Kwisatz

Well, I build weapons using the building toy K'Nex and rubber bands. I made a crossbow that fires a nine-inch plastic "bolt" ~75 feet. Although it really isn't fletching, it's kind of the same thing.

I built a PVC water gun and overpressurized it, so it busted me in the lip and split my chin. Just one week ago. Diagram of gun:

Yeah. See, I started to grow my curly hair out into a mini afro-type thing (I'm caucasian). And it made me very popular with the opposite sex, because they liked the way it felt. A lot. And my mom get it cut just before the dance. So I pretty much sunk my chances of getting a date. And then my dad's like "haha you lost out and didn't have a date for the eighth grade dance." I was not too happy at all.

There are lots of rules that make zero sense on these forums, like when somebody makes a topic when there's already one yet mods lock bumped old topics. Just deal with it. Lots of stuff, like this, is spam, but some of it isn't, and it angers me when a mod locks stuff and says "Don't bump old posts."

*points to location* When the new forums came I just dug into my cache files and found the stuff :P. **EDIT: Holy crunk shizzle! I've been here over 2 years and have 952 posts...almost 1000! "I r teh oldbie." I should start posting more again.

Rock and a bit of oldschool hip-hop/rap. If I had to name 5 favorite bands of ALL TIME: Boston Van Halen Foreigner J. Geils Band Blue Oyster Cult Today's trendy MTV trash is so overrated. Only two recent songs I have in my playlist are Take Me Out (by the aforementioned Franz Ferdinand) and Hey Ya.

I actually HAVE one. Mine is about as loud as a lawnmower, not much louder, and is street-legal (considered a bicycle). However, people complain when I ride, despite the fact that the poseur with the $20,000 Mitsubishi ricer with a broken (read: NON EXISTENT) muffler can ride all up and down the street picking up blonde idiot girls. So just shut up. IMO they make little noise, and anybody who says otherwise is just idiotic. I can barely hear it when it's running from inside my house.

In a nutshell...but my goal is to use it for emulators so my bro and I can play Goldeneye and be able to use more than just the Stick. My keyboard and mouse USB adapter is seen as HID compliant. I know there are HID-compliant joysticks out there as well. Is there a program that emulates an HID joystick as an HID keyboard?

Okay, I have an adapter that lets you plug in a ps/2 keyboard and mouse and use them thru the usb port. I also have keyboard and mouse ps/2 ports on my motherboard. Is there any way I can plug two keyboards into the USB adapter (although one ps/2 port on the usb adapter is labeled mouse) and set them each up as a gamepad? So that any game that recognizes and uses gamepads can use the keyboard?

Buy a laptop. I bought a PDA and it does nothing for you. Just buy a low-end laptop and it will be far more powerful than a PDA ever will be. Or buy a DS or PSP, or just blow all of that upgrading your graphics card. Once again, I will reiterate: PDAs are a waste. If you want to store information, then buy a $10 electronic organizer or something. If you want to play games, get a DS or PSP. If you want to do everything, then get a laptop. That simple.

I run (all non-OC) AMD 64 3000+, 128MB PCI-E 600GT, 1GB and I can max out all the settings on HL2 and it will run at 60 fps on 1280x1024, but break down and overheat soon afterward. I get 100fps with no AA or AF.

Runs perfectly fine, got it yesterday. ~100 FPS on CS Source (which I got for free along with HL2) on 1280x1024. This was the best deal in the universe. I'm gonna post the company on the buying thread. Anyway, whenever it is doing something intensive like gaming, the temp is about 88 F. Is this stable?

You have integrated graphics. That means you are killed for gaming. Believe me, I know. I can't even run a circa-2003 game at lowest possible quality :? Get a video card that is independent and doesn't suck up system resources. Everyone screams 'OMG!!111111111 NVIDiUH 6600 GT" so I guess the best thing would be to get the NVidia 6600 GT and stick it in the AGP slot (if you have one, and you should). http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 206&depa=0 Hope that helps :). Or you can opt for a processor-mobo combo AND a new vid card, plus a new vid card, but that would set you back like $500 if you got decent parts, at which point buying a new computer is more economical.

Is it so difficult to read 16 posts? I posted my configuration a few posts above and I have a 6600 GT. For all who are lazy:

Damn, can't edit. Anyway, also, is Media Center Edition an add-on to Windows XP, or an OS in itself? I got it with the Microsoft Action Pack (google for it if you don't know what it is), and I may get a cheap TV Tuner Card in the near future.

I have a question - since I got a fan controller as well, will this turn off fans or slow them down or what? And with the system I have (see up two posts), will I need extra case fans? It should come tomorrow, so please tell me if I screwed up on the cooling so I can run out to Staples and buy fans or whatever.

