unbibium

When I was growing up in the 1990s I called BBSes and they had these text files describing how to build strange hacking devices and programs, how to hack the phone system, and other interesting things of varying legality. Sometimes it was just ideas for pranks and exploitation at K-Mart or McDonald's. See textfiles.com for examples, if it's still up.

In the 2000s, there was a cable channel called TechTV, and a show called The Screen Savers which was basically about emerging technology and online culture, hosted by Leo Laporte. And there was a young employee of the show named Kevin Rose whose first big segment was about the port 139 exploit in Windows. He gained a reputation as "the Dark Tipper", with the kind of stuff we used to see in BBSes. And this was how I knew him for many years, as he expanded his role on the show, as the Screen Savers was replaced with Attack of the Show with him as host, and as he and his AotS co-host Alex Albrecht hosted the video podcast known as diggnation, despite Rose living in SF and Albrecht living in LA at the time.

As his career progressed he tapered off the "Dark Tipper" stuff despite the demand from the likes of me. He hosted a more explicitly underground show called thebroken with co-host Dan Huard. The intro had this kind of campy cyberpunk "heroes on the run" thing. He started the show with him and his co-host each opening a 40. They started strong with a street segment where they hacked WiFi and even broke first-generation WEP encryption. Then they had this weird segment where Ramzi, a "hacker" correspondent, just downloads Bonzi Buddy over KaZaa while crazy foreign music plays in the background. And after that, they describe how to get a free pizza by trailing a walk-in customer, writing down their name and order, and impersonating that customer over the phone while complaining to the manager.

man, what a scummy show in retrospect. But it was all stuff that '00s me was happy to let slide. Why shouldn't we all just break into encrypted WiFi? Why shouldn't we laugh at funny foreign man doing bad acting? Why not lie to minimum wage employees and franchise owners to steal pizza? Indeed, I was able to wash my hands of all this because I was too lazy to actually try this stuff.

His heart wasn't in it anyway, and he made two more episodes: a short "oops, all Ramzi" episode and an interview with Kevin Mitnick. For years, people clamored for him to keep the show going, and he always gave excuses like they couldn't get Ramzi back.

Eventually they put out episode 4, and their way of apologizing for the long wait was a two-minute sketch where both hosts stumble are incapacitated by marijuana. The rest of the show continued the theme of tacky fratboy culture. The campy cyberpunk intro had a strip club scene now, and strip club scenes are scattered throughout to break up the long technical segments. The first segment was completely illegal cell phone jamming with a "don't do this in America" fig-leaf disclaimer. After another Ramzi bit about removing DRM, they do a bit about hacking the X-Box 360 to play backups, which includes this part where they stand outside of a Blockbuster, in Blockbuster uniforms, and tell their audience send pirated DVDs back to Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service as revenge for getting "fisted" by the brock-and-mortar stores. Boy that aged like milk didn't it. There were credits, and then 5 minutes of bloopers where they showed how hard it was to make the funny foreign man say "dat ass".

Rose and Huard also put out a serious tech show with none of the GTA shit called Systm, which I think only had one or two episodes. I can't find it on YouTube, but I remember they had a circuit diagram with a debouncer on the first episode. I may still have a T-shirt I bought to support the show. His production company, Revision 3 Studios, would go on to make other stuff.

At some point, Kevin Rose got on the cover of BusinessWeek in shabby clothes for a "dot-com kid gets rich" story about Digg. Rose hated the cover, and Digg's fortunes didn't last.

I lost track, but at some point, Kevin Rose resurfaced an "angel investor"... and he'd still appear on This Week In Tech every so often.

and then, I heard Kevin Rose did the Joe Rogan podcast. this was back when Rogan was just a comedian with a super popular podcast, a lot of MMA expertise, a few ill-considered opinions, but was still many years away from becoming a full-fledged tool of the alt-right.

And he spent the first twenty minutes talking about keto.

I don't know why that felt like a revelation, or what it revealed, but I knew that I was no longer one of what Kevin Rose was. The geek species had diverged, into nerds like me, and tech bros like him.

All the TechTV alums were early adopters of bitcoin, but most fell by the wayside, as it became known how impractical it was as a currency, how wrought with fraud and crime the industry was. A few years in, Leo Laporte lost the password to his wallet, and it became apparent that his story was more common than the successful cash-out. But Rose stuck with it, to the point that Laporte doesn't want to give him airtime right now.

and I wonder, was Kevin Rose really a cyberpunk gray-hat hero who stuck it to the Man, only to become one of the Man's tools of financial dominance? Or do his old thebroken episodes betray ethical blind spots that were always there, and society has just disintegrated enough that our latest generation of capitalist sociopaths can exploit them? Are those ethical blind spots endemic to tech culture, ever since those 1980s text files telling us how to steal services from phone companies and mess with K-Mart employees?

I've been messing around with scrambls and annoying people on facebook with it.  so far I've discovered a few things that trouble me a little.

