Looting Brain’s Computer
One of the many awkward side-effects of Brain’s current condition is the loss of one of my decent computers. It’s a long story, but here’s the gist: I had built a sweet little small form-factor system for the dining room so my dad and brother had a community internet station. Well, my brother abused his internet priviledges and I pulled the system. This was right at about the same time that the Gateway that Brain had put up with for about 3 years was really starting to rub him the wrong way. I decided that Brain needed something a little beefier to develop on, and gave him the SFF computer, and we agreed that as he could afford them, he would replace each component until he had a new computer, and I had my system back. Well, he had purchased a VERY pricey new video card for it, and upgrade plans were put on the backburner. When he had to leave town to go to college, I told him he could take the computer along (we had parted out his Gateway, anyway), and I would worry about it later. Well, he never got the opportunity to replace it, and asking for it back at this point would kinda be a dickhead thing of me to do. I could use the system for something, but I’ll consider it a loss.
Still, there are tons of invaluable files on there that I would like to make sure are preserved, namely his MBs and MBs of source code. Currently, his computer serves as dumping grounds for all sorts of medical supplies when they aren’t in use. It sits buried and unused. Well, I was over at his house tonight for dinner, and decided I should grab that stuff while I could before Brain’s mom decides to do something stupid with that computer…like use it. I booted the system up and AIM and ICQ logged themselves in. For a second I wondered if anybody on his buddy lists had seen it and possibly got their hopes up, so I signed out of them. I imagined the event, his sign-on and sign-off, being written to my IM logs back home, the first event to be written to Brain’s log in nearly 13 months, and had to sit for a second to collect myself. Yeah, geeks get all worked up over dumb shit. Finally, I went about the task of locating his programming projects, and any and all music he had written. I assumed my 256mb USB drive would be enough, and boy was I wrong…I ended up having to burn a CD of over 500mbs of source and compiled applications. All of his songs were in Fruity Loops format, so there’s not much I can do with them for the time being.
After I got home, I had a ton of fun going through all our old projects: a complete retrospective of every game we had ever collaborated on, and even some dumb “utilities” we would design and he would program. I was hoping to be able to post a couple games, but several of them are compiled as short demos, or a specific feature of a game that he would send to me to bugtest. There were even more games that I remember working on, with 16 titles in various stages of development in the “Visual Basic” folder alone. In the C++ folder, there were 5 titles in various stages of development, including our magnum opus: Phoenix Rising (working title). I even found our short-lived port of “Force Disruptor”, one of our most complete and enjoyable games, to the Gameboy Advance. There are also 3 or 4 OpenGL screensavers he was working on. If any of these were really usable programs, I would post them, but I’m going to have to have somebody go through the code with me to compile stuff that works. There is a really fun C++ version of Astrolander, including a level editor, but when you complete the first level, the game stops. The rest of the level files are present, so I know it works; it may just be commented out.
Our games were fun projects, but I think I had the most fun with the various random “utilities” we would come up with and implement to varying degrees of success. Some of his older VB stuff varies from annoying mouse pointer manipulation “joke programs” to some more serious password-reaping and keystroke-logging stuff. Our password-reapers were some of the funnest. One, entitled “AIMBait”, was basically a fake AIM client that would be left open on college computers. Invariably, anybody sitting down at the system would attempt to log in through the fake front-end. When they click “sign on”, the client fakes a crash and dumps the username and password to a text file (behind the scenes, of course). Confused, the victim would re-launch the application from the start menu or desktop shortcut or whatever, which of course opens the real AIM client, and they would go about their business, never thinking twice about the mystery crash. AIM crashing? In Windows? I wouldn’t think twice about it, either. Another, entitled (not so originally) “Novell Bait”, was designed to look and perform exactly like the Novell login client on all the college computers. This could be run on a system that had already been logged into, and would collect student IDs and passwords. I don’t remember specifically, but I think Brain eventually got in some trouble for this one, but it was less “You are being expelled” and more “That’s really impressive…please don’t do that.” Similarly, I discovered our old dummy Windows XP login screen, which gave the user the impression they were entering an admin password to exit out of a screensaver. I’m not joking: it worked. Funny that nobody thought it was weird that an admin password was required to stop a screensaver… This provided some fleeting fun at Walmart.
There was also a simple program called “HaX0r”, through which input text is output to the window of your choice (like, for example, your IM client), only translated to 1337-sp33k. This program can only be described as “obnoxious”, and I won’t be posting it. Sparking even funner memories with Brain was the discovery of his keylogger program. This program will always have a special place in my heart, as it was indirectly responsible for me and Brain’s run-in with local police after a little incident concerning my termination from a employer we shared. This keylogger was later rewritten in C++ and was vastly improved, especially as far as stealth goes, but a strange bug that was never worked out made the program apparently use 100% of the computer’s spare CPU cycles, although it had absolutely no impact on actual system performance. Still, in execution, the logger worked beautifully, and while he worked on an email/FTP function (to transmit the resulting logs to a dump site), simple BAT files on our USB drives made manually recovering logs a snap.
I also discovered a simple IM client he programmed for us to use when both our laptops were on the same network, like if we were at work or tag-teaming a wireless network for example. I have, oddly enough, HALF a log from a “test” run of the client. For whatever reason only my side of the conversation is visible, not his responses. Still, it makes it that much more enjoyable for me, because I only vaguely remember this night/conversation, so having to guess what he is saying inbetween messages makes it a lot funnier.
(11:41:24 PM) Me: hey
(11:41:31 PM) Me: cant be too sagfe@@!!!
(11:42:28 PM) Me: you there?
(11:42:40 PM) Me: you got a list of computers?
(11:42:42 PM) Me: there are tons
(11:43:02 PM) Me: yeah i got admin on one
(11:43:12 PM) Me: oh wait….
(11:43:14 PM) Me: looks boring
(11:43:18 PM) Me: *hostname removed*
(11:45:16 PM) Me: any luck?
(11:46:50 PM) Me: ummm
(11:46:53 PM) Me: not without admin
(11:47:16 PM) Me: yeah if youre admin
(11:48:30 PM) Me: *hostname removed*?
(11:48:37 PM) Me: theyre sharing c and admin
(11:48:48 PM) Me: i did
(11:48:49 PM) Me: didnt work
(11:50:17 PM) Me: oh sick
(11:51:56 PM) Me: ahh
(11:51:59 PM) Me: check out *hostname removed*
The rest of his 500mb folder of source mostly consisted of various tech demos such as OpenGL particle demos or physics demos and schoolwork, but it was a lot more fun to dig through than an old shoebox of photos would have been. I do plan on getting some games of ours working in the future so they can be posted, along with source, so that No Budget Games can live on. If I deem any of our utilities usable, I may post some of them as well. I hope that in the meantime, you have a better understanding of why I called him “Brain”.
December 1st, 2005 at 11:29 pm
I remember Brian could’ve really gotten in trouble at the college with that keylogger when he first wrote it, he had it running on 10 or so lab computers with the text file that it dumped to having the extension .skz (sckuz), so if you just tried to open the file you would get an “unrecognized extension” error or something, but all you had to do was open as a .txt and you have the keystrokes of the last 3 users. So when he got backed up with the hundred or so text files being created daily he enlisted me to help sort them. Shortly thereafter a professor that heads the Computer Science department informed the class that there was a “virus” duplicating itself in “some kind of new file type” and that if it was found out that a student wrote it there would be *insert empty threat*. Brian also refused (despite my constant pleading) to let me run up a few thousand dollars on the credit cards and bank accounts that he had infiltrated. Probably a smart move, in retrospect.