That would be it. Arthur C Clark - 2001, A Space Oddysey. Also 2010: The Year We Make Contact, 2061, and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

I've used this ever since I joined the boards. I thought everyone knew about it since there was a link there :/ . I always check my posts before browsing any boards.

Tubarina What the heck is (sub 255)c(sub10)? Exponents are how you calculate it. I know I didn't account for the fact that some pieces of text have identical hashes, but let's examine: a one-character password would be 255^1, because there are 255 characters. a two-character password would be 255^2, because there are 255 first characters and 255 second characters possible per first character, so 255*255. As I said before, this doesn't take into account the odds of having a same hash.

ermm open your eyes mate, he already explained why theres a copy of the post there :roll: hi matey, i mean that he didnt wrote it all himself, he stole some stuff from others. :roll: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: What do you mean by that? You cannot copyright knowledge. Obviously all of this came from somewhere else, I didn't just make this all up; I learned through personal experience.

Skelm... It was posted by Force on Zanet. Who's force? ForceAPE! And I posted on that thread too...http://www.zanet.co.uk/forum/YaBB.pl?bo ... 1;start=18 third post down. Don't accuse me of plaigarism. I don't take it well.

Out password expire every 28 days and much be changed, we cannot use the same password again. ;) 8 characters is more than enough to be secure. Anything over 6 is pretty hard to brute force. I touched upon everything except the writing down bit (the logging out part doesn't matter if you have a strong password anyway, the file can't be cracked unless it's Windows, in which case yes you should log out). I'll calculate odds... Assuming full alphabet (255): 10 characters will take a conventional computer 18431691879 years. 8 characters will take it 283455. Which are you more safe with? I'll take 10 thank you. You're right, but what if they had a supercomputer with like 100 Itaniums in it? Then you're screwed too. My computer password is 25 characters long and had 5 symbols, 3 uppercase, 12 numbers and the rest lowercase letters. How's THAT for security!

