The picture on my Samsung LE40B535 turned red. Ish.
So yeah. I was playing around with my TV, and the picture turned red. Yeah, like red red. It had a red tint, or a hue, or some such shit. So first I was obviously like, "ok some weird settings change occurred". Check settings. Nothing. Reset settings. Nothing. Picture is still redish. I mean the picture is sharp as all hell, but on all inputs, the picture is red. Including the built in DVB-C tuner, the PS3, the Xbox 360 (both over HDMI).
The only thing that changed? I hooked up a desktop PC through VGA for testing purposes.
Yeah! Hooking up the PC over VGA borked the picture on all other inputs. Great.
Googling... Find a forum that has the solution, luckily. First page was all "I called service!!!". Second page had the solution. Go to the service menu, set a setting back to normal and presto: we're back. No service needed. So how was it done? Here goes:
- Shut down your tv, but leave it in standby.
- On your remote, pointing it at the TV, press, in order, Info, Menu and finally Mute. Do not hold the buttons down, just send one command per button to the tv.
- Turn TV on. You should now be in a Service Menu. (this should work for most Samsungs)
- From the ADC/WB menu, select ADC Result
- From there, find the 2nd_R_Offset value, which for me was about 20 or so higher than the 2nd_G_Offset and 2nd_B_Offset values.
- You should see the change immediately.
- To get out of the menu, shut down the TV and start it normally.
Note: My TV was running on the latest firmware available for this model. The PC was a standard Fujitsu-Siemens desktop, and i was running memtest, so nothing even remotely graphically complex. I am also running another PC over HDMI: My MediaPC. It runs XBMC on Ubuntu 10.04. No issues on this for the past two years I've had it.
I am therefore inclined to blame the VGA. This is an old model so a firmware fix is unlikely. I am also inclined to thank 'vasili0s' on the cnet forums. Thanks!
Voiding Warranties..again
- Disclaimer - I won't be responsible for anything you do to your phone, voiding waranties, setting small cats on fire, or causing your local subway system to stop working -Disclaimer-
I recently got the HTC Desire Z. Slightly older, but it has the qwerty slider, which i wanted. Anyway, the HTC Sense UI default "shell" put on top of Android is great. By far better than the Samsung uh.. Touch Wiz thing. Smoother, and smarter. But i won't get into that. What comes with Sense UI on this phone (and i'll bet a lot of other HTC phones), is a bunch of applications. Applications that i didn't need. So obivously i tried to remove some of those applications. Turns out, to remove apps like Facebook or Twitter (that i do not want on my phone), you have to have root. I didn't find any smart way of getting rid of the apps without root, because it requires modification or removal of files that are in directories that are not world or group-writable.
So, after some internal debate between me and myself, i decided to root the phone. I quickly realized that the operation would not be as easy as on the Samsung, which has a fairly established and easy-to-use toolset for doing both rooting and rom management. Samsungs can also be exploited on pretty much any version of the OS.
However, on the HTC, i found that i had to first downgrade the firmware, so that i could use an exploit to gain root. And to make matters worse, this didn't work on it's own. I had to turn my microSD card into a "goldcard", then do the downgrade, then the exploit to gain root, and then flash the new firmware on top. In this case, i ended up with Cyanogen Mod 7.1. again, since i had good experiences with it.
So, let's go through the process that i had to go through. Reading a bunch of forums, i quickly got the picture that your mileage will vary. First of all, let's start with what i had. I had the HTC Desire Z (known as the HTC Vision G2, i think, in the US). I had the latest firmware, which in this case meant uh.. Android 2.3.4 (or 2.3.5), called the HTC Sense version 2.1. Anyway, the latest version available through the HTC OTA update. The phone was bought October of this year.
I started out with the Cyanogen Mod instructions for downgrading the phone to an exploitable firmware version on this page. Or actually, i started out by installing the android sdk, but on arch linux it was as easy as installing android-sdk from the AUR. I use yaourt as a frontend, so i did a yaourt android-sdk. On a 64-bit system, i had to enable the multilibs repository, to get the necessary lib32 libraries.
I ran through the steps of pushing fre3vo and misc_version on the phone, which went fine. I then did the chmods and the debug, which then got me a root shell on the phone temporarily. The next step has me setting the version for a misc_version, and then pushing the actual downgrade onto the phone. All good so far. Next step is to reboot the phone bootloader using adb (the android debugger). This also worked.... until i got a dreadful message. "CID incorrect! Upgrade fail!". CID? Wtf? Okay. Step back for a moment and google this fucker.
Turns out certain phones need some finetuning to be able to downgrade, due to either..carrier lockin, or some branding put on the phone, or perhaps an unknown reason (maybe hardware or software revisions?). I found this thread on the Cyanogenmod forums, which helped me onwards. The thread describes my exact issue, though with a slightly different downgrade firmware than mine. In any case, i decided to give it a try. The process involves the creation of a "goldcard", which is then used as a place to store the downgrade firmware. The goldcard is simply a microSD card, with the first few bytes overwritten with some new data.
The steps were basically:
- Download the goldcard helper application from the Android market. The phone was still bootable and fully operational, as no downgrade had taken place, so i was able to download and install this.
- Using the goldcard helper, get the reverse CID for your MMC2 card. That's your microSD card. MMC0 is your internal memory and can't be used for this, as far as i've read.
- Taking the reverse CID for your microSD card from the program, input it into the goldcard page (a link is also in the application).
- The site generates an image, which you will download
- Download also a hex-editor, such as HxD
- Take your microSD card out of your phone and put it into a memory card reader (i also read you can use your phone as the reader, but i used a Kingston reader instead), and open up the card from the HxD editor using the extra tab, then the open disk menu and under physical disk selected the removable disk which was the microSD card. Make sure that read-only is not checked when opening the microSD card.
