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- -= H A C K E R S =-
-
- Issue #8, File #2 of 9
-
- Letters
-
-
- >From matt@matt.net.house.auSun Apr 21 18:41:18 1996
-
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 19:09:28 +1000 (EST)
- From: Matty <matt@matt.net.house.au>
- To: Mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: Handy Hack
-
-
- G'day.. just started reading HACKERS #8 (finally got around to getting
- it!) and thought I may as well make a fool of myself and contribute this
- hack by a friend and I. It's not very exciting, and has nothing to do
- with breaking into secret government computers or anything - but we were
- proud of ourselves.
-
- This was two years ago - when the lab that held the Sun workstations was
- restricted to a few students 9and not open like it has been since they
- stuck the colour linux boxes into another lab - anyway)
- There was an aging line printer... 132 columns or so... extremely noisy
- and usually having reams and reams of paper in a complete mess on the
- out-tray bin and all over the floor. (it's been replaced by a laser now..
- but I continue)
- The problem was, there were some morons in the lab who were either
- blind, stupid, or had difficulty reading the large sign above the printer
- that we had made saying "THIS PRINTER DOES NOT PRINT POSTSCRIPT" - which
- it didn't. Every time a postscript file came through, the printer would
- happily churn out literally hundreds of pages of gibberish - wasting both
- paper and ink - and being a general nuisance to those of us who had
- important things to print out. One night my friend and I had important
- things to print, but some lusers had postscript jobs queued ahead of us.
- Anyway, it was typical programmers time (like about midnight or 1am) so
- the Big Chief wasn't around to log in as root and nuke the jobs.
- So anyway, after the usual "you dipshit" letters to the offenders, we
- started thinking how we could get our jobs to go through.
- Well, as usual, the printer was out of paper anyway. So I went on the
- hike to the Computer Services Centre (from our faculty) with my large
- backpack, and returned with around 3 inches of fanfold paper. The
- advantage of the printer room (which is now gone - but basically it was a
- partitioned-off section of a general computer lab) was that the security
- camera was blocked by the partition - hence I could rip off as much paper
- & stuff as I liked. The fake job I printed out was discarded in the usual
- manner (banner & login name ripped into various segments and disposed in
- random bins along the way out along with a few cusses about the printer
- screwing up again) and I hiked back to the faculty with the paper.
- First off, we took the ribbon out (no sense wasting the ink - it was
- almost dry anyway) and then tried taking the paper out but of course the
- printer had built-in detectors and wouldn't print. So we tried the
- looping paper trick, but it started strangling the tractor.
- Next we tried getting a long strand of holey bits and looping that around
- - it failed due to a second paper-detector.
- So two loops were made - and after the long wait for the glue to dry we
- put them in - and it worked for a bit - then the loops jumped out. So we
- cut them up tight enough to not jump but loose enough not to rip (it was
- really crappy paper that would rip if you looked at it hard enough) -
- waited again for the glue to dry - and set it off again. Worked
- perfectly - we jammed a bit of paper over the tractor so it wouldn't get
- damaged by the hammers, and hour or so later the crap stuff was out of the
- queue and we could print our stuff.
- While we waited my friend wrote up a short spiel about how to clear the
- print buffer on the printer and how to defeat postscript jobs - this was
- pinned on the noticeboard above the printer where it stayed until we took
- it down when the line printer was replaced by a laser.
- The tech. staff thought it was cool - we had a few compliments from others
- who used the lab and experienced the same problems we did - and yeah we
- were pretty proud.
-
- Well that's it. Not a great hack, but still, a hack.
-
- ObLittleHack:
- Dialling 199 on a Telecom Commander PABX actually rings _every_ extension
- on the system. Kinda fun in a big shop where you spin some crap to a
- clueless salesperson who wanders off to find out and you reach over & grab
- the phone, dial, hang up, look innocent, and wait for the joyful tones of
- an entire PABX ringing - then the look on the faces of everyone who rushes
- to pick up the phone, gives the standard welcome speech "Hello, Fred
- Bloggs Nose Picking service, Jane Doe speaking; how can I help you?" and
- gets the annoying *beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep* in the ear.
