Tuesday, October 07, 2014

A certain port, a certain country


Ever since that whole Chinese Thing, which pissed a lot of people off, I've been ever so slightly cautious about dropping bombs into Full Disclosure.

I mean, what business of mine is it if silly programmers think making a public proxy of your machine is The Right Thing To Do?  After all, McAfee did it, right?  So it must be a Good Thing.

I'm sure you've noticed those new proxies on a certain port in a certain country.  My database shows they started appearing in August of this year.  They're all over the globe, but almost two-thirds are in that certain country.

And if you go to any number of new-ish proxy lists, you'll find these proxies being tested in near-real time.  They work pretty good, they disappear, and then they come back.

It doesn't take advanced Google-Fu to find out what's going on.  You will even find a certain tech support article on how to open up a certain port on a certain operating system.

WTF were they thinking?

Rather than ruin a good thing (decent proxies are so hard to come by these days), I'm keeping my mouth shut.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

BlazeDTV v3.5 Serial Number


Let me just say up front I am not in the business of pirating software.

These days.  The 90s was a different story.  But I digress.

A few years back, I bought an Auvitek ATSC USB dongle for an XP system.  It was cheap and it worked great.  It was bundled with "BlazeDTV v3.5" for tuning, recording, playback, etc.  Then I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit and it stopped working.  Even after finding the 64-bit drivers for it (after a long hard search) it still wouldn't work.  So it sat in a drawer until one day when I "inherited" another XP system.  I ran the installation disk, plugged in the dongle, and it asked me for the serial number, which I promptly plugged in.

And the little rat bastard told me I had installed it on too many systems.  It refused to run.

Problem was, it was phoning home to check on the serial number.  I null routed the mothership, ran setup again, and everything was fine.  Can't call home, can't check the serial, can't brick the software.  No problem.  I made it a permanent entry in my local DNS recursor (PowerDNS).

This worked great for months.  It works with Windows 7 32-bit just fine.  Then today I was playing around with proxies (as usual) on IE9 (which I don't normally use).  Forgot about it and went to watch some TV.

And it wanted the serial number.  When I plugged it in it said "FUCK YOU" and refused to run.  At that point I remembered I had set IE up with some proxy in God-Know-Where (probably some MikroTik router in Venezuela--those are pretty fast) and it found the mothership.

So here's my (BAD) serial number if you need it...

MU3MJNBK9LRH4-6H8ECXDT5MVA

It's no good.  It's used up.  Huffed.  So I don't feel bad about giving it out.

You need to add this line to your local hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.blazevideo.com blazevideo.com

And that will kill the mothership, which you will never be able to hit with anything ever again.

Unless you use a Venezuelan proxy (or equivalent).