- Open up another tab by opening from the extra tab "open disk image", and load the .img file that you got from the goldcard site. Also uncheck the read-only checkbox here. Use the default 512 byte sector size. You should now have two tabs open.
- From the goldcard.img tab, do a select all, then copy. Go to the microSD tab, and select offsets 00000000 to 00000170 and from the edit menu do a "paste write". This will paste the content of the goldcard.img, to the first offsets of the microSD card.
- From the file menu, save what you've done. Accept / ignore all warnings.
- Ok, now you have a gold card.
Proceed by copying over the downgrade image to the newly created goldcard. Continue with the CyanogenMod instructions.Following the instructions for the downgrade, you can safely redo all the steps to make sure. Once you are ready, reboot the bootloader again. You should now have great success, in the words of Borat. Navigate with the volume up and down keys, and select using the power or the navigation-touchpad thing-button. Select bootloader, then select fastboot. Confirm that you want to go ahead if necessary.
This will take a moment. You'll then be downgraded to an earlier version of the firmware, which has a known exploit, allowing us to root the phone. The phone will (i think) reboot on it's own, and give you an older looking Sense UI.
Continue with the rooting instructions here. Basically you are downloading and pushing onto the phone a bunch of packages that are needed. Then, you're running the actual exploit which should find a register in the memory, which we will use to sneak in (i think this is a correct analysis of what goes on, though i'm no programmer). Remember to match those md5 sums listed in the instructions before going on.
After this you have a rooted phone, hopefully with clockwork recovery mod installed. You can now keep using the Sense UI thing (i'm not sure that it'll OTA upgrade anymore?), or install Cyanogenmod, using these instructions. For some reason, i either failed some part, or something failed, but i didn't have clockwork recovery mod installed after this process. No sign of CWM anywhere. So, i headed on to the market, and downloaded the thing from there. I was now ready to install Cyanogen, which went without incident.
Note, that if you can't get into recovery mode using the restart into recovery (from the normal shutdown menu, after installing CWM), shut down the phone, and use Power, volume down and the navigation thing pressed all together.
Ok, so now i have Cyanogenmod 7.1.0 on my HTC Desire Z, with Android 2.3.7 on the bottom. Nice! Quadrant scores (yes yes, synthetic benchmarks..) went from 900 to about 1900 compared to the latest Sense UI. Phone feels snappy.
One thing to note was that market kept crashing! I was getting worried for a moment, but then i remembered the internet, found that thread, and fixed the problem. After downgrading, rooting and installing Cyanogen, i had the phone set to a language called English HD. I selected English US, and my problem was gone. So note this.
Winamp keeps crashing now, but it did that on the Sense UI side, so i doubt it has anything to do with Cyanogen. Version 1.2.6 is the latest as i'm writing this, and there is no later version available. The default media player, though, is pretty usable in any case, so i'm just using that for now.
Now, if i could just install this Cyanogen Nightly build... 
I feel like titling every post ‘Random’
Yeah I'm bad at figuring out titles for my posts, so they will be..what they are. For now.
I've been back at work for about 7 days now, and I'm already pretty stressed out. Nothing I can't handle, but still. A decent reminder that yes, i have a job that i do well, but that is not easy to do well without feeling the effects.
My home garden is still alive, and looking better than ever. The balcony-project has been growing lettuce for many many weeks and providing tasty goodies for many a salad. The basil is looking good as well, and right in the middle, you can see some slow-growing parsley.Inside i have another similar box which has some Chives, and some Rucola growing in it. They are not yet in representable condition, so pics will have to wait.
Home-growing (not that, hippies), I've found, is quite satisfying, even on this small scale. But in an urban environment (such as in our bustling megacity of a capital, Helsinki), small is where the game is at. Word.
I had the weirdest dream last night. Perhaps one of the weirdest ever, and all without any mind blowing, groovy, 60's drugs. Basically it was me, my father and my paternal grandfather (who just turned 90, props) on the yard of one of their previous homes. For some reason, which was not explained by anything else by twisted dream-logic, he had.. a cake. Growing out of his left temple. It had apparently started out as just a.. splotch, and dismissed as something old people just "get". But then it started growing, and turned out to be a cake. And it kept growing and growing. I found a screw on the top side of this cake (at this point he was unable to move because of the size of the cake), and i for some reason, reasoned that this screw is what holds the entire thing in place. So we started turning the screw, which eventually released the cake.
Now if this isn't fubar, get a load of this. On the side of the cake was.. a door. Opening the door revealed a bakery or a coffee shop. A coffee shop inside a giant cake, growing out of a mans head. And there were people, employees, inside this giant cake/bakery .. thing! So i promptly told them to get the fuck out of the giant cake, and to leave my grandfather alone. The shift-manager, was this weird.. Stepford-Wife kind of person who just had this creepy smile on her face, and without commenting on the weirdness of the situation, calpped her hands merrily, and asked the other employees to leave. I think her happy (creepy happy) face and demeanor was the last thing i saw in this dream.
I would wager i had some late-night fever or something, because never, in my nearly 30 years, have i had a dream that was this fucking convoluted. I've been fighting some viral infection for a few days, so it might explain things.
This is so fucked up, you have to realize i could not possibly make this shit up.
So what else. Finished the patio/whatever at the cottage, and it now kicks ass:
Kick. Ass.
Still don't reaaaally have a well-behaving Ubuntu 11.04 with kernel 3.0 rc[n]. It does boot, but i get bogged down with a bunch of issues. I've been posting some bug reports, but most of it has already been posted. So there's not much i can add. But i try to do my share.
