for keeping track of my digital experiments

Last night I went to Woodbury High School’s web page to check the schedule, to see if my high school friends had the day off today. Well they didn’t, but that doesn’t matter for now. What I found instead was weird javascript code inserted into the schedule. It slowed down the page load so much, that I decided to investigate.

Viewing the source of the page [image] [zip], I discovered that the root domain, nuclear3.com had a very odd looking whois record [Archived - DNS | Contacts] [Current]. I then checked out the whois record on the IPv4 address for the www A record [archived] [current]. Well the www A record is hosted by Ecommerce Inc [trace], but the A record for e.nuclear3.com is apparently part of the Chinese school system [nslookup] [apnic.net whois record] [trace]. How ironic!

I was originally looking around for a preexisting methodology of peer to peer networking that would suit my upcoming game engine. It needed to be able to function without a central server, have low peer lookup times, and the network had to be resilient to outages. As usual I was sidetracked by interesting forms of peer to peer architectures. I found two interesting articles which I shall highlight.

Overnet
I discovered the Overnet two years too late. It was an interesting lead, a preexisting implementation of DHT methodology, combined with the now defunct eDonkey network. The Overnet was a true serverless network. Nodes that wanted to connect would query a preexisting peer list or get new initial peers via the eDonkey net. The Overnet-ish system is still in use today, but for other things than file sharing.

Storm botnet
One of the most prevalent uses of the Overnet still in use today, is the Storm botnet. It is a remotely-controlled network of “zombie” computers (or “botnet”) that has been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam (Wikipedia). The size of it is staggering, with conservative estimates at 160,000 to a more agreed upon 1 million. The crazy part is the amount of bandwidth that 1 million geo-diverse DSL lines could throw at a host. 1 million computers * a mid-range DSL line (256kbps) = 244.14 Gbps = a whole lot of bandwidth. I am not really scared, because I don’t pick fights with multinational spam corporations. What I find amazing is how peer to peer architectures can scale so much.

As with all material in this area, I must provide a few disclaimers.

1. This article is meant for educational purposes only, and any use of this knowledge for any purpose is the choice of the reader.
2. Jason Zerbe, his hosting provider, and any person with any relation to Jason with not be liable for any negative choices of readers.
3. I, Jason Zerbe, do not condone the illegal applications of the knowledge presented. For more information on the hacker legal system from Agent Steal’s perspective, you can read a write-up he did in 1997 while incarcerated.
4. This article may be freely reproduced, in whole or in part, provided acknowledgments are given to the author. Any reproduction for profit, or law enforcement use is prohibited.

That said, now for the goods. ;-]

I was exposed to computers as a user, first when I was four, but I never started investigating how they worked until my 13th birthday. I was granted one of my dad’s old computers to indefinitely borrow. For my 16th birthday I bought my own computer, with my own specifications, and my own money. In those three years I mastered the Windows API, gotten into Unix/Linux, worked through much of the Java API, experimented with C++, mastered various networking principles, and have an in depth knowledge of PHP, MySQL, the Apache and Lighttpd servers.

A few suggestions to get you started, taken from a (mostly) complete hacker howto created by Eric Steven Raymond.

1. Learn how to program – From what I’ve heard and experienced it is best to know a combination of the following: Python, C/C++, Java, Perl or PHP, LISP. I still have zero experience in Python and Lisp …. ah more projects.
2. Get an open source OS (operating systems) and know how to use it – My personal favorites are Debian, CentOS, and OpenBSD.
3. Learn how the Internet functions and how to script HTML and now CSS – Do you know what http, ftp, imap, pop, and smtp are? How you are connected into the internet and how that technology works? HTML is the all encompassing mark-up for the internet. Learn it or become dependent on pathetic Microsoft-type generators. CSS is also vary handy to get the look and feel of your Web 2.0 creation just right.
4. If you don’t have functional English, learn it – All of the source code that I have laid eyes on to date, is written in English syntax, the code and comments.

Once you are “in”, the status symbols of hacking culture are surprisingly counter-culture to the mainstream American thought process. To excerpt from Eric, “Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.”

In the upcoming posts, I’ll probably be getting into a tutorial/how to phase of actual hacking.