Archive for April, 2008

Hey everyone, CB here, just wanted to grab your attention for a second and tell you to click the Darkmindz button to your left, and vote for Flyninja, helps out greatly keeping us listed in the top and it does a great service to the site your viewing (makes you stronger too).

Darkmindz recently released their toplist, and so far so good, you should check out their site they offer a lot of great hacking and development content, plus a lot on security learning material with some really great mindz, wether dark or not. If your lazy like me, and don’t feel like moving your mouse that far, go ahead and click here, here, or here.

hack the fucking planet!~

I agree, in part, with Grym on some stances he takes with regards to the ‘white hat’ hacker ethic. However, one can draw a parallel between the saying “All a good man must do for evil to previal, is nothing” (or one of the various other forms, of the same meaning) and the aforementioned, hacker ethic.

What I am getting at is, if you play by the straight – the “White Hat” creed, evil will indeed prevail. I think it is not only right, but also necessary that these same ‘white hats’ do NOT always play by the law. You are indeed right, if the white hat hacker does not stand for himself, no one will..that is exactly my point. You cannot play white hat, bake the cake and eat it too – you must change colors and protect the domain that is yours, the internet. Do not sell out for money, do not give up because the man says you ‘cannot do that’ – learn and prosper, do what it takes. The internet is ours, we must keep it.

Do what is necessary, if you must break a law to bring justice to someone – do it. Law is only a constraint of freedom and one must only give up the freedom that is necessary for their own protection. Must I give up my privacy for my own protection? No!

The root of my rant is that one must not be passive to what is around them, if one is, one has already lost.

Be free, break the law that constrains your freedom for your own ‘protection’ (ahem!) and then prosper!

Recently, while waiting to go to trig class, I stood wearing a shirt that identified me as a hacker.  Being a white hat, this has never bothered me.  Some other student asked me, “Are you a Hacker?” Shrugging, I said yes.  He told me about his friends that had nice stereo systems that they had gotten from hacking.  Trying not to talk about the ethics about hackings (or throw Schmooballs), I told him that I’d never gotten money from hacking.  He looked at me like I must be a n00b.This got me to thinking about how there just may be no place for White Hats in this Brave New World of ours.  Being the Senior Administrator at Cheer10s.com, I read about Crackers and Black Hats every day.  I’m not sure sometimes if there are no good guys anymore or if they just don’t make good press.  I do my best to only use the word ‘Hacker’ in a good light.  And I will continue to do that as long as I feel it is the right thing to do.

Before Notacon 5, a friend of mine got a one word response from a bystander for the word ‘Hacker’. The response: ‘dirtbag’.  My friend asked the publisher of a well known hacker magazine what he thought about this when trying to get an interview with this publisher.  The publisher thought enough of it to say “we’ll have to change that” but not enough of it to grant an interview (and interrupt a drinking competition with an empty wine bottle).

The point is, if the White Hats won’t stand for themselves, no one else will.

ok so some people have asked me to tell them how to change some certain things in their Ubuntu desktop to make it look more of their own, things such as the main panel icon, panel font colors etc…So here we go heres how you can do some of this stuff.

Ubuntu uses a so called “Human” theme at default, so I will assume thats what your using at the moment, but these little tricks should apply to other themes as well, however don’t quote me on it.

Changing the Main Icon of the main panel

To accomplish this nifty trick take whatever graphic you want to use as the new icon and resize it to 22px by 22px, honestly I have mine resized to 30px by 24 or 25px, LOL, also it may be a good idea to make sure you have a transparent background to the image so that your icon will look fine with other colored backgrounds/themes…rename the resized image to:

start-here.png 

now CP or move the new icon to the folder:

/usr/share/icons/Human/22×22/places

Go back to /usr/share/icons/Human and delete the file icon-theme.cache open up terminal and type:

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/Human

killall gnome-panel 

If all went well you should now see your logo/graphic as the menu icon now

Changing panel font colors 

This is handy for lightening up those fonts to be readable for darker custom themes…open up your home folder and make sure you can view all hidden files, look for the file .gtkrc-2.0

If the file isnt there open up your text editor and create one, put this into that file:

style “panel”
{
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”

}

widget “*PanelWidget*” style “panel”
widget “*PanelApplet*” style “panel”

edit fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff” for your desired font color thenhead back to terminal and killall gnome-panel again.

