Routers play a crucial role in the internet.  They allow for transmission of emails, songs, web pages and  everything else available on the internet.  One thing routers use to decide what goes where is a configuration table.  It uses a process similar to cleaning a house – different things go different places and things have priority over others when you’re putting them away.  You also have to make sure that what you’re putting away doesn’t go to the wrong place and you make sure that whatever you’re putting away makes it to wherever you want to put it.  This is like a router handling a piece of information.  It looks at it, decides where it should go and makes sure it gets there.

Questions or comments?  Feel free to leave them.

LEARN MORE

How Routers Work – HowStuffWorks.com

Router – Wikipedia

Let’s say you have a full-size grand piano that you want to send through the mail.  It’s too big to send in one box so you have to split it up into a bunch of little boxes or “packets.”  These packets have all different parts of the piano stored inside them.  The mail service you are using also requires that you not send more than four pieces of the piano per day.  However, if you send it to the wrong receiver through the wrong postal service, they will reject the pieces of the piano.

Replace the grand piano with something huge (movie, video game, etc.), the postal service for the internet and the different packages for these things called packets.  Packets are little parcels of the big thing you’re receiving.  If you send whatever you’re sending to the wrong computer, the computer you’re trying to send it to will probably reject it.

There’s also internet monitoring devices called in-line devices.  Now say you’re internet connection is a string.  The in-line device is like a knot in the string – everything still passes through and people don’t know it’s there, but it has the ability to open the packets up and see what’s inside before it sends them on.

As always, comment with questions.  If you would like to get to me more quickly, go to http://coyotetechy.blogspot.com and use the Meebo chatroom, the MeeboMe widget or the Google Voice widget to contact me.

Matt

LEARN MORE

Pianos – Wikipedia
Packets – Wikipedia
In-line Devices – SecurityFocus

matt

Applications on your computer such as Internet Explorer start using ports through a thing called a binding.  To expand on the analogy, you are the owner of the wall of holes.  You have many golfers such as Internet Explorer sending balls through your wall, but only one person can send a ball through one hole at one time.  If more than one person tries to send a ball through one hole at the same time, the balls will collide and neither will get through.  This is what happens when you have two applications trying to get through the same port at the same time.

Since you own the wall, you can also choose when to close holes and which ones to close.  You can also choose which holes are open only to the golfers on your side, which ones are closed only to the golfers on your side, which ones are open only to the other side, which ones are closed only to the other side and which ones are open for balls to fly both ways.  If you leave one of these holes open from the other side to your side, you are more vulnerable to attack by hackers who shoot balls through the wall and try to make them look like legit balls.

Now imagine when a ball comes in it hits one of the shooters on your side of the wall.  The shooter is going to be curious and look at what hit him/her.  This is what happens when one of the applications on your computer receives data.  If a long string of large balls comes in and continually hits one shooter, the shooter faints.  Depending on how long the person(s) on the other side of the wall want the one shooter to be knocked out, they will hit the shooter many times from many different locations.  If there is only one shooter on the other side of the wall aiming at the shooter on your side, the attack he is performing is called a denial of service attack.  If there are many shooters on the other side of the wall aiming at your shooter, the attack they are performing is called a distributed denial of service attack.

The processes described above are happening an infinite number of times every day all over the network known as the Internet.  Hope this helps describe a little bit about how people communicate on the internet.

matt

LEARN MORE

Golf – Wikipedia
TCP and UDP Ports – Wikipedia

The U.S. government used to hide data; some things only available through the Freedom of Information Act, the rest buried in one of the government’s ~24,000 websites. Fortunately for us, it won’t be that way anymore. The goal of Data.gov is to organize the government’s information into a massive catalog. For example, the Library of Congress holds roughly 300 terabytes of information. This is only a piece of what Data.gov has to grapple with and organize. The other big goal of Data.gov is to provide the data in a “mashable” format meaning raw data that’s easy to work with and manipulate. Kundra is doing this because he knows that the public can do very different things with the data than the Feds can. This is only the first version of the site and they are only organizing the executive’s data, which is still a large task. I recommend checking this website out. The link can be found below.

