Technology Bytes

Allright! Jay Lee is back after several weeks spent off continent, meaning that we’re back at full force and that Dwight is no longer grue bait. At least for now… Friend of the show, KD5, is also freshly back from a lengthy trip from iPadding it down-unda. Both travelers will be making one more trek this Friday night to the Coffee Groundz for the October installment of the Geek Gathering. If you’re interested in travelling light while still carrying enough tech to stay connected across multiple countries, these are the people to talk to.

We’ll have *another* traveler joining us this Friday, this one fresh in from Italia. While we’ve had many members of the Arduino family make appearances at Geek Gatherings past – the venerable Diecimila, the younger, faster Duemilanove, the much more pronounceable LillyPad and the Mighty Mega – the newest member of the family will be making a Houston appearance this Friday. That’s right – The Arduino Uno made its debut this past weekend at the Maker Faire: New York. We’ll be unboxing one (yeah – they actually come in boxes now!) this Friday before promptly plunging it into a pumpkin in an effort to make something scary for Halloween. From scooping out pumpkin guts to wiring up motion sensors and LEDs, we’re going to try to go from unopened box to finished project in the course of an evening. Things kick off
around seven in the evening and won’t end until the last Light Emitting Diode is lit. The Coffee Groundz serves coffee, tea, beer and wine in addition to a light menu. Free WiFi and a few available AC outlets complement the evening, as does the promise of a breezy back patio. Hit www.geekradio.com for details and directions.

Oh! We’ll also have a visitor from China – in the form of Seeed Studio’s ‘Film’, a flexible band containing a microprocessor and some supporting electronics. They can be joined together to do some interesting things with wearable computing. Unfortunately, I’m one film shy of having enough to go all the way around my wrist, so if you’re thin wristed, relatively free of Cheetoh dust from the elbow down, and have ever considered becoming a forearm model, we may require your services Friday night. I want to be clear that I’m not discriminating against my orange fingered bretheren out there – it’s just that the Seeed Film is orange, too, and we really do want it to show up in pictures.

Now, if you know that you can wash off the Cheetoh dust, but you’re still worried that you don’t have the required fortitude of forearm for photos on Flickr, you’re probably not spending enough time in front of the command line. As with many things, it’s really about having the right equipment. So if the equipment in your DOS gym feels old and busted but you don’t want to ante up enough money for a new Mac Membership, you can always hit the free weights at the Linux gym to really pump up your pecks and hunts or to get those rock hard abs you’ve always wanted. That’s ABS as in the Arch Build System, the software package manager for Linux. That’s funny, because I bet you all thought I meant Advanced Bash Shell Scripting… Bazinga!

If you need a little help in getting motivated or you want to pick up enough Linux acronyms to make your own joke train wreck, you’ll want to attend the Linux 101 workshop at HAL-PC Headquarters Tuesday, October 5th at 7:00 PM. The Linux 101 special interest group at HAL-PC takes a look at Linux from the beginners point of view the first Tuesday of every month. And while there *is* a very powerful command line under the hood, if all your moves are mouse-centric, you’ll be just fine in Linux with KDE or Gnome. HAL-PC is located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, not too far from the West Loop and San Felipe. Linux 101 takes attendees through a three month progression before turning them out on their own or inviting them back to rinse and repeat. Actually, that’s the attendee’s choice, I don’t think you can actually flunk Linux. Well, SCO did, but that’s a different story. Hit www.haaug.org and then click on the SIG Calendar for a full description of the workshop.

And lastly, if all you do is stay at home, hanging out on FaceBook, maybe it’s time you get a life and go out to see a movie about FaceBook. The FaceBook movie, called The Social Network, opens this Friday and chronicles the founding of social media site. Depending on ticket availability after the Geek Gathering, there may be a late night trip to check our FaceBook status on the Big Screen… I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll play the Twitter short, but we’ll see how it goes…

That’s it for your forearm forewarning and that’s that for BarretTime.

This is the last BarretTime before the return of Jay Lee. Hopefully, we’ll be back to full force next week, but for now, Dwight is the only person here in the booth to take the brunt of BarretTime abuse. Again, sorry about the Grue last week; those things happen…

So, Dwight, when was the last time you ever Hi-5’d, Yak’d or Multiplied?

