight of it’s occupants

3) As you see the clouds pass through the doorway, have the clocked dude close the door

4) Watch the screen scroll with “bitch be takin’ damage” messages

This technique has gotten me through a lot of fights that would have otherwise required effort, planning, and possibly danger, thus allowing me to get on with the roleplaying.

It’s also worth noting that if you cloudkill a few spaces in front of an enemy, and immediately turn and run after casting, by the time the enemy takes damage, you will be far enough away for it to chase and attack.  This technique is nearly as broken, and is the outdoors open-area ’sploit complement to the dungeon-based one above.  In other words, cloudkill is the way to go for any situation, as long as your opponent is vulnerable to cloudkill.  Early- to mid-game, my main cause of sleeping was not running out of healing spells, it was running out of cloudkills.

Other things you can do with doors are herding enemies around and trapping them, but I mentioned that in the previous post.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m tired.  Sorry this is so short, I overestimated how much juice I’d get from the topic, but I promise I’m not done with BG2 yet.

* Nothing like this actually happened; it appeared in my head as a fully-formed nonsensical tech horror-story and it seemed funny.

Game Review: RobotFindsKitten

Posted on August 2008 in game reviews

robotfindskitten is a roguelike game in which you play robot, and your goal is to find kitten.  In case you couldn’t guess, robot is a robot, and kitten is a kitten. It is like NetHack, the greatest game ever, in that you can use both numpad (noob) and hjklyubn (1337) to control your character.  It is also like NetHack in that you move around and bump things to interact with them.  However, the similarities end there.

Unlike NetHack, the greatest game ever, in robotfindskitten you are represented by a # instead of an @.  There are a lot less items (ie, none), so you don’t get the thrill of inventory management.  But worst of all, you can’t have a pet.  Isn’t that sad?

But in addition to these downsides, this game has plenty of good stuff.  It is completely scaleable, so if you have a large screen, the game will make use of all of it.  Also, the entire game takes place on one dungeon level, so you never have to worry about forgetting where you just were or something.

Okay, you can’t do an entire game review as a delta from NetHack.  Unless you’re reviewing SLASH’EM.  But I’m not reviewing SLASH’EM, I’m reviewing robotfindskitten.  Robotfindskitten is a colourful roguelike game in which you, the robot (#), must find the kitten.  There is a game grid (sized to your terminal) littered with 20 (by default) non-kitten objects, and kitten is hiding amongst them.  You must find kitten!  So you go up to things and talk to them.  This game is a refreshing change of pace from most RPGs, because most of the encounters are actually peaceful.  I never understood why it seems like “RPG” means “everything that’s not sentient and half of what is wants to kill you.”  In robotfindskitten, most of the things are friendly, and when there is a hostile, you can just run and it won’t chase you.  When you do find kitten, a close-up animation of you approaching kitten is displayed, and you win.

When I first won, it was thrilling and heart-touching.  Naturally, I wanted to experience it again.  But what fun is playing the same game twice?  Well, like any good roguelike, robotfindskitten is randomized for infinite replayability!  Every game you play will have random encounter positions, and a random one of them will be kitten, so you can relive the experience of not knowing which of a bunch of stuff is kitten (even the symbols are randomized!).  Also, there are a lot of different encounters you can have, so even just bumping stuff that is not kitten is rather entertaining.  And while you would perhaps expect finding kitten to not be as much fun the second, or third, or fourth time, I can assure you, it is.

So, here’s the caveats, and why I couldn’t say robotfindskitten was the best game ever.  First of all, the interface needs work.  There are a lot of nicenesses I’ve come to expect from modern games, and robotfindskittens, frankly, doesn’t have them.  You can’t save a game.  There’s no run command, so if you want to go a long way, you just have to hold down directional buttons.  There’s no farlook (although you might say that’s a benefit, since actually using a farlook would be cheating.  I would agree, but I needed to fill out the list).  You can’t customize the controls or use a joystick.

But more than interface, I must say the game lacked the depth of gameplay that makes me really fall for a game.  While it’s certainly a fun way to spend a half hour, and it has infinite replay value, it’s not something I could spend an entire weekend on without taking a lot Deus Ex breaks.  So basically, a great game, but it just doesn’t grab my attention span the way greater great games do.

I definitely recommend downloading and playing this game.  If you are on any sensible operating system, you can emerge, apt-get, yum, or pacman it, or whatever package manager you have, or download the posix source from robotfindskitten.org and compile it.  If you are on Windows, you can download cygwin, which is like a little sensible operating system oasis right inside that desert of insanity, and then you can compile it just like you would on a mac or something.

