New Theme

So it's been a couple of months since I destroyed my last custom theme and then left this blog to collect dust while posting on my new gaming blog this-mage.tumblr.com

I decided to be a little lazy and instead of designing my own theme again, I went ahead and downloaded a pretty cool looking theme off btemplates. It's easier to download and gut a theme that you like rather than create one from scratch, especially for me considering I can do the coding but lack some design creativity.

When I say gut, I don't mean that I removed every reference to the original author of this theme, I did leave all of their references in the code and in the footer of this blog. I did however remove a lot of crap in the code left by the author. This theme had a hugeee image above the posts that would link to the author as well as a stupid link to advertisements!! There was also a ton, and I mean a huge chunk of, code that was for the slideshow that played above my posts to link to the author.

Despite the set backs I do like the theme. All I have left to do is put a dropdown navbar at the top and come up with a new banner in photoshop.

If you're interested in what theme I used it's here:
http://btemplates.com/2011/blogger-template-rio-movie/

Gaming Blog... this-mage.tumblr.com

I've always wanted to start a 2nd blog devote to gaming. I don't like posting anything gaming related to this blog, because it floods all of my other posts and pushes them further down to other pages. In the past I would solve that problem by posting less on games, but then I'd sit there wanting to post something grand but stopping myself from doing it. I'm an avid MMO player and most MMO's are starting to have a feature that posts in game events to outside social platforms like Twitter, Youtube, and Tumblr... oh and I can't forget Facebook! I see that in one game I'm playing called Rift, and the new Star Wars MMO, SWTOR, will also have that feature as well.

Long story short, I've created a simple tumblr blog dedicated to gaming. Now when I have gaming news, I can post it there instead of on this blog. Maybe that's why I have yet to fix the code on this blog, after breaking my old design XD

http://this-mage.tumblr.com/

Back to blogger and blogging

So after jumping between... ummm.. 4 different blogging platforms (wordpress,drupal,squarespace,tumbler) after initiall leaving blogger, I told myself that I was never going to blog again. IMO it was a waste of time and I was already busy between gaming, school, anime, and whatever else I'm into. Blogging about those things took me away from actually doing those things. So after about a month of no blogging, what do I do, I start a new blog dedicated to one game and start blogging again on my original blog (this blog). It's terrible, I know. So know there are like 20 posts from one day alone, but all of those posts were taken from my old blogs. Those are only about half the posts, but some do get lost in translation.

I've spending a lot of time with photoshop and web design lately, that I've been getting a lot of ideas for this blog. Coming back I'm surprised to see how well I even designed this with not knowing what I know now. I used a lot of shortcuts and rigged the code just to make it work, so the automated blogger design doesn't really work with my blog. Even switching out a theme will make a lot of the code disappear. So I'll go through and hopefully get a lot of the old code cleaned up and start designing my blog more to my current tastes.

I'm also throwing in more categories (or more tags being used as categories) into my topics list. My old list was pretty lacking in topics, so this will be more to my tastes. This is all probably due to me getting a little older and being more experienced since I last posted to this blog.

Como Tocar Por Tu Amor

Lately I've been feeling more and more motivated to start practicing guitar. My friend has been pushing me to do it for about 5 years. He has been using my guitar, which is better than just letting it sit in the closet for those 5 years. So lately now that I've been feeling more motivated to play, I've been listening to a lot of classical music and other various acoustic songs of interest. I've always like the guitar in Por Tu Amor, by Los Alacranes, but never could find a good tutorial on it.

I found this one on youtube by a user named Tanalyss who shows how to play the main part with just 4 chords. Even a noob like me understands this video pretty well.

Lich King Down!