If you’ve ever Twittered, FaceBooked, Flickrd, MySpaced, Linked In, Friendstered, Multiplied, Hi5’ed, LiveJournaled, AIMed, Yak’d, ICQ’d, IRC’d, CompuServed, Prodigied, AOLed, GEnied or arguably even USENET’ed, you may want to take this moment to look down and find out who owns the shoulders on which you’re standing.

(Even if you don’t want to do this, it’s too late now…)

Any guesses as to the initials of the giant that made all of these activities possible before they were given cute monikers?

(beat)

That’s good, because that would have totally blown the rest of BarretTime out of the water…

What about the initials of his creation? BBS.

The first BBS or Bulletin Board System was born out of the Great Blizzard of 78, when five feet of snow fell on Chicago in a 24 hour period. Coded in just four weeks, the CBBS, or Computerized Bulletin Board System, was named after its cork board counterpart used in dormitory, offices, and apartments to exchange information and offers among its local community. The breakthrough idea is this: rather than trudging through five feet of snow to see if anyone is hocking Moon Boots or Space Heaters on the bulletin board at the end of te quad, you simply (Big Radio Air Quotes Here) “Dial In” to a computerized BBS with your phone line and modem, download any notes, postings, or messages, leave your own, then disconnect so the next user could walk up, sorry, “dial in”, to the Bulletin Board and conduct their own social business.

Things were still very local, as this was before the Internet had hit the home, and to reach a BBS in Detroit, you actually had to place a phone call to Detroit, incurring whatever long distance rates were in place at the time. And if you lived in a rural area, not only did you have long distance charges to contend with, but often something known as a party line.

Actually, we’ll take a quick DC to cover this… If you’ve ever had an annoying little sister or little brother pick up the phone while you were dialed into an online service, you can only imagine the frustration of having ten or twenty of those siblings all sharing the same common phone line. The idea is that its cheaper to string a single phone line between multiple rural homes than it is to run individual cables between the CO and each home. And if you lived anywhere as far removed as Conroe in the 80s, there’s a good chance you know what I’m talking about. It’s h3ll on downloads.

So getting us dialed back into BarretTime…

The creator of the first Bulletin Board System, the CBBS, was Ward Christensen, creator of XMODEM protocol, which can still be found lurking in corners of the Internet that only Grues and embedded systems developers dare still tread.

The CBBS was first installed on a cobbled together S-100, the bus designed for the Altair 8800, arguably the first hobbyist microcomputer, and soon had Chicago users connecting, one at a time, to post to the very first forums. The SysOp or System Operator played the role of arbiter in what belonged on the board, or even who could post there. Most early boards were free, run by hobbyists, but boards soon popped up that required cash on the barrel head as a way to add additional phone lines and modems. File sharing also took off. Before BBSs, shareware was exchanged in person or by snail mail, but now, people could easily upload and download programs to their BBS without ever leaving the cold glow of their CRT. Power users frequenting more than one board would often aid in transferring these goods from one BBS to the next, and while funny lists and cute ascii art didn’t move at a viral speed, espcecially by today’s standards, they did crawl along at a microbial or fungian pace.

Of course, with the good comes the bad; it didn’t take long for BBSs dedicated to illegal file sharing to crop up. These were often fueled not by paid subscriptions, but by upload ratios: meaning that in order to download something good, you usually had to be the first to upload something better. They also had cooler sounding names than their credible cousins: The Tholian Web was a notorious 713 board used heavily for distributing games in the Gulf Coast area. Of course, all of the info for this BarretTime came from Wikipedia. Groove, can you remind me to hit up Wikipedia post-show and make sure that all of this stuff is actually in there?

BBS use grew fairly quickly through the 1980s and by 1993 there were tens of thousands of local BBSs around the world. A *few* of the dial-in boards made the move to the Internet, letting users connect via telnet or even packet radio, but the vast majority died with the widespread adoption of the Internet that really took hold this same year.

So, to Ward Christensen, I thank you, early shareware users thank you, anyone who has ever used open source software thanks you, social media users thank you, the RIAA has it’d doubts, but we’re all sorry for the scuff marks on your shoulders.