First, the double-@-sign bit doesn't work with LJ's rich text editor: @@derp@@.  if I switch to HTML it will, like in my last post.

More troubling is that I can retroactively change the access group of any message, no matter where I post it.  This tells me that the decryption isn't completely client-side; your browser will at least have to phone home to determine the current access group of the message.  So, strictly speaking, you do not have anonymity when you read messages; scrambls' servers know which account is reading which message.  But it also implies that every message is encrypted under a different key, which might make it harder to break the encryption.

It admits it's "social" security, meaning it's better for personal use than for overthrowing the Syrian government.  But anyone I know who cares enough about encryption to install a plugin, probably cares a lot about anonymity too.  

For what it's worth, I broke my Atari trying to put the new OS in.  I even tried putting the old OS back in, still won't boot.  I wonder if I fried one of the existing components, though all the soldering was done near resistors, and I've heard resistors don't just die from heat.

I'll need to have someone who knows what they're doing come by and look and see if there's some easily reparable damage that's more apparent to the sighted than it would be to me.

OK; that black wire is probably the antenna to my wireless card. So I figured I'd better reconnect it, just to keep it from flopping around the inside of the case, and so I didn't have to remember all this if I moved it out of this room. But I had to remove the video card to get my giant hands in there, and apparently there was a latch I was supposed to release, and now the video card is stuck in a crooked position. I'm going to wait until I can get someone experienced in here before I monkey any further.

last night:

* party at tamtrible's: pretty good, though a bit crowded and that really young kid was a human pinball. Played some Pirate Flux and ate turkey and talked programming with some people.
* secret santa exchange at Casey Moore's. will probably talk about my gift later. I didn't reveal myself to my secret santa recipient.
* RHPS: some folks from Casey Moore's actually showed up to this. there were technical difficulties but the show was good and I was surprised when my friends were impressed with my callbacks.

This morning:

* kind of achey.
* I decided to install that new power supply in my PC just now, but removing the old one is proving a little difficult. There are some cables zip-tied together that make it impossible to remove. Is there some trick to releasing the zip-tie, or do I have to cut them loose? My scissors aren't up to the task. And I wonder how important it is to zip-tie the new power supply into place.

So the only output device I have for this Arduino board is a blinky light. So I whipped together some code that outputs morse code through it.

But since my only input device is a button that I finally wedged into the right holes, code that reads morse code might be more useful. As it stands, I can only put text at compile time.

But that's just a trivial C++ exercise. Circuit design is the really new stuff.

I visited jecook's new house yesterday. It's enormous, and he had a neat 720p projector set up. But apparently the plaster ceiling is a little too delicate to mount it there. Here's hoping it doesn't get spilled on.

He's building up a DVD collection. I told him I mostly stopped buying DVDs since I got Netflix, and my Roku player for streaming on the TV. But he doesn't need one because his PC is already hooked up to the projector. As for Netflix, ir's fine for fulfilling your curiosities, but there's something to be said for having DVDs on the shelf for display purposes; they're kind of an identity good. And he found the entire series of Babylon 5 for $100 -- that's less than I paid at Lowell Observatory for Cosmos, which is at least ten years older, and only 12 episodes. And you can stream Cosmos from Netflix or, without a Netflix subscription, on Google Video, or at cosmolearning.com.

Speaking of which, there are two MP3 players of note I'd like to bring up. The first is the 2GB Sansa Clip, which is on sale at woot today for $15. It's small and clips onto clothing like an iPod Shuffle, except it's got a screen and an FM radio. I bought one a couple of years ago when I was sick of losing iPod Shuffles. It even plays audiobooks from Audible. You can buy one, load it up, and throw it in your luggage for your next long plane trip.

If $15 is too rich for your blood, then compare it to this clone I found on DealExtreme, which looks almost exactly like a 2nd-generation iPod Shuffle, with some subtle differences. It has no built-in storage; you have to provide a microSD card. It also has a more standard USB port, so you don't need a custom dock. But, it has no shuffle switch, even though it has a shuffle logo on the package. I don't know if that means it's always on sequential play, or always on random play, so wait for the reviews to come in from whoever buys them. But at $7.50, it's a nice "why the hell not" sort of thing, especially if you're already there buying other cheap crap from China. It comes in black, silver, pink, gold, and blue.

Yes, Desert Sweet Biofuels is the same people as Desert Sweet Shrimp. It's carbon-negative, which is better than carbon-neutral. More importantly, it's also economical, which means you don't have to trick people into buying Carbon Credits™ to get the price down. The world is saved, unless the people who killed the electric car also kill this project.

So I gave the keys back to my old apartment complex, and my keyring is much lighter.

I'm getting more unpacked every day.

Also, I've hacked my Wii. Perhaps a little too hard, as I think I might have corrupted a few strange system functions. Fortunately, I think I know how to restore it from a backup I made more or less immediately after I hacked it.