By happen chance I was able to fill in the last spot for a dps on a 10 man ICC raid.  Most people in the raid were geared for Cataclysm raids while I strolled in with my pvp gear.  I stood out like a sore thumb but I assured them that despite the handicap I could still push 10k dps and plus  I knew all of the mechanics to every fight already.  Sadly the fights were a land slide.  With our high end gear the fights were seamless.  We had 3 wipes on the Lich King but we were shooting for an achievement and it we needed people to pay attention.  In the end we got him and the achievement.  The gear carried us a little bit, but other people finally started getting the hang of the boss mechanics as well.

[caption id="attachment_3195814936" align="aligncenter" width="573" caption="Last stretch before killing the Lich King"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3195814935" align="aligncenter" width="573" caption="The 2 achievements awarded for beating the fight"][/caption]

Trust You- Yuna Ito

Heard this song from the ending of the first season for Gundam 00.  This is an awesome song and fit the anime very well.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2E3UzZQbh0&w=640&h=390be

This video was banned :(

Gundam 00 FTW!

Gundam 00, one of my top fav Gundam serious now, right below Gundam Wing.

 

 

This is Me

Rift Puzzle and Cairne Locations

Screw my previous post with the map of every Puzzle location in rift! The following link is a webpage with every puzzle + every cairn in the game with videos and snapshots on how to do them.

 

 

http://www.kfguides.com/rift/puzzlesguide.php

Blogger Announces New Changes!

For those not in the know, SXSW (South by Southwest) was last.  One of the keynote speeches was by google on upcoming changes to Blogger, Google's blogging platform.  I have to admit that I'm excited to see Goole finally revamping Blogger and catching it up to the modern internet.  This makes a lot of sense with Wordpress still being very popular and the rise of new blogging platforms like Tumblr.  Twitter and Facebook statuses are also taking a chunk out of the blogging business.

 

Blogger was the first platform I had ever started blogging on and despite some lack of features, it was always the one blog that gave me the most control.  Being my first blog I would find myself changing the style every month.  Hell I blogged on Blogger for a long time, since '06.  The blog isn't being used, but it does still exist, just marked as private.  If Blogger gains features like pages, while allowing the same amount of control as before, I'd definitely consider moving back.

 

Below is the video presented by Google on Bloggers changes.  There wasn't to many features announced in the video, we'll just have to wait and see!

 
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhFc6GqVdU&w=640&h=390]

Those Were the Days

• When gear was earned, not given.


• When you had to work with friends in order to make it.


• When a run was a challenge and not a grind.


• When reputation with other people mattered.


• When everyone on the server knew each others game name.


• When content was new and not recycled.


• When those who wanted to PvP, PvP'd and vice versa (no mixing it up).


• When shit was fun and most friendships today formed back then.

What's This?!

What is this?!?! Hint, it isn't WoW. Shhhhhh, don't tell the guildies.

Infinity Blade

Typically when it comes to my iphone 4, I watch movies on netflix or crunchy roll streaming and/or listen to music on Pandora. I find it hard actually find a game that works well with my phone. I have some insanely awesome classic games like Sonic and Gunstar Heroes, but the lack of textile buttons makes the game play not just difficult but annoying. I've also spent money and downloaded games like Civilization and Final Fantasy, but end up playing the 0.99 cent or free games. Time is also a major factor in that case.

When the iphone 4 was first announced, Infinity Blade was a demoed game with major backing that was made specifically for the iphone. The 5.99 price point and the lack of wifi when I'm bored enough to want it, had kept me from downloading this game.

Now I finally have it, and conclude it's seriously addicting. The graphics are amazing and the controls were definitely made for the iphone. You play a knight who invades this castle to kill the evil leader who killed your father. As you make your way through the dungeon you fight a succession of bosses. While fighting you can swipe your finger in either direction to make your person dodge in that direction. Swiping in the direction of a blade swing parries the attack while swiping in any other motion makes your character swing out with his sword in the direction you swiped. You also have magic spells that when enabled you write out the symbol for the spell on your screen to cast. The first few levels are pretty easy, well except for the main boss(I wont spoil it). Although every time you come back the bosses are harder and trickier than they were the previous time you fought them.