I love how Linus Torvalds has taken up using Google+ to announce new kernels and other misc stuffs. Not sure i like google+ though. It's turning into facebook for me, which i left nearly 2 years ago. The only thing I'm liking more, is the way it handles links and media, for some reason. Facebook might be just as good nowadays. Who knows. The games addition is (not yet at least) as bad as Facebook, since you can actually choose to opt in to seeing game-related content. So i don't have to follow your progress on fucking Mafia wars or some other inane piece of productivity-waste.
I started reading Devil's Eye, by Jack McDevitt. So far it's basically a "far-in-the-future", as in millennia from now, detective story. So far. The sole reason i picked it up, out of the blue, was that i was reading an article on Hypernovas (as opposed to Supernovas), and the article mentioned that this book features a hypernova. That sounded interesting,so i placed my order.
Ok enough rambling. I'll update with some stuff on my HTPC at a later date.
Assembly 2011 – My notes
Assembly 2011 came and went as it always does, the first weekend of August. Pretty much a standard deal, nothing revolutionary on any front really. We only got some attendee tickets this year, as our usual gang kind of fell apart. We've usually had 7-10 computer-seats for our crew. Having just the 40 euro attendee ticket wasn't bad. You always had a place to sit. The WLAN mostly worked (thanks probably go to the netcrew placing more AP's in the arena, and Cisco...), and you were more free to come and go as you wished. We live 10 minutes away from Hartwal Arena where the venue is held, so it wasn't a big thing to go home, grab a bite to eat, watch a movie or something. We were mostly on the Arena for the compos.
There were not really any mind blowing entries this year, except for perhaps the particle-laden "Spin" by Andromeda Software Development. It had some pretty awesome stuff in it! Also, the real wild compo had two entries that I really got a kick out of. One was built around an Arduino-platform with an LCD screen, and the other was a freestanding, rotating led-thingamajig that displayed text and images. Absolutely kick-ass!
The attendees are still mostly young and getting fatter by the year. Top three games are, as last year, Counter Strike, Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft. Not too hard to see. Kids still have a hard time realizing that this is a demo event, and not a huge lan party. When the compo starts. we get the KAAL, or the Kill All Audio and Lights. This is a sign to stop playing, shut down your fucking Rihanna or whatever crap you're listening to, and look at the big screen. And ever year it fails, because our darling 13-year-old rebels will wait until 3000 people are screaming at them until they shut everything down. Or they start playing music when the call for KAAL (see what i did there?) comes. I get it, it's very rebellious, and you get to go back to your school and tell everyone what a tough guy you are. Also i get that when you get home, you cant:
- Have that nude chick as your wallpaper because your mom will take offense
- Play loud music
- Play games 72 hours straight
Being at home feels like being castrated. And there, in the bosom of Hartwall Arena, you get to be king for four days. It's probably a great thrill.
But next year, if i decide to go, and i see a fucker pull this shit... I'll just buy a bag of cheap wrenches from Clas Ohlsson and start throwing them around. I'll go medieval.
Booth bitches and other promo-whores are getting ever more popular, which is really boring. They go around in their microshorts and talk to gamers and ask stupid questions and act like they know something. Then they hand out a fucking 10 cent lanyard or some other piece of shit. I remember one year, they came to our area and i think asked one of us why he or she had two screens. "Does that mean you're really pro?". No, it means go away you dumb shit. They are just doing their job, but what do we really get out of all this except a throbbing headache. Maybe the kids get something else. I don't know. I find them annoying.
No 64K intro compo this year, because there was only one entry. Loads of 4k entries. None among them legendary. The 64k intro was put into the demo category, and came in second, which was deserved. Fairlight & alcatraz did a good job there.
Rovio was prominent with their own booth, and their own KAAL which was fucking awesome. Rovio, according to the organisers, actually got their start at Assembly 2003, i think. Which is cool!
Concerts on the main stage instead of every-night raves? Not so cool. We had Machinae Supremacy, who don't play too well i think. And we had Press Play on Tape, who were good, but a bit too loud. Get off my lawn. And next year? Can we have the bloody raves back...
Ok that's about it. A different experience for me this year, and next year... Well who knows. Maybe i'll go, maybe i won't. Like i say every year.
Check out the Results from all the compos here.
To download any of the entries, go to scene.org
My non-edited, non-framed, non-hipsterized photos from Assembly 2011 can be seen here.
Distrohopping like a Motherfucker
Like the topic sez. I've been trying out different distros over the past weeks, and landed right back where i started. Basically. I've gone through Arch, Archbang, Xubuntu, Debian 6, and finally Ubuntu. This is sad to admit, but in all other distros, i had some deal breaker problems that i was unable to solve in a decent amount of time, and ended up valuing the fact that most things work pretty much out of the box on Ubuntu. I can't believe that i'm actually giving Unity a try as well! It's probably going out of the window pretty soon, because i just can't get a hang of how to use this most effectively. Things are sliding in and out of view.. i can't see what i'm running, i can't see the menu bar until i hover over it, and.. oh god. It's just not Gnome 2, y'know?
Arch i like. I like pacman, it feels right. It feels like 10 years ago, in a good way. But i ran into some stupid audio problems. And automounting usb sticks and the likes didn't work as well as i hoped it would. Now, I'm not saying the issues are unsolvable, they are not. But i gave them a reasonable amount of effort, and if it didn't work, then it was out of the game. For instance, Archbang, which is a bleeding edge rolling distro, like Arch, had massive problems with audio. Alsa lost my cards, or some mixer element, and i'm talking lost the entire /dev devices that were supposed to be there. The excellent Alsa Troubleshooting page was not able to save me, at least not as far as i could deduce. I was going to download Alsa and compile from source, but i said fuck that noise.
