philo news Apr 2017 16:38:14 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

[snip]

I seriously doubt you would be using forklift batteries or
stationary batteries. I doubt you ever would have anything bigger
than a car battery and I did not deal with those.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions, right? I actually
get a kick out of people who make the mistake of trying to judge me,
or the knowledge they think I have/don't have, without knowing
anything about me, personally. Not only have I 'used' forklift
batteirs for various projects, including running an electric
forklift (they make fantastic inverter power sources, too, btw),
I've also spent a considerable amount of time rewiring the charging
boards, rewinding the motors which typically provided hydraulics in
my case; although, I do remember seeing one or two that I call
direct drive, no hydraulics, just hard grunt work provided by a DC
motor.

Btw, I recently rebuilt the charger for a skyjack and reconditioned
the batteries for the same unit. It doesn't use car batteries
either. ROFL.

Suffice to say, I know a bit more about batteries from hands on
experience than you've made the mistake of publically assuming.

I'm just as guilty of assumptions I previously made about you, based
on what BD mislead me to believe about you. He mislead me into
thinking you were a peer of mine in so far as IT, and, ehh, that's
just not the case. It's not the first time he's tried this **** mind
you, but...I don't usually get the chance to have a civil
conversation with the person he volunteered. Until you came along,
that is.

If you can't read/write code, you're limited. Sorry, but, you
are. The computer still 0wns you, you don't 0wn it.


It's not like I can't do it, but I prefer the hardware end of
things.

Heheh... Famous last words. I've met a lot of people who think
coding is easy, too. Until they're asked to actually do something
'useful' without the benefit of a 'compiler' to hold your hand for
the most part. Matter of fact, if you don't really understand what
your compiler is doing with your code, you don't understand how the
resulting executable might contain several vulnerabilities that
someone like me can find with a debugger/disassembler and take full
advantage of. There's a big difference between an HLL programmer and
a 'coder'. Despite both 'programming'. One understands in intimate
detail what's going on with the code he/she is writing, and the
other, does not.

Way back around the year 2000 I went so far as compiling my own
Linux kernel . In a way it was kind of challenging and fun but
that type of stuff is not my cup of tea.

What did you add/remove code wise from the source prior to
compiling? Was it something you wrote, or additional hardware
support you needed at the time? In other words, did you incorporate
an additional (in windows speak) driver?

I realize you're quite a bit older than myself, but, my
electronics troubleshooting background isn't exactly new. I was
repairing tv's, stereos, etc, and later, vhs based vcrs;
previously beta max; which was superior, but, still lost out,
long before I became a teenager. Some kids did the dishes for
allowance, I fixed neighbors equipment for mine.


I repaired my first radio (an AM portable) when I was 12 years
old. I did my first computer repair in 1979. For a post graduate
course I built a 6800 based computer that was used to program
EPROMS. It had four 10k memory boards and one of them only
registered as 8k. My professor could not figure it out but I
eventually did. It was a bad PCB feed through.

LOL. I was already doing radio repair, shortwave TUBE type, antique
my dad once owned, at age 5. [g] I borrowed a tube tester from an
older person and was able to use it, without his assistance. I was
even able to acquire a source for replacement RCA tubes for it. My
dad was shocked, but, I got to experience what his dad knew as
'radio' with the excessively long warm up time required between
turning it on and actually hearing something. Considering it was my
first hands on experience with a tube radio, I thought something
might still be broken. I wasn't expecting to power it up, verify it
was getting power, and then, waiting for a bit for it to make noise.
Seriously, I was watching it with an eagle eye, ready to shut the
power down as soon as I saw smoke, sparks, arcing, or something.

I also obtained a small black and white tube tv. yes, I know at the
time the crt was tube too, but, this tv was actually old school,
tubes. It took twenty minutes before you heard anything or saw
anything on the little screen. It was a 'portable' tv that had a
handle, but, for my little self, weighed a ton! I remember enjoying
many episodes of what people younger than myself now call 'classic
dr who' on it. Along with nat king cole on PBS. I was able to
connect my atari 2600 into it and play asteroids though. [g]

Now, in all fairness to you and others reading; the knowledge I've
acquired is primarily due to far older very knowledgeable
individuals who saw I had a real interest in what they were doing
and spent the time to teach me. I didn't really associate that much
with people my own age. Didn't read comic books, didn't care for
sports, didn't really like going outside to 'play' as most kids my
age preferred doing. I wanted to know how things worked, AND, why. I
was very lucky in the sense that most of my family on both sides are
engineers, tradesmen, etc. I took full advantage of it, I learned
whatever they were willing to share and teach.