Clear Sky has been delayed, but that’s probably a good thing.  I’ll most likely review it at some point after it comes out, within maybe a couple months, or more if I’m lazy (hint: I’m lazy).

In case you were wondering, I’m not sophisticated enough to review Passage.

Computer Status Updates

Posted on July 2008 in Alex Blog vs The Pantheon, excuses

So once again it seems the gods have been trying to sabotage my server, this time by cutting power to various parts of the house*.  As it turns out, every single computer in the house with a monitor turns back on after losing power.  As I learned the following day, the Server does not have this feature, so it stayed off until I pushed the “magic website button.”  The “magic website button” causes the server to automatically turn on, start all it’s services, and update it’s IP address.  Laypeople call it a “power button.”  So that’s that, if you can read this (and I hope you can), my server is back up.

In other computers news, I got a new computer.  The graphics card is a GORRAM FOOT LONG.  That’s a lot of inches, and it shows.  I installed up some hot 64 bit Linux with the evil proprietary nvidia drivers, and nexuiz runs at 1280×1024 at 300 frames per second, which I am fairly certain is more than my monitor can do.  It also has a nice CPU, case, and price.  By “nice price” I mean “I wish I still had that much money.”  So I gave the old one away, to some person who is absolutely not unsuspecting because I TOTALLY WARNED her it had a nondeterministic CPU, so when it BSODs hard, I’m not a used car salesman…

Alright, I’m done boring you with that, go about your business.  New game review soon.  Which game is a surprise :P

* The microwave exploded and my dad was fiddling with the circuit breakers trying to shut it off

Apple Leaks it’s Own Least Favorite Bits

Posted on July 2008 in nerd stuff

As many people may remember, a while ago a 1337 hacker (the good kind of hacker, not the kind you wish would stop r00ting your boxen) named Brahms broke the filthy DRM slime encumbering iTunes music purchases. Obviously, this was a big win for everybody, since it sucks balls to buy some music and then be told you can’t use it how you see fit. The program to crack the DRM was called Requiem. It remained there until Apple caught wind of it, and being the strong, dumb, bully assholes they were, they decided to try to get that shit shut down. They made unfounded legal threats, and got Requiem removed from the Hymn Project (which had been hosting it). This was a very sad day indeed for the Internet.

This would be the end of the story, except I got a vague anonymous tip from someone inside Apple, presumably either a disgruntled developer or someone who just has moral values. I won’t name the person, because aside from journalistic integrity, I wouldn’t want to see the only person with a spine in the entire company fired. The tip was basically that iTunes contained the information necessary to break it’s own protection. Now, what’s the only program in the universe capable of breaking the FairPlay DRM? Well, aside from QuickTime (which obviously has to decode the files to play them), the answer is, of course, Requiem.

So, obviously the tip was dubious (I mean, how would they manage to sneak that in past Apple’s creepy men in suits, er, quality control?). But nonetheless, it was big enough to warrant further investigation. Obviously, requiem (~400kb) is much smaller than the bloatware piece of shit that is iTunes (a hefy 63MB), so I would have to find it before I could unmask it. I began doing FIPS randomness tests, looking for high-entropy parts of the iTunes installer. Of course, it was compressed, so most of the pieces were turning out to be pretty random-looking, but one stuck out like a sore thumb. At byte offset 31337, the entropy was pretty much on par with the rest of the file, which is exactly what you’d expect from well-hidden data. More importantly, can you think of a better place for a hacker to hide data than 31337? I sure can’t. It is just about the most elite number, and that’s a fact.

So I began to investigate 31337. Before I could even approach the task cracking the encryption, I would have to know what algorithm they used. Obviously every good modern algorithm has indistinguishable from random ciphertext until you know the key (and even Apple is smart enough to not use some shitty homebrew crypto, unlike Microsoft), so I was going to have to take a shot in the dark. I began to think about what scheme I would use if I wanted to hide data without being caught, and the answer hit me like a train.

The One Time Pad. It’s perfect. It provides perfect deniability: Any ciphertext can decrypt to any plaintext with the right key. It also provides unbreakable encryption: because you can decrypt to any plaintext, nobody can bruteforce a key, because they wouldn’t know when they got the _correct_ plaintext. However, the One Time Pad has one gaping hole: If the adversary knows what the correct plaintext looks like, he _can_ bruteforce the key. So I acquired a copy of requiem through *ahem* potentially questionable means, and started the search.