So here I am, typing away on Ubuntu 11.04, with Unity (shrug), and waiting for something to break so i can say "Aha! Told you so!". Deep down i know it won't break, not that badly anyway. Sure it's not a rolling distro. Sure it's for "noobs" but whatever. I mean i like to have a tool that gets the job done. Ubuntu has done a bad thing by taking in Unity, at least that's what i feel now. I guess I'm just getting too old. But it is *still* a pretty good out-of-the-box experience. No matter how you turn it. You can still do the Gnome Classic thing, and run with what you're used to. Xubuntu worked quite well too, but there were some issues there too. XFCE4 is pretty damn brilliant. KDE is just something i haven't touched for so many years.. It hurt me back then. Left me creepy voicemails. I'm not taking her back.
I've also been giving Google+ a whirl, mainly because it is not Facebook. I hopped off that wagon over a year ago, and i haven't looked back. Look, i don't care how many fucking melons your Farmville farm grows. I don't. Twitter is opt-in which i like, and you can easily grasp the concept, and with a short glance, see what people are saying. That's the main reason for using Twitter. Brevity. Now, Google+ is a new thing from Google. So naturally i had to try it. I got an invite from an old boss of mine, and soon i was typing away at something that is kind of like.. Facebook way back. Or an unbloated Facebook. But also not. It has some novel concepts, like the Circles, as a way to limit the distribution of whatever it is you are sharing. It's much more multimedia oriented, which i like. It has the whole Hangout thing. It has no Farmville.
But still I'm not sure what it gives me over using Twitter. It's status messages. It's people's doings and goings. It's Google. I dunno. I probably won't stick around, but I'll give it a run for it's money, that's for sure.
At home, we're still putting the finishing touches on the place. We're having some people over tomorrow, god knows what that'll be like. Tomorrow also marks the day i start my summer vacation. It could be in more relaxed circumstances, as I've been dealing with some nightmarish problems at work this past week. Somehow, even though i know i shouldn't bring my work home, i end up doing that anyway. Because i feel that it's somehow my duty. I want to do a good job, even if it means long hours. I want to make sure things are running smoothly. But i also know i desperately need a vacation. And the following four weeks are just what the doctor ordered.
Some Android bits and bobs: I've been running GingerReal 7.1.3 for the better part of a week now, and fucking hell it is a good ROM! My Galaxy S has longer battery life than ever, and the UI is snappy as hell. I'll probably do a proper writeup once I've played around with it some more. I've now had my Galaxy S for a year, and the only complaint i really have is the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. My next phone will have that, for sure, but I might go with the Galaxy S for as long as it goes. It's a solid phone, with a great community around it.
Passion for hardware
No, not this kind of passion you perverted fucks:
I'm talking about the thing that drives us to do this work. As a sysadmin, we're mostly invisible, and then extremely visible when things go wrong. It's a thankless job, but someone has to do it. So I've been thinking about what drives me to do it.
It's the passion.
Ever since I was young, I mean.. 5-years-young, I've been taking things apart and learning about how they work. It's been a rocky road of trial and error, but somehow, even from an early age, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I'm doing it right now. What drove me to learn new things (and fix many old things), is still the driving force. The thing that gets me out of bed every morning to face new challenges at the office. Sure, the level has changed. The stakes are higher. Back in the day I might mess up and break a 1000 euro computer. Now it's a 40 000 euro computer, or a 100 000 euro piece of SAN equipment. But it's still just the same. The toys have just gotten a lot bigger.
Today at work, I took delivery of a new Sun (frack it, Oracle) blade server which I then assembled, updated and set up. After that, I did the same to a brand new IBM xSeries server. And I'm happy as a clam. Most people don't understand this. They think it'd get boring after a while. And it might. But it is not this day (had to slip that Aragorn quote in there, sorry). As long as I have a yearning to learn more, and a passion for the hardware and the things I work with, my job will never be dull. And most of all, it helps you go through those shitty days when the fecal-matter has hit that spinning thing.
Ok, so this was a really short post, and mostly just an excuse to post that picture. But it was something I devoted some thought to today, and this is why I had to type it up somewhere.
Assorted updates, week 18
This week has been mostly about preparing for the move, which will take place at the end of the month. The new apartment is hopefully ready at this time (the day it is supposed to be ready is 16.5). If not, well, then we have 100 square meters of stuff with no place to go. Maybe i'll dump it at the office....
Speaking of the office, there's been a lot of cool stuff happening there as well. New hardware coming in, new stuff to learn. It doesn't seem to be slowing down toward the summer just yet. Lately, i've mostly been learning more things about IBM hardware, VMWare and installing a very cool piece of IBM Power7 hardware. Work is more interesting than it ever was!
But back to the other stuff. Moving is arduous business. There are papers to be filed, documents to be signed. And the packing of the god-damn boxes. So far i've:
- Canceled the old rental agreement
- Signed the new rental agreement
- Sent in a paper to the maintenance company to take our names off the door etc. by the end of this month
- Sent in a paper to the new maintenance company to put up our names at the new place
- Arranged for the transfer of my power contract
- Arranged for the transfer of the home insurance to the new apartment
- Official moving announcement to the magistrate
- Ordered 30 boxes to put our stuff in
- Arranged for a van (thanks B)
And i'm stressed out of my mind.
On top of this, i'm participating in a research on early detection of psychoses (as a control patient. don't worry, i'm not that crazy just yet..), which included an extensive neuropsychological questionaire and test, an MRI scan, and some labwork. The MRI was fascinating business. The device was a 3 Tesla scanner, by General Electric. That's a pretty powerful magnetic field it can generate, there. The scan took a little over an hour, and consisted of one anatomical "classic" scan, at a high resolution and different angles, and then two different fMRI's (functional MRI), which measure brain activity during (in this case) answering questions, and watching a 10 minute clip of a movie. The scanner takes one (quite low resolution) image every 2.3 seconds, and then makes a "gif" out of the activity, which can be correlated to whatever question or thing you were watching at the time. This was then processed by a very powerful HP workstation (an xw8400 if i'm not mistaken), and then burnt on a disc and sent to a radiologist. I was allowed to look at some of the images, and boy was that cool! Turns out i do have a brain in there!
