"Pain is just weakness leaving your body."

 "Pain is just weakness leaving your body."

- Sean Kennedy, (TFM)

aka SKTFM

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST ISSUE of PA1N: a world of pa1n.

\----------------------------------------------------????

What exactly do we hope to accomplish with PA1N? Not a whole lot really,

or maybe everything. We have no agenda, we have no plan. There are those

among us who do, however, and one thing I, as editor in chief of PA1N would like

to do is support them, and offer a soapbox to these people. First, however, let me

explain how the group of us came to the idea of creating another online zine, as

if there aren't enough already. The concept has been done, it's been dragged out,

beaten, left for dead. But I feel confident that the people who are helping me,

and those that have provided the inspiration will lead this into a new direction;

integrity. We don't seek to make ourselves famous, fame is a crown of thorns,

it makes you a target. We don't seek money, power, just a few thousand bytes

on the ether. We seek to be heard, to create a forum for some of the cyberpunk

scene's most gifted, creative and brilliant denizens. A forum in which to have

a voice that cannot be bought. Cannot be sold. Cannot be silenced Cannot be

stopped.

Cannot be intimidated into oblivion or obfuscation.

The world is full of pain.

This is now a world of pain. The country is plagued with a dying and

disemboweled economy, as people starve only miles from the white house lawn.

The planet shudders every second as we race headlong toward it's ultimate --

and therefore our own -- destruction. But no one asked me if I wanted to fund

genocide. No panel or census told me my taxes would fund bioweapons, nuclear

holocaust, or even the very agencies that might seek to silence this new voice.

No one asked you either. We have been bought and sold, our rights have been

written off as a casualty of a war.

A war on terrorism.

Where there are no terrorists.

A war on drugs,

where the enemy is the lower class.

A war on freedom,

which sucks the life out of our society.

But we can take it back.

It's already started. This is fuel to the fire...

I used to write for The Midnight Raid, HAPPLE, HazMat, TSHG, Reptile, the

list goes on and on... I was lured away from the scene as it became plagued

with neophytes whom I hadn't the patience for which I should have. People who

had been fed by the corporate media what hackers were. What phreaks were, what

goths did, what a punk was, who a fleshtripper was, and that those who protect

themselves are terrorists.

The norm became piracy, pornography and the outlets of all kids. The

economy died, and every hotline server, scores of IRC channels and

until-then free websites were relying on banner ads and popup scams to pay for

the bandwidth; whilst the sysops and admins worked three or four jobs to pay

the rent. The scene died, so I thought.

But we don't die, do we? No we don't. The culture that was spawned ever

since someone realized a single person could change something; if nothing other

than their own lives, a culture of new ideas was born. Rebellion, perhaps. But

with a cause ripe with nobility and idealism. The packet switched network was

the catalyst for a worldwide insurgence of new ideas. Then in the 1980s, the

United States Secret Service launched Operation Sun Devil. They arrested Steve

Jackson of Steve Jackson games for a cyberpunk RPG. The FBI and Secret Service

joint computer crime task force arrested Phiber Optik of the legendary 'Legion

of Doom', and Knight Lightning of the cornerstone magazine Phrack.

Yeah. They did a good job of ruining the lives of people who had committed

no crime; they destroyed the lives of people who had committed non-malicious

crime; and they almost killed Kevin Mitnick by placing him in maximum security

with a man who nearly beat him to death for taking too long on the phone

(something to that effect.)

And now there's the PATRIOT Act of 2001, the Homeland Security Act, the US

DoD wants ident cards initiated as standard ID, and everyone is afraid. Or so

it seemed. Then a girl who'll be known as Sapphire told me something important.

There was something happening on internet radio, a new-ish medium. Rantradio

gave me the hope I needed, and the faith I had lost that there were still

people who want to band together. To make the world a better place, perhaps? Or

maybe to make a new world. To throw out the old rules and live as ronin,

warriors without masters, but to live by the beleif that it is your duty as

another human being to stand up for those that cannot defend themselves.

As RumblingSky once said, "I am a cell of rantradio." And we are growing.

Now the Sean Kennedy Show is the first in-studio audience, and popular

non-mainstream tv show, rather, internet television show about things that

matter. Things that are real. It was Jello Biafra that said it best though,

"Don't hate the media, become the media."

- Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys

originally from the H2K Keynote Speech, then later on a

spoken word album entitled "Become the Media."

By the way, I mean what I say. Nothing more. You don't have to judge me, but you will.