An average of 2.955*10^238887 keys later, I had a hit. I checked, and it did indeed decrypt to Requiem. The anonymous tipster had told the truth! The one-time-pad key can be found at http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/otpkey. I also wrote a nice (quick and dirty) c program to perform OTP encryption and decryption (’cause they’re the same thing), which can be found at http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/xor.c. Finally, to make things completely easy for you, I made a bash script that will automatically do the whole durn process. It can be found at http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/getrequiem.sh.

Happy fair-use-ing, and stick it to da man!

EDIT

I don’t wanna get slapped with no slander charges, because slander ain’t what this is about anyways. So let me throw this out there: This post is a work of satire. There’s no anonymous source, and the latest version of Requiem was released like 11 months after the latest iTunes (’cause Apple’s a bunch of slackers). In case you didn’t read, the properties of OTP are such that I can pick a key that will decrypt anything to anything, and that’s what I did. The important thing here is the fact that I am hosting nothing a file that, taken alone, is not related to either Requiem or iTunes, just both. Since I’m not hosting iTunes, I’m not hosting Requiem, and since I’m not hosting Requiem, I’m not hosting iTunes. If I were hosting Requiem, Apple’s laywers would probably get their panties all in a twist because they hate Freedom. If I were hosting part of iTunes, they’d probably be bitching about that too, even though hosting 400KB out of a 63MB file is not really that much to complain about, but hey, when you like to complain, you like to complain. Anyways, have fun, and remember, you didn’t get Requiem from me.

Why Baldur’s Gate II is the Best Game Ever

Posted on July 2008 in best game ever, game reviews, masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver

No, it’s not because it’s fast-paced gameplay kept my adrenaline pumping.

No, it’s neither because it’s developers actually knew how to program worth shit.

It’s not because it’s stunning 3D graphics brought my video card to it’s knees and my jaw to mine.

It’s not even because I have a webserver with advanced Linux technology which allows it to remain on for months at a time, serving pages, and not suck dong like your Windows box.

Baldur’s Gate II has an excellent plot, with rich detail and hot side-plottage action, and it has questionably good gameplay that’s certainly a lot of fun.

So first I’ll go over why the plot is awesome, although obviously reviewing plot isn’t my forte, so I’ll make it short.  But hey, I have to leave something for AzeltirWrite, because Ben hasn’t posted in a while.   *nudge* *nudge*

At the beginning of the game, you’re in some dungeon, getting tortured in a cage (that’s not a spoiler, because as mentioned, it’s the beginning of the game).  Then some events might or might not happen that cause you to end up both willing and able to leave the dungeon.  If they do, though, that part of the game is boring.  But once you’re outside, you can start wandering around, doing sidequests, and getting onto the plot.

The first plot-aligned quest you get is pretty much “collect much money.”  Effectively, this is the developers telling you “grind-quest until you feel comfortable with the game.”  At least, that’s how it felt to me.  Don’t take this as a bad thing, of course.  Unlike World of Warcraft which [I arrogantly and ignorantly assume] has cheesy-stupid quests, the quests in this game are tied to the plot, each other, and the characters, and are generally interesting and involved.  Despite being scripted out the wazoo, it actually does a good job of feeling like a dynamic world, unlike anything by Valve.  At the beginning of the game, it really seemed to suck (thank goodness I had Ben to egg me along), but after a few quests, I was starting to settle in (the interface takes a bit of getting used to) and enjoy myself.  After not many more, I started to find exploits, and finding exploits is fun (especially when playing with Ben; he’s cute when he’s angry!)

So.  I’m not going to detail the exploits, that’s for the Bitch Moves posts.  But I will say they are a’plenty.  This shit is brokehacktacular.  You’re probably thinking it’s about D&D broken, maybe a bit more.  But no, it’s not close to D&D broken.  It’s not even Deus Ex broken.  I’m not even talking about some pansy Pokemon Blue/Red broken.  I’m talking about “broken” as a design principle.  When they had meetings, there was a chalkboard with:

• Great plot
• Great characters
• Great interface
• Crappy interface
• Broken

(by the way, I’m serious about the interface; that’s not a mistake, but that part’s later)

This game is built on broken.  There are spells that provide absolute immunity to certain physical attacks and other spells, there are spells to abolish those protections, there are spells to defend the same protections against counterspells, and there are spells to abolish those.  There are ro-sham-bo, er, spell equivalence charts on the Internet that make my head spin.  There are creatures with intrinsic immunities to physical damages or magic.  There are ways to temporarily reduce or remove both.  Non-cumulative beneficial spells can be used to lower resistances (you’ll love the bitch moves on that one, Ben).  The way you have to attack some adversaries becomes specific enough that things that would seem like a dirty exploit in a fair game simply become a necessary part of strategy.  And that’s only by design.

