SHODAN Conversion underway
I met Allan yesterday for the first time in 3 years. Like a good girl from a certain dating sim, I waited in front of the Skytrain station for him to come pick me up. He seemed to have gained a sense of fashion (his black coat hearkened of old Squall Leonhart’s coat), and lots of awesome hardware along the way. Did I say a lot of awesome hardware? Yeah, a lot of awesome hardware.
His apartment sure had a sense of style, too, unlike its surroundings, which were mostly full of dying brush, leafless trees and trash. It was decidedly minimalistic, and the apartment decidedly new. Allan seemed to have developed a taste for Vaio laptops, so every laptop in the house was a Vaio. His mother’s, father’s and his own laptop, a small one with a Core Solo and a 5 hour battery life even with brightness turned all the way up, were all Vaios.
He also had an air rifle, which he amused himself with by shooting pencils, people’s windows, people, and crows like any ordinary boy. Go Allan! I especially loved the sound the pellets made when they bounced off the unsuspecting victim’s jacket. It seemed they didn’t dare to linger around to see who shot them. Probably a good thing the rifle’s metal had a matte finish.
We set about fixing Allan’s computer, which he said hadn’t booted for 2 weeks, for some unknown reason. It wouldn’t even POST. So we took out the graphics card (a X800 XL AGP) and reinserted it, and it still wouldn’t boot. At this time we were at a loss, so I proposed going out and getting a new graphics card, since Allan was pretty comfortable warping the return policies around his own finger and I had forgotten to bring that Geforce 2 MX200 I snuck out of the co-op room just for this purpose. We went down to Metrotown, looked over some graphics cards, and eventually bought a 7600GT for just 99CAD (I know, that price just staggers me. That thing can play Quake 4 at high res, and it’s just 99CAD? DAMN!!!! But anyway Allan was buying it, and he had no intention of keeping it (the X800XL was a classic, he said), just like he did with most other stuff he had bought and returned. Oh, and we bought some Lays chips and a loaf of bread, although I forgot to bring that with me when I left. What a waste of money.
After much ado, we plugged in the 7600GT just to find that it wouldn’t work, again. Then I remembered something from my Athlon XP 1800+ computer in Malaysia (still the fastest computer in the house!), and pulled out the stick of 1GB OCZ RAM, and put it back in again. This time it booted right up, and complained about me forgetting to put the Molex connector into the X800XL.
We traded lots of anime after that – after all, his computer was packed to the gills with anime (and fabricated girl-band JPOP, but I digress). I forced him to copy Code Geass and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and Kai, and persuaded him to copy Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ver.B. In return, he gave me RahXephon on a DVDR+DL. He had a whole stack of them, just for his X360, he said. Wow, I have a dual layer DVD+R in my hands!
I reinstalled Windows XP so I could create a new partition that actually worked with gparted (EVERYBODY DO NOT USE VISTA’S PARTITIONS, NO OTHER PARTITIONING UTILITY WILL WORK WITH THEM), and used gparted’s Live CD to resize the partition. Copied a few pictures over to Allan’s computer. Then installed Arch Linux, and aircrack-ng, the main reason why I had to go through all of this reinstalling and partitioning.
Allan said he had always wanted to get aircrack working, but he just couldn’t wrap Linux around his finger. I told him he wasn’t missing much by not using Linux. Really, he’s not. He said that his boarding school only let him download and upload a total of 250MB a day, a far cry from the 5GB per day in UBC’s Resnet; and he had ‘borrowed’ a MAC address from the local tech guy (tech guys get unlimited bandwith, so he downloaded about 20GBs over one weekend), and got caught. Strapping him to a chair, they dissected his laptop in front of his very eyes and used lophtcrack on his XP machine and found a MAC address changer program, along with the tech guy’s address. So he was grounded for two days.
So that was his introduction to the program lophtcrack. The scary thing was, he said, he had an 18 character password on his XP machine (which should have made it a NTLMv2 hash automatically), but they still managed to crack that shit. I mucked around in his laptop’s registry to make sure that the thing wouldn’t ever have anything to do with LANMAN hashes again, but it’s pretty clear that that’s not going to help again. He needed disk encryption, probably, and something out of the scope of lophtcrack. He said that his current password (something to the tune of 27 characters and a fingerprint reader) couldn’t be cracked with rainbow tables or whatever, I don’t get it, but anyway, lophtcrack certainly is a dangerous program.
Which is why today I deleted that Arch Linux partition, and used cryptsetup to make a new one. I don’t think anything short of a quantum computer would be able to get past an AES crypt on my Linux partition. I wonder if you can change your passphrase…
Anyway, Allan’s now a legend in his school, so legends really need better security. Still, he’s interested in making aircrack-ng work. I was a little too tired to read all that documentation on aircrack, though. he mentioned this program called Cain and Abel and how you need to have access to a computer that’s already authenticated on the wireless network in order to get Cain and Abel to work.
Holy shit, ophcrack needs 8GBs for the tables? Fuck that!
And I had dinner at Allan’s place. Yay!
And he watched Lucky Star, we argued over whether Byousoku 5cm had episodes (if you really push it, 3, but there were like 13 files in that directory!), fooled around with his iPhone (my Galaxy Angel de Fever was on it, replete with a cover image! wow!), more air rifles, talk about ipwraw, and why Allan hates Linux (apparently it’s the text config files).