In kindergarden for example, I was allowed to skip naptime and
follow the electrician around; my teacher thought that was more
productive than nap time for me. I was already bringing electric
motors to school, anyhow.

The electrician got a kick out of me, too. he didn't have to dumb
down what he was doing. I understood. And, I enjoyed the time he
spent with me. He even let me install a new ballast. With his
supervision, of course. I neglected to tell him my dad had me well
versed in doing that, at home. g

For my sixth birthday, I got an oscilloscope. My mom at the time
worked for a company which manufactured circuit boards to control
commercial equipment. Mixers, soda dispensers, that sort of thing.
So, she was bringing me testing gear, technical reference manuals,
diodes, capacitors, resistors, etc. I had a soldering iron long
before I ever had my own lego set. I could already ready a schematic
long before I was taught to read a map with a compass.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6800

I'm familiar with it, but, I was already writing code well before
college professors provided their insight to it. I got in a little
trouble in the same school described above for hacking the oregon
trail game on the green screen apple. I wanted more ammo. g I
didn't own a computer at home yet, that was three more years down
the road, but, I catch on quick to things that interest me. And, I
had the coding bug already.

We even had a robotics class when I was in 2nd grade. It was driven
by a room full of those apples I mentioned previously. With a long
data cable plugged into the back of it; which was kept off the floor
and out of the way via a boom; similar infact to what you'd find on
a tv production set for a microphone. We 'talked to it' with the
logos language. Are you familiar with it?


I never have had to reload Windows to fix a software problem.
Back in the days of Win98 I did occasionally get a machine that
was was so infected the only thing that made sense was to re-load
Windows.

Er, besides contradicting yourself, you took the 'easy way' out too.
And I understand your likely reason for doing so, time is money and
you can't realistically bill a customer for many hours for a single
job when reloading could save time and lessen their bill. Or, if you
didn't bill them, save you a lot of time. In my case, I would have
taken samples of the suspected malicious code and studied it on my
own time. for later use. In the event I encountered it again. it's
how I originally 'taught' BugHunter, anyways.

As far as never having to reload windows.. If you had to changeout
the mainboard for another using a different chipset on an NT based
box, how did you get around the BSOD issue? You had two options.
One, reload windows, or, two, boot the machine from a startup disc
able to read/write to NTFS (or fat32 if the drive wasn't formatted
for NTFS) and manually mount a specific file that is part of the
registry 'hive'; to edit a single key entry. By single key entry,
the key itself contained subkeys and you just 'deleted' the entries
dealing with the hardware. Once you did so, saving your changes, you
could restart the machine on the new board, and instead of the BSOD,
Windows would begin hardware detection. This same trick worked for
the win9x series too, btw.

In the case I recall off hand, it would have taken hours to trace
down every last trace of infection yet barely took an hour to back
up the tiny amount of data and reload

infection? Do you remember what it actually had? You see, had you
been a coder, you could have written a small utility to hunt the
'infection' traces down for you. Once you acquired a viable sample
of it, that is.

For many years I repaired circuit boards on my job and have plenty
of experience replacing IC's. Never unsoldered an EPROM though. My
"lab" at home does not have the good vacuum desoldering tool I had
at work. I've had plenty of dumb customers but never one foolish
enough to interrupt an EPROM flash

If you have a large enough customer base, you run into all kinds of
stupid. And, that's not confined to matters of IT. it's in appliance
repair (see my previous post in this newsgroup on bypass the two
safety lockouts on a maytag washer using digital controls),
electrical, electronics, etc.

Even when I was a kid, doing vcr repair, I can't count the times a
toddler thought the machine was hungry and 'fed it'. Granted, the
toddler wasn't stupid per say, just very ignorant, which is
understandable. I used! to think The parents were imho, stupid for
letting the kiddo anywhere near it unsupervised. Until I was
responsible for little ones years later. They can get out of sight
on you in a hurry, especially if your mind is focused elsewhere.