Play Mario Bros in Your Browser

I may be behind the times with this post but I still find this awesome.

Typically I could spend hours browsing and downloading old school Roms and Emulators just to scratch my itch to play some Mario or Zelda. But now you can just load these up in your browser without actually having to download them! Check out the link below for some classic Mario.


Play Super Mario at Emuparadise

Server

For the last month or so I've been using an old family computer as a server. My initial motivation was to take every computer I could and create a beowolf cluster out of them. A beowolf cluster is a group of computers that are networked together to share processing power. After ruling out every single one of my old laptops (except my durable little dell pentium 1) due to hardware issues, I decided that in the end a beowolf cluster with the computers I had wasn't really worth the sweat.

While initially doing research and working on setting up the cluster, I also got the idea to use the server as a WoW (world of warcraft) private server. Around 5 years ago I had played on a private server with GM powers and I wanted the ability to that again + with friends. On a side note all of us still pay for and play often our typical WoW accounts.

The only laptop of mine that was still running great was my old pentium 1. I swear, besides my new asus, none of my computers lived up to my old dell pentium 1 inspiron. My step-dad recently got a new computer and that meant the old family desktop was sitting outside collecting dust. One thing about a desktop, any hardware problem can be fixed a lot easier than it could in a laptop. Let me note that the old desktop was not my computer and was not taken care of. It was in terrible condition when I opened it up to clean it out. The inside of the computer had cobwebs galore and about 1/5" of settled dust on everything. On top of the heat sink for the CPU, there was about a quarter inch thick of dust, and I mean thick. The power supply had dust all through it's insides and the cd drive no longer opened it was so clogged.

I took my 3 can's of air and thoroughly cleaned that computer out. I was able to get a WoW private server running on just the 512MB of RAM and the dual core 2.8 GHz CPU. The CPU didn't make all the difference since it was pretty much sitting at idle once the WoW login and world server was up and running. My main problem was memory since the programs for the WoW server were taking up all of my RAM and almost all of my paging file. I decided to up the memory to 2 gigs. The next problem that arose was a CPU that constantly sat at 70 degrees Celc. That processor shouldn't go above 68 degrees celc. I wasn't too surprised to see that the chip was overheating, especially considering all of the dust that had built up in there. The good news is that with a little bit of thermal glue I fixed the overheating problem easy. I barely see the CPU peak above 68 degrees unless I'm doing multiple things like running a virus scan and running other apps other than a browser at the same time.

My biggest lesson learned with this server is to not use Windows Server 2003. My original plan was to make an Ubuntu Server and I had given up on that plan after the WoW private server didn't run right (although I later found out I had missed some steps). Because I moved back to a windows environment I should have used Windows XP. Trying to find a free firewall and virus scanner for the server proved almost impossible. All of my favorites don't support Server 03' because it's used by corporations and not in private use. I also ran into a lot of driver problems because it seems like no driver has support for Windows 2000 or Server 2003.

Hack Blogger

A network security professional linked this site on twitter this morning. I haven't tried this hack yet, but it looks like an easy 3-step method to making yourself the admin of someone elses blogger account.


Here's the link for your perusal.

http://www.nirgoldshlager.com/2011/03/blogger-get-administrator-privilege-on.html

I Want Translations for This Video!

My Eyes Hurt Just Watching This

Old School Gaming

Both of these systems were the shit when they 1st came out, but they didn’t last long and have already been lost in time. I had a virtual boy that broke on me about 6 months after full time use. I never had the Game Gear, but instead had the Sega Nomad that was a portable system using the actual game cartridges. A lot of my friends had the Game Gear though.

ATT Rep Talks Shit on Twitter

This lady is definitely getting fired.  She reportedly got on her twitter and started trash talking everyone who was showing interest in switching to Verizon. The twitter account is closed down now, but this wasn’t very smart of her to do.  What was that saying?  Oh yeah, the customer is always right!

