DrunkenBlog

Ticket to Hell #407

I got to hang out with a group of old friends today and compare notes, which was both surreal and cool. I hadn't seen these people for years, and some of the stories came up were things I'd forgotten about.

Headlight-tag was mentioned, which isn't worth going into that great of detail on... suffice to say it involved a group of people in the dead of night, involved you being 'it' when someone flashed their brights in your rear-view mirror, and I wish I could go back in time and slap some sense into us.

One story was brought up which I'd already left in the comments on tomservo ages ago, so I figured I'd throw it up here since I'm interviewing someone and making them tell an embarrassing story for posterity.

I will preface: I know I was a jerk, and it was payback for a joke they'd played on me which I won't give details on because it would just make me look worse. My practical jokes had a habit of being heavily disproportional to the original offense.

Dunno why, but this reminded me of a very cruel joke I played on a friend awhile back to get even for a not-so-cruel joke played on me a month before. This person was mildy computer literate.

Basically called and said my net was down, and that i was in the middle of a project, and could I come over and borrow their net access… said sure, no problem.

Showed up and plugged in the laptop, checked some mail and fired up the terminal… and did ssh into a few places and did some stuff for awhile… after about an hour the mark asked what I was working on, and I said “I’m trying to get into somewhere” after hesitating for a few seconds… they asked where, and I said a remote computer I’d heard about that had some software I wanted and that I wanted to poke around in. “um, here, you can see, but its between us, right?” was said…

Moved the laptop to the table, and had a suitable amount of aliases and functions setup to really make the gag work, as well as setting the hosts file to redirect specific things locally. Prompt was changed, commands pulled up pseudo-military gobblygook. Remember, i had a month (didnt want to do things too soon after their little joke…) to work it all up in my spare time.

srv08.airforce.gov.mil raised a flag in their head, as did the application ‘JohnnyPassCrack’ which was just finishing throwing a bunch of *****’s across the screen and giving a ‘please enter password’ prompt… entered the password, and a really nasty looking “us airforce warranted personal only” list came up… with the prompt changed again, and throwing me into a local directory that had a bunch of text files.

Opened one which gave an a web address and pass, to which i entered… which due to the host file being redirected was sent to apache (made sure to have the address bar in the browser turned off), which then pulled up a really awful tv-special-looking “US Airforce Federal Database” page… complete with non working forms for various things and several equally bad pages… which the person never got a look at except for the titles as I clicked through, but would set off red flags in anyone’s head. IE, Warrant Search with a sidebar full of random peoples heads of the most wanted which were animated gifs to keep switching… really hokey stuff.

Then I said “this feels slow” and switched over to the the terminal app and ran “backtraceCrack” which of course did its “searching…” progress and pulled up a bright red “ALERT Backtrace in progress from srv08.airforce.gov.mil 87% complete” and upped the percentenge by one every half second, which allowed me just enough time to look dumbstruck and look at the person like “shit” and stand up to fumble in the back of the laptop for the ethernet connection and unplug it a hair after it said “backtrace 100% complete”.

Said mark was really really really freaking out, as said mark had seen enough movies to know tracing often meant following something back to the source… ‘did you get it out? what the hell? can they tell where we are? what did you do? what did you do?’. I of course said “I didn tthink they could do it that fast! That was way too fast!” along with things like “Jesus, is there anything on your computers you could get in trouble for? We need to get rid of anythiing now”… while they were really starting to melt down and go into freakout mode.

“I have to go, I can’t have this on my record, I’m sorry I have to go” while acting just as nervous and freaked out but saying that we didnt actually do anything and their logs should show that since we didnt get a chance to erase them so they shouldn’t really have anything on us. “US? I DIDNT DO SHIT!” and such were said… it didnt go well.

They didn't want me out the door, said I needed to stay to explain things, while I was trying to convince them we should both grab the important hard drives and take them somewhere and come back in case someone does show up… but if we were going to do it we needed to do it fast, as right then if they were going to come they’d be throwing in a request to a judge for a warrant of the ISPs records and sending a message to local authorities to pick us up…

Long story short, I got them to crack their case and take their hard drives out to their car, and then hit a coffee shop and made them park with the license plate towards the building just in case there was an APB out for the license plate… next step was talking him into hitting the bank to withdraw enough money to live on for a few weeks in case his accounts were somehow frozen… or at least enough to get him to his parents while things hit the fan… all the while posing interesting questions like “will going to their house make them liable?”, etc.

Which I never got to, as while we were having coffee they just got so upset that they were shaking and almost in tears and well I just didnt have the heart to keep it up… it wasn’t pretty when I told them, then showed them the scripts, the files, the locally-served webpages…

Basically we have a moritorium on practically jokes now between the two of us. “Crazy fucker” was mentioned several times along with other phrases I won’t go into. But, yeah, I don’t really do practical jokes anymore… like everything I do, they tend to go a little bit beyond the point where any sane person would stop.

Don't judge the guy too hard for falling for it -- the key to this one was the person believing it's something I'd really do, and I was the guy who'd tried to build a smokescreen and rocket launcher for his car on a bet (this didn't go well) and almost been expelled for screwing up the computers at school (among other things).

Suffice to say, he was well within his right to question my decision making process when it came to judging risk/reward as a young man.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 02, 2005, at 06:43 PM