Ad Block - Savior of time and trial

For those people who read this and try to take me seriously, I try to get ya some good content because you probably have very busy lives. Well, Ad Block, I believe, can help you minimalize your efforts. I've touched on this before but never really gone in depth with it.

Ad Block is an extention for firefox that I found is extremely amazing. There are other ad blocking programs.























Other ad blocking programs will, do as the picture below shows, replace the ad with the text [AD].













Even Norton has an ad blocking program built into their web assistant



but Ad block is unique in a few ways that the others aren't. When you have Ad Block running and you go to a website you'll see ads and all that crap. If you see an ad and it's a picture on a site with a link you can right click that picture and you'll get a menu that's something like this.



You'll want to click the link that says "Adblock Image" and you'll get a little box confirming the link to the pic where you can click "OK" or "Cancel" to get the ad blocked from appearing on your browser.



The problem with all ad blocking programs is that you have to select each ad seperately and that only takes care of that one ad on that one site. Lets go back and look at the confirmation box. :)

If you look here this is a pretty lengthy address for an ad. Also, If you look, you can edit the address in this box. The full address is to this ad itself, but what about the directory the ad is held in, or even the site that the ad is coming from. You can shorten this address to block out everything from the specific site. Many sites are set up specifically for ad placement so if you completely knock out the site from showing you anything, you prevent every ad that said site has to offer.

Also with Ad Block you get to block the flash promos as well. You know the ones I'm talking about. The stupid Shoot the dog and win a psp, or catch the falling Pope to win a Nintendo DS. These are complete crap and we don't need to see these either. Ad Block even helps you block these by offering a little tab that is visible. Sometimes you might not see it, but thats because the frame the ad is located in is made specifically for that ad. Simply curser over the ad and use your scroll mouse as if you were using it to scroll down a page. It should push the ad upward exposing the tab for easy blocking. The Ad Box that pops up should look something like the following



After installing Adblock, it gets a little section under your Tools tab at the top of firefox. Inside of it you'll find 3 things.



The first one bring up everything there is on the page you're currently on. It seperates every part of it. Scripts, Images, IFrames, and things that are Embeded into the page are just some of the things you'll see. The main things you'll be dealing with are the images and the iframes. An IFrame is a frame designated for an image or, in this case, an ad.

Now, if this was all there was to the program I's say thats p retty nifty, but I'm not just going to post about a nifty program, I'm going to post about a program MacGyver would use.

Once again, lets look at the confirmation window. This little box presents us with so much more than just a simple ok or cancel.



Upon shortening the address within the box to
"http://www.discovery.com/media/panels/ad_panel.swf"
we can see the direct location of the ad. Everything that follows that in the actual address are limitations on the image itself. Lets say we wanted to save this ad for one reason or another. All we would have to do is put a link to this ad somewhere on the web like say...here

Upon clicking the link we get denied from viewing it. This doesn't stop us from right clicking the link and saving it to our hard drive. Upon saving the file we get to view it in any way shape and form we want. Or, if we want to block this ad and everything else similar from this site we can shorten the address even further to "http://www.discovery.com/media/panels" and anything located in the section called "panels" on that site will be blocked. I found that all the shockwave files for that site are held in the "Media" folder and panels is a sub folder within that media folder. So lets bring the confirmation window back up.



and lets copy the address inside up to the media part "http://www.discovery.com/media"

When we paste that into the window we'll get an error that the page has been removed. This is actually just their security system. The page is there, they just won't let you view it. Some sites will though.

Going here will bring you to a news site where you can see Tom Cruise squirted in the face with some water for a prank by British tv. When you click the ad block link, which is there because of the type of media player they use, you get this address

http://www.wtsp.com/includes/buildasx.aspx?fn=http://wm.gannett.speedera.net/
wm.gannett/wtsp/0506/19/cruise3.wmv&sp=http://wm.gannett.speedera.net/wm.gannett/ wtsp/ads/humana_pre.wmv,http://wm.gannett.speedera.net/wm.gannett/wtsp/ads/ humana_post.wmv"

Thats a long address for such a load of crap, plus the link above takes you right back here since it was giving me trouble linking to random places you didn't want to go. When breaking down the address you see where the cruise video is and you see where the 2 commercials they show is. After shortening the address we come to the following

http://wm.gannett.speedera.net/wm.gannett/wtsp/0506/19/cruise3.wmv

This is all we now need to view the video. Upon making a link to this and clicking it the video opens up in your default media player. Once the video loads and plays through check your temporary internet files and there should be a copy in there that you can copy and paste somewhere else on your computer if you want to save it. Furthermore, some sites aren't safe guarded very well and looking at an address given can give you the location of their parent directories. Parent directories will give you the location of the files on the given site and make things a bit easier on you.

Well, now it's over...wow, this is a long post, but it's deserved since it took me so long to get a new post out to you all. I hope you enjoyed it.

