Tonight I sharpened two blades with my new Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker. It’s a set of two ceramic stones (one medium, one fine) set into a plastic base, with two brass hand guards. The base sets the stones at a 40° angle (there’s also an option for 30°), allowing the user to hold the knife parallel to the base, which eliminates the fudge factor that comes with normal stones. So far, I’m enjoying it. It’s certainly sharpened both knives I’ve tried on it (Leatherman Wave and BK10), though they’re neither razor sharp. Both were pretty dull to start with, so I think it’s just going to take a few more cycles through the Tri-Angle before I can get them up to speed.
The Wave had a small cink in the blade that the medium stone was able to take care of. The BK10 has a significantly larger cink that the medium stone shaved down a bit, but it’s still there. Again, I think I’ll be able to take care of it with a bit more work. If not it may be worth it just to take it in to a professional sharpener so I can start with a clean slate.
My only complaint about the Tri-Angle is the cheap plastic base. There’s a variety of different slots, all made to hold the stones and guards in a variety of different configurations, but each require a little fiddling with to insert the stones and guards into. I think a metal or wood base would have been more appropriate.
The sharpener also comes with a DVD demonstrating proper use. It’s amazing how versatile the system is – or, at least, how versatile the DVD claims it is. It seems anything can be sharpened with the Tri-Angle. From plain edge to serrated knifes, hair clippers to toe clippers, potato peelers to screwdrivers. I may try a serrated blade on it tomorrow.
The average price on the net seems to be about $45. I picked it up for $42.95 (those guys have amazingly fast shipping, too). At that price, I’d say it’s a very worthy investment.
The fire and shelter class was originally supposed to be 2.5 days. Somewhere along the line, Management cut it down to just 24 hours. Still, our teacher decided to continue with the class. We focused on shelter building, not having much time for fire.
The shelter we built was a debri-pee. Rather self explanatory – a tee-pee, but made with debris. The group of people (there were 6 of us) sit in a circle, legs crossed, and place a stick in the ground behind their back. This marks this circumference of the circle. After this, two rows of alternating sticks, 2 feet tall, 1 foot apart, are placed around the circle. Three ridge poles, the hight of the tallest person, are setup in the middle, with their ends inside the circle, and tied off with some form of cordage at the top. Their angle should be about 45 degrees to maximize rain run-off. More ridge poles are lain around the circle – as many as you can find and fit. Then, the lower wall (created by the circle of alternating sticks) is insulated with debris (mmm…sword ferns). Next, the upper wall (created by the ridge poles) is latticed (the lower branches of Hemlock work great – snack on the needles while you work). Then start throwing on the debris. Sword ferns make a good first layer – about 4 feet of insulation. Then toss on some maple leaves to minimize rain penetration. Perhaps shingle it with bark. Remember to punch a smoke hole in the top. The hole for the door should be slightly wider than the biggest person. The door itself is a plug made of vines, twigs, sticks, leaves, ferns, etc. Insulate the floor of your new home with ferns, but first lay down a little Hemlock. Remember to stash firewood anywhere and everywhere inside. Small pieces. You don’t want to burn your new home down. Carry in a few coals from your outside fire and settle in for the night.
It took the six of us about 5 hours to construct our debri-tee. Since it’s sized out by us all sitting cross-legged in the shelter, it’s a bit cramped when laying down. You’re basically sleeping in the fetal position, with your head on the next person’s legs. But other than that, it’s comfortable. We each had alternating one hour fire-tending shifts, to keep us warm and make sure the ferns didn’t catch fire. It started pouring at about 3AM and rained all night, but our shelter kept us dry.
We each left with a block of cedar from which to craft a bow-drill. I’m waiting for my new knife sharpener to arrive before I give it a shot.
Speaking of knives, our teacher, Phil, had a Tracker knife that I played with – the custom, $400 version made by Dave Beck, not the commercial one made with crappy steel. It’s certainly nicer than my BK10, though, overall, I can’t say I was too impressed with it. Not for a $400 knife. I fell an Alder with it, but the saw is really too short to do much with. The handle has two positions, but felt too small for my hand. I did like cutting ferns with the dip between the chopping and carving blades.
I’m looking forward to building a debri-tee here. And transferring some of the tricks I learned to the other shelters up in the woods.
Keeping warm and dry are two of the foremost priorities for wilderness survival. Learning to build your own fire by friction and shelter in the woods are also great fun. This new 24-hour NatureSkills weekend introduces both topics from a variety of perspectives. Participants should their own food including something to cook over the fire for dinner.
Fire Topics: philosophy of fire-making; 5-minute fires; primitive fire-making methods (bow drill) collecting/harvesting fire materials.