- alienbinary

[ Special Thanks ]

Thank you to the following communities, people and friends that have encouraged

myself and others to make this happen. Together, I think we can make something

happen: Turnspike, for actually coming through and helping me pull this one

together, Cheezi, one of my partners in crime, the owner of e-lite

Communications, who has given me more help in my life, more fucking bandwidth

than GOD and of all people, if anyone deserves to own the domain e-lite communications,

it's him. Nemisis, the master of tic-toc, Oscar, AIM, YIM, etc; whose exploits

ended up in the local newspaper, along with some code of my own. Temporary

celebrity is fun, when they don't know your real name. To GrinReaper, one of

the best friends I've ever had. And not someone to mess with. Don't worry man,

we'll get your car back eventually. I want to thank Cimmerian of RantMedia,

whose opinion I have and always will respect; Sean Kennedy The Fucking Man, who

has proven that it's not how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit.

- PA1N Editor, alienbinary.

!

alienbinary | jared@e-lite.org ------

| '--------- Brought to you by...

Turnspike | turnspike@spfd2600.org ------'

|

j|l_

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PA1Nv1x2----------------------------------------------------------------------

Understanding Password Strength

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Understanding Password Strength

by alienbinary

[ preface ]

A modern misconception among both IT and non-IT people is that the vulnerabilty

of a box is inversely proportionate to the strength of the encryption keys

utilized by the systems administrator.

However, the old idea of a "weak" password still holds more weight than the

cryptography employed. The reason for this remains simple. Think of a computer

as analogous to a building. If the sides are guarded with razor wire and

turrets and barred up, the physical strength and security of the perimeter is

very high. However, all that is required to get into this building is what

every building uses: a key. Think of a password as just another key on a

keychain, and you understand that even if you suture up your packets nice and

tight, anyone with root access can freely traverse un-encrypted data. So while

SSH using Blowfish or PGP is a safe way to secure packets in transit from being

hijacked en-route, any data being transmitted can be accessed straight from the

source if an attacker can 'SUID root,' with the right password.

In order to understand the nature of passwords, you have to get even simpler

than that. What is a password? Passwords used to be real words. "hello", or

"aardvark." Because of this, people often make the mistake of remembering a

password as an idea. In old UNIX environments, no one was particularly

concerned with strong passwords, dictionary attacks were long, arduous

processes, and they required rudimentary knowledge of DES, the Data Encryption

Standard as set forth by the NSA. Therefore, people often look around the room,

maybe for a picture or a statue. The average computer user in a cubicle at an

office building might simply choose the first word of the first book to catch

their eyes. If you sat someone next to an iMac and a Poster for Fight Club,

chances are pretty good that the person might choose "iamjackspassword",

"tylerdurden", or "soap" when password protecting anything.

However, security 'experts' have long since warned about the idea of using a

password that can be located within the dictionary. These people suggest

subsituting a number for a letter or vice-verse. They suggest adding a number

to the end of the password string. This, in theory, would make it more secure.

Before the real meat of the article, it is important that you have reference,

and basic understanding of strings and ASCII.

[ password ranges ]

In the ASCII Range, every possible character has been assigned a numeric value

ranging from 1-255. Even a carriage return is assigned a numeric value.

chr(13). If you allow only uppercase and lowercase letters, your range per

segment is 65-91 and 97 - 131.

A = 65 B = 66 C = 67 D = 68 E = 69 F = 70 G = 71 H = 72 I = 73 J = 74

K = 76 L = 77 M = 78 N = 79 O = 80 P = 81 Q = 82 R = 83 S = 84 T = 85

U = 86 V = 87 W = 88 X = 89 V = 90 Z = 91

a = 97 b = 98 c = 99 d = 100 e = 111 f = 112 g = 113 h = 114 i = 115 j = 116

k = 117 l = 118 m = 119 n = 120 o = 121 p = 122 q = 122 r = 123 s = 124 t = 125

u = 126 v = 127 w = 128 x = 129 y = 130 z = 131

Now, notice the gap between the two arrays? that's because...

0=48 1=49 2=50 3=51 4=52 5=53 6=54 7=55 8=56 9=57

therefore:

a password string consisting of only lowercase letters has a range of {97-131},

a password of only uppercase letters has a range of {65-91}, a password made up

of both sets of letters has a range of {65-91;97-131}. A potential password

character with only digits is {48-57}. So a password of all three arrays has a

range of {48-57 ; 65-91 ; 97-131}. The total number of potential characters in

such a string is (letters(26)+(26))+(digits(10))=62. Only sixty-two possible

characters, that's why the next section explores the entire range.

[ measuring strength ]

A string of characters is only as random as the following variables will allow:

range (255 max in standard ASCII) and length. The range of a string corresponds

to the minimum numerical value and the maximum numerical value; where the

length correlates to the number of possible letters/numbers/characters.

The number of possible combinations for a password is an exponential equation.

r = range

l = length

r^l=x

where x = the number of possible combinations.

