eoclan.net

So yeah.

Lately I've been experimenting with various distrobutions of linux. I've downloaded various types, tried, prodded and experimented.

By the end of this I've ended up with 2 clear favorites.

1. Karmic Koala (Ubuntu's latest release)

2. Backtrack4 (Pwnsauce)

Karmic Koala is your most popular linux distrobution and anyone that uses it can see why! Its elegant, sexy, powerful, adaptable and user friendly. What more could someone want?

Backtrack4 however is a slightly shadier variant of linux. It is developed on a kubuntu core (Ubuntu with a KDE GUI) making it easy to use. But the special difference here is that it is loaded to the brim with network security tools. Or to put it more plainly, hacking tools.

Now I do enjoy the odd hack, its a challenge right? And who cares if I do it legally? In fact there is ever a career option in this vague genre of computing called "Ethical Hacking". Its a field thats becoming everincreasingly popular and neccesary.

First thing usually someone would start to hack in this day and age, are wireless networks. They're just sitting there right, why not use them? But not for malicious purposes. First thing you would do is estabalish the encryption and cypher, along with the essid, bssid, channel and connected clients. If it is wep and there are clients, just setup an airodump-ng shell collecting IVS and writing them to a file. If there are none, you must capture a packet, re-engineer it, and replay it with aireplay-ng. Easy done than said ( ;) ). And then you will have your data stream you need to capture enough IVs to crack the passphrase with brute force. If it is WPA/WPA2 TKIP, its basically the same deal minus the IVs, you are looking to capture a 4-way handshake in which you can run a dictionary attack on to break. You MUST have connected clients to hack/crack wpa/wpa2. Enough of that though.

If you want to have some harmless fun with a laptop. Get a backtrack live cd. And just have a play.

I was recently camping in a remote location in NSW and I couldn't sleep. So naturally i whipped out the bluetooth enabled laptop and proceeded to see what i could do. In the next 20 mins I had discovered a vunerabilty that affects most modern day phones that are bluetooth enabled. And I had discovered a persons phone in the tent next to me. So naturally, I screwed with his head. >:D

I was sitting in my sleeping bag, bashing out a command in bash, I then paused for a moment and observed the silence before slamming my index finger down on the enter key. Only to hear my tents neighbours phone burst into live and start ringing, needless to say he was awoken, startled and rather confussed why his phone was ringing even though there was no call. After having much joy with this for the next hour or so, I decided I'd like to hear what they were talking about when it rang, so i reverse dialed his phone to mine and listened to the conversation he was having with his wife that night. It consisted of "What the fuck, what the fuck, why the fuck is my phone ringing? This shouldn't happen, make it stop, its 2am, I'm just going to take the battery out *click*" And thats where my fun ended for that night.

Needless to say, I slept very soundly that night. :)

~Ryan

I never imagined the game being this large. I have played about any Bioware RPG before but Dragon Age: Origins is one big-ass game that overshadows many RPG’s. Not only is it long and huge, it also really takes you in and its hard to skip a quest and get on with the main storyline to cut through that delicious gaming butter a bit faster. Some quests looking like smaller side-quests might end up costing you quite some precious dough at a later stage in the game that you need to buy potions, or you could miss a sweet armor or a useful party member. So be careful with what you are skipping.

Enough with the excuses and let's move onwards with some serious investigative reviewing. One of the first things that struck me with the game is right there on the box. Why on earth is there a subtitle called Origins on that box when this clearly isn’t an installment in the X-Men series? The game is a brand new IP in a freshly made up universe yet the title reads like it’s an add-on or a sequel. The reason for this is the ways you can play the game. You can start the game from six different origins based on race and class and each origin plays different yet keeps the

same universal goal which is preventing the evil Darkspawn from taking over the world. Now this explanation is cutting the corner a bit but explaining the whole system would be hard without giving away some game elements. Just remember that on top of just having a huge game on the first go, you actually can play six games that differ quite a lot from one another. Add the fact that each origin can have a different story because of the decisions you take and it rapidly becomes clear that this whole game is a big, complicated and therefore dangerous endeavor.