LEARN MORE

Data.gov

About Data.gov

White House Open Government Initiative

Open Government Initiative Blog

“And Data for All” – Wired.com (PDF)

matt
[Edited by Erty on 2009-11-14 05:41:00]

1. Facebook currently has so many users that they have essentially created another internet of information on Facebook’s roughly 40,000 servers.  They want to keep growing.

2. Facebook envisions a future where Google’s algorithms won’t dictate what you get when you search.  Instead, you’ll be searching the information on your friend’s Facebook pages for what you want to know.

3. Facebook has two new initiatives – Facebook Connect and Open Stream.  They plan to use these to colonize other websites along with the thousands of applications.

4. Facebook’s last step is selling targeted ads to users based on what their profile information is.  This is the gold mine for online advertising that Facebook plans to open up.

The top thing Facebook is doing right now is creating a giant blind spot for Google since 99% of it’s information is stored on servers that it keeps shielded from Google.  The other thing it’s doing is driving a large amount of traffic to outside websites because users put links to these websites up on Facebook.

However, the naysayers of Facebook have to remember a company that started up not too long ago with the goal of organizing the world’s information.  People only really realized what Google was up to when it had made itself integral in the lives of the majority of the people.

LEARN MORE

The Great Wall of Facebook – Wired.com

matt

If you’re interested in becoming a zomtech, you can use that form (or leave a comment on this post), and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

–Erty, Matt, and Brendan

For starters, SSH is a network protocol that allows for the secure exchange of data between the client and the server, normally on port 22.  SSH is usually used to run commands on a remote machine but you can also use it to encrypt and tunnel internet traffic out to an SSH server.  The client side is done with a program in the PuTTY suite called Plink.  Plink is a command line SSH client that you can use to tunnel your traffic.  When you’re starting Plink, the options you want to select are “-N” for so you won’t start a command session and “-D” to specify a tunneling session and what port you want to tunnel through.  None of the other options apply here.  When Plink is connected to the server, it acts as a local SOCKS5 proxy on the port you specified after “-D”.  The SOCKS protocol provides communication between a client and a server.  Now, normally HTTP goes out on port 80, but Plink creates a local SOCKS5 proxy that you can loop back to on whatever port you specified, encrypt it and send it to the server that decrypts it, treats it as normal internet traffic, encrypts the results it gets and sends it back to you.  The diagram at http://www.applematters.com/assets/images/uploads/ssh-tunnel.jpg shows how this works.

DIRECTIONS

Before you do anything, make sure you have an SSH server you can do this with.  *nix should have a server built into it.  If you are running on Windows, I recommend using software called FreeSSHd.  I believe it’s the best free SSH solution for Windows especially because it allows you to use your Windows user account to connect.  If you want to go this route, I recommend using one with Administrator privileges.  If you don’t know what that means, the account you set your computer up with should be good.  If you don’t want to use your Windows account to log in, FreeSSHd has an option for storing your password as a SHA1 hash or using key authentication.  I recommend using key authentication even though it’s extremely difficult to set up the server side.  More on setting up FreeSSHd later.

Make sure you know the user name and password of the account you are going to use on the domain (ex. omnomzom.com) or IP (ex 216.17.139.40) you are going to use.

Now to use Plink.  Plink is available on the PuTTY download page, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.  Save it somewhere easy to remember.

Open a command prompt.  Use the “cd” (change directory) command to go back to the directory you stored Plink in.

Type the following “plink -N -D [port] [user]@[server]“.  Make sure you replace [port] with the port number the server’s SSH server is configured on, [user] with the user name you want to use and [server] with the domain or IP address you want to tunnel through.  If you are setting up a FreeSSHd server and don’t know your IP address, you can find it out at http://www.ipchicken.com.  If you need to know how to port forward, http://www.portforward.com can give you a very good step-by-step tutorial on what it means to forward a port and how to do it.