I sold my aquarium, and it's being picked up on saturday. This means i won't have to move it ever again. It's kind of sad at the same time, but i'm glad to get rid of it. It's been with me since 2005, and i've had an aquarium for the past.. what.. 15 years or so? The last original fish, an armored catfish, had survived for about that time, died a few months ago. It was probably more than 15 years old.
I came into posession of a Linksys WRT54G last week, but to my dismay, it was a version 7, which has the Atheros chipset, instead of the Broadcom, and is therefore about as useful as a cock-flavored lollipop. It's not supported by any of the major distributions of "router linux", openwrt or dd-wrt, and there are i think no plans to add support either. A bit sad. But maybe it'll get a good home somewhere, or i'll figure out a way to put it to good use. My OpenBSD router/pf machine crashed last weekend, i think due to a faulty secondary hard drive. I didn't spend too much time debuging it; instead i just took out the drive (a Western Digital Green-series 1TB drive..my second of this type to break), and put in a smaller drive. Since 4.9 just came out, i decided to upgrade to that while i was at it. Install went well, and pf config was mostly intact from 4.8. I think they corrected some feature with the built-in egress-macro (?) , because it now worked better than in 4.8, where i decided to use my own macro instead.
Ubuntu 11.04 is also out, but i clicked "Don't upgrade". Unity can suck my ballsack, and i don't think i'll ever upgrade to that. It's very possible that 10.10 is the last iteration of Ubuntu i will ever use, unless they somehow magically decide to backtrack to a sensible UI. KDE isn't an option, and well, while i like XFCE, i don't think i would run that as an everyday WM. I have been looking into Arch, and it seems like a solid choice. I have been using Linux for 12 years now, so maybe it's time to take the training-wheels off anyway..
I got my Sony fail-mail last friday along with, oh, 77 million other people. I don't own a PS3, but i have used PSN on a console, and registered for an account. I didn't use a credit card though, luckily, so at least i won't have to cancel that. And i'm lucky in that i very, very rarely use the same password anywhere, so i won't have to worry about that either. But still, it's nice to be a part of something bigger than me! Sony started blaming Anonymous a while ago, due to, alledgedly, a file left on a system that has the words "Anonymous" and "We are Legion" in them. That qualifies as proof i guess. And hey Sony, maybe if you play the blamegame long enough, nobody will notice that you (alledgedly) had an unpatched box on your fucked up network that enabled the attack in the first place!! I mean, if it was Anonymous, then who the hell cares about anything else, right? How about this instead: You man the fuck up, and say: Hey, we had an unpatched box, and we stored and trafficked data in an unsecure manner. We're sorry, and we'll work to create a better system. And try to be open about that new system, so people can test it, and point out flaws while you're at it. Instead, i'm hearing that they are "fixing problems and coming out with a "new and improved PSN" very soon!". Which means, they are spending didley-squat on security, audits and whatever, and just concentrating on getting back online ASAP. Which means, sooner or later, you are going to get fucked over again. But maybe that's someone elses fault as well, and it won't matter that you just lost the personal information of like half of the worlds console-gamers. Wake up, Sony. This alone is a good excuse not to buy one of your shitty, propietary consoles. If only it weren't such a good bluray player..
There's a 2600 meeting happening everywhere today, so go there. I'm going.
HTPC Ubuntu 10.10 Upgrade
Yesterday i started upgrading the HTPC to Ubuntu 10.10. I was having some problems with audio (no doubt related to pulseaudio....) and i had a bunch of updates waiting to be installed that i didn't dare install. I have this nagging feeling that every time i do an apt-get upgrade, something breaks in XBMC. Might just be a feeling. Might not. Anyway. I started with a clean install of 10.10, installing propietary codecs and updates from the web during the install. After the installation, i tried to remove pulseaudio. I did an apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio, which still left some libraries like libpulse0 and others. I tried removing them by hand, but that resulted in some dependency-errors. Further trying to remove that resulted in me not having a stable gnome desktop to log into. It started GDM, but after that i just got returned to the login window. I did an apt-get install ubuntu-desktop, and a reboot, which fixed the problem. Then again apt-get remove pulseaudio, and left it at that.
After that i added a few PPA's to keep my Nvidia and ALSA-drivers current. Alsa works better with XBMC, handling both Dolby Digital, DTS, as well as MP3 and other stereo audio. The latest Nvidia drivers have not always been problem-free, but i decided to give them a try. The PPA's i added were from this, and this site, and the complete commands were:
/ some dependencies first / sudo apt-get install dkms python-software-properties sudo reboot / after the reboot install the nvidia drivers / sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings /installing the audio drivers/ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/unstable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils
After this, i rebooted, and ran sudo alsamixer. This starts a console-based mixer-application, that you can use to un-mute required outputs. Sometimes tihs is needed to get audio out at all, if you're using for instance HDMI (i haven't tried this), or say some analog output.
Then i added the XBMC ppa, which allows me to install the latest version.
/ some dependencies / sudo apt-get install python-software-properties pkg-config sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc sudo apt-get update / and the actual xbmc packages / sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone
Finally, starting XBMC produced an error that i didn't have the required packages for hardware acceleration installed. I downloaded the libvdpau package, which cleared the problem.
