Archive for the ‘hacks’ Category

Sony is suing George Hotz for hacking HIS OWN PS3

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Just in case you didn’t know already, Sony is suing George Hotz, also known as “geohot“, a talented young guy who among other things helped unlock the iPhone. Sony sued him for violation of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because he hacked HIS OWN PlayStation 3. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise however, as Sony once tried to sue a guy for getting his AIBO to do non-Sony approved tricks.

George even has a page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

I’m tempted to get a PlayStation 3 and hack it just to make a statement. Sony, this is not how you should treat customers. I was considering buying a Vaio because they’re some of the best laptops I’ve seen but I definitely changed my plans!

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Defeating paranoid system administrators

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

If a paranoid system administrator has blocked ssh access from Linux hosts to your office’s network — using the OpenBSD packet filter‘s fingerprinting — and you find yourself without access to the office’s mail server, you might want to make your Linux workstation’s TCP stack look like something else by changing the TTL, for example:

echo 128 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl

The road to this hack is quite easy, anyway:

  1. install OpenBSD in a virtual machine;
  2. look hard at /etc/pf.os and look for possible useful differences;
  3. see that Linux uses a TTL of 64 while Windows XP uses 128;
  4. profit!

Item 1 was needed because I couldn’t find a copy of /etc/pf.os quickly, so I figured that it’d take less to just install an OpenBSD.

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Here comes the Sun

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Yesterday I recovered two nice Sun Ultra 30 workstations (and one big Sun monitor) that were about to be thrown away at my office. They’re in quite good condition, apart from lots of dust and a cut keyboard cable. Apparently some smart guy thought that the quickest way to detach the keyboard was to cut the cable. In case you didn’t know, Sun keyboards have a small connector not unlike a standard PC keyboard or mouse, so just unplugging it certainly takes less effort than finding a cable cutter and applying the necessary force.

Of course I plan to install Debian GNU/Linux on at least one of them. In fact, I think I’ll put all the memory and both hard drives into one workstation and keep the other for parts.

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