so, about last night… – my hal 9000 apple experience
i’ve been experiencing intermittent issues with my iphone 4 home button not responding as crisply as it should for some time now. ahighly-documenteddesign flaw exists where the baseplate under the home button eventually flexes and causes contacts to touch and circuits to do shit they shouldn’t be doing. up until yesterday, it had manifested itself as nothing more than a minor inconvenience, forcing me to press the home button more than necessary for the desired effect.
real quick, i want you to think about the sheer number of people in your phone. think about how many coworkers, colleagues, friends, schoolmates, relatives, drunken buddies, ex-girlfriends, server companies, roller rinks, and pizza places you have shoved in that little device. think about how many people that you have stored in your phone with the express purpose of recognizing their number so you can ignore them when they call. think about how long you’ve had some of these numbers. think about how many people in your phone may not even have the same number since you saved it. think about the world.
the iphone 3gs and iphone 4 have a wonderful feature called “voice control,” replaced by the omnipotent siri in the iphone 4s. it looks like this:
to activate the voice control application, you simply depress the home button for a number of seconds, the phone beeps twice, and you tell the phone what you want to do – “play playlist led zeppelin”, “call dad”, etc.
last night, i was on my way to bed when my home button completely shit out on me. well, mostly shit out on me.
see, while i was sleeping, happily dreaming away the evening and morning with my iphone within forearm’s reach, the malfunctioning home button caused my iphone to randomly enter voice control mode, and my obnoxious, apnea-ridden snoring was detected as “call [executive at nbc]“, “call [random friend from third grade]“, “call [del the funkee homosapien's manager]“, “call [guy i got drunk with at a show in 2008]“, “call [girl i fucking hate]“, etc. this went on for a span of about six hours on a school night.
due to the nature of snoring and the rudimentary interpretation of speech by the iphone4, some people sadly got REPEATEDLY wardialed, only to either hear firsthand or receive a voicemail of a very tired ytcracker on the other end sawing logs. i discovered the problem upon waking up and seeing the cornucopia of missed calls from people i hadn’t talked to in years, only to view the call log and find out that I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS.
in short, if you have a voicemail or wonderful memory of me snoring, please share it with everyone and further my embarrassment. thank you.
does google auto-correct go too far?
like most humans, when i am bored, i tend to do stupid things for no reason on the internet.
i was watching a video on yahoo about a black hole devouring a star that some smart people got to see through a telescope.
i unilaterally decided the term “black hole” was decidedly unpolitically correct so i googled “african american hole” to see what would come up:
surprisingly, no pornographic images at first glance, but it did auto correct/substitute “african american” with “black”.
tl;dr i am suing google for being racist even though i am the sick bastard who searched this.
p.s. yes, it is funny that neil tyson comes up during this search. here is a bonus picture of him yoked the fuck out in college:
nerd life.
the story behind the music video for “the link”
i forgot if i ever explained the meaning behind the music video for last year’s space mission song titled “the link,” so i will attempt to break it down for thee right now.
this is the video, or you may click here to view it in a new window:
i began pondering the concept of this video while i was very scientific with my buddy lieutenant wombat at his apartment. i gave a brain dump of my ideas in a decidedly disheveled and cryptic email to doctor octoroc, who executed the animation all by himself based on my shitty design document. the resulting piece of art blew my mind.
i wanted an alien civilization that somehow received my music through a giant antenna and basically lived their entire lives as if my music was the gospel of their people. to honor me, the aliens all wear white hats and engage in various activities that i have rapped about in the past. the video begins in a speaker, thumping to ye olde bass drum by my partner in crime, dicepticon (the other half of wisely syndicate and frequent collaborator). as the music plays, the sound waves travel out of the solar system and to my adoring fans a billion galaxies away.
the underpinning theme of the video is that nerd life is a productive, amazing, and totally righteous way to exist. a pastiche of images illustrating these aliens doing digital gangster ass shit coupled with the visage of my attractive 8-bit face rapping on every big screen in every building follows the lyrical content of the song. you see aliens playing video games, going to holographic ytcracker concerts, recording songs, djing, spamming, flying spaceships, etc. they are all having an amazing time.
