Do you want to know somethings about a person? Do you want to learn about an individual’s intimate details? Do you desire to understand you target’s patterns?

Then continue to read…

Social networking (SN) websites are great places to make new friends that share similar interests. It is also a great place to get some ideas. Additionally, the fact that is is possible to be involved in various networks with others from all over the globe is an amazing feat in itself.

However, a much darker side of social networking exists…

The type of information that can be collected from these types of networks can range from the most basic information to the most detailed. For example, email addresses, phone numbers, resident location(s), work related details, family members and leisure activities. These examples can continue to make a rather long lists from just one member.

An independent study has shown that as the linux kernel is changing, ext4 isn’t keeping track with the changes.  Not to say ext4 isn’t good, it’s just not as fast as ext3 with the current newer kernel changes.  A shame really, as I was a fan of the idea of ext4 (who wasn’t?).

Again, this testing was looking at the file-system performance when each file-system was left to its default mount options. EXT4 could be mounted in a way that it would not suffer as many performance penalties (at the risk of data being potentially lost in a crash) and the other file-systems can be tuned as well, but we will save that tuning and mount option testing for another article.

Source: www.phoronix.com

So it’s been a while since I have sat down and written a no kidding “What I want” kind of blog entry.

I’m stuck.  I like the idea of BackTrack(4), but I just don’t like it.  It’s rough around the edges, quite dodgy in driver support and half the time I have to ADD more stuff to it to get something to work.  I want a new distro.  I don’t just want ANY distro either, I want my own.

I’m hunting down different tools that I can stuff into it, I want to create a PPA that will allow me to update all of the “extra” files (hashes, library files, dictionaries, etc) that one creates on the fly so that I can have them at a moment’s notice.

I want to build three or four different flavors too.  My “work” distro that will allow me to do all my PT work, my “social” build that I can wow the folks from the LUG with and recruit new users with, my NAS build for the house, and my server build.  I’d love to stick with a Debian flavor, but I must say the newer Fedora builds are forcing me to look twice at the RedHat strains.

I’m not just a kickass Linux ninja.  I’m a mediocre, so so user, that knows his way around a command line.  I poke holes in security for fun and pay (under contract only, thank you), and am looking to share some of that knowledge with the appropriate folks via a new distro.

I may whip up a few distros based on different strains and get some input on them.  Nihilinux is coming.  That’s what I decided to name the distro a year ago, and come hell or high water (or quite frankly both with the weather being as jacked up as it’s been), I’ll get this sucker out there.

Time to bang on….

Oh and remember this:  Microsoft’s new mantra is “A world without walls”.  Well in a world without walls, who the hell needs Windows?

The legalese is rather simple here:  private World of Warcraft servers are illegal.  Bottom line.  However, private WoW servers are growing and spreading like wildfire because people see the game as aging and don’t want to continue to pay a premium for old content or for characters that they may or may not play for spans that extend beyond weeks.

I’m not terribly interested in jumping onto the attaboy wagon and squeeling for all to hear about how this “provider” is running a criminal enterprise on a global scale.  Actually, I’m going to critique them.  I have taken the time to experience the “Scapegaming Experience” in full and I must say, there are severe issues across the board.

Before I dip too deep into the waters of slandering and spewing – which I fully intend to do, I would like to sing some praise for the reverse engineering that goes on here.  The “lead developer” that essentially fleshes out the “StormEmu” server emulater does a pretty good job.  Not great, but not horrible.  I’m not sure how the hierarchy behind the scenes fleshes out, but I have to admit that for one guy who knows what he’s doing mixed in with a bunch of amateurs, it’s not a bad deal.  Ok, that’s all the good I can say.

The staff at Scapegaming is pitiful.  I’m quite sure that the average age of the ’staff’ is at best 18.  The maturity of decision made from the forum staff to the in game staff is foolish at best.  As a player, it is best to simply keep your head down and accept that over half of the quests in the game (keep in mind that World of Warcraft is a ‘quest’ driven game) are broken (they simply don’t work – either the NPC is not spawned or a critical element is not written correctly i.e.  go to quests).  Complaints and concerns are either being ignored or if you get someone’s attention it’s associated with being removed from the game either as a kick or banned out right.