Then there’s the accidental.  If you thought the by-design brokehacktasticicity was bad enough, this game is buggificatious.  There are AI shortcomings that will let you easily confuzzle enemies with the use of doors, area of effect spells, clocking, and just kind of moving fast (and by the end of ToB, half your party will probably be permanently hasted).  There are game mechanics glitches that let you get away with scoring some extra hits per return hit on enemies.  Finally, there is a gold-mine of buggy spells that can be exploited to do ridiculous quantities of fun stuffs.  So if you’re the type of person who likes to find and abuse vulnerabilities, the gameplay will be very fun.  If you want to abuse bugs without having to find them yourself (:P), http://sorcerers.net/ is a great resource, and (hopefully) so will be my bitch moves posts.  If you want a well-balanced game with sane combat, well, you’re in the wrong place…

Aside from having the balance of GlaDOS’ psyche, the gameplay is very good.  It runs realtime, with characters moving whenever they want, but also tracks turns which are used to limit spellcasting and attacking.  The weapons are diverse and interesting, and there are other items and spells with diverse effects, so it doesn’t get monotonous and it always feels freeform.  I hate games that give you so few options you feel like you can’t really control your character, and BGII is definitely not one of those.

The interface itself is not great.  It’s pretty much feature complete as far as what you’d want, but it’s just clunky.  Not much more to say on it than that.  It’ll be clear when playing this game that programming was not the developers’ forte.  But this is well made-up for by the way the game is awesome.

Conclusion (ie, tldr target)

So that’s that.  Put into words, my reasons for loving this game seem somewhat more flimsy than they felt before.  I admit, there is quite a lot not to like, as will be detailed below.  But all-in-all, it’s a great game.  Give it a shot, and be patient, it’ll take some time to grip you.  But once it does, well, you’ll be gripped.

So now the bad stuff.   As mentioned already, the balance sucks.  The interface is clunky.  But I also had a few specific complaints I felt I should put here.

• Several times, ending a battle triggers you teleporting somewhere.  The game needs to recognize the importance of looting the battlefield!  Especially since most plot-important battles involve enemies with great artifacts.  A few times, the area in which the battle was held is not even returnable, so it just sucks.  Additionally, you lose the stuff you had on any party members that died during the battle, since they won’t carry their inventory while dead.
• The pause button tends to lag a lot when I need it most, at the beginning of a battle.  I don’t know if it’s some surprise round rule, but anyway, nothing should stop me from pausing.  It’s just not fair.
• NPCs should not initiate dialogue without me talking to them explicitly, except when the plot really dictates that they should.  Often the NPC will start talking to one of my non-main party members, which is a pain, because the plot party members will make comments during a lot of conversations, but only if they are not the one _having_ the conversation.
• The way the game gets stuff from bags is awkward, and stupid too.  It can only extract a single item from a bag if you have an empty inventory slot, even if that item would fit cleanly into a stack in your inventory.  The same goes for picking up.  Also, trying to extract a lot of items of one type at once will sometimes (as far as I can tell, randomly) result in only extracting one.
• All summons have AI, and will therefore tend to blow off your orders and do what they want (attack an enemy when you want them to retreat, for example).  Their autocasting of spells sometimes causes problems if you have multiple summons, because of redundancy (like, I somehow have 24 planetars, and I raise a party member, and suddenly I have 24 planetars all casting heal, which doesn’t play nice with autopause-on-cast)
• Multiclassed mages can get their quickspells crowded out by other class abilities
• The game is buggy as hell when it comes to remembering the payloads of sequencers and contingencies, and not in a good exploitable way, but just kind of sucks
• Sequencers must have a target, even if none of the spells in the payload require one (Damnit I wants my triple-cloudkill and triple-skulltrap)

There you have it.  Good game with problems.
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Now playing: E-Rotic - Gimme Gimme Gimme
via FoxyTunes

Captchas Back! w00t!

Posted on July 2008 in bans

Okay, it’s not really happy news.