Again, make sure you know the user name and password for the account you want to access on the domain or IP you want to tunnel through.  When you have everything above entered in a command prompt window without the quotes or brackets, press enter and it should ask you for a password.  Enter the password, press enter and if it sits there for a few seconds without telling you that you typed something in wrong, you’re golden.  Now you just have to configure your web browser to use the proxy you just set up.  In Internet Explorer, you can configure it from the the advanced proxy settings in LAN settings under the connections tab.  In Firefox, to go the network tab in advanced options and set up the proxy settings.  It’s a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost running on whichever port you specified after the “-D” option in Plink.  If you want to test it, go to http://www.ipchicken.com without the proxy, apply the settings and refresh the page.  Your IP address should change.

If I missed something, could explain something better or got something wrong, please let me know.

LEARN MORE

SOCKS5 Protocol – Wikipedia

SSH Protocol – Wikipedia

HTTP – Wikipedia

Encryption – Wikipedia

[EDIT: The facebook dislike button application turns your language to Italian! Watch out!]

Anyway, I thought I might poke around into these groups and see if I could actually get this thing to reveal whatever secret it held. My results:

Here is what the facebook pages often say to do:

NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT DO EACH STEP CORRECTLY, THIS WILL NOT WORK.
Step 1: Follow dislike button on twitter (it won’t work without it) http://twitter.com/guinnessrecord
Step 2: Click invite people to join!
Step 3: While you have the invitation page up, copy and Paste this script into your address bar EXACTLY AS IT IS and hit enter:

javascript:var numfriends=document.getElementById(’friends’).getElementsByTagName(’li’).length;
fs.click(document.getElementById(’friends’).getElementsByTagName(’a')[1].parentNode);
for(var i=0; i < numfriends; i++){
fs.click(document.getElementById(’friends’).getElementsByTagName(’a')[i].parentNode);
}

Step 4: Confirm invitations sent.
Step 5: To finally get the dislike button you must then click here- http://tinyurl.com/fbdislikebutton If that link doesn’t work, make sure you thoroughly completed steps 1-4-5.
HINT: If it didn’t work. You didn’t do it right; repeat steps 1-4.

Step by step now:

Step One: “Follow dislike button on twitter (it won’t work without it) http://twitter.com/guinnessrecord”

There is no way that this will do anything to Facebook. Notice that their twitter username is “guinnessrecord”. I suspect that they’re just trying to gain a bunch of people to get “most twitter members” or something like that.

Step Two: “Click invite people to join!”

Inviting people to join the group is a great way to get the group more members, but not much else.

Step Three: “While you have the invitation page up, copy and Paste this script into your address bar EXACTLY AS IT IS and hit enter:” and then some JS code

This javascript does not add a dislike button. If you read through it, what it does is select everyone in that invite box (the one that you just opened). This means that your invite will be sent to everyone in your invite list. The code does not do anything else. It’s just an easy way for them to get more followers while having people who can’t read code be fooled into thinking that the code is adding the button.

Step Four: Confirm invitations sent

A.K.A. Make sure you’ve spammed all your friends

Step Five: To finally get the dislike button you must then click here- http://tinyurl.com/fbdislikebutton If that link doesn’t work, make sure you thoroughly completed steps 1-4-5.

That tinurl leads you back to the facebook homepage. Nothing else.

Final Word:

Don’t believe this hoax – quit the group, tell your friends in a non-invasive manner. This kind of thing is a great information harvesting project, and one of the most successful so far. If you follow through, they have your twitter username. If they tell you to add an app, then they have your facebook username too (and they’re allowed to read all of your info and post on your wall). Then they have you tell your friends about it before you see the product.

I don’t blame anyone if they fell for this – it’s a clever hoax and a smart bit of code. If you can’t live without a dislike button, there’s a firefox plugin available that does this in a secure way.

–Erty Seidel