during the first hook, an oil leak occurs off of the coast, ruining the ocean and killing the sea life. this is in reference to the bp disaster that took place last year. instead of being tied up in bureaucratic red tape and bullshit (like it was here in the US), a council of alien scientists convene and discuss how to address the problem. after a brief deliberation, the scientists decide to throw bales of marijuana into the oil-infested waters to soak up the rude crude. crisis averted.
the cinematics during the second hook reference the eyjafjallajökull (ay-ya-fyalla-yokel, lol mouthful) volcano in iceland last year that grounded flights in europe. three well-known nintendo heroes (link, mario, and megaman) come to visit me as if i were the wizard of oz. after i entrust the group with godly elemental powers (in the form of colored and inscribed coins, no less), the brave warriors ascend to the top of an erupting volcano. the nerd life heroes unify their abilities and work together to extinguish the flame, completing their quest and gaining x levels.
at this point, the video rapidly zooms out, replaying the sequence of events in reverse. PLEASE NOTE: this is before the movie inception came out. i will be suing christopher nolan in the near future for his transgressions because i am the one who invented things in things in things in things. the final planetary shot is of a couple bosses sitting in the antenna/broadcast/receiver building control room, monitoring the entire population of the planet. from here, the music video zooms out into a macro view of various galaxies, showing other civilizations receiving and relaying the nerd life broadcast to the end music of the game “kung-fu.”
finally, the screen slowly fades into the speaker from whence our journey started, because the universe is in a speaker. deep, man – real deep.
“a fucking egotistical video, this is.” – yoda
musings from the sky on my way home from animinneapolis
first off, allow me to show you a little doctored image of a g0g0inflight chat using a trick i learned from the whodi hairetsu.
yes, most of the actual hack is obviously redacted but with any associates level social engineering degree from the university of digital gangster, you should be able to decipher all necessary elements (and maybe a few of your own) to exploit free internets IN THE SKY.
(google is probably going to index this page about how to hax g0g0 so i’m typing dumb)
anyway, i went to the HOSPITAL on the night of my supposed appearance and for the FIRST time in my life i cancelled a show. you have NO IDEA how terrible i feel. i’ve been on the verge of tears the past two days and seriously if people do not forgive me for this, i do not blame them. thankfully, the only real red flag is high white blood cell count, which could mean any number of things, some of which are cancer. mostly though, not cancer.
heart and lungs are in EXCELLENT shape. brain is another organ. we can talk about him later.
i’ve been having a conversation with the lady next to me without even talking to her. it has just been in my head and i am answering her questions and i hear her talk back in a voice i think she sounds like, but she is sleeping right now. she’s probably in her mid-40s, early 50s.
so in my fake conversation with her, i said “hey, out of curiousity, how long have you been flying?” and she replied “oh, quite a while, since the early 80s.” i asked her if she remembered when you could actually smoke on airplanes (i barely even remember, the ban went into effect in 1987, i think) and she said yes.
then i directed her attention up to the area with the oxygen mask and the lights and fans and shit. there’s a seatbelt light that goes on and off depending on what’s going on (ps turbulence is fucking NUTS RIGHT NOW HOLY SHIT) but yea there is this no cigarette light right in our faces and it is everywhere all around the plane in front of everyone’s faces on the bathroom door on the walls on the fucking everywhere.
ok now i’m going to let this broad go to sleep without me using psychic energy vampyrism even though i never even talked to her in the first place. i just used my imagination. i have a good imagination for a 28-year old.
