High School Of the Dead… So far… 3 or 4 episodes

The manga turned anime titled “High School of The Dead” is probably one of my must watch on the list.

Background info: This series is about a world having everyone infected with some kind of disease and when they die, their bodies get re-animated. Okay, fair game. Sounds just like your average zombie flick or another Resident Evil movie… Just your generic zombie apocalypse, this time in animation.

So far 3 or 4 episodes later, I just find this series… well a bit morbid, bloody and sometimes smexy. (I just wished the directors for this series didn’t put too much of exposed female lingerie for the audience… Yes, the girls are hot and smexy… But… Just a little too excessive of wardrobe malfunction…). I also find it entertaining in a world where pretty much everybody’s turned into zombies and the survivors now have to face challenges just to live on. Those challenges can be from person to person or just trying hard not to get killed by the horde of zombies that’s coming at you.

Oh well, I’m just waiting for the episode where the firearms start to come out… Yes… Firearms… Oops, I forgot… they don’t have sub-sonic ammunition and a suppressor to kill all of the zombies without being noticed. Okay, if the zombies are indeed sensitive to sound, then why don’t the author of the manga add suppressors and sub-sonic ammunition? But then again it’s part of the plot, right? Non-stop action on killing zombies is just only the beginning of the story. Sadly they don’t feature my favorite PDW… The P90. Notice the absence of the ‘S’. Yes… Full auto mode… Subsonic ammunition… and a suppressor… just makes killing zombies in the world of HSoTD easier and a lot more entertaining… Killing zombies and having them not know what hit ’em? Just perfect.

And also, a old friend of mine I haven’t seen in ages made a post about it… Just wanted to post a URI to ping her blog… Right Pam?
Pam… Here is my response post because you posted about it.

Even if you don’t like the series Pam, just wait for the part where the firearms start to come out…

Not News: Facebook Now Available Over IPv6. And My Opinions On It

It’s not exactly news to most people who are IPv6 enthusiasts, but yes. Facebook is finally getting the message and they’re transitioning to IPv6. You can access it here: Facebook over IPv6

Why access facebook over IPv6? It makes you look cool, that’s why. Just imagine the first person on the block being able to access facebook over IPv6 while the majority of users out there who don’t have an idea what IPv6 is go “Wow… What’s IPv6 anyways?”. You IPv6 enthusiasts, gurus or whatever you call yourselves, don’t worry, we’re on the same boat if we mention IPv6 in front of an average person.

My opinion on facebook trying out IPv6: Great move. The transition has to happen some time. Don’t be like craigslist or Wikipedia who has clearly stated a while ago that they didn’t have a plan in place for the transition to IPv6. Having it enabled on a popular site like facebook can certainly raise awareness that the transition’s happening soon… Only if the facebook staff did make a public announcement on the availability of the site over IPv6.

I’m not going to explain in depth what IPv6 is and why we need IPv6 right in this post. I’ve assumed by this point if you understood what IPv6 was meant to fix, you’ll get the point.

My Rant on Facebook Chat… Why I don’t even bother about it.

Lately I’ve been noticing people on Facebook having a tendency to use the social networking site’s built in chat feature. And some of you might wonder, why I am never on facebook at all and out of nowhere I blurt things out on facebook. There is a reason behind it: Facebook chat sucks. Period.

So some of you might wonder what is IRC. IRC is well… Old school MSN, ICQ, YIM or whatever Instant Messaging network you used to use before Facebook came out. IRC is similar to talking with strangers and meeting them online. The idea of talking with strangers is the reason why many school districts/administrations ban this nice method of communication. Want to know more about IRC? Go on Wikipedia please, I won’t explain it anymore in depth here. I assume you know what IRC is before you continue reading this article. I would also assume that you know how TCP works. If you don’t, please don’t waste your time reading this rant. Just know that I never use Facebook’s chat. That is all.

Okay, on to the ranting part. Why do I hate Facebook chat? It’s not real time and even if it is, it can be resource demanding on the user’s browser. The current chat platform can take up to 5 minutes or so to get your message across to the intended recipient; Sometimes longer if a system administrator decided a transparent caching proxy is the best way to conserve on bandwidth. However, the idea behind any live chat sessions is to get your message across as fast as possible to your intended recipient. And getting it across as fast as possible means you have to get it there in real time, or at the very least within a delay timeframe of 100ms to 500ms.

