Craigslist Scam

I could not find this email address anywhere when Googling so I figured I would put it up on my blog and hope that others see it.  The email from the scam “artist” is as follows.

What is the body condition and how old is it??i will take care of all Shipment Preparations for the merchandise to be transported,i will buy at the listed price and payment will be sent through PayPal which is a fast, safe and reliable method of payment,and i will be needing your email with PayPal for payment or you could send me an invoice.Make sure you get back to me so that we can arrange for pick up as i will like it to be picked up..await your response.

It originated from an email address of mathewlucas4real@gmail.com.

2 quick things

Number 1… HP/Compaq, you suck!  You rebrand a decent laptop, then cripple the hell out of it by not allowing me to drop in the wireless card of my choosing?  Well thank god for Phoenix Bios Editor and Mirkes.de TinyHexer.  Too bad there’s not any way to actually remove the Ven and Dev ID checks.  I’ve got a CQ60 that I found a smashing deal on, dropped in an 802.11n card, and was greeted with the error: “104-Unsupported wireless network device detected. System Halted. Remove device and restart“… What a bunch of bullshit!  I’m surprised that Dell hasn’t approached this tactic as well.  Anyway, found what I needed in one of the extracted bios rom files, hex edited the dev and ven IDs as well as the subsys id, and I’m back in action.

Number 2:  Ubuntu Natty is out and I like it. :)

Motorola Droid on Alltel with full EVDO!

Ok, so this was a week and a half long adventure… but I’m finally at the point where I can write about it!

THIS IS NOT A HOW-TO! This is just general information on what it took to make this happen. With your own brain-power you, too, can figure it out.
This is all proof of concept only as some of the steps here would be illegal to do in the US in real life.

Pre-reqs:
1. Has to be non-divested Alltel!
2. Having an “in” in Alltel (We have a business account manager who rocks)
3. Need to have a means of fixing the “stick” issue
with the Motorola Droid’s PPP username always reverting to “@vzw3g.com”. I’m waiting for permission to release the information, DO NOT ASK ME HOW, PERIOD.
4. QPST
5. CDMA Workshop (newest version, not the pirate copy of 2.7 floating around)
6. HW Virtual Serial Port
7. A phone that can be used to easily clone the droid temporarily
8. Alltel PRL

Note: This does not require the Motorola Droid to be rooted.

First of all, the PPP “stick” issue needs resolved. Once again, I will not be going through that here. Once that is done, you need your MEID on Alltel. This is where you NEED to know someone on the inside. If you are persistent enough, you can call their general customer service and find someone to do it. We lost a Droid this way however, a CSR flagged the MEID as not usable on Alltel’s network once they found out what we were trying to do. Once that’s done, here comes the fun part…

Before activating the Droid, the Droid needs cloned to your easy-clone phone, preferably an Alltel phone. This will allow you to retrieve your HA Shared Secret which you will need for EVDO (3g) service. For some reason the Droid does not retrieve this when activated. Without this step, data WILL STILL WORK! Just at 1x speeds instead of EVDO. Now, activate this phone, retrieve your HA SS (might require QXDM depending on the phone used) and save it for later. Restore this phone to it’s original settings and power it off.

Now, Motorola Droid. Put the Droid into FTM mode (hold T while powering on). Use HW Virtual Serial Port to give the Droid a com port. Use QPST to write the SID and PRL to the phone, as well as setting a few settings. HA Auth needs to be disabled. Now, go into the menu where you can write the HA Shared Secret, and paste in (hex) what you retrieved from the easy-clone phone. Write these settings to the phone and reboot. Activate just for fun and make sure you’re on the Alltel network.

Next, put the phone into FTM mode again, and fire up CDMA Workshop. This time, write the PPP, PAP, HDR, and HDR usernames and passwords. The PPP and PAP passwords are alltel. The HDR passwords are the phones pESN.

After all this, I had working EVDO on the Droid, and it’s great.

Droid

Blogging from my moto Droid..
Finally I’ll be posting interesting things. Yay!

So it’s been a year!

I FINALLY got my WordPress blog set back up and upgraded to the newest version. A lot has changed, my server is now running on a virtualization platform, I’ve upgraded it to the new version of ubuntu as well, and got a couple of T1s to host it on. :)

Finally got Cass’s 1099 today…

What funny people her ex-employers, or wtf ever they are, are. We lost Cass’s original 1099, so naturally needed a replacement so I can finally file my taxes (oopsie :) ). But instead of letting Cass go the whole block to go and pick it up, they mail it. Haha, it’s amazing what lengths people will go to just to try and spite someone else. All the while saying that we need to drop our beef and move on…

My beef dropped and decayed long before this day. What’s even more pathetic, everyone I told thought it was the damn funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Someday… will they grow up? I hope not, I love them just as they are. Reminiscing about these events still brings a smile to my face and a chuckle escapes my lips. Anger makes people weak and it shows.

Finally, azureus is working

I’ve been having troubles since upgrading to Intrepid. Vuze (formerly Azureus) had a prob with 100% cpu usage and crashing. Found a neat command “sudo update-java-alternatives –set java-6-sun” that sets sun’s java as the default JRE, instead of GCJ. Now all is well in the world. :)

Yay!

We’re having a girl!

Dang pfSense routers

So I have this WRAP board that needed to be forced into using 10baseT on one of the NICs. Easy enough, just edit the config.xml file and add <media>10baseT/UTP</media> and <mediaopt>full-duplex</mediaopt>. Sounds simple right? Well for some reason those settings don’t work on WRAP based pfSense routers (I tried on 2 different boxes). After some digging, I just added <shellcmd>ifconfig sis1 media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex</shellcmd> to the <system> area of my config.xml, did a few test reboots and everything looks good.

Yay!

Finally…

Upgraded my xbox with a 500gb HDD today. Ended up with a SATA drive, and ide adapter. I’m surprised it worked to be honest with you. :)