Changing default theme colors miscellaneous stuff 

Open up the file /usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

check out this file and edit the colors as you see fit, after editing this file i restarted X (ctrl-alt+backspace) twice to get my results…

Have fun with it!

Mr.Gamer take a seat and strap yourself in. If you just so happen to be browsing the net reading up on game reviews, opinions and all that jazz you may have come across one of the hottest, and even more so, coolest vixens to ever grasp an Xbox controller. Her name is Britini Martini, and before checking into your Halo multiverse make sure to check your gear because she will likely spank you all the way out of your mommas basement and into the skin burning sunshine with a reality check.

I came across her bloggings about a week ago while I was just URL surfing and the site Gamegirl.com just made me click through. I was struck by a bolt of lighting (enthusiasm would be a better description) seeing these cool albeit good looking girls who are hardcore gamers. Now I will admit that I feel ashamed of my negligence when it comes to the amount of gamer girls out there, I haven’t met many, but I will not say that I disagree with girls pwning us guys in any of the various game worlds developed…by right, if I suck at a game – then I’m straight up fair game to anyone regardless of sex. Anyways…

If you want to catch up on some of the great stuff she has blogged and reviewed head over to Gamegirl.com and read up. Her [interview with N0M4D] and the N0M4D controller setting for Call of Duty 4 is inspiring as well as interesting. If you don’t know who N0M4D is, he’s a pro Rainbow Six Vegas player at MLG and has a rare condition known as Arthrogryposis which restricts the use of his arms and legs. He plays with his MOUTH! So since N0M4D has this condition that limits his ability to play games like most people, the guys over at Infinity Ward worked with him to create a COD4 controller setting so that he could experience and use every aspect of the game. Very cool indeed, not just that N0M4D disregards his condition and is a pro gamer anyways, or that you can play games using only your mouth and face, but that it goes to show the possibilities of gaming without your hands. That, my friends, is real gaming and real dedication.

I can rap off a few other things that would put this girl in my Top 2 coolest gamer/geek girls alive and gaming category, other than that she digs the Xbox 360 and likes Assassins Creed, but that she is a devoted gamer, attends game conventions and tournaments, and she hates walks on the beach (as stated in her myspace). It’s in my opinion that walks on the beach are overrated as is, I would rather sit on the beach and let the water come to me instead. She also hates Jack Thompson (which any gamer should acknowledge the same feelings) who is one of those government voices against “violent” video games. What a fucking douchebag…if us gamers and geeks wanted non-violent video games…us gamers and geeks would MAKE them. Jack Thompson GTFO and STFU.

You can catch Britini Martini surfing around Myspace, Gamegirl.com, pwned,com and hoopledoople.com a rising adult live gamer community whom she just recently teamed up with. Keep an eye out for this one fellas, Britini Martini has likely got you within the crosshairs.

If your like me then there are a lot of things you want to do. You want to get outside during the day, get some sun on your pale skin and shed those pounds that have built up over the last few winter months. We’ll an awesome concept that we came across at Notacon may just be an answer to that. Hacker Spaces. We all likely have heard about them before but never really threw the idea into context with the phrase. Cult of the Dead Cow, Squid Labs and Instructables have done it, not to mention cBase from way over the Atlantic, which some would say could be a splinter cell from THC. The idea has probably crossed your mind a few times. “Hey why don’t some friends and I get a place where we can do all our cool shit together.” That has crossed my mind so many times, friends and I have talked about getting a small building just for that cause. However there is a new trend that is emerging with these Hacker Spaces.

It’s called ‘publicly available.’

Before these groups were close knit and would not let outsiders into the group, much less the building. Aside from obvious ‘secretive’ mentalities some of these people may have had, it likely has more to do with not getting your crap stolen by the first crack head nerd that walks through the door. And that makes sense. However even with obvious problem of someone stealing all your stuff, there are groups emerging all over the place starting these spaces and making them publicly available, giving classes, teaching people who WANT to learn and who WANT to be apart of something.

At Notacon I was given the opportunity to sit down and speak with some guys that are apart of the Hacker space called HacDC, located in the Washington D.C area.

I sat down one on one with Nick Farr and Eric Michaud to talk about these Hacker Spaces and how to go about setting one up, the types of things you may find in one, and how such spaces are getting people involved in projects together physically and breaking the net collaborations. This is were its at. Stay tuned for video of our talks!