Now we all know that facebook is completely runs on a web browser; running such chat sessions on facebook can cause the user’s browser to wobble or crash if the coding is inefficient. However, so far I haven’t seen a facebook chat session can potentially crash a web browser. So how does one make a browser based chat protocol as realtime as possible? Well, you tell the browser to keep refreshing that chat dialog, or use dirty AJAX hacks that might work on one browser and completely unusable on another.

Compared to IRC, a chat session is a persistent TCP connection between your client and the server that is hosting the network. What is the advantage for a persistent TCP connection? It doesn’t put too much strain on the user’s computer. Why does it work better than the non-persistent nature of the normal web browsing protocols? Because the computer doesn’t have to make new connections every single time the user receives/sends a message over the chat session. All the computer has to do is resume the stream of data that’s being sent between the server and the client. Simple as that.

However there are advantages between IRC and Facebook’s bulit in chat, and I won’t go into detail with them. With facebook’s AJAX chat, the chat session will never get lost somewhere due to a problem in the network connectivity or a problem with the ISP’s routing. This advantage allows users to use the chat regardless of the operating conditions of the connection. On the other hand with IRC, the persistent nature forces the user to require a reliable connection in order to use the network. Any interruption between the client and the server can cause the user to lose the chat session entirely. A restrictive or poorly designed firewall with a short timeout period can cause IRC sessions to become disconnected.

So there you have my rant. In my opinion IRC is far much more superior than facebook chat because it requires very little resources on my computers or web browsers. Now move on and have a nice day.
RTSP

Because I Care…

I’m a frequent lurker in bakabt’s channel over at rizon and they asked us for our help, so they have it!

How to save an Internet community
Hello BakaBT community and people of the Internet,

We need your help! Please spread this message everywhere on the Internet.
If you have a blog, twitter or myspace or know someone with a blog, twitter or myspace copy this message verbatim!

I am writing this message right now as my community website is unreachable due to a continued DoS attack.
A DoS attack is a Denial-of-Service attack that drowns all normal traffic going to the server by sending a tremendous amount of (fake) traffic.
It is the bane of any website owner as there is very little you can do against it, other than hope the attack will stop or invest in special expensive DoS protection hardware.

The demand of the attacker is that we remove information we posted about his person a while ago on our blog after he did an earlier (simpler) attack.
We managed to dig up all sorts of interesting information thanks to another site (www.0xyg3n.com) which had also been attacked by the same ‘hacker’.

Our site has been down for 24 hours, after which the ‘hacker’ promised to stop the attack and give us 1 week to remove the message.
The attack never stopped, normal traffic was able to siphon through so the server seemed reachable. But this means he obviously can not, or will not, negotiate with us.

We have thought a while about what to do, and we have reached some conclusions:
Apparently there is something valuable in the message that we posted as the ‘hacker’ is spending a fair dime attacking our server (DoS attacks ‘sell’ for about $60 for 24 hours).
There is nothing that we can do to make him stop this attack. Yes, we could give in to his demand, but why would he stop the attack then? He sure isn’t stopping now. And then what is next? last time he asked for my resignation.

So, we have decided to fight fire with fire. Fight a distributed attack with distribution, and for this we need your help!
If you have a blog, twitter or myspace, or know someone with a blog, twitter or myspace, copy this message verbatim!
If this message is copied many times to many different sites all across the Internet no one will be able to erase it from the Internet.
What happens to our website and 6 year old community? I don’t know. It would be a shame to loose it over something so trivial.

Below is a summary of the information we found about him (please copy this as well as that is the whole idea of this message!):


I also have his home IP from the comments 77.162.16.18 […] Anyway since then I have noticed I’ve been getting hits for people doing a search for his site 0xyG3N.info (which I’ll point out has been offline for some time) I would also just like to say that his site has nothing to do with me everything I do online is only via 0xyg3n.com […] He also uses the username roffamaffia which I suggested he should go back to using. He also uses kyuubinyuu@hotmail.com as an alternate email to the msn one.