XBMC seemed really well configured at this point already, because sound worked out of the box (thank you and goodbye pulse, and thank you alsa). Also, video acceleration was configured correctly out of the box. This is a stark difference to some of the old old versions of XBMC i had once installed.
I tried some playback already, but not in the living room with the amplifier and TV, so that's up for later today. The current setup i have is:
- Samsung 40B535 40" LCD television
- Harman/Kardon AVR-235 amplifier
- HTPC
- Silverstone HTPC-case, incl. 120W power supply (model Lascala SST-LC19S-R) - Current price 173€
- ASUS AT3N7A-I motherboard with an Intel Atom processor (dual core 1,6 GHz), Nvidia ION chipset/graphics - Current price 155€
- 2GB DDR2 memory - Current price 28€
- 1 TB Western Digital Green hard drive - Current price 58€
- Totally 414€ with current prices
- Connectivity
- HTPC -> TV with HDMI
- HTPC -> Amplifier with SPDIF (optical cable)
- Wireless Logitech mouse with the Universal Nano Receiver (model M215, red)
- Wireless Logitech keyboard (an older Logitech Comfort)
- Network: 1Gbit through an HP Procurve 1400-series switch
Things to note here. The price of the entire thing hasn't gone down much in a year or so, which is pretty curious. You can get better ION motherboards now, so that's probably something i'd change. Maybe with WLAN or more i/o ports? Perhaps. The case i am pleased with, though it could be entirely passive. The ION/Atom combo, plus the mechanical hard drive create a lot of heat, and i think that this set couldn't run without the CPU fan.
I would also switch to a bigger HD, since the amount of media has exploded. A 2TB drive is like 10 bucks more, or so. 3TB drives have just been released, though they are still rather expensive.
A remote control would be nice, but i've yet to spend any time researching that. I'm pretty good with just the mouse so far. I don't need that far of an integration to the living room. It's still a computer to me, and not an appliance.
The final afterthought goes toward a Blu-ray drive. The case fits a slim Blu-ray drive. The price of such a device is like 100-200€ depending on the model (i'm not sure they all fit?). I've read many positive reports that say Blu-Rays work just fine with Ubuntu + XBMC, but i have no first-hand experience. I may go this route, or i may just stick with the PS3, which seems like a great player.
The HBGary incident, reviewed and revised
After a more thorough review, the previous writeup i did on this incident had to be redacted. The course of events was incorrect, as it was merely assumptions on my part, based on the data i had read. Mail exchange between me and Jussi Jaakonaho forced a rethink of the whole issue, and hence, this rewrite.
It should be noted that very few parties have a full and accurate account of what went on, and this is still just a version of the events.
I will start by making a list of parties and persons involved:
- HBGary - An American security company. Owns approx. 15% of HBGary Federal. CEO - Greg Hoglund, President - Penny Leavy
- HBGary Federal - An American security company (a 2009 spinoff of HBGary) that deals with the federal government. CEO - Aaron Barr
- rootkit.com - Not directly affiliated site, hosting a community of people discussing rootkits and security issues. Connection to HBGary is through CEO Greg Hoglund, also affiliated with rootkit.com. The site is not an official project of HBGary or HBGary Federal, though Greg is the founder of the site, and it is hosted by HBGary due to this fact.
- Greg Hoglund - CEO at HBGary, affiliated with rootkit.com
- Penny Leavy - President at HBGary
- Aaron Barr - Security researcher and CEO of HBGary Federal
- Ted Vera - COO at HBGary Federal
- Jussi Jaakonaho - affiliated with rootkit.com, used to reset Hoglunds account and confirm current root password. Not affiliated with HBGary.
The sequence, as far as chronology is unclear, but here is a list of events, possibly in rough chronolgical order:
- Aaron Barr claims he has infiltrated Anonymous and has identities of organizers, leaders and founders. Discusses research with Financial Times, which acts as a trigger for Anonymous.
- Anonymous breaks into HBGary Federal server through SQL injection, gains accounts and emails of key figures.
- Either separately or as a consequence of, an HBGary tech support system is compromised
- Anonymous uses account of Aaron Barr, who had administrative privileges to HBGary e-mail systems to access further data
- Anonymous takes control numerous online presences of key HBGary and HBGary Federal executives and employees. Aaron Barr's Twitter, Ted Vera's Linkedin (now offline, he was renamed Colossal Faggot)
- At some point, Greg Hoglunds e-mail is also compromised and used to send e-mail to rootkit.com administrator, Jussi Jaakonaho, to reset Hoglunds account, and confirm root password. Link
- Rootkit.com is compromised, supposed password lists are leaked, sql database dumped
- At some point, HBGary Federal site is defaced, taken offline along with HBGary.com. HBGary later put back online with a short post on the events. HBGary Federal remains offline, as does rootkit.com
An important distinction to my earlier analysis is that rootkit.com was not the starting point of the attack, it would at least seem. This is because before the rootkit.com attack, Greg Hoglunds mail was already compromised, as evident in this "log", also referenced earlier. Through this account, anonymous supposedly had knowledge of the previous and current root passwords at rootkit.com, and used the account as a platform to reset hoglunds account at rootkit.com, thereby gaining access, and root on the server. My previous supposition was that accounts found on rootkit.com were used to gain access to other sites (such as other HBGary and HBGary Federal servers). Although it is probable that accounts found on rootkit.com were tried on various other sites, no details have emerged over such usage. Rootkit.com was simply a footnote, with the simple connection of Greg Hoglund.
Anonymous, along with many reports seem to not understand the connection between HBGary and the spinoff, HBGary Federal. They are separate, though related (as evidenced by the IRC logs, see lines 2755 and 629, as well as HBGary main site) companies. Aaron Barr was working on his own researching anonymous, though knowledge of his research existed with HBGary as well. Anonymous, acting fast and wide, attacked both companies, as well as rootkit.com.