In tow of my trojan guide, and since I just developed a sudden interest in cryptography and such using computers, I have decided to write a guide concerning the creation of a secure password. This guide will help users to create strong passwords that are unlikely to be brute-forced and harder to crack. So, without further ado, I present to you: BTTF Man's Ultimate Insider Guide to Strong Passwords "You weren't trojaned and you were hacked? Are you sure you had a STRONG PASSWORD?!?!" Disclaimer: This is an agreement between you, the reader and/or user, and BTTF_Man, the author and creator of this guide. This guide may be used by anyone for commercial or private purposes free of charge. However, the author (BTTF_Man) assumes no liability for any damages caused directly or indirectly from the use of this guide. Although the author (BTTF_Man) has made every attempt to make this guide understandable and free of technical, grammatical, and any other type of errors, there may still be some, and the author (BTTF_Man) accepts no responsibilty for damages caused by the use of this guide. Damages include, but are not limited to: computer crashes, computer overheating, mind-boggling, obsessive interest in one-way encryption algorithms, baldness, sudden inability to communicate with "normal" people, and being struck by lightning or spontaneous combustion. I will also make vast incorrect generalizations concerning hackers and stuff, but that's how the public views them, so tough. Now since that crap is out of the way, I shall delve into the guide itself! Fundamentals of one-way encryption and password hashing Contrary to popular belief, when your password is stored on any computer, whether it be your own or AIM's servers, it is not decrypted, rather, it is encrypted permanently. This is called one-way encryption, or hashing. Here, we shall delve into one of the most common forms of password encryption, a standard called MD5. MD5 is widely used throughout the world for storing passwords and the like, most especially in PHP and Perl. In fact, your forum account's password has been MD5'd. I shall examine an MD5 hash below: c30bb76b355a39dcd9e73bfb934b380d An MD5 hash is a 32-character long hexadecimal string that is generated based on a piece of text. For instance, the above is the md5 hash of "fark". In fact, go to here and enter "fark" (without quotes for those of you who are slow) in the "Input" box, then click MD5. In the "Result" box, you will see the above hash. Click it several more times. As you can see, an MD5 hash of a piece of text is the same EVERY TIME. There is nothing random about it. So, in a nutshell, you can take any piece of text of any length with any symbols, letters, and numbers in it and generate an MD5 hash. This hash can not be reversed (supposedly) mathematically, and is therefore considered secure and safe for use in passwords...but IS IT? WARNING: "GEEKY" MATH WITH LOTS OF DIVISION AND EXPONENTIAL EXPRESSIONS Scroll down to where it says the end of the geeky part and read from there if you aren't interested in the math. The odds of two pieces of text having the same MD5 hash are so impossibly tiny, but are present. It is 2^64, or 1 in 18446744073709551616. But, MD5 only works well if you have a longer password. If your password is 2 characters long and could have symbols in it, it would take at most 255^2 operations (65025) to guess it, and if it was upper and lowercase and numeric, it would take 62^2 (3844). Now these numbers may seem big, but when you take into account that my 7-year-old computer can do 250,000 guesses when trying to bruteforce or systematically guess the original password, it will take less than a second. But, if your password has symbols, upper and lowercase letters, and numbers in it and is a mere 10 characters long, it will take a conventional 2.7Ghz desktop computer, at most, (255^10)/2000000/60/60/24/365 years (or 18431691878 years) to guess your password (unless the person doing the bruteforcing had a supercomputer, in which case it would take a considerably shorter amount of time). GEEKY PART DONE NOW. READ FROM THIS POINT FORWARD. So how does all this math relate to you and your password? Well, since we are past the geeky part, I can go on to the layman's explanation. How to make a strong password (the part you should read) So, with all these figures in mind, let's just talk for a minute about how a hacker would even go about finding your password. When I talk about MD5, the MD5 hash is stored on the server, so that only the owner of the web site may get to it, and even then, unless they have powerful resources, they can't decrypt it or bruteforce it. But, there have been vulnerabilities in many pieces of software (PhpBB included) that allows a hacker to obtain MD5 hashes. Even if the hacker cannot get into the database and find your password's MD5 hash, he can still write a program to bruteforce and just guess through the online form, so the program types in your username and tries all possible passwords. This would take as many calculations as bruteforcing the hash itself, but is extremelyt infeasable because of the time needed for connecting to the server and such. Anyway, after getting off that tangent, many hackers who are trying to bruteforce a password assume that the user only has lowercase letters and possibly numbers in their password, so they will only look for those when bruteforcing. What does this mean for you? If your password has uppercase letters and symbols (the less commonly-used the better), you are more safe against a bruteforce attack. For instance, consider the following two passwords: abc a84jf%HR%#d#c-$&*/fdE Which is more secure? The second one, because it has nonadjacent symbols and upper and lowercase letters, plus some numbers. Granted, the second one could be shorter and still very secure, but this is just for an example. But, what I haven't touched on are two things: MD5 reverse lookup databases and social engineering. An MD5 reverse lookup database is a website where a hacker can go and enter an MD5 hash into a website. If the MD5 hash is in the database, then the web page will tell the hacker what the original text (password, in this cas, is). If it isn't he is out of luck. But he can also type in any piece of text and get it added to the database. So this is just a case of hackers helping hackers. If a hacker DOES manage to get your MD5 hash, and it is a common word that may be in the database, then he can find it easily. If your password is football and a hacker enters the MD5 hash of the word "football" into the database, it will probably come up and say that football hashes to that MD5 hash, because it is a common word. In short, don't use common words. My friend gave me his MD5 hash and bet me $10 I couldn't find out his password (this was after I explained the whole process and method of MD5 to him). I reverse-lookup'd his md5, and his password was, ironically, football (he is not a member of these forums and I have never typed his name on the computer at all, so admins and mods don't flip out). In 5 short minutes I probably could have accessed his email, AIM, and anything else important to him, had he had the same password for all his services. Which leads me to my next point... If you use the same password for all your services and accounts, if a hacker finds out one account's password, you're pretty much screwed. But if you have different passwords for all accounts, then you'd only have one account affected. Just common sense, I guess. Now on to social engineering. A hacker often uses a technique called social engineering to just guess passwords. They will gather all information possible about you: your name, middle name, maiden name (if applicable), your relative's names, your childrens' names, your dog's name, your ID number, your EVERYTHING, and then try to guess your password based on those. If your password is your mother's name, it's a pretty good chance that they'll guess it. But this doesn't happen as often as bruteforcing does, because some hackers are nice and assume you're smarter than that (but some don't). So don't do that either. They may also manipulate you into accepting a trojan or you telling them your password (if you get a trojan see my guide). And don't make your password something dumb like 1234, q1w2e3, or zxcv. What you SHOULD do for a secure password Basically, your password should be upwards of 10 characters long, contain numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and some symbols, the less common the better. It should also be random, if possible. And you should use different passwords for each account you have: your forum account, email account, and IM account should all have dfferent passwords. It should not be a dictionary word or contain any word that relates to you personally. Those rules of thumb will almost guarantee you a strong password. To recap and list for all you slow people: At least 10 characters Random if at all possible Upper and lowercase letters Numbers Symbols, the weirder the better (whee, ~~~tildes~~~ and ```weird apostrophes``` work well) Nothing stupid, like 1234, password, pass, your username, q1w2e3, or zxcv Nothing personally familiar to you No dictionary words There. You are close to hack-proof. For additional anti-trojan and regular security, read this thread with lots of software links and of course (prepare for shameless plug, third time in this guide) my guide on trojans. I hope you enjoyed this relatively-exhaustive paper on passwords. Go change yours from your dog's name to f74$&hJJ#4 or something.

Shows sizes, or it did when it worked...