Via China to your brain, below is a link into a world most of us think belongs only in spy novels. These days, a bit of real-life cyberpunk married to web tools - how to use the tools you have to overcome The Man, in this particular case, trying to contact a trapped Blogger under house arrest by the Chinese Government.
How long can the wall stand against the tide of information?
Via Gamasutra, this East European crackpot has managed to bend Excel to his dark, 3D wireframe will. Videos and everything - highly entertaining stuff.
…what more can I say?
Are you the ultimate PAC-MAN fan? Envy PAC-MAN for his dot chomping ability? Show your love by donning the PAC-MAN Plush-Head! Only available at clubNAMCO.
Imported from Japan. Limited quantities available.
I’m not actually convinced that this would work but as a game industry professional, I spend *way* too much time trying to get access to the ‘net in strange lands where the powers that be have devoted significant effort to making such things impossible or sufficiently expensive to justify taking out a second mortgage… so I’ll probably give it a go at some point.
Did you ever sit at the airport or at a cafe and there was a unencrypted wireless access point nearby, but whenever you wanted to visit a site their website would pop up asking for a fee to use the internet through their AccessPoint (aka. Captive Portal)?
Well, I did, several times. But in most cases you are able to look up arbitrary hostnames, ie. google.com.
But you can use the fact that you can resolve arbitrary hostnames to gain free connection to the internet.
The Idea is to tunnel all outgoing traffic through DNS.
I did too… but I’ve certainly never thought of overlaying TCP/IP over DNS! This guy has really taken the idea and run with it though;
ntez375sy2qk7jsg2og3eswo2jujscb3r43as6m6hl2ws xobm7h2olu4tmaq.lyazbf2e2rdynrd3fldvdy2w3tifi gy2csrx3cqczxyhnxygor72a7fx47uo.nwqy4oa3v5rx6 6b4aek5krzkdm5btgz6jbiwd57ubnohnknpcuybg7py.6 3026-0.id-32227.up.sshdns.feh.dnstunnel.deSo the responses come Base64 encoded. Such a response might look like the following one:
695-8859.id-39201.down.sshdns.feh.dnstunnel.de. 0 IN TXT "AAAAlAgfAAAAgQDKrd3sFmf8aLX6FdU8ThUy3SRWGhotR6EsAavqHgBzH2khqsQHQjEf355jS7cT G+4a8kAmFVQ4mpEEJeBE6IyDWbAQ9a0rgOKcsaWwJ7GdngGm9jpvReXX7S/2oqAIUFCn0M8=" "MHw9tR0kkDVZB7RCfCOpjfHrir7yuiCbt7FpyX8AAAABBQAAAAAAAAAA"
Now bind (the default DNS server software) is one of the most complex and arcane pieces of software I’ve ever come accross and I’m not entirely sure that anyone fully understands DNS (the DNS configuration that seems to work best for us here at hellomonster is technically illegal according to the RFC but a properly formed DNS entry fails a lot more frequently for some reason)… so layering an entire TCP stack on top of it is just brilliant. Or madness, it’s hard to tell.
Damn, Bad Gods stole the idea for my new game! Not just that, they gave away cheats to our entire battle system. We can’t change it now, we spent years obsessing over the details and getting everything just right. Oh well, I guess it’s back to the drawing board!