Basically, as you might remember, I said I was going to try IP banning as a spam solution since it would pose no inconvenience to the vast majority of my tiny readerbase (the exception being Ben, who regularly ends up in China and stuff). I now officially consider that experiment failed, because although the vast majority of spam comes from a few countries that aren’t really useful to the Internet and just kind of crap it up (No offense, Asia, but you SUCK at the Internet), there’s still enough spam locally to go around. Basically, it all comes down to botnets. In the USA you’ll get a butt-whooping from the government pretty quickly if you dish out spam. But, as long as our government refuses to require an IQ test to get on the Internet, we will continue to have plenty of Windows-guzzling suckers who get their computers infected with bots, and thus end up spamming from what should be a completely reputable IP address.  As it turns out, there is a strong overlap between people who might read my blog and people who get their shit infected (not you, of course ;).  So IP filtering isn’t an effective solution.

I turned off all my IP bans.  Wlcome back all the good-for-nothing countries, rentable hosting, and a few largely legitimate IP ranges that nonetheless pissed me off!  This doesn’t mean I invite spam now, though.  I turned back on a captcha system called ReCaptcha.  You have to type like 2 words, and they’re not that hard.  If you have javascript turned on (and you’re an idiot if you do*), it’s pretty convenient.  If you don’t use javascript (the Internet thanks you), you’ll have to do the captcha, submit the form, and then copy a blob of text from one box to another, but whatever, it’s not so bad.  I promise to try to find a workaround, but in the meantime, suck it up (If you really can’t leave a comment, email me.  My universal handle is the same as my subdomain, and my email service is provided by Google).

So that’s that.  Sorry.  I really wanted to have a non-annoying solution, but that one didn’t work.  There’ll probably be more failed experiments with non-annoying solutions in the future, so you can be excited about that or something.

BGII review coming soon for reals I think

* The reason I linked to a Firefox exploit is that nobody under 30 uses Internet Explorer anyway.  Yes, I know, IE has way, way more exploits.

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Now playing: Queen - Headlong
via FoxyTunes

State of the Gaming Address

Posted on July 2008 in game reviews, metablogging, new features

I just finished Baldur’s Gate II+Throne of Bhaal (the expansion).  There will be a review coming soon, plus a bunch of bitch moves posts.  So look forward to that.

I also just started Morrowind, and not long ago started Knights of the Old Republic, so you can expect content on those soon.

Enjoy.

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Now playing: Paul Brandt - Convoy
via FoxyTunes

Baldur’s Gate II: Fireworks (and stuff; mostly stuff)

Posted on July 2008 in masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver, story time

Today I went to a fireworks show, and I had the brilliant idea to try to correlate all the fireworks with BG2 spells (no, I wasn’t drunk, that was yesterday).  As it turns out, it wasn’t that exciting, since most of them were fireball.  The rest were burning hands, chain lightning, delayed-blast fireball, magic missile, and contingency (casting a contingency makes blinking sparklies appear around the character).  So much for that.  Not even a Melf’s Acid Arrow!

So I finished Shadows of Amn (which is what it’s called without the expansion) and I’m moving on to Throne of Bhaal.  I managed to win using a great new exploit I found.  Since I have enough material for at least three more bitch moves posts (and thus you won’t be seeing this ’sploit for a while), here’s a preview:

1) Spell Trap

2) Project Image

3) ???

4) Profit!

So things to look for in the near future are my Baldur’s Gate II review, more bitch moves posts, me starting a new game, and a post clearly typed with one hand about how I should have been more careful with these new firecrackers.

Things I will probably do if you nag me in the comments are play (and then review) your game of choice, give Deus Ex it’s much needed bitch moves post (after playing it for the seventh time), write a post about things to do with 14 nine-volt batteries, talk about something interesting other than gaming (I should probably diversify), and post those damn fire videos.

On a completely unrelated note, thanks to this brilliantly addictive-as-crack game, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Windows.  This would pretty much mean I can’t ssh into my network from outside (and, in fact, can’t not suck), except it doesn’t, and we have my server to thank.  The server has committed to always run Linux no matter how enticing the temptation, which ensures that no matter how much awesome vidjagames cause me boot the devil, I will always have a place to call ~.  I think my server deserves a round of applause.  Also, I’ve been running iptraf on it, and judging by the fact that most of the time the only connection to it is me calling iptraf, it’s clearly getting very lonely.  If you know of any way to increase readership (such as telling your friends about my blog, or simply me making it not suck so much balls), let me know, because my server and I would both love to be popular.

Baldur’s Gate II: Bitch Moves (Volume 1: Edge Abuse and Clockblocking)

Posted on June 2008 in bitch moves

The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Three simple techniques and how to break the game with them.