So, if you only allow the lowercase alphabet characters into a password, and

your password is 5 characters long, the equation to find the maximum number of

potential passwords looks like this:

26^5 = x

{ just letters, lowercase }

26 x 26 = 676

26 x 26 x 26 = 17576

26 x 26 x 26 x 26 = 456976

26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 = 11881376

26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 = 308915776

26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26 = 8031810176

{ lowercase uppercase and digits }

62 x 62 = 3844

62 x 62 x 62 = 238328

62 x 62 x 62 x 62 = 14776336

62 x 62 x 62 x 62 x 62 = 916132832

62 x 62 x 62 x 62 x 62 x 62 = 56800235584

{ full ASCII range }

255 x 255 = 65025

255 x 255 x 255 = 16581375

255 x 255 x 255 x 255 = 4228250625

255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 = 1078203909375

255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 = 274941996890625

255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 = 7.011020920710938e+16

There are limits to the types of encryption certain software will use, so there

is a varying degree in terms of how much room you have to be creative with your

passwords.

[ outro ]

So now we come back to the Fight Club Poster and the kid with the iMac.

len("iamjackspassword") = 16.

range of characters {97-131}.

Possible characters = 26 (the length of the alphabet.)

So just how strong is "iamjackspassword"?

26^16 = 2.147484e+9

So let's just modify the password. Same phrase, different characters.

"iamjackspassword" becomes "IamJacksPassw0rd"

62^16 = 4.767240170682353e+28

Now that's a little better. There's always punctuation, though...

- 2003 alienbinary

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P41Nv1x3 ----------------------------------------------- o.O-------------------

The Department of Injustice, the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

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X-o.O-X X-O.o-X

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! "Don't tell me about the valley of the shadow of death. I live there. " !

! - Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live From Death Row !

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

PA1N Political Editorial

The Department of Injustice, the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

by alienbinary

[ Mumia Abu-Jamal ]

The world was given a wake-up call in the late 1990's, when Rage Against

the Machine and the Beastie Boys headlined a concert to raise both money and

awareness for the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a person for whom those that once

sang the praises of had turned a blind eye to his wrongfull conviction of

having shot a police officer to death. For the first time in years, music was

back again, as a voice to wake up a population all too happy to throw in the

towel and ignore the problems that eat away at the structure of our justice,

economic and social systems. I had never heard of Mumia Abu-Jamal before, and

as you might expect, almost no one else I knew had either.

The man in question was a former Black Panther, and then an active member

of a social justice organization called MOVE. MOVE was a police-brutality

awareness organization, a much needed voice against police corruption.

Abu-Jamal hailed from Philly, where the single most noteable thing about the

Police Department, is it's corruption. Although an FBI inquiry into the actions

of six Philadelphia detectives led to hundreds of cases with similarities being

overturned and scores of inmates being let free, Mumia Abu-Jamal is still on

death row, waiting for the legal lynch mob of the Fraternal Order of Police to

call a death toll. I can't really imagine that, no matter how hard I may try:

waiting under the most brutal conditions in the United States corrections

system to be put to death by the state of pennsylvania for a crime I could not

possibly have committed. But, as unimagineable as it seems, that is precisely

the case with Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In the last several years, the pressure has turned up on the case,

prompting federal and even international inquiries into the questionable

circumstances surrounding the controversial conviction. The scenario is already

an unbearable one, before the officer was killed. According to the defense, and

now it appears that the Justice Department has come to a similar scenario,

Mumia Abu-Jamal approached the officer in question, after driving home in his

taxicab, which he drove for a living. Due to a previous encounter, Jamal had a

.357 Magnum revolver on his person to protect himself from being robbed again

in his cab. The initial reason for the confrontation had been grounded in the

fact that Mumia had happened upon several police officers beating his brother

to death with his flashlight. This, incidentally, has remained undisputed.

Now here the story becomes confused. Mumia may have drawn his weapon as a

precaution to ward off the hostile officers. At this point, forensics experts

from the Federal Bureau of Investigation speculate that a firefight broke out.

Although some speculate that the initial firefight occurred before Mumia

arrived on the scene.

Clearly, two people were hit. One was a police officer, supposedly in the

line of duty, the other was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been shot in the liver. By

most accounts, a gunshot wound to the liver is extremely fatal. However, during

the time Mumia was unconscious, several things happened.

The prosecution would later claim that Mumia Abu-Jamal had fatally shot the

police officer and even bragged about his alleged murder on the way to the

hospital. However, there are no witnesses to this activity, with the exception

of a prostitute who had been paid off by the other detectives, and a crackhead

who is speculated to have actually been the killer. In reality, Mumia Abu-Jamal

was laying face down with his eyes closed, trying to stay alive, bleeding to

death and then suffered a severe beating from the accompanying officers. During

this time, he was only vaguely conscious, until he blacked out; he blacked out

long before the alleged admission of guilt in the ambulence. The EMS teams

recall no such admissions.