- (Australia only - I assume the numbers & stuff differ overseas)
-
- matt@matt.net.house.au (not on DNS)
- tp943845@ise.canberra.edu.au (on DNS)
- -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
- Version: 3.12
- GIT/GMU/GO d- s++:- a-- C+++ UL++++(S+) P--- L++++>$ E- W+++(--) N+(++) !o
- K- w--- O M-- V--(!V) PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP t+ 5++ X+ !R tv--- b+ DI(+) D++ G--
-
- e>++ d++ r--->+++ !y+
-
- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From matt@matt.net.house.auSun Apr 21 18:41:27 1996
-
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 19:58:35 +1000 (EST)
- From: Matty <matt@matt.net.house.au>
- To: Mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: Another Hack
-
-
- Oh yeah... forgot to add this one:
-
- Lacking sufficient ethernet cabling and cards at the time, we were unable
- to set up net.house properly - however with a few null-modem cables and
- SLiRP (http://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/slirp/) we finally got the place
- nettable. The link looked like this
-
- INTERNET
- |
- 128K_ISDN
- |
- /~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\
- |AARNet gateway|
- \______________/
- |
- eth
- |
- /~~~~~~~\ /~~~~~~~~~~~\ /~~~~~~~~~~~\ /~~~~~\
- |blitzen|--eth--|ise-gateway|--eth--|csc-gateway|--eth--|annex|
- \_______/ \___________/ \___________/ \_____/
- I
- modem
- I
- (telco)
- I
- my-modem
- I
- /~~~~~~~~\ /~~~~~~\ /~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\
- |neil-mac|==serial==|smoopc|==serial==|matt.net.house|
- \________/ \______/ \______________/
-
- In order, my PC runs SLiRP off blitzen through the annex (they haven't
- given proper (C)SLIP/PPP to students yet) Smoo runs slirp off my PC, and
- Neil runs slirp off Smoo's PC. So when you look at it, Neil's Mac was
- faking it was Smoo's PC which was faking it was my PC which was faking it
- was blitzen.canberra.edu.au *phew!*
- My poor little 28.8K modem was pretty busy keeping up with it all, but
- the link worked (albeit slow at times - especially the Mac - hehe)
- When Spakman moved in, the link got worse - it was the same to my pc, then
- we had spak's pc slirping off mine and his laptop slirping off his pc, and
- Neil's mac slirping off my other serial port. A nightmare of cables and
- not much say in whose PC went where on the desk (cable length limitations)
- Now I have my ethernet card back, and neil has a new ethernet-able mac, so
- net.house is fully coax-ed and there's just the one slirp link faking
- PPP from my pc to blitzen - and I IP-forward and proxyarp the rest of the
- house. But that serial==serial==serial==serial slirp connection to get
- every computer in the house on the net has to be one of the better hacks
- we've done this year.
-
- Again, not a 'secret government documents' - kind of hack, but I've been
- out of that scene for a while...
-
- matt@matt.net.house.au (not on DNS)
- -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
- Version: 3.12
- GIT/GMU/GO d- s++:- a-- C+++ UL++++(S+) P--- L++++>$ E- W+++(--) N+(++) !o
- K- w--- O M-- V--(!V) PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP t+ 5++ X+ !R tv--- b+ DI(+) D++ G--
-
- e>++ d++ r--->+++ !y+
-
- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From matt@matt.net.house.auSun Apr 21 18:41:32 1996
-
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 20:25:30 +1000 (EST)
- From: Matty <matt@matt.net.house.au>
- To: mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: Australian ANI numbers & stuff
-
-
- They say there's two types of users - those who read everything first and
- then send the mail, and those (like me) who just keep on mailing and
- mailing until everything is read & sent :)
-
- Anyway, I'm on to the letters section now. I don't know about that 1114
- and 1115 that some guy/gal wrote in - it could be true but it sounds kinda
- fake. The number I know has always been 19123. HOWEVER (I just had a
- brief flash of insight) the 111x stuff _could_ be for a pay phone - I'll
- have to test that one out. 19123 does _not_ work on pay phones (it says
- "No information to identify telephone number" in this cool robotic voice)
- - works on normal house phones though (and I assume a PABX or other
- non-pay-phone phone)
-
- New info: dialling "12711" will identify which service carrier you're
- using for long distance calls, and how to use a different carrier. I
- guess it's of some use to someone somewhere in Australia :)
-
- Apologies for my 3-message spam - I really should learn to collate all my
- thoughts first but I'm a spontaneous kind of person :)
-
- matt@matt.net.house.au (not on DNS)
- -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