Cheating in the server environment by players is through the roof.  One in three players uses cheats regularly.  Not just to gain advantages, but also to make quests work or to be able to successfully travel to otherwise unreachable areas due to simple game mechanics failing, such as lifts and elevators.  There are more speed cheaters in this server realm than in any other I’ve ever seen.  As a player who has seen this realm in earlier days and then again in more recent weeks, I’m appalled.  Granted, my ethics are a bit shady at times, I’ve been known to harbor an exploit for a while until it no longer serves me, then expose it, the rampant outright use of third party tools to manipulate the game are sickening in Scapegaming.

Sadly, most players accept all of these negatives and either partake as needed or just ignore these flaws and move on until it affects them.  The next level of fail comes from the uptime issues.  Due to pisspoor coding within the databases, the servers suffer from massive memory leaks which in turn cause substantial lag.  The player community has created a name for long load screens, “fruit loops”.  During a “fruit loop” phase, it can take players over an hour to pass the initial loading screen to join the in-game environment.  The staff, on the opposite end of the spectrum react with pure apathy.  If the forums are hammered with posts relating to long load times or down time, they are locked or deleted almost immediately.  Granted there are times when posts last for hours, thus showing the inactivity and inattentiveness of the staff.

The most criminal element that I have seen in the Scapegaming environment is the “Donation Process”.  Apparently, to maintain hosting fees, the staff have created a method of  ‘gifting’ high end equipment to players who choose  to ‘donate’ specific fee amounts.   The double edged sword here, which actually amuses me endlessly, is that Scapegaming is actually being scammed by overseas players who use fraudulent credentials to get the equipment they desire and play for a period of a week or two, until the smoke clears on the fraudulent ‘donations’ – showing no funds available from that source.  I can’t help but laugh when I think about it, as the whole system is corrupt.

So why stick around and try to muddle through it all?  Surprisingly enough, the players.  As with all MMOs, players develop friendships and relationships in game.  They crave the time to hang out with one another and work towards common goals.  The in-game community is both wholesome and corrupt.  There are groups of individuals that make the time spent there worth the effort, but sadly, more and more of them are finally coming to their senses, forcing me to take account of my own time.

The end is nigh for Scapegaming, and I’m glad to be here to witness it.  They grew to a massive size of easily over 50,000 individual players through less than favorable means and it pleases me to see them be taken down in the same fashion.  As a person trained in how to spot and react to the types of attacks Scapegaming is taking, it saddens me that it’s run by fools.  Then again, the reality of it all is that they had it coming.  They created this facade by cheating, lieing and stealing, and funnily enough, that’s how they’re dying.

I teach a course at the home office that is part of the Senior Law Enforcement Seminar for the state of Arkansas.  My period of instruction is based on cyber terrorism awareness.  I basically teach cops the basics about how the bad guys operate on the internet.  One nugget I found that I just can’t help but love more and more is this pictorial of how a botnet operates:

Such a great breakdown of botnets

A diagram of the process by which spammers use zombie (virus-infected) computers to send spam.

1. Virus writer sends out viruses, infecting ordinary users’ Windows PCs.
2. Infected PCs log into an IRC server or other communications medium, forming a network of infected systems known as a botnet.
3. Spammer purchases access to this botnet from virus writer or a dealer.
4. Spammer sends instructions to the botnet, instructing the infected PCs to send out spam.
5. The infected PCs send the spam messages to Internet users’ mail servers.

As stated, this is NOT my work.  I’d LOVE to give appropriate credit for it, but don’t have those details.  If you know of the author or another place to find it online, feel free to contact me and I’ll give appropriate credit.

Post Edit:  I found the source for this image @ wikimedia.  Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the heads up.