While rootkit.com is only fleetingly connected, i am mentioning it because of the local connection. The admin at rootkit.com used to reset the account of Greg Hoglund at the server, and to confirm the current root password is, admittedly, from Finland. The "research" done on his current employment status was poorly done, irrelevant, and therefore best left unmentioned, and was also included only as a local curiosity.
I will also address the fact that the anonymous who emailed Jussi is claimed to be a 16 year old girl known under the alias `k and kayla. There is, of course, no way of confirming this as fact, and I chose to include this because it is a funny footnote, if true.
As a fellow administrator, i have to also say that it's quite hard to blame Jussi. The e-mail originated from Gregs e-mail, and i know for a fact, even though it is bad security practice to discuss passwords in emails, this happens on a daily basis in our industry. If the identity of Greg Hoglund could have been confirmed at this point, rootkit.com may have gone unscathed. I don't have to stress the usage and importance of pgp, or ssh keys on servers, or good password policies in general, it's a topic for another post.
Final thoughts
I still hold to my point that Aaron Barr's demise was well deserved. If you do shoddy research and try to profit from that, you deserve to burn publicly. I also can't say i have a strong sense of empathy towards HBGary or HBGary federal, as they have known about the research. HBGary Federal has shown it is not to be trusted with federal issues, or tax payers money, as the research it's CEO has produced was nothing short of bullshit. Had this methodology spread to the federal government, the results may have been costly, and grossly inaccurate. Granted, there was collateral damage, but in the wide world, money is what talks. When a company such as HBGary or HBGary Federal gets plastered all over the news, and loses potentially millions, people tend to listen. This goes for the DDOS attacks on VISA, Mastercard and others last year. Big names, big losses, big headlines.
As an aside, Krebs on Security has a writeup of the events, but i'm left unclear as to how many of HBGary's systems were compromised initially. Krebs quotes Greg Hoglund, who says that a system containing tech support for HBGary was compromised, as well as a web server used by HBGary Federal. The order of those compromises is not immediately clear, so one can only speculate as to whether one led to the other, or whether they were independent compromises.
The sheer misunderstanding of the "structure" of Anonymous is still prevalent in the media. I feel that the structure of Anonymous is grossly over-estimated. The arrests made so far have shown little to no effect in the actions of anonymous. The group is perhaps best described as a mob.. or a flash mob. An idea that people can stand behind. A form of neo-anarchism that anyone can join without an understanding of the technology, the issues or the ideology. Even the ideology is a curious concept as it chances as many times as the gasoline price at my local gas station.
Having been a bystander at 4chan and of the anonymous movement, i'm led to believe that there is very little in the way of organisers, leaders or founders. It just sort of came together. Sure, the IRC channel has Ops to keep the order and the peace, but they can hardly be concluded to be leaders or organisers of the group, not that there is such a thing. Barrs research contains gross inaccuracies, if it is indeed what anonymous released in the form of a pdf. Nicknames from the IRC-channel (which is completely public and requires no "infiltration") were matched with nicknames used on Facebook for instance, in many case implicating completely unrelated people.This was said to be the main concern of anonymous, as voiced a number of times in the IRC logs referred to earlier. The list was so inaccurate, that anonymous supposedly sent it in to the FBI, to prove a point.
Also what is curious is that many people, that do have Op and seem to be "running things" on the IRC side of things were left completely un-identified in the "research". This includes people who have not even made an effort into being anonymous, such as "press guy" Barret Brown, or joepie91. It also includes clear jokes, such as Guy Fawkes from London.
As a final, final thought, i would like to discuss the importance of research and sourcing, and the difficulty of online "journalism" (though i don't view myself as such). Inaccuracies spread like wildfire. Content put online never comes back down. People and names get mixed up very easily, as online, anyone can be anyone. This is implied for both the personaliteis discussed here, and the personalities discussed in Barr's "research". Sourcing becomes a difficult thing in such sensitive issues, and this has been an important lesson for me as well; to strive to do even better research in the future. The problem is companies usually want to keep breaches a secret, and "attackers" like to add FUD and propaganda to their side of the story. Thus, forming a coherent picture of any event becomes challenging.So, as this has obviously been a lesson for many parties and many issues, including myself, i do hope people actually learn from this. I sure have.
Random & The HBGary Federal stuff
Disclaimer - This was an earlier post, with a lot of speculation on my part, in regards to the HBGary hack by Anonymous. After more thorough research, a revised post was released here. Please refer to this if you are looking for a hopefully more accurate account
So the last few days, weeks, whatever have been a bit quiet. So i'll just take this time off and talk about some of the issues i've been thinking about.
First of all, i need to get rid of a bunch of hardware, so if you need anything like memory, or servers (without their harddrives), or regular desktop machines.. or i suppose i might even have a few smaller lcd screens, hit me up with a comment or an email. I'll post a better list later, but here's some of the stuff:
- Two HP DL380 tower servers, i don't have the specs on hand, one was i think a dual processor and the other single. RAM included
- An IBM xSeries tower server, which is actually pretty compact and not too loud, but also, it's not very fast
- Various desktop towers
- RAM: DDR1, DDR2 (1GB and smaller sticks), and various DDR1 and DDR2 SO-DIMMs for laptops
- I may also be selling two 17" LCD screens
- Various expansion cards and what-have-you
I'd also be interested in finding a pair of 2GB non-ECC DDR2 for my desktop, since running multiple virtual machines is putting a strain on my current 6GB configuration.
Currently i'm on an Oracle 11g course, which lasts five days. I'm not really going to be a database guy, and frankly i'm not too interested in this either. I do it from a pure carreer perspective, and because i know that we have a lack of Oracle knowledgeable people where i work.