Shelter Topics: properties of natural materials for insulation; creating individual and group shelters, using fire inside shelters; and staying overnight in a shelter that you have constructed.
I’m looking forward to more bow-drill practice.
Despite the cold, wind, and rain we’ve been having the past week or so, Weather.com says I shouldn’t freeze my butt off – but a sleeping bag is on the gear list (I didn’t think it would be), so as long as I spend enough time waterproofing my shelter, I should be ok.
I spent most of yesterday playing with SpamAssassin, ending up installing my own copy instead of using Dreamhost’s instance. It seems to be working, more or less, but will take some time to train. If you send me an email sometime within the next month, and I don’t reply within a few days (and your message warranted a response), try to send it to me again. Or contact me through other means.
(I will be checking my “Spam of Death” folder for false-positives and correcting them, but you never know.)
Someone set off the fire alarm in my building last night at 2am. Just as I was about to go to bed. Luckily, the alarm isn’t tied directly to the sprinklers.
Before moving into my new place last month, I had planned on paying an ISP for internet access. But, complications arose with the company I had chosen, so I decided to cancel my order soon after it was placed. Instead, I planned to borrow internet access from my neighbors (hey, they’re pumping signals into my air-space). Trouble was, everyone had encrypted their networks with WEP. No doubt this is a good thing, and a vast improvement from the last time I had scanned down here (about 8 months ago), but I wanted in. I was able to justify cracking in to myself by recognizing that my paranoia isn’t limited just to the “others” out on the global interwebs – no, I’d be just as paranoid about the owner of whomever’s network I was breaking into watching my traffic. There was no question I’d make ample use of encryption, which, as a side benefit, meant that anything I did through his connection would be rather difficult to trace back. So, he was protected. As long as he wasn’t paying for bandwidth by the KB, he’d not be much affected by my leeching. (I use the pronoun “he” because I know now that the owner of my primary network is, in fact, a he – put a password on your routers, people!).
But there was another problem, in addition to WEP: during reconnaissance, I would rarely pick up any connected clients. Perhaps I was always trying at the wrong time of day. Or perhaps people pay for internet access and never use it. Regardless, it would have taken weeks of constant logging to gather enough IVs to crack the WEP key. So, the first step was to take the money I had saved by canceling my order with the ISP, and invest in a new wireless card that supported packet injection.
The Proxim 8470-WD (from aircrack-ng’s recommended list) caught my eye, though it took a while before I could find it a decent price. To do my initial cracking, I popped in Backtrack and followed aircrack-ng’s newbie guide. (I had upgraded my trusty old Auditor cd to Backtrack just for this occasion. It’s quite the nice distribution.) Within about 5 minutes, I had gained access to the first network. Goes to show how secure WEP is.
Though the Proxim card is plug and play in Ubuntu, the steps to crack WEP are a little different. Here’s what I do (note that I do recommend using Backtrack, instead).
First, of course, one must install aircrack:
sudo apt-get install aircrack
You may change your mac address manually, or, if you aren’t concerned with anonymity, don’t change it all. I have a preference of using the macchanger tool:
sudo apt-get install macchanger
Set your card’s MAC address randomly. In this case, the network device is at ath0:
sudo ifconfig ath0 down
sudo macchanger -r ath0
sudo ifconfig ath0 up
Put your card into monitor mode:
sudo iwconfig ath0 mode monitor
Start scanning:
sudo airodump ath0 dump 0
In this case, dump is the file prefix for airodump’s output and the 0 tells airodump to channel-hop. Now you want to pick your target network from the scan. It should have at least one client connected (displayed at the bottom of airodump’s output), the more the merrier. (Hopefully that client is transmitting data, too.)
When you pick your target, kill the first instance of airodump and start it up again, this time specifying the channel of your target:
sudo airodump ath0 targetdump 9
The targetdump is the file prefix and 9 is the channel. Optionally you can add a 1 to the end of the command, which tells airodump to only capture IVs (which is what you’re after). I normally don’t bother.
When you’ve captured somewhere in the range of 250,000 - 500,000 data packets (shown by airodump in the “Packets” column of your target client), you can start cracking:
aircrack -b 00:12:34:45:78:A3 targetdump.cap
In this case, -b is the essid of your target network. Cracking could take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. I’ve never had to wait over 20 minutes.
But what if the client is being a party-pooper and not transmitting? That’s where packet injection comes in. From aircrack’s guide:
ARP works (simplified) by broadcasting a query for an IP and the device that has this IP sends back an answer. Because WEP does not protect against replay, you can sniff a packet, send it out again and again and it is still valid. So you just have to capture and replay an ARP-request targeted at the AP to create lots of traffic (and sniff IVs).