1) Edge Abuse

The game has many edges, or map transitions.  It can’t help but do so, it was designed for computers that aren’t as badass as yours!  But as usual, any time there is an imperfection in simulation, it can be abused.  Specifically, since time does not pass on the other side of the edge while you aren’t there, you can do stuff while your enemies can’t.  This stuff can be buffing, preparing things, or just twiddling your thumbs while you wait for effects to end.

Now, there are two types of edges you need to be aware about.  There are minor map transitions, where you have to load a new zone, but you can split your party members between the maps.  You can see whichever one you have a selected party member in.  If two maps are loaded, monsters may move between them (such as to follow you), but creatures under your command that are not party members cannot.  Any maps will be running if you have party members in them, and as soon as you take out all party members, the map is saved and unloaded.  Nearby monsters might follow you when you unload a map.  The other type of level transition is a major transition.  You must gather your party before venturing forth, and anything that is not your party will never cross these (although plot NPCs can, of course, be found in different regions).

Both types of transitions are abusable, but in somewhat different ways.  I’ll begin with major transitions, since these are simpler.  Expect coverage of how to abuse minor transitions in a future post.

- Coward Poking

You run through a transition, and frantically bang the pause key (spacebar) at the loading screen.   When it loads, you have all your spellcasters fire off sequencers or rapid spells, and then immediately retreat.  You can then reset your sequencers and wait a few seconds to recoup your spells.

- Buff Milking

You run through the transition, and wait for the enemies to buff themselves, cast spell protections, etc.   You then retreat, and go make yourself a sandwich or something while their buffs run out.  Repeat the process until the enemies run out of their daily castings.

- Sequential elimination

After passing in, target all of your attacks on one enemy until it dies (preferably instant magic attacks, because there’s no point in actually putting yourself at risk), then flee.  You can now reset your sequencers, or even sleep.  Enemies will recover spells and probably heal overnight, but they won’t come back to life, so if you are fighting an exhaustively strong force, it is a good idea to try to kill one and then duck away to nap.  Repeat until they are all dead or the size of the enemy army becomes more manageable.

2) Clockblocking

As we all know, the spy from Team Fortress Two cloaks using his wristwatch.  Since cloak sounds kind of like clock, and wristwatches are kind of like clocks, I decided to call it clocking.  Not long after, I decided to just call cloaking clocking in general.  It lets me make stupid riddles like “Why couldn’t the AMULET user find the i686 CPU?”  Anyway, lets pretend not to acknowledge the fact that “clockblocking” sounds like “cockblocking” and get it on.  Get on with it.  You know.

Enemies will not see your clocked (invisible or hidden in shadows) units, but they are smart enough to know not to try to walk throw them (geez, why aren’t you?).  There are a few tricks you can pull off that take advantage of this, and by a few I mean a whole lot.  Lets begin.

- The simple corner block

A melee enemy is standing in a corner.  You make Namlok hide in shadows, and you put him right outside that guy in the corner.  Now he can’t move and he doesn’t really know why. Then you just walk in with ranged units and shoot him until he dies!

- The hallwall

Using good ol’ Invisibility 15′ Radius (a great spell, clocks your whole party, and cheap too!), make several party members invisible.  Enough to block a hallway.  Now go piss off some enemies, and when you want to hide, run back behind your wall (allies will temporarily push each other out of their ways).  The monsters walk up, and find they can’t walk any further!  Sucks to be them.

- The Inconvenient Detour

For this, you need to find a place with a circuit, with two doors.  Here’s a crappy MSPaint illustration:

The way you carry out this trick is as follows:

0) Ensure that both doors are open, and don’t be seen during setup

1) Get some cloaked party members blocking the block point

2)  Send  a party member to guard door B

3) Send an uncloaked party member to taunt the asshole

4) when the asshole pathfinds around the long way, close door B with the guard, and use either a clockblocker or the taunter to close door A

This is a very effective way to trap enemies you don’t want to deal with.  Remember, if it isn’t you, it can’t open doors!  More on door abuse next post, by the way, so stay tuned. 