Ever remove an active copy of lojack from a laptop without losing
any data or otherwise harming the laptop? I have. Ever encounter
a password locked Dell where the password was set on the HD
itself? I have. And, I succesfully unlocked the hard disk, too.
No, sticking the HD in another machine won't give you any access
to the drive contents, if that's what you were thinking. The
machine won't even be able to identify the drive, because the
circuitry on the controller board on the drive itself is locked
out. Trying to get cheeky and swap controller boards will not
unlock the drive either; it's mated to the mechanical section at
this point and will not allow you any access. In case you had
that in mind as the next step.

Ever crack Autocard r13 as a teenager, and make thousands by
selling a couple of cracked copies? I have.


LOL, when I was a teen I was into tube-style amateur radio
equipment.

Do you know what lojack is? The name itself should be a big clue, if
you know anything about antitheft for cars/trucks, etc. It's along
the same lines. Anyways, the lojack software requires a bios
reflash, where it actually gets loaded as several win32 PE based
executables, as an 'optionrom'. Once it's up and going, even a clean
install of Windows won't save you. It'll silent install (as in, drop
the images from eeprom to disc and edit the necessary registry keys
to ensure execution, later on). Then, it checks in when it detects a
live network connection to see if the laptop is reported stolen.

If it is, it locks the laptop down and holds your data for ransom.
As well as snitching out the laptops location as best as it can to
the lojack company, which gets the local authorities involved.
Pretty soon, you have a knock on the door and you find yourself in
handcuffs for being in possession of stolen property.

The particular laptop was provided to me (I did not know where it
came from at the time, or how lojack wound up on it, until after I
completely removed it) by a family member who didn't bother to tell
me it was a rent to own machine from rent a center. They still owed
for it, and rent a center wanted their money or the machine back.

It was mailed to me from someone out of state, non working. The hard
drive failed, basically. I copied the owners data to another drive,
and installed a new one. After loading a clean copy of Windows XP
VLK edition using a good key from my collection, I noticed it was
trying to do something on my 'fake' network. I thought that was very
strange, considering that I wasn't opening any applications yet at
the time, it was a completely clean installation. When I snooped
it's activity via a hub (yes, a hub, not a switch), I noticed it was
trying to contact an IP I knew nothing about, that wasn't a known
one for windows updates, or anything related to the drivers I was
still in the process of getting on the machine.

So I started checking out the machine a bit closer. It wouldn't do
this if booted from read only media. So, I used a custom repair disc
I created to see what the hell was going on. That's when I noticed
it was trying (and failing) to create two executables with an MS
like name buried in the windows sub folders.

So I had a look at the hard disk, and sure enough, these files
existed there. So I copied them over to another machine for malware
analysis. That's when I discovered it was lojacked, and, active.

Prior to doing this, I wasn't familiar with lojack in the sense of
first hand experience. So I disassembled it. I wanted to know where
it came from, I knew my media was clean, so it couldn't have come
from there. So, I used a generic BIOS firmware dumping utility I
wrote to see what was up. and, that's where I found the ****er.

Doing a bit more work from console on my clean machines, I was able
to remove the option rom and reflash the new firmware; without
lojack. After removing the registry keys and the added executables,
I booted the laptop back up on the HD I installed. And monitored it.
No more lojack.

After doing all of that, I was curious as hell about the entire
lojack situation, since the software isn't freeware and isn't cheap,
either. So I called the owner and inquired about the laptops
history. Did they buy it used off somebody or what? Nope, it was
from rent a center, and, they had missed several payments.

Keep in mind, I took the approach of unknown malware on the machine,
not a legitimate installation of lojack by the actual owner of said
machine. I didn't know at the time, until I got into it with a
disassembler the software wasn't technically malware and was just
trying to protect the real owners interests.

Concerning the radio aspect...

I did get busted by the FCC when I was 12 years old for running a
home made 1kilowatt FM radio transmitter. I could! have played
stupid about the entire thing, but, my proud parental units gave the
*******s a tour of my lab, not realizing how much they were screwing
me over. They had hours to chat it up with my mom and dad while I
was still at school. Ever seen the movie, Wargames? Well, when the
kid notices the van coming out of the convenience store, he realized
something was up, but it was too late.