That’s it for this Brief BBS Debriefing and that’s that for BarretTime.

There’s a long weekend coming up, and while many of you may be out of town, the majority of the Tech Bytes crew will be holding things down in Houston at the Coffee Groundz this Friday. Things start a little after seven at 2503 Bagby at McGowan. WiFi and Geeky camraderie are free, but the coffee, beer and eatz will cost you. Parking violations and towing fees can also make a dent in your wallet, so be sure to not park along McGowan directly in front of the coffee shop if you do come out Friday night.

You can find more information about the Coffee Groundz, as well as a couple of pictures from our past Geek Gatherings on their main page at www.coffeegroundz.net. And of course, you can get always all the details at www.geekradio.com, along with some pictures of phliKtid the Coffee Groundz has yet to grok.

Now, even though the Geek Gathering is on for the weekend, pretty much everything else of a techy nature is off.

VB Programming at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
The Basic 101 Seminars at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
Samba and Network Administration? Cancelled.
And Monday’s Chief Architect Special Interest Group Meeting? Cancelled.

So what to do with all the extra time and no user group meeting to go to?

Well, you could always use the long weekend to improve your hacking skills. Gone are the days when a hacker was forged from equal parts curiosity, technical prowess and thousands of hours at the keyboard. With the advent of YouTube, you, too, could become an uber hacker in only a matter of minutes; just four minutes and twenty six seconds, if all you want to do is view other people’s IP addresses. That’s right, in just under five minutes, NextGenHacker101 will walk you through using the l33t hacker tool Tracer-T to see who’s connecting to a particular website, their IP addresses and their connection speeds.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you’re really missing out on some excellent mis-information. The joke is that Tracer-T doesn’t really do any of the things that NextGenHacker101 believes – it simply shows each piece of network routing equipment that sits between you and a particular host on the Internet. If you want to check out the tools that *really* get the job done, carve out some time this weekend to get familiar with the following current gen hacker toolkits:

Pin-G: Pin-G is installed by default on most modern operating systems as well as a few ancient ones. To use it, simply type in Pin-G, spelled p i n g, onto the command line followed by the IP address of the computer you’d like to hack. You’ll immediately see if that computer is reachable from your own, as well as a report on how much lag may exist between you and the target. You can even use Pin-G to build other more nefarious attacks like Smur-F or Floo-D.

OK, now that you’ve determined that your target exists, you’ll want to see what kinds of Internet Aware programs it may be running. To do that, we’ll need to reach for the next tool in our arsenal, Inma-P.

Inma-P is a free network security scanner that can do things like list the open ports of a particular computer on the Net or even detect the operating system of a remote host. All in all, it’s a very robust and powerful tool. Inma-P comes installed by default on many Unix based operating systems, and is available for download for Windows, Mac and other Operating Systems at n m a p . org. To use Inma-P, type n m a p onto the command line followed by the IP address we used in our previous example. Using it like this, in its most simple form, will yeild a list of open ports on the target computer.

So, Now that you know what kind of services are running on your target, you may want to capture some of that traffic to see what’s really going on.

We’re getting away from the command line now and going graphical. After all, the Internet is a series of tubes and you’re going to need to crawl up a couple of them if you’re truly going to make the metamorphosis into a l33t haxor. And as all hackers know, the command line is not for crawlers: we’re going GUI on this one.

The last tool of the evening is called Wireshar-K. It’s a packet capture tool that will allow you to save and inspect the individual packets traveling over your local network segment. If nothing else, use of this tool will scare you into using end-to-end encryption whenever possible. That means using https instead of http in your URLs and using products such as PGP or GPG to encrypt email and attachments.

Of course, all of these next gen hacker tools have real world counterparts. Ping, nmap and Wireshark all all great network diagnostic tools with legitimate uses: they can give an experienced network admin quite a bit of detail about what’s actually happening on their network at the packet level. If you do spend some time with them this weekend, be sure not to direct your next gen attacks at anyone other than yourself, as many servers run Network Intrusion Detection Systems and don’t appreciate being scanned.

That’s it for this NextGenHacker Fourty One One and that’s that for BarretTime.