Hacking While Intoxicated

Posted on June 2008 in alex shares wisdom, nerd stuff

As mentioned in the previous post, I got myself pretty tipsy this week. I’d tell the diarrhea story, but I think that was for a different reason. Anyway, one thing about Mexico is that all over the place, people will try to get you to give them money to use the blagoblagoblag. Now if you hang around idealist freedom-obsessed hippie-type open-source-nut loonies (people like me), you’ve probably heard the saying “I could really go for some pretzels right now.” Wait, wrong forum… You’ve probably heard the saying “Information wants to be free.” That also doesn’t quite apply here, I’m just messing with you (the post on bypassing wireless network firewalls might happen, but is certainly not this one).What I’m really trying to say here is that it’s hard to give people stuff but really only kind of give it to them and not let them use it on their own terms. I haven’t heard a clever saying to make that sound not awkward, except maybe indirect ones like “go read Bruce Schneier.” But it’s a common issue. People try to give you information that you can’t lutz; that’s DRM. People try to give you boxen on which you can only run their code; that’s Trusted Platform Computing (aka. gaming consoles, aka. locked phones, aka. thanks for buying this computer that still isn’t yours). In this particular case, it’s people trying to let you use their computer to read your webcomics on the tubesoblag but only during the time you paid for and not before and after. This post is about maximizing the Internet-usage-efficiency of said before, and when necessary, after, in the face of the computer’s provider’s pathetic attempts to extract your hard-stoled^H^H^H^H^H^Hearned moneys.

There are four things you need to know about the organization of this. First, the order in which I put the entries is increasing order by likelihood of getting in trouble. So if you want to minimize risk, you can just follow down the page. Second, the numbered order is the order in which I generally do these things. It differs in that it factors in convenience and power as desirables; ie, running on a Linux system is more desirable than ending up on a non-admin account in Windows. Third, I’m not going to pretend that the system does not run Windows; the system always runs Windows. Four, I can apparently hack better than I can walk.

Super-Low Risk: Get around the authentication screen

This sounds like an end, not a means. But I mean this pretty literally: most of these authentication systems work by having a program, with a window, where you can put in your credit card bullshit. They usually have some kind of protection mechanisms in place to prevent you from just ignoring the window. For one, it’s almost always fullscreen, and hides the oh-so-useful start menu. Your goal here is to get something to open a web browser, explorer window, or cmd shell; all of these can be used to run whatever you want.

3) Try to close the window: Try using alt-f4 or the task manager. These are unlikely to work: the task manager is usually the first thing they block, and applications can ignore alt-f4 easily. But, they are worth a try. Note that the task manager can be accessed indirectly with ctrl-alt-delete, but also directly with the lesser known ctrl-shift-escape. If you’re lucky, and they blocked by key combinations or something dumb like that, they may have missed the latter.

2) Use the Windows run dialog: Windows hotkeys tend not to be blocked. Try hitting windows-r. If you get a run dialog, type iexplore.exe for Internet Explorer, explorer.exe for Windows Explorer, or cmd.exe for a command prompt.

4) Use links to spawn Internet Explorer: This one is a tricky one, and it got me into the mostly secure business center at the Hilton. Just hit windows-u. That brings up the Windows Utility Manager, which is for people who need help using a computer. What’s more helpful than documentation? If you click through the utilities a bit, you will easily find several links to Microsoft’s website. Clicking any one of them will bring up the website the only way Windows knows how: by running Internet Explorer.

Low-ish Risk: Add hardware for Great Justice

These tricks require preparation, but can pay off against a computer that is fully secured only against the expected methods of user input.

9) Bring a media keyboard: Some keyboards have “media control” buttons, like next, previous, etc. Those same keyboards tend to also have buttons like “calculator”, “mail”, and most importantly, “web browser”. If you can bring in a USB one and plug it in, you might find that the “web browser” button works as it should, because the engineers of the system didn’t count on you having such a button.

8) Autorun: Windows has this super retarded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvenient feature called “autorun”, where basically some files say “O hai Windows execute me plx” and Windows says “You seem trustworthy, okay.” If you just load a flash drive or burn a CD to autorun a batch file to run internet explorer or even a portable web browser, you might find yourself having bypassed security by simply plugging it in or popping it in the disk drive. Instructions on making autoruns can be found throughout the Internet.

Momentary medium risk: Gain authentication while offline

You may be used to thinking of “online” and “offline” as meaning on and off the Internet. In some contexts, though, it means “inside the system” and “outside the system.” For example, on Windows, an online password attack doesn’t necessarily mean over a network, it just means trying to authenticate through Windows. But I digress. By offline, in this case, I mean by inspecting the contents of the hard drive without the cumbersome Windows in the way. These attacks are less dangerous than simply replacing the system, in my opinion, because after you gain the authority you can put the system back online, and the presence of the computer’s familiar Windows GUI running will give an observer a sense of normalcy.