*Clicking the images will bring you to the original article on techcrunch.com

Zelda Remix

Got this on repeat

Boxxy is Back

Another vid with disabled embed : -/

Eight Movie Scenes That Messed You up as a Kid

Definitely #5 that made me cringe.

danmeth:

Eight Movie Moments That Messed Me Up As A Kid
compiled by Dan Meth

1. Final Shot of “Sleepaway Camp”


2. Twins from “The Shining”


3. Bear from “The Shining”


4. Mouthless Girl from “Twilight Zone: The Movie”


5. Zelda from “Pet Sematary”


6. Dwarf from “Don’t Look Now”


7. Alien behind the door in “Communion”


8. Donald Sutherland’s screech in “Body Snatchers”
   
   HALLOWEEN WEEK CONTINUES… 

100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know

These were some of my favorites!
1.  “I don’t believe there’s a power in the ‘verse that can stop Kaylee from being cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct-tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” – Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (episode: “Serenity” (pilot))

2.  “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.” – Wash, Serenity

3.  “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” – Chief Brody, Jaws

4.  “Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Ian Malcolm, The Lost World: Jurassic Park

5.  “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” – Taylor, Planet of the Apes

6.  “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!” – Robbie the Robot, Lost in Space

7.  “And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…” – Milton Waddams, Office Space

8.  “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.” – John McClane (in writing), Die Hard

9.  “Shall we play a game?” – Joshua, WarGames

10.  “Ya Ta!” – Hiro Nakamura, Heroes

11.  “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

12.  “Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.” – Egon, Ghostbusters

13.  “Never argue with the data.” – Sheen, Jimmy Neutron

More of these can be found on the original article on wired.com athttp://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/100-quotations-every-geek-should-know-geekdad-wayback-machine/

DDoSing Tumblr

DDoSing Tumblr.  This site frequently goes down.  I myself am guilty of sitting there and hitting F5 over and over again until it pops up.

CoD Rap Song

Guilty!

I’m guilty of this with everyone

confessionsofagamergirl:

Everytime.

We Didn't Start the Fire

This video grew on me over time, org seen posted on wowinsider.  I can’t imagine how many tries this took to get the timing right.

Chromeo

Chromeo - “Hot Mess” from Paradoxal Inc on Vimeo.

Found this video while browsing Vimeo about a week ago.  Since then I’ve been hooked on this band.  It’s not what I’d typically find myself listening to but it has a good beat and is very catchy.  Another one of there songs I really like is HERE on youtube.

Technorati Tags: chromeo,music,vimeo

More Pets and Holiday Guild Ideas

Just noticed that Blizzard has released the Ragnaros and Moonkin Hatchling pets!  Naturally I had to buy them.  I’m a pet collecting whore I know.  At least I’m donating to charity when I buy one of these pets, or at least that’s what I tell myself to go to sleep at night. 

Buying the pets got me thinking, I should do something like this for my guild for the holidays.  So far my idea consists of either a 100 to 200 gold opt in.  It’s a lot, but at the same time not really.  I’m not sure what kind of contest it will be atm, but the 1st place person will be able to choose between a blizzard store pet or half the pot of gold from the opt ins.  The 2nd place winner will get the other item not choosen by the 1st place winner.

We’re a smaller guild, so I’m not to sure on how much participation we will see.  I’m working with my officers to get more ideas and to get them to participate.  Plus, if I give people enough time, we can see a bigger turn out.  A lot of people log in during the day when we aren’t even on.  No matter  what,   we’ll figure out a way to make it fun.