Also, this morning i realized we live in a world where few clocks ever tell the same time. Waking up, eating breakfast and walking to the train station, i was confronted with at least 8 different versions of what the time currently was. Bewildering.
Anonymous owns HBGary and HBGary Federal
Disclaimer - This was an earlier post, with a lot of speculation on my part, in regards to the HBGary hack by Anonymous. After more thorough research, a revised post was released here. Please refer to this if you are looking for a hopefully more accurate account
And i don't mean they bought the fuckers. So here's the story as i've been able to patch it together: HBGary Federal (a separate corporate entity working under the HBGary name, providing infosec research and such for government) CEO and Co(?)-owner Aaron Barr decided he was going to blow this whole anonymous case wide open. Now as i've discussed in multiple posts, this stems from the clear stupidity and thick-headedness of people, refusing to understand what and how anonymous works. Barr had the brilliant idea of "infiltrating" the anonymous networks (err.. i mean the public irc-channels at anonops.ru #anonops #anonymous #reporters etc.) and find out as much as he could about the leadership of anonymous. He then compiled in data from various social networks, simply taking a persons IRC identity or other available data, and connecting it to mostly random people using the same nicknames or such on Facebook, for instance. You should now be able to see how faulty his methodology is to begin with. He then boasted that he has the identities of most of anonymous' leadership and organisers. He made up roles and titles for various people, like "co-founder of anonymous". Anonymous caught wind of this, and decided to have a look at the list.
Supposedly 16 year old female hacker 'kayla', known on the IRC channel as `k, social-engineered an admin at rootkit.com, Jussi Jaakonaho (who is also a chief researcher at Nokia, incidentally) pretending to be Greg Hoglund, CEO at the main company HBGary. Note that HBGary is not directly affiliated with HBGary Federal, though it carries a 15% share of HBGary Federal in the form of investments. Through Jussi, she was able to get root access to the servers at rootkit.com. From there the problems escalated, and while i don't have the full details, i suspect credentials or data found on rootkit.com were used to compromise Barr's account on HBGary Federal, and numerous other locations, such as Twitter.
The result was an onslaught of defacement and luls from Anonymous, as they downloaded over 50 000 internal e-mails from HBGary and HBGary Federal employees and executives. These were subsequently published as a torrent, which can be found with little to no trouble. To add insult to injury, Anonymous sent the "brilliantly" collected (and false) data that Barr was supposedly going to sell to the FBI (as evidenced by an 11 AM meeting on monday 7th February found in his e-mails) to the FBI for free. Barr claims he was never going to sell the data, or that he was going to redact the names, but that's really irrelevant at this point. He also claims it was only for research purposes, but internal emails show he was clearly going to profit in a business sense either directly through selling the data/research or through PR he would have gotten for "exposing" the "leaders" of Anonymous. All of which is total and utter bullshit. Most of the people on the list have little or no affiliation to anonymous, and could have gotten into serious trouble had this data not come out in time.
Barr's twitter account was owned, adding "raging homogay" to his about-box, and posting various lewd comments on his feed. His new Twitter avatar is also a variation of a classic 4chan meme, "Forever Alone", modified to "Forever Barrlone". You should really check it out, it's quite funny if you are into this whole meme business. Also read all the tweets from the past few days, as they provide some insight into what went on.
Ted Vera's (COO / President at HBGary) Linked in profile was also defaced to change his name to Colossal Faggot, though i doubt it's still out there. Google cache might still have it, plus i suppose screenshots exist.
All in all i can't say i give a flying fuck about any of these people or their respective companies. If you are in the security business, and particulary in the business of selling research and data to the federal government (thank god it's not mine), then you need to be competetent and know what the hell it is you are doing. If you are an incompetent asswipe, then bad things may happen to you. You don't deserve your job, your bonuses, your cushy little office and the notion of job security. You deserve to go back to school, admit your failures and start over. Though that might be a bit hard at this point, seeing as i would find it very unlikely that the likes of Barr would ever be hired to do anything with computers ever again.
Anonymous has stated they have in ther posession more emails that are as of yet unpublished, and they have had negotiations with the owner and CEO of HBGary as to the next steps in this whole debacle . The IRC logs of that are quite .. a read. Anonymous demanded that for the rest of the data to stay secret (this is called extortion), they need to see Aaron Barr stripped of his job, and all future investments to HBGary Federal. Also they requested that all such funds instead be diverted to the Bradley Manning defense fund, the EFF and other such causes. HBGary is in the process of thinking about things.
Quite a thing to see the CEO of a multi-million dollar company on IRC, begging these anonymous types not to release more mails, as they would cause millions in damage. "Think about what this will do to your reputation", HBGary urged. Anonymous replied with "What reputation, and why should we care?"
It has to be rather bewildering for your average corporate type to face an adversary that does not care for the traditional things. Reputation is irrelevant. Possible consequences, irrelevant. Legal threats, irrelevant. Sure, you can (and they have) caught a number of people associated with anonymous, but there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people ready to take their place, if they feel like it will get them the laugh of the day.
I'll end with another paraphrasing from the IRC logs, where one Anonymous stated, after just saying he knows this will cost HBGary millions, and that he doesn't care, that he will now go play Fallout.
Oh and one more thing...
I have to really hand it to both Greg Hoglund, and especially Penny Leavy, who is president of HBGary. She took time out of a nightmarish day, to go on IRC and talk to anonymous. She tried to talk to these people, and she tried to grasp the concepts. Aaron Barr however, who also appeared on the channel under the alias CogAnon, was less than courteous. He talked trash and left without answering any questions, clinging to the one sentence he thinks will save him: "I did it all for research". That's like pissing on an angry mob, who has already burned down your house, broken your car and kidnapped your cat.