I also know his name which is mesut baysan he’s 15 and lives in Dongen Noord-Brabant Netherland oppps. I also have a home address but I’m not going to post that up as I’m not sure if its totally correct or not. I also have some other details that I’ll save for a later post if needed.

Our blog: http://blog.bakabt.com/2009/08/23/kdos/ (use Google cache if the domain is unreachable)
Our backup blog: http://baka.applehomicide.com/2009/08/23/kdos/
0xyg3n’s blog (not the hacker): http://www.0xyg3n.com/?p=555 about his encounter

E-mail / Live:
– us3n3xt@live.nl (old)
– amaterasu_@live.jp (latest known)

Known nicknames:
– 0xyG3N (note the capital G and N)
– Roffamaffia
– Sasuke-

Help us save our community and give power back to the webmasters!

My Saga for Unlocking and Debranding the SonyEricsson J105a (Naite) From FIDO (Rogers)

It’s been two months since I’ve owned my SonyEricsson J105a (Naite) bought from Fido off for $150 dollars. Well, everyone here knows that I’m a tech savvy person and I am willing to hack anything just for the heck of it.

This is my story on debranding, customizing and unlocking my Naite just for the heck of it.

The story all began as soon as I got my hands on a SonyEricsson Naite from a random Fido dealership in Richmond Center. And here’s what I can say about the sales experience there – it seems like the sales associate was trying to pressure me into buying the more expensive SonyEricsson T715a which I see no point in buying. How was the sales associate pressuring me? I just had to laugh in the back of my head when he claimed the Naite isn’t a quad band GSM phone. But then again, I insisted on purchasing the J105a because I like prefer bar phones over any other types of cell phones. Sales experience wise, I’m noticing these sales associates in Fido stores tend to lie to get you into purchasing the more expensive phones that are just considered overkill for me. My needs for a phone is to talk, light internet browsing and tethering. Ranting aside, I’m going to go on the unlocking part.

Anyone who’s owned a GSM phone in Canada would know it’s most likely locked to the provider where it was purchased from. Naturally, I wanted to find out who can unlock my Naite for less than $20 bucks. None of the ‘unlockers’ I talked to was willing to do it for less than $20. However, I found out that a group out there calling themselves “Cruiser Team” are charging around $15 USD to unlock any Sony Ericsson phone. For me, I found a reseller who sold me credits for about $13 CAD, $7 cheaper than most unlockers out there and I get to have the codes that can re-lock the phone back to Fido if necessary. Now this phone can be used on Rogers, Bell and Telus… possibly on WIND Mobile or Moblicity if they do get the license to operate on the North American GSM 850/1900 band.

On the topic of debranding, you may have seen me post on HowardForums about the Customize.xml file for the Naite. Well, that’s the file you’ll need to debrand and customize your phone’s settings. You can do it using either a customize_upgrade.xml for settings to be applied on a non-permanent basis (useful for testing, etc) or by overwriting the customize.xml file for settings applied permanently. Where’s the customize.xml file? It’s here. Customize the file to your liking, it’s your choice.

On how of using the customize or customize_upgrade file, you have to upload it to your phone using a2uploader, which can be found here. That page is in Russian, but looking for the a2uploader.rar file isn’t that hard. Just scroll down.

After customizing the file to your liking, use a2uploader to upload the customize.xml or customize_upgrade.xml file, shut down your phone completely and remove the battery. Start a2uploader in file manager mode. a2uploader at this point will instruct you to press down the “C” button on the phone while connecting the USB cable. Now navigate to /tpa/preset/custom and drop that customize.xml or customize_upgrade.xml file there. Shut the phone down and start it up. It should see either the customize.xml or customize_upgrade.xml file and apply your customizations that you’ve made to it by displaying a “Please Wait” screen. After that “Please Wait” screen’s disappeared, verify that the settings applied correctly.

On a side note, if you do use the customize_upgrade.xml file, read my HowardForums post about the CDA value. You need to put that CDA value in the customize_upgrade.xml file as my Naite lost it when I a customize_upgrade.xml file without the CDA value on it.

Hope my story of debranding and unlocking my Naite will help somebody out there that’s desperate to rid of Fido’s logos, demo games and themes.