Technorati Tags: world of warcraft,WoW,pets,store,blizzard,contest,guild,holiday,christmas

Throwbacks and Showcasing Ultra Quality Settings

A unique thing about World of Warcraft is that you can look back on it much like you would RL (real life).  In game, relationships are formed between fellow guildies and other friends met in the online world.  Despite not knowing these people in RL, you spend so much time with them in the game world that the relationships formed are much like the ones formed outside of the game.  It’s not so much as remembering a persons avatar, but more so remembering their online name and the person behind that name.   If you spend a lot of time on just one server instead of many, you often run into the same people over and over again.  You may end up questing with someone you helped level in  a previous expansion or vice versa.  I’ve bumped into people, or invited people into my guild, that I realize I’ve ran with in the past.  *I’ve played the game for 5 years, so I can put an emphasis on past.* 

I recently blogged about a new computer that I bought and I have to say that I’m still very happy with my choice.  I’ve been running everything max settings and multi-tasking like a beast with no noticeable loss of performance.  I only have a couple of screen caps in game since the new settings, but I wanted to show the difference between now and the past.  Some of the past photos which will be labeled, are throwbacks to previous guilds and WoW experiences.

Taken with ultra settings, me and Malfurion Stormrage!

My friend Dylan riding my rocket (inside joke). Picture also taken with ultra settings.

A throwback picture on medium settings. This is the early days of Naxx and our guild at the time.

Another throwback. Medium settings. Left to right, brother’s ex, brother, and myself

Hopefully in the coming months we’ll be seeing more of these picture postings with my current guild, either in a raid or a BG, doesn’t matter.

Technorati Tags: world of warcraft,WoW,screen caps,pictures,throwback,ultra settings

Brotherhood

   I finally started watching Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood.  I loved the “original” anime and it was hard for me to want to watch a totally different retailing, despite the fact that it’s more true to the manga.  I’ve been stuck on this intro for the series and love the guitar riffs.

Lich King

The Frozen Throne   It took a long time, long enough that this expansion is almost over, but we finally stood at the bottom of the frozen throne.  Are adversary, the Lich King.  It was a good run while it lasted and I was lucky enough to have found a group that actually stuck together throughtout the run without rage quiting on everyone.  The 10 man raid mainly consisted of members from an end game guild on our server.  I hope to get my guild in here one day, even if casual.  For now, I have to better myself as well as anyone else I can drag along with me from the guild.  The more powerful I get, the more options I open up for the guild.

   Unfortunately despite making it to the final boss, we weren’t able to defeat him.  A lot of people were tired from a full day of raiding that no one was up to par for the LK.  So we were not able to get our kingslayer title, but we faced him.  The knowledge of all the fights had up until the LK will help with future content.

Breaking in the New Computer

Breaking in the new computer, originally uploaded by seokid.

My newest edition to my collection of laptops! This laptop is a G37; part of Asus’ gaming laptops and it’s a beast. It can currently handle anything I throw at it with max settings, and then some. I had this running WoW (max settings) whist installing Starcraft 2, streaming internet radio, running Voip, and torrenting anime, all at the same time! That was with no impact to the performance of my gameplay. At least now I’m set for when Cataclysm comes out in December.

Specs:
1.75 Ghz I7 (/w turbo boost)
6GB DDR3 Ram
17.3”
640GB 5400RPM HDD (the weakest feature IMO)
ATI Mobility 5870

…and everything else that’s not as important to me

Dreamcast Weekend

An itch that that needs to be scratched!, originally uploaded by seokid.

Because I didn’t do to much last weekend, I’m making up for it this weekend. I’ve dusted off the dreamcast and redownloaded (shhh) all my old fav. games. I do support buying games that I enjoy, but it’s not like I can find these in stores anymore. My 7 year old brother is going to be over this weekend and I’m unplugging the xbox, wii, and ps3. He’s going to have to experience the classics.

Games to play this weekend:

Guilty Gear X (pictured)
Jet Grind Radio
SF Rush 2049
NFL Blitz 2000
Marvel vs Capcom
Resident Evil Code Veronica
Resident Evil 3 Nemesis
Fantasy Star
Capcom vs SNK
Chu Chu Rocket

..and whatever else I can’t think of atm

Halloween and Calculus 2

My Halloween, originally uploaded by seokid.