- Version: 3.12
- GIT/GMU/GO d- s++:- a-- C+++ UL++++(S+) P--- L++++>$ E- W+++(--) N+(++) !o
- K- w--- O M-- V--(!V) PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP t+ 5++ X+ !R tv--- b+ DI(+) D++ G--
-
- e>++ d++ r--->+++ !y+
-
- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
-
- [ Exactly the kind of hacks I was looking for...anybody can hack into
- government computers, but what the hell do you do when the printer is out
- of paper? Definetly cool hacks. You win the Hack of the Month award, send
- me your snail mail address and I'll mail it out to you. ]
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From jmfriedman@chop.isca.uiowa.eduSat Mar 30 18:27:28 1996
-
- Date: Thu Mar 28 19:07:34 1996
- From: jonathon friedman <jmfriedman@chop.isca.uiowa.edu>
- To: mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: HACKERS 7
-
- I would like to respond to the 13 year old who wants to learn how to hack. I
- would not recomend it, or at least actually doing it espieccially if you are a
- "newbie". You will probably ask why should you tell me what to do,w ell, I am
- 13 years old as well, and I used a rlogin bug to get in to a computer at our
- university (when i was 12) and I didn'at do anything, though Ic oudl have bu t
- I was caught they didn't do anything like taking me to court but if I had done
- something I could have been, anywyas the moral, Don't hack, especially if youd
- on't know wha tthe hell you are doing.
-
- --Jon
- ---
- Wise man say the meaning of life is "Life is like.....Ever seen forest gump?"
-
- [ Good advice, despite the typos...in my opinion, the real hacks are those
- like the first two letters. Anyone can run an 8lgm script. Levy's version
- of Hackers is what it is really all about. ]
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From turgjb@ee.mcgill.caSat Mar 30 18:43:39 1996
-
- Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 14:48:22 -0500 (EST)
- From: Turgeon Jean-Benoit <turgjb@ee.mcgill.ca>
- To: mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: Hackers subscription
-
- I read the latest edition of Hackers. Its a great zine!
- Sysadmins at our lab are quite paranoids about hackers, they feel the network
- is threathened by hackers every minute and even look for any file containing
- the word "hack" in all users home dirs. Anyway, hiding ourselves is not
- the way to go. So to end this story could you add my address to the
- subscribtion list.
-
- Thanks JBT
-
- [ The same thing is done on the computers at my campus. If anyone out there
- is currently in college, watch the names of the files you leave lying around. ]
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From arcane@texnet.net Thu Oct 10 19:58:01 1996
-
- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 09:24:35 -0500
- From: Brian Thomas <arcane@texnet.net>
- To: mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: phone number decyphering
-
- I ran across issue six from 96 and saw the article on dialing the ANI code
- to determine the number you are at. In the article wyle@max.tiac.net wrote
- about a three digit code that will give you the phone number for any phone
- in an area code. In our area code (817) I have found that the numbers are
- actually based on the prefix and not the area code. For example
- 817-741-#### would dial 974 but 817-752-#### would dial 972. For anyone
- that tried to find a number based on this code and failed you might try
- again and use the numbers around it because of a difference in your prefix.
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- >From gauravm@giasbma.vsnl.net.in Thu Oct 10 20:01:48 1996
-
- Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 19:09:53 +0530 (IST)
- From: GAURAV MARBALLI <gauravm@giasbma.vsnl.net.in>
- To: mrs3691@hertz.njit.edu
- Subject: Very tightly secured UNIX system
-
- Hi! My name is WeByte from Mumbai, India. Our ISP gives us a UNIX based
- Lynx browser for the Internet (Lynx version 1.0). We get access to the
- UNIX prompt, but it is a Restricted Korn Shell ('coz it says rksh:
- everytime). Earlier security was not so tight and so me and my friend used
- to Cracker-Jack the password file, to get the passwords for the more
- expensive TCP/IP accounts. But not anymore man!! Security is so bad, we
- aren't allowed to use even "ls -la" forget "cd". So help me man. I tried
- methods suggested by other hackers like "shelling" out of "vi" and stuff
- like that, but man, we do not even have "vi". We use PICO. So help me
- man!! I want that passwd file. (Remember I am a rookie) Bye for now! and
- Thanx!!
-
- [ Another testament to the horror of not leaving back doors. ]
-
- * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
-