That's basically what happened to me. I noticed the wrong van (it
had the wrong telephone company name on it) sitting near our
apartment. As in, directly across the street. I actually turned
around (I walked home from school) and started walking in the other
direction when my dad saw me from the window and yeld at me to come
upstairs, they had people who wanted to meet me. I've had several
what I call, close calls since I didn't get arrested or anything,
since then. Such as the Melissa virus. I didn't host it, My only
assocation other than being one of several friends of it's author
was securing a local ISP to provide a dedicated machine to host
another friends website, known as codebreakers.org. I didn't know
the melissa virus was going to be offered there, until after the
fact. As in, front page local news.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/apr/03/news/mn-23832
https://www.cnet.com/news/melissa-su...in-new-jersey/
The FBI also contacted Global Connection, a small Internet service
provider in Kingsport, Tennessee, whose computers hosted the Web
site Codebreakers.org, according to Dennis Halsey, 36, chief
executive of Global Connection. That site contained computer virus
information and may have helped spread the Melissa virus, Halsey
said.

A few days ago, a Silicon Valley company and another person
contacted Halsey by email, saying they got the Melissa virus and
tracked it to the Codebreakers Web site.

"We shut down the Web site on Monday. We don't like viruses any more
than anybody," Halsey said.

The Codebreakers Web site was put together by his business partner
and a friend of the partner, Halsey said. That friend, he said, "is
apparently in a large, international virus organization."

The Melissa virus and Codebreakers.. first, a little reading material:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/02/us...ail-virus.html

This is the most important part:

Officials from Global Connection, an Internet provider in Kingsport, Tenn., said they also received a call from the F.B.I. on Thursday in connection with the Melissa investigation. Global Connection was host of the Web site of Codebreakers.org, a group that includes some virus writers and to which VicodinES apparently once belonged.

Alex Potts, sales and marketing manager for Global Connection, said the company had already decided to disconnect the Web page from the Internet on Tuesday to ''err on the side of caution.'' Mr. Potts said the company had read news reports and received E-mails that connected the site to the Melissa virus.

And this one:

http://articles.philly.com/1999-04-0...g-virus-makers

Dennis Halsey, the CEO and vice president of Global Connection, said
he did not think anything of the request at the time. In fact, Halsey
did not require any formal application and never checked to see what
the Web site was. Neither Halsey nor the FBI would release the man's
name.

The site turned out to be Codebreakers.org - one of the main places
that virus creators use to trade code. ``We never imagined it to be
something this big, believe me,'' said Halsey, who described the man
as a computer wizard.

Halsey, who is not implicated in the case, said he knew the man only
because ``it's a small town and everybody sort of knows each
other.'' But Halsey thought it was inconceivable that such a young
man could be the infamous VicodinES or another prominent virus maker.

``I'm sure that he is not the one who wrote the virus,'' Halsey said.
``I mean, this is a multinational organization, there are members
everywhere. How could this young kid be involved?''

I do look very young for my age. I tried to find the original
release provided by the kingsport times news, on their front page! in the
physical copy, but.. it's been so long...Dennis thought I was
sixteen years old and was named Justin. Close call, right? Had he
known my actual name, he would have thrown me under the bus in a
heartbeat.

My co worker and friend who hooked me up with Dennis, since he was a business
partner of Dennis at the time told me to go pickup the newspaper when I got to
work that morning. I found his request odd, considering we were a computer shop
and could read the news, online, whenever. But, I humoured him and did as he requested.
My jaw hit the ****ing floor when I read that on THE FRONT page of the newspaper.

Needless to say, I turned in my notice that morning, got my
paycheck, and left the state for awhile, until things cooled down. I
actually moved a bit further down south, but, the remailer, nor
David Brooks, etc, ever managed to find that address on me, either.
ROFL.