——
i forget which airlines i have recently been on where they have swapped out the ‘no smoking sign” with a “keep your electronic devices off” sign. that is fucking brilliant, regardless of the fact that it would require at least fourjilliontrillionthousandhundredtwoswag (or thereabouts) electronic interference to bring down a plane. that light fucking does something. it serves a purpose. since 1987 all this motherfucking NO SMOKING SIGN does everywhere i look is make me jones for a motherfucking cigarette. it does nothing beyond that. it has been over 20 years now, you can remove it.
so fuck you.
anyway, turbulence is really bad – hopefully we land well. TOODLES – remember the alamo!
some #antisec tl;dr thoughts
i wrote this while i was bored at the airport yesterday morning.
just throwing my two cents into the #antisec youtube video debate and gibsons in general. sadly, i do not have wordpress comments enabled, but you can always weigh in on my facebook comments or on twitter or take out an ad on a billboard.
let me preface this entire entry by saying that i have been fucking owned COUNTLESS times. i have had everything under the sun happen to me – credit cards stolen, utilities shut off, boxes of unsavory sex toys carded to my house, you name it. i have been both the natural target of l33t hacker war as well as merely collateral damage. most recently, in march (during sxsw), my friends at kryogeniks (i really mean this, it was more of a prank than anything, DFNCTSC) socialed at&t into disabling my SIM card. they put new equipment on it and texted my registrar password to my number and stole my domains temporarily. the rest is history.
personally, the most common misconception i find people have about what constitutes hacking by the general public is they feel it requires some exceptional and unique technical prowess. in reality, hacking is all about PEOPLE. every system designed thus far, hardware or software, was created by human hands. if history has taught us anything significant, it is that the human race sucks at doing anything right in the long run.
i would say 85% of what actually constitutes hacking is the exploitation of human emotion, stupidity, laziness, or ignorance. the technical ability that comes with your run-of-the-mill script kid can easily be taught, and the higher echelon of the security community that actually provides advisories and PoC enables that culture to flourish.
(you could argue that hacking is 100% people if you assume the position that an exploitable hole was technically left by human error and therefore human incompetence, but i digress. penis.)
for instance, to analogize from a game programmers’ standpoint, building a gaming graphics engine like crysis or unreal or doom ][ requires extensive knowledge of things that aren’t just a programming language, like vector mathematics and physics modeling. code efficiency and optimization is incredibly important. having awesome glasses is incredibly important. being mentally ill is incredibly important. there may be many people that can “program computers,” but there are only a relative handful that have the scientific background to crank out brilliancies with any regularity. for the rest, they are forced to stand on the shoulders of giants and license game engines to make their own dreams come true.
what lulzsec is doing might seem like complete anarchy to you, and i see people complaining about how “innocent people” are being affected by these leaks, but the truth is, these people that are getting their facebooks hacked into are not getting their passwords stolen from facebook, they’re using THE SAME PASSWORD across multiple sites. when people are getting their facebooks and paypals and what not logged into using the credentials in the released databases, it is proof positive that these “innocent people” are not following best practices.
is it morally correct? probably not. is it effective? i would hope so. an informed public is a stronger public, and with every time that **i** got owned or ran the wrong exe outside of my VM or someone socialed me, i learned from it. no one is above getting owned – the shit happens to EVERYONE in the game one way or another. no shame in it either – think of it like the show jackass where you really are around more people that want to hug you than hurt you, but it is funny when you get hurt.
no, the government probably won’t pass more laws as a result of this. no one here is trying to bankrupt companies and shoot for world domination. yes, companies are embarrassed. hopefully they learn and grow. yes, people are embarrassed. hopefully, THEY learn and grow. there ARE people trying to take over the world, but they aren’t putting it all out on front street. there are chinese and russian state-sponsored hackers 90 billion times more leet than anything we have over here in the states, and frankly. until we get an informed public through whatever means (even tough love) those guys will outgun us at every opportunity.
what a bunch of rambling bullshit – fuck you ytcracker.
quantum computing and why the internet will soon suck
ladies and gentlemen, if i may, i would like to introduce you to the whodi peter shor:
i know what you’re thinking – he looks EXACTLY like nerd life’s answer to the question “what is nerd life for $2000, alex?” you’re right.
