Standard Mischief

Once we get the bonfire going pretty good, I’ve been a participant in a strange ritual where we toss empty spray cans into an outdoor fire, then duck behind a woodpile until the aerosol can cooks off. Fun but silly.

I’ve never even thought to cook off live ammo, but now I know what it should look like thanks to this You-Tube video. A 7mm Remington Magnum is on the higher end of the scale, as cartridges go, and it makes a pretty satisfying bang. Please note that all the safety warnings on this video are at the end. The creator took pains to make sure that no one else was around and he also shielded himself with a tree.

Below the video on the You-Tube page, in the comments, you’ll see a few alarmist a-holes whine about safety. Typical. I think things were presented here in a safe, sane manner, but there will always be a few killjoys out there. Maybe they would feel better if it was subtitled “Trained Professional — Do not Attempt!”?

Let’s just hope he sifted those ashes and packed out that trash in the end.

Just in case you are easily amused, here’s the latest roundup of bandwidth theives.

The standard mischief in this case is to swap the picture on your server, renaming the original and changing your links to point to the new picture’s name. Rob does a pretty good demo of the prank. One of the finer points about the trick is to change the date of the file that you are going to substitute to something that?s earlier than the original picture. That way the original thief keeps reloading the original picture from his cache, instead of your substitute. This keeps the prank a secret from the thief for longer, but new site visitors get the prank image. Unfortunately I wasted an enormous amount of time last night trying to do just that. On my end, changing the date is pretty straightforward, but even when I had the settings correct on my FTP program, my hosting provider changes the date upon upload.

If you want to do this automatically, there’s always the .htaccess trick.

Anyway, here are the examples. At least one of these ought to still be working, but as of today, all of them do. (They should all be pretty much safe for work. My standard substitute image is text only, with one cuss word.)

http://www.friendster.com/15332091

http://www.spritz.it/blog/

http://ar15.com/forums/

http://artinheart.org/

myspace.com

militaryphotos.net

Yup, seems Chris Soghoian has made something that lets anyone generate a fake boarding pass, a pass that should allow you access through the secure area and right up to the gate. (Update: looks like Chris has a blog too)

It’s not really a feat of HTML wizardry by itself, but the idea is brilliant.

It’s useful for:

1. To meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
2. To ‘upgrade’ yourself once on the airplane - by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you’re already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
3. Just to demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

I, of course, love it. There’s also some tips to circumvent teh “No Fly” list, (although I can’t personally vouch for them). This might be useful because an innocent party who has their name on the ?No Fly? list usually enjoy a steady diet of extra scrutiny. There seems to be no way to appeal the fact that you are on said list, and I understand the very best you can do is apply and get a TSA “I’m not a terrorist” super secret ID card. However, it seems that even with that ID card, you can’t check-in online or by using a kiosk, you still need to check in in person. (Thanks for the tip, Paul)

Update: I took a second look at the boarding pass code and found that the barcode is a static picture, and is not generated on the fly. So this likely won’t pass a barcode scanner test. Just FYI. Chris says the TSA check is just to see that whatever you printed out matches what your government issued ID says, and they don’t do a barcode check at that spot.

Update 2: Slate, from last year.

Finally, I’d like to point you to Scott Adam’s Blog, where he discusses a recent trip through security.

[Boarding pass tip via Feministe.us]

A few days ago I complained about YouTube’s lack of a volume control cookie. I was wrong, they do have a cookie, but it’s a Flash Cookie, more properly called a Flash Shared Object.

To be able to store the data on your PC, the preferences need to be set properly. I already knew about the existence of flash cookies, but being a “knee jerk” privacy advocate, I long ago set my preferences such that no site was allowed to save anything permanently on my hard drive. There’s a lot of potential for abuse here, because websites can store anything here at all, and retrieve it between sessions. This has the same security implications as normal cookies, except they stay persistent even if you, as I recommend, “upchuck” your cookies after each session. I totally forgot about Flash Shared Object a few days ago, I just knew the volume defaulted to full on.

So here’s how to set preferences for flash items. You need to go to the site and then right-click on any flash panel. When you do that, the gray menu thingy will appear:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

At this point you want to chose Settings, and then poke around a bit. It’s not too hard.

I let YouTube have 10 KB, but they are currently using less than 1 KB. Here’s the hexdump of the cookie they have stored on my PC (Note: hex codes I do not understand have been changed to protect the paranoid):

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 51 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Q……|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 00 00 |…mute…|


Note, shown above is the volume level I prefer

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 59 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Y……|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 00 00 |…mute…|


Above is the volume at eleven

standardmischief$ hd /home/SM/.macromedia/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects/-snoopy-number?-/youtube.com/soundData.sol

00 bf 00 00 00 31 31 7e 53 4d 00 04 00 00 00 00 |.?...11~SM......|
00 09 73 6f 75 6e 64 44 61 74 61 00 00 00 00 00 |..soundData.....|
06 76 6f 6c 75 6d 65 00 40 59 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.volume.@Y......|
00 00 04 6d 75 74 65 01 01 00 |…mute…|


And above is the volume still at eleven, but I have the mute button pressed.

The other interesting tidbit came from an unlikely source. There’s this virtual place called Habbo Hotel that seems to be pretty popular with young teens (and the adults that seek to talk to them.) It?s like a chat room with movable avatars.

There’s a number of people who are amazed that kiddies would want to play in a virtual world and swim in a virtual pool, and instead of live and let live, they have decided to pull pranks. Oddly enough, these peoples who hate other people in a virtual world seem to hang out at places like el-jay. Here’s an Encyclopedia Dramatiuca article on the whole deal.

Getting a whole bunch of avatars with afros to block the pool (because it has aids) or stand around, forming a swastika would be non sequitur, except people end up getting banned, and to circumvent the ban, they uninstall flash and then reinstall it again.

So my question, (and my bleg), is this. Does Macromedia Flash have a unique serial number for each install, or is the delete and reload just a crude way to delete a flash cookie? Anyone know? I’d be happy to link to your webpage or blog post. (Update: if I dare use Encyclopedia Dramatica as a source, they appear to just be deleting a flash cookie.)

Further reading: Here’s a post on Digg.com about flash cookies and some info over at Adobe’s Flash Player website privacy settings panel.

Related Tags: YouTube, flash cookie, Flash Shared Object, Macromedia Flash, Habbo, Habbo Hotel, pool is closed, Nigra, POOL’S CLOSED, Pool is closed due to AIDS, SwastaGET

OK, so here you go:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

So here’s what I did. I took a standard dollar bill that I legally possessed and did some stuff to it. I took a Sharpie? marker and XX-ed out “federal reserve”, and wrote in “NOT FEDERAL NO RESERVES”. Then I added “WORTH ABOUT 18?” and “IN 1968 MONEY” (that year being the year we went off the gold standard.)

Although I don’t intend to confuse anyone in to thinking this is a virgin dollar bill, I failed to remove or obfuscate ?The United States of America?, I hope that’s not a problem. I think I’ve really added something here, and I’m thinking of selling this piece on Ebay for say $1.50 or so.

I also want to let everyone know that I find Sharpie? markers useful for all kinds of stuff, including enhancing the playback quality of purchased prerecorded music.

I also want to make it clear that I, in no way, shape or form, want to cause any harm to the MD-34 bridge over the Potomac (that being the last piece of infrastructure I think I took a photo of.)

So what do you think? Is this art, or is this terrorism? Or do only the Attorney Jackasses get to decide that?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should probably read this over at SayUncle’s and this here in my own blog.

(Whew, three posts for this day! I’m gonna take the rest of the week off)