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Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

blogs.avg.com

91–100 of 106 posts

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#91
post #50

Sorry for the tangent, but did the author really have to assert his or her endorsement of Chinese nationalist politics and write "Taiwan, China" instead of the neutral "Taiwan"? Taiwan is not currently controlled by the PRC, regardless of whether or not one believes it "should" be. Taiwan's acting government, the ROC, believes it shouldn't be, and China's government, the PRC, believes it should be. Most Taiwanese peo…

Both the PRC and ROC lay claim to the whole of China, with Taiwan as a part of it. It's absurd, but they both agree that Taiwan is part of China, they simply disagree on who should be ruling that greater part.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#93
post #91
post #50

Sorry for the tangent, but did the author really have to assert his or her endorsement of Chinese nationalist politics and write "Taiwan, China" instead of the neutral "Taiwan"? Taiwan is not currently controlled by the PRC, regardless of whether or not one believes it "should" be. Taiwan's acting government, the ROC, believes it shouldn't be, and China's government, the PRC, believes it should be. Most Taiwanese peo…

Both the PRC and ROC lay claim to the whole of China, with Taiwan as a part of it. It's absurd, but they both agree that Taiwan is part of China, they simply disagree on who should be ruling that greater part.

That's partly true. The PRC and the Guomindang (the Nationalist Party) of the ROC both officially claim that they should be ruling all of China, but the Minzhujinbudang (the Democratic Progressive Party) of the ROC views Taiwan as having developed its own culture and identity that's distinct from Chinese, and they don't try to claim ownership of or any relation to the mainland. And in English the phrase "Taiwan, China" really means 中国台湾 and not 中华台湾, i.e. "China" there refers to the PRC rather than the land of the Chinese people. So both parties in the ROC reject the phrase "Taiwan, China."

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#94
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Sub7 had a tool which did this. You could also 'pack' the executable. My infection vector of choice was embedding it into fake resumes and sending it to job ads...ahh, the memories...

You can add the contents of the .exe to the JPG but when the computer opens it then it isn't going to try and execute the code (it will try and render it as a graphic and probably fail) unless there is some unpatched exploit in the image viewer.

It would create a .exe file that was a simple image viewer and give it the standard .jpg icon. You would name it something like picture003.jpg.exe and most people's computer would conveniently hide the true file extension.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#95
post #15

When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…

Perhaps a rather naive questions, but: were the username and pw transfered in plaintext?

RFC 1459 Internet Relay Chat[1] clearly shows in its example that it uses plaintext passwords:

  Example:
    PASS secretpasswordhere
It also explains how the server password can be set either globally or per client.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-4.1.1

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#96
post #50

Sorry for the tangent, but did the author really have to assert his or her endorsement of Chinese nationalist politics and write "Taiwan, China" instead of the neutral "Taiwan"? Taiwan is not currently controlled by the PRC, regardless of whether or not one believes it "should" be. Taiwan's acting government, the ROC, believes it shouldn't be, and China's government, the PRC, believes it should be. Most Taiwanese peo…

Fellow web developers, I can tell you from experience that you must edit this list before deploying it in an application: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/cou... My understanding is that we have the UN to thank: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/background_on_iso_3166/...

Is it just Taiwan, or are there other countries in similar situations?

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#97
When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I was chatting with a friend on AOL Instant Messenger and suddenly was forced into a black screen with green text where I communicated briefly to someone who was forcing this new chat session onto me. The crack scared the absolute crap out of me. It ended once I told the person that I was irritated and that I was going to contact the police (I didn't and I doubt there was anything that really could have been done). Once the fear subsided I became more interested in how this person did what they did. It's one of those weird technology-related moments that sticks out in my mind to this day more than 10 years later.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#98
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you should say this. I practically did the same thing, from a different perspective. I ran my own little IRC server when I was a teenager, and one day I noticed a lot of my friends were being disconnected from the server. After some more investigation, it seemed like they were actually being disconnected completely from the Internet. Bit odd. Upon more investigation, I found an acquaintance had something l…

That's a neat variation on the old PING +++ATH0 trick.

NO CARRIER

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#99
post #50

Sorry for the tangent, but did the author really have to assert his or her endorsement of Chinese nationalist politics and write "Taiwan, China" instead of the neutral "Taiwan"? Taiwan is not currently controlled by the PRC, regardless of whether or not one believes it "should" be. Taiwan's acting government, the ROC, believes it shouldn't be, and China's government, the PRC, believes it should be. Most Taiwanese peo…

Fellow web developers, I can tell you from experience that you must edit this list before deploying it in an application: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/cou... My understanding is that we have the UN to thank: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/background_on_iso_3166/...

That's sad considering that Taiwan isn't even in the UN.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#100
post #66
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent half a year in China, and I didn't find the word Taiwan as a location offensive to anyone. Could it have been the case that you weren't allowed to say Taiwan specifically when referring to it as a political entity? I was under the impression that Chinese Taipei is the compromise name the two governments agreed on using when referring to Taiwan as an independent entity in sporting events, since having an indep…

Sounds like you know a lot more about it than me, and certainly makes sense - I was at an esports tournament (so would likely follow the rules of sports events), the 2002 World Cyber Games Grand Final. We weren't given any background, just a list of words not to use on air.

You probably used English as a lingua franca, what happens is that whoever watches you doesn't understand 99% of what you're saying except for a few keywords. This has caused a lot of diplomatic grief even between allied countries, because without context the worst is always assumed (cognitive bias, I guess). It seems to me a similar situation applies here so a list of words to avoid or replace would be a sensible thing to use.
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