As you can see, I’m spending my Halloween prepping for my Calc 2 midterm tomorrow (and posting this of course). The worst thing about studying for my Calc midterms is that the time always get’s away from me. For example, I’ll set down my pen, confident that I have an understanding on the section and then woah! I look at my phone to see that 2.5 hours have already passed. Not fun when you have like 7 sections.

I may take a break in a bit, squeeze in an episode of Dollhouse. I also rented a couple of horror movies on the xbox. This way if I pull an all nighter, I have something to watch around my midnight break. Makes the long night go buy a lot easier.

The sections I have to study for this mid-term are
7.7 Approximating Integrals
7.8 Improper Integrals
8.1 Arc Length
8.2 Area of a Surface of Revolution
8.3 Moment and Center of Mass
10.1 Parametric Equations
10.2 Calculus with Parametric Curves
10.3 Polar Coordinates
10.4 Calculus with Polar Curves

Wish me luck!

——-UPDATE————-

Mojo says that’s enough studying for the night

——-UPDATE 2!!!————

It’s now 12pm and I think that calls for a tv break.  I think I can squeeze a horror movie in there, considering my Halloween has been pretty lacking

Blizzcon

Daniel and Ronaldo, originally uploaded by seokid.

Pic of Daniel and Ronaldo waiting in line for the World of Warcraft beta. We wanted to get some goblin play time in, but it was to laggy for that.

Firesheep, Protect Yourself

   In my last post, I talked about a new firefox extension called firesheep and how it can steal your logon sessions from websites like facebook.  While visiting your local starbucks, or using your schools public wifi, who knows if there is someone else running firesheep on it.  I’m curious to stop by the starbucks near my college and do some shoulder snooping.  How much do you want to bet I’ll find someone running it? 

   While using a public wifi, if your only doing things like reading the news, then you don’t have to worry.    It’s the people who are logging into various online services that have to worry.  The best protection against someone using firesheep, is to not use public wifi or to avoid logging into sites.  But this sucks, and that’s facebook (don’t know why i keep picking on facebook, lol) is probably 90% of the reason your even using the public wifi.

   If you choose to continue using the public wifi, and want to log into your various accounts, the 1st method of protecting yourself is to use a VPN (virtual private network).  Those of you who work from home (or starbucks!) you probably use a VPN to log into your workplaces network.  VPN is good because it “tunnels” or encrypts data between your computer and the server running the VPN.  Your cookies will be safe from anyone at the coffee shop, and so will all of your browsing habits.  The downside of VPN is that if you don’t already have one set up, you have to pay per month for it.  This could range between $7-$50 dollars a month.  There are also ways to set up one on your home computer, but that’s for another posting.

   The 2nd way of protecting yourself, is totally free, and that’s to force the website to use SSL on everything.  You can do this easily by using some firefox extensions, like Force TLS and Facebook Secure.  Unfortunately there is nothing out for IE or Chrome at the moment, but hopefully this simple attack will spur them into creating some way of forcing SSL connections on sites you specify.

   Hopefully we will start to see sites providing some sort of encryption for everything and not just the login.  For now though, at least you have some ways of protecting yourself.

VPN:

Witopia

StrongVPN

Super VPN

Extensions:

Force-TLS

Facebook Secure

Hacking a Password Protected Iphone

   For those who may or may not know, it’s possible to setup a password on your iphone.  This way, if someone gets their hands on your phone, they wont have access to any of your information.  Now a way to bypass that password has surfaced.  By pressing certain things in sequence on the emergency call screen, a thief can gain access to all of your contacts, voicemails, and history.  They don’t get access to the rest of the phone, but I think we can agree that your contacts and voicemails are most important to keep private.

   Below is the video I found in a link on twitter.  Go ahead and try the hack on your own iphone, I did :)  If you get stuck and can’t back out of the screen, just call a phone number and then cancel it.  This will send you back to the passcode screen.