10) Search for information on how the authentication system works, and find a hole, backdoor, or master key. I’ve personally never used this one, since the convenience of raw, automated cryptanalysis is well worth the time it takes. In other words, I’m lazy and I don’t know shit about reverse-engineering. I include this for completeness.

7) Crack the Windows passwords: Password cracking is supposed to be computationally infeasible. Luckily, thanks to design stupidity on Microsoft’s part, combined with the inevitably crappy passwords in use wherever you are, it is far from infeasible. Ophcrack is your friend here. Their LiveCD has scripts to automatically do everything it takes to show any alpha-numeric passwords on screen within 20 minutes using a rainbow table attack. Also, if you look around a bit, you can get 60GB tablesets to crack pretty much any Windows password under 15 characters within 45 minutes or so. Once you have the password for the desired account (which is, of course, Administrator), just boot back to Windows. Chances are it autologins, but you can hit windows-L to get back to the login screen, where you can log in as Administrator.

Medium Risk: replace the system

I say “medium risk” because this will be obvious to anyone who is watching you. If the computer in question is not being supervised by a human, than there is pretty much no risk in this.

1) Live Linux: Boot Linux off a CD or flash drive. I recommend slax, puppy linux, and dsl-n as three good livedistros to look at (if I missed your favorite distro, don’t forget to leave bitter comments! This, of course, means I expect to hear from Scott about knoppix). This will work as long as the BIOS is not locked down, and will be blatantly obvious to anybody who can see the screen.

High Risk: vandalize the security system

These attacks basically involve removing the security in place. They are high-risk because they leave big traces unless you take measures to cover your ass, and unlike the above, are probably illegal in most cases.

11) Change passwords: There are several tools for letting you change Windows passwords offline. More than one of them can be found on the ever-so-useful Hiren’s Boot CD.

12) Flash the BIOS: If you can boot your own OS, you have OWN3D the box. So generally, they don’t want you to do that. If you are finding BIOS passwords to be cumbersome, you can try to flash the BIOS. To do this, unplug the computer, open the case, and remove the BIOS battery. Wait a few minutes, maybe poking around with a paperclip to cross random wires (shorting things is a good way to make RAM go bye-bye). Then put the thing back together, and with any luck, it has been reset to factory defaults. More details on BIOS flashing can be had from more reliable sources.

13) Remove the auth system: The system in place to protect the computer will consist of executables (like the dumb spash screen thing), registry keys to run said executables, and probably registry keys to lock stuff down. Most likely, just deleting the annoying executables will take care of security, but you might also need to fix some registry values like the ones that disable task manager and the ones that prevent explorer.exe from starting when the computer starts.

Now, for some important notes on how to goatse the security wide open after gaining some access:

-If you get a cmd shell, you can run “explorer.exe” to get the Windows desktop. Due to something in Windows’ programming that is not quite a bug but is rather retarded, this will only work if explorer.exe is not already running, even if you currently have no desktop.

-If you get Internet Explorer, you can turn it into Windows Explorer by just typing Desktop in the address bar. I’m not sure if this still works with the later tabbed version of Internet Explorer.

-If you have Windows Explorer, you can run all the programs by browsing to them. cmd.exe is in c:\windows\system32, or some similar directory on odd systems.

-If “the” task manager is blocked, it doesn’t mean programs that happen to be task managers are blocked. Google for and download “process explorer.” It is better than Windows task manager in every way imaginable, and it is not blocked.

-If the computer connects wirelessly to the Internet, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get Linux to access the wireless card without downloading some drivers, which you will need to download on Windows, since Linux can’t access the Internet, and once you’re on the Internet on Windows you might as well stay since you’re lazy. If you do get the system to boot from CD, but can’t get Linux to connect to the Internet, try one of the offline attacks to gain access to the Windows system.

Goodbye Latvia et. al.

Posted on June 2008 in bans, masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver

While I was chillin’ out in Mexico celebrating the wonderful convergence of my age and Mexico’s Drinking Age, apparently my blog was hit by mucho spam-o. So I am happy (by which I really mean not happy) to announce that Latvia, and probably some other places I can’t pronounce, have been banned. If they ask nicely, I will unban them, but I don’t really expect that to happen until way in the future when I’m popular enough to be read by people I don’t know personally, at which point I will have a better anti-spam solution (hopefully), as well as a webserver that doesn’t suck and stuff. But I do have a webserver.