peter is a boss in the quantum computing field. he is known for his candy-painted low riders on swangas, his comprehensive 8-track collection, and shor’s algorithm, which essentially brings integer factorization and computation of discrete logarithms well within the reach of mortal lifetimes.
a couple of somethings ago, i tweeted a link about rsa’s securid getting ravaged and i compared it to the magic device hidden in the answering machine that could decrypt EVERYTHING AWESOME in the 1992 movie sneakers. i was taking a bit of creative license there, and i meant to correct myself with a more thorough post later. well, now is later, so yeah.
before i go any further, i want to point out that the same writers who wrote wargames also wrote sneakers. i actually own both dvds. they did not write the movie hackers (i wrote that movie).
the internet and technology grows really fast. as anyone who spams on multiple c-classes knows, we are currently seeing usable IPv4 space dwindle away. IPv4 was invented during internet v0.7, and it has taken us this long to pull our heads out of our asses and start playing with IPv6 like real gentlemen. for those of you old enough to remember the Y2K bug, this was also a limitation in old hardware and software programs that made centenarians zero years old. it was like being born on a leap year or something.
radical quantum computing is most likely already in the capable hands of the NSA. those alphabet soup guys in and around the eastern seaboard are probably already mining the shit out of bitcoins with their quantum rigs, buying up all of the LSD on the lol deep web and feeding it to their engineers, but that should be the least of your worries.
solving the science of effective integer factorization renders a lot of the encryption standards virtually useless. simply put, SSL (the technology all of your non-techie friends rave about on facebook, making their facebook accounts “unhackable” via https) is based off of the RSA algorithm. banks use it, amazon uses it, your p. nis uses it, the internet uses it. in simple terms, it works as follows:
Generate two large prime numbers, p and q
Let n = pq
Let m = (p-1)(q-1)
Choose a small number e, coprime to m
Find d, such that de % m = 1
Publish e and n as the public key.
Keep d and n as the secret key.
checking the primality of a few big ass numbers is easy in polynomial time. doing math is easy in polynomial time. downloading porn is easy in polynomial time. conventional computing makes backing those initial values out via factorization from nothing but a key very difficult. however, properly harnessed quantum computing makes that process easy, like those other things i just typed up there.
post-quantum cryptography is a current field of research, but who knows how quickly internet standards will catch up, because humans are fucking dumb. this is why i don’t bother to encrypt anything. my password is sex.
jace hall f. ytcracker – lol money (youtube version)
anyway, click here to mark ye attendance for this wonderful one-off show in san diego next week filled with sexy, wonderful people.
i’ve been jocking this guy andysill on soundcloud and so has everyone else of moderate to heavy importance. anyone who can make lamb of god sound harder than they are has an obvious gift that we must respect as spacemen and aliens. here are a couple tracks:
i feel like kind of a traitor because i disabled comments on my blog because there was so much spam. you know i love spam, but this was a LOT of spam. that guy in se7en who ate himself to death would only have to sit here for 6 or 7 microseconds before he would have enough spam to asplode himself. if you want to holler about some dumb shit i post here, fb or twitter or email or etc. are obvious options.
love you!
“john f. kennedy was killed for his synth patches.” – brett wisely
imagine, if you will, a world – a world where every amazing musician has actually been preselected through some feat of amazing genetic engineering developed during world war ii.
rick rubin provides all of them with the ultimate software and VST plugin pack and tells everyone that, **IF UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE** they talk to the media about what VSTs they use, just say they use “massive and protools.”
a nation of people has grown up with the belief that they, too, can be amazing, but really everyone who is amazing was already given this VST pack at birth and it is uncrackable and there are no keygens for it and you can’t find it on rapidshit or taurentz.
p.s. i “lost” my copy. please seed rickrubin.dmg.rar if you happen to have it. thanks in advance!
N.E.S
Nerd Life
Serious Business
The Digital Gangster LP, with MC LARS
Chrono Nurga
Space Mission