You’ll want to keep airodump running, so that all the traffic you generate will be captured. In another terminal, start injecting:
The -3 tells airepay you want to replay ARP requests, -b is that target network, and -h is the client. In a little bit, aireplay should inform you that it has captured 1 (or more) ARP packets. Sit back and watch airodump count up the IVs.
If that pesky client still isn’t cooperating, you can give it a little motivation. From aircrack:
Most operating systems clear the ARP cache on disconnection. If they want to send the next packet after reconnection (or just use DHCP), they have to send out ARP requests. So the idea is to disconnect a client and force it to reconnect to capture an ARP-request. A side-effect is that you can sniff the ESSID during reconnection too. This comes in handy if the ESSID of your target is hidden.
...the risk that someone recognizes this attack or at least attention is drawn to the stuff happening on the WLAN is higher than with other attacks.
Keep airodump and aireplay running, and in a new terminal give it a little kick in the butt:
sudo aireplay -0 5 -a 00:12:34:45:78:A3 -c A3:78:45:34:12:00 ath0
The first switch, -0, informs aireplay you want to force the client to be unauthenticated, -a is the target network, -c is the target client. When the client reconnects, you should start grabbing ARP requests.
After you have enough packets, crack the WEP key as before.
To manage and connect to my wireless networks, I’ve taken to using wifi-radar. It scans for networks, allows you to specify which networks you prefer and, for each network, allows you to set preferences such as the WEP key, whether to use dynamic or static addresses, and the like. What I like best is the connection commands, which allows you to set commands you want executed before wifi-radar connects to the network, and after. In the before field, I have it randomly change my mac address:
ifconfig ath0 down && macchanger -r ath0 && ifconfig ath0 up
After it connects, I restart tor:
/etc/init.d/tor restart
(As another reference for you, this site keeps turning up as a guide to cracking WEP in Ubuntu.)
Three Worlds Gone Mad: The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven gets back to what RYP does best: storytelling. The book documents Robert Young Pelton’s journeys to three different war-zones (Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville) and his attempts to understand the place and its people. Like in DP, Pelton manages to explain the places better than any history text. Where else are you able to see from the eyes of pirate hunting mercs, American ex-CIA jihadists, and hermit rebel leaders? Unconstrained from the limits of a journalism, Pelton shows us firsthand a world outside of our own – a glimpse into war-torn regions of the world – and the ordinary people who inhabit them.
I highly recommend this book to and fans of RYP and, for those who have never read his works, this is a good place to start.
Around 11PM tonight I heard a bunch of yelling and screaming out my window. At first I thought nothing of it – there’s always a bunch of drunk kids around here at night having a good time – but it was persistent, so eventually I peeked through my blinds. Across the street, there were perhaps 10 people kicking and stopping on one guy curled up on the ground. I grabbed my camera and started shooting video of it. In about 30 seconds, a car pulled up, two people got out and scared the small gang away. After the video stops I called 911, but they had already had it reported. The cops and medics arrived about a minute later and I went over and showed them what I captured. They were all rather adamant about confiscating my camera for evidence, but I suggested they find someone else with video of the event and confiscate his camera. One of them took it over to where another cop had detained one guy, but that turned out to be uneventful, as they let him go. After about half an hour of standing around, a cop suggested I go with one of them down to the station where they could download the video (they weren’t up to me just emailing it to them). So, I hopped into the car of Officer Brian Chissus (badge #220) and off we went to the evidence room of the police station. I had to walk him through how to download the video (funny how I know the police’s own computer system better than the police themselves). Then he gave me a ride back to my apartment (they don’t make the back seats of those cars very comfortable).
It was interesting to see the inside of the station. It was also the first time I was able to get a close up look at the laptops they all have in their cars. Everything ran Windows XP.
Anyway, I’m going to bed now. I’ll upload the video I shot tommorrow.
Edit: Video here: http://files.pig-monkey.com/video/rr-fight.avi
Update:
Reported: Oct 10 2006 10:54PM
Offense: ASSAULT-FELONY
Case #: 06B43705
(V1) and (V2) assaulted by a group at the above location.
Arrested: QUINTON, KEITH EDWARD Age: 0 (DOB: Jun 23 1982 )
Arrested: PINNER, MICHELLE NICOLE Age: 0 (DOB: Oct 1 1988 )
Reported: Oct 10 2006 10:55PM
Offense: WARRANT - LOCAL
Case #: 06B43713
(A1) had three warrants for his arrest.
Arrested: QUINTON, KEITH EDWARD Age: 24 (DOB: Jun 23 1982 )