AK

Defcon 13

Yes, it's that time of year again. Defcon is coming up again. Once again, I'm depressed because I live on the East Coast and I don't get to go. (Frowny face).

For those of you who can't make it to Defcon but still wanna buy some swag then head on over to J!NX Hacker wear. Once there do a quick search for Defcon and you should find some stuff. If you're not looking for Defcon stuff, but still want some nice clothes, I suggest checkin out their other stuff. We tech guys have to stick together. Support the cause, ya know?

Now, I was reading over my last post and I couldn't believe that I forgot this place. Line Interference is a group of 3 geek radio shows that are ran by a group of tech savvy people including the elusive Lineman, and Isreal who is known for his Social Engineering knowledge.

I want to give props to Kevin Rose for quitting G4, I forgot to do that recently and just wanted to say CHEERS!!! to Krose.

To all of you gamers out there you'll enjoy this pic of a first grader's quiz. Hopefully I'll be acquiring some hosting space online and begin posting some of my more wanted programs and videos, as for now...does anyone have any suggestions?

AK

Online Hacking Media

Ok everyone, I know that this can't be the only site that you come to for random hacker content, We're not that good, yet...

But what I thought I'd do in this posting is to give you some links to other places. Granted I hope you keep coming back, but these other places are good too.

The first place you wanna check out is Hacker Media. This site compiles all the new media productions from a slew of different sites. It mainly has links to the .mp3 files from tech radio shows, but there are a few videos out there.

Next I'll get to some of the more specific places. Infonomicon is a good place to go to because they not only have good audio bits to listen to, but they have a Infonomicon TV section of their site with a few episodes for you to check out.

I've listened to Rant Radio a few times and gotten a few nuggets of knowledge out of it. If you're bored and just feel like doing something tech related you COULD listen to this stuff, or you could go out and try some things for yourself.

The Binary Revolution group I really like because they take a lot of their time to do tech stuff. They have an audio program, a couple of videos, and a internetzine (which is just a magazine thats internet based).

2600. Ok, this is it. This is a magazine that is put out 4 times a year. The Hacker Quarterly. This rarely has outdated information in it and is amazingly accurate. If you're just starting to get into hacking or what not I suggest buying these and waiting till you know a little more about coding and all that before you begin reading through these. Definately not for novices, but amazing for those who are mediocre or better.

Digg is a site that is based off user submissions and is usually tech heavy information. It's not really a media site, but you can usually find links to some good media that is out and about.

The next few are based on videos more than anything else. From The Shadows came on strong at the beginning putting out 3 videos in a very short period of time.

The Broken is a fun hacking/cracking/tech group that put out 3 videos and have promised more. I really enjoy watching these videos because of the depth of the information given in the light hearted manner.

Systm is a series of videos created by pretty much the same group as The Broken with a more adult and professional feel to it. They offer their videos in a slew of formats which help because not everyone has all the formats avaliable.

Thats all I have for this post. Mainly because I couldn't think of anything else to post about so...yea...Next time I'll have a much more original post for you all.

AK

Fun, Good stuff, and Updates

First off, a group has created a website to advance free speech. There are groups that rally for the downplaying, or even elimination, of the theory of evolution being taught in schools. School is to help us decide things for ourselves, not to become a hinderance of our thought process. Props to you all.

This is a calling to all tech savy people out there. Email, Call, Get in touch with your senators any way possible. If you're not in the US get in touch with your government officials/representatives. Request a Letter of Marque. A Letter of Marque is a letter allowing piracy by making the carrier a privateer for the government they live under. They are used to right a private wrong. This means that you could maliciously attack things that you found to be in harm of the government. Multi million dollar corperations that get massive tax breaks by abusing the system are this kind of enemy. For another example of a target, see below.

Finally, we end with some figures that I got from RollingStone.com

Number of peer-to-peer users in August 2003, the month before the lawsuits began: 3.85 million

Number of peer-to-peer users in April 2005: 8.63 million

Number of people sued by the RIAA to date: 11,456

Number of people who have settled with the RIAA to date: 2,484

Maximum amount you can be sued per song: $150,000

Average settlement: $3,600

FUCK THE RIAA, Leave those p2p users alone
AK

Create your own slax distribution

Ok, sorry about taking so long to post a new one.

First I wanna start out with being able to create your own slax distribution. Click Here and you can get a program which will let you take a root iso of slax you download seperately along with random linux modules that you get seperately. Then it compiles it all in one big smorgasboard of slackware live cd wonder. Slax is derived from slackware which is a pretty decent distribution of linux in which it's stripped and made into a live cd.

Kevin Rose, mucho props, has said the 2nd episode of Systm is coming out this week. I can't wait, The first episode was brilliant and I bet it only gets better. Kevin, I'm still waiting for that next Broken episode ;)

Finally, Does anyone know how to make a decent timed explosion for cheap? It only needs to be big enough to fit inside a cell phone of average size and give off a really cool scene.

Late
AK