—-Update: This trick only works on iphones that are currently up to date.  Tried to show a friend yesterday and it didn’t work because their iphone had never even been updated—

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/ugADxS5ol48?fs=1]

Firesheep, Sidejacking Made Easy

   Toorcon, a network and computer security conference, was just last weekend.  Over the past few days, the internet has gone crazy over a new firefox extension, Firesheep, that was unveiled there.  You wont be able to find Firesheep where you typically get all of your firefox extensions, but you can download it on the authors website at http://codebutler.github.com/firesheep/

   So why has this extension taken over the internet by storm?  And by storm, I mean over 120,000 downloads, and news stories about this tool on every news website I typically visit.  Firesheep is a one click, simple (except for some windows users) way to hijack someone’s facebook, twitter, etc.  If your on a local wifi, you’re probably susceptible to getting your accounts broken into.  This is because most local wifis are unencrypted or at least running WEP (which is also susceptible).

   What is sidejacking?  Sidejacking is a technique used to gain access to a victims online account without needing to find their username or password.  This is made possible by grabbing a users cookie.  You have probably heard or seen cookies when cleaning them out in your browser.  A cookie is what keeps your signed in to your account.  Without it, you would have to keep logging in everytime you visited a different webpage.  Cookies are also used with the shopping carts seen on websites; that’s how it remembers what you ordered.  So cookies are very useful in the online world.  The main problem is that most sites don’t encrypt them.  A website, like facebook, will encrypt your login information but will send you the cookie unencrypted.  Over a wireless network, it’s just simple prey floating through the air, just waiting for another attacker like firesheep to grab it.

The picture to the right is firesheep in action.  Firesheep sits in the bar at the left, and sniffs port 80 (unless otherwise specified) for all of those yummy cookies.  As it finds them, it lists the victims name, pic, and what website they’re on.  You can double click one of the listed sites, and the session will appear in the window to the right, already open and logged in.

  Google is safe, somewhat, against this type off attack.  They have actually deployed SSL for everything on their site as of last December.  I myself have always been told that running SSL on everything is a complete waste and takes way to much computing power.  Google has stated that they only see a 2% increase in CPU usage and feel that everyone should move to using SSL on everything and not just the login.  For smaller companies with one server, this is hard, but for big companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Hotmail…. you need to pick up the slack!

   Pictured to the left is the preferences menu inside of Firesheep.  You need to specify which device to do the sniffing on.  I had some problems myself with the wireless sniffing, mainly due to windows.  Your card needs to be put into a passive mode in order to sniff packets.  In windows, this is a pain in the butt to do.  You have to have winPcap downloaded, but sometimes that doesn’t solve the problem for you.  I’m waiting for the linux one myself, so I can load this up into Ubuntu.  At least there, it’s possible to put my card into the passive mode.

If you want to read more on Firesheep, check out the authors website here

Again, you can download it on his website here

You can also download winPcap here

   If you’re interested in sidejacking in general.  There is another cool tool called Hamster and Ferret.  It’s a little more complicated than Firesheep, and requires man in the middle, but it’s another tool to try out.

Bri's Birthday

   My sis’s (pictured far left) birthday was this last Tuesday, so my family held a get together today to celebrate it.  It’s been a long time (mom’s FB states 7 years) since we’ve had everyone under the same roof at the same time.  Everyone is so busy that no one’s schedule ever matches.  Crystal, who’s laying across everyone, is typically busy with her family.  We got to see who two sons today who are getting very big.  Lauren goes to college in Sacramento and has little time between work and school.  Amanda on the far right is stationed in Texas.  She’s currently on leave visiting the family and just came out yesterday.

   I have two other siblings who aren’t pictured, Kaylie and Nathan.  I think at this time they were hid away in their rooms.

What Were These Girls Smoking

Sushi Etiquette

Damn, I’m guilty on a couple of these. Guess I need to go to the sushi bar to improve on my etiquette!