My pirate radio station was home made, and, I thought it only
xmitted around my local neighborhood; I didn't realize it was
broadcasting a bit further and some people didn't appreciate the
music I'd play on it. But hey, I was 12, and I built it entirely
from scratch, on my own, without help. I was pleased with it, it
sounded great on the radios in the house. They found my FM wireless
channel changer too. And took my original version, my beloved
prototype. It would let you wireless control ANY fm radio. You turn
it on, set the dial, the radio would ONLY pickup what you tuned in,
regardless of station you set the radio to. It did this by
generating a dampening field (obviously) and only allowed one
frequency to pass thru, that you determined with the dial on it. So,
it worked, literally, with ANY FM radio. House, car, made no
difference.

If I can't claim to have removed lojac, I don't think you've ever
neutralized the tank circuit of a DX-100 transmitter.

You'd be wrong, again. It's a heathkit. i've done ALL KINDS of
things to heathkits. Both of my granddads were into ham.

http://www.heathkit-museum.com/ham/hvmdx-100.shtml

I still think it's a pile of **** rig, for what it's worth.

I'd take a galaxy saturn with mods over that pile of ****, any day
of the week. you do know what galaxy radios are right?

Your argument only proves people have different skills

On that I do agree. Most importantly though, it's not wise for
either of us to make assumptions about what the other knows or
doesn't. You know very little about me, and I only know a little
about you, based on our interactions and what BD lied to me about
concerning your skillset with regard to IT. You aren't what he
claimed you were. He's been trying for years now to find someone on
my level to help him pay me back for a very specific response to his
own I did:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boaterdave...nt&t=h_&ia=web

or

https://www.google.com/#q=boaterdave+hhi+torrent

Yea, he was dox'd, and how.

Why did I do that to him? It's simple. He took what he thought was a
valid meatspace address on me and converted it to a gsv. He then
took this and posted it as a new post, into several different
newsgroups asking if it was my house. It wasn't, but, that wasn't
the point. He tried! to dox me, without any provocation by me. I
simply refused to help him gain unauthorized access to a couple of
web forums he'd been banned from.

He's had a hardon for me, ever since. He even recruited the lead
Malwarebytes researcher to help him break into an encrypted .zip
file I stored on my BugHunter site. Not only did they fail,
miserably I might add, they exposed their incompetence in the
process by claiming it wasn't a .zip file, because none of the
archiving tools they tested it against recognized it as a.zip file
in the first place. Of course not, it was encrypted! The required
header information wasn't available to the utilities. That's what
you get for asking someone who knows nothing about executable code
or binary file structures for that matter to assist. Considering
that I'm also a former employee of same company from the same
****ing department, he had no right to even do that, nor do I feel
they had the right to try to help him. He didn't know at the time
(he does now, though, oh yes he does) that her claim to fame in the
antimalware industry is that of a script kiddie, NOT a coder, like
myself. His dumbass thought her title meant she knew more than I did.
I still enjoy reminding him how wrong he was. BFG

He's had the same .zip file for over a year now, and, nobody he's
been able to sucker into helping him has been able to unlock it. Not
a single person. and, here's the funniest part to it all, the
algorithm was originally written by me on a coco3; my first
'computer' and has since been ported to the PC, years ago. It's not
PGP, mind you, but it's not script kiddie grade crypto, either.
ROFL.

Threw my TV out 25 years ago. I don't have anything to do with
that ****

It was a lucrative source of income for me for several years. Free
PPV was worth monies at one point especially with all the sports
channels included. Mostly football fans, but, I digress. Good monies
I made doing it.

I don't know what horse **** BD has told you about me, but, if it's
what he told me about you, it's horse ****, straight up, horse ****.
We aren't peers, bro, not even close. We have some things in common,
but, we're not even in the same ballpark.

You might like to know how I encountered what you call your friend..
if you do, this will explain it all:

http://bughunter.it-mate.co.uk/bdemail1.zip

He tried (and failed) to trick me into doing some shady **** to
people I didn't know that he has a personal issue with. Because I
refused to do that, he tried to dox me, and, we've been less than
what you might say, friends, ever since then.

In other words, he tried to use you to deal with me, because, he's
unable to do so on his own. He seriously misrepresented you to me.

I'm obviously not as old as you are...However, age doesn't really
mean that much when discussing experience and acquired hands on
knowledge, either. Not in this case, anyhow.



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.