DrunkenBlog

I did not hack your computer

I was just listening to the audio version of the WWDC presentation by Will Shipley. Very cool, I would send you a link but it already has you finger prints on it - in the comments it says "drunkenbatman was here" :)

Troy P.

Yeah, amusing that. I've been getting a steady trickle of these over the last ~2 weeks, which have to do with an audio file Will Shipley put up on his blog at the beginning of July.

If you hadn't seen it, Will gave a talk to a big group of students at WWDC 2005, and threw up some slides afterwards, and then decided he wanted to do a (in his words) 'podcast thingy' of the talk. If you go and get it, and throw it in something like iTunes, you'll see this...

Who knows how many downloaded the audio file, but I know the slides were downloaded umpteen thousand times... And I've gotten around 15 emails from it, which isn't bad considering someone had to notice it, then make the connection, then find my email or at the very least open Mail.app and type wordage.

Unfortunately, I've also gotten this:

TO "DRUNKENBATMAN" OR TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN OR EDITOR OF DRUNKENBLOG.COM

I AHVE RECENTLY FOUND YOUR NAME UNWARRANTED WITHIN MY COMPUTERS FILES. MY INVESTIGATION HAD LED ME TO THE WEBSITE WWW.DRUNKENBLOG.COM AND YOUR SECURITY EXPLOITS. I DEMAND FULL NOTICE OF THE MEANS YOU ACCESSED MY COMPUTER AND A LISTING OF EVERY FILE YOU HAVE MODIFIED OR VIEWED OR I WILL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO CONTACT THE PROPER AUTHORITIES. IF YOU DO NOT RESPOND WITHIN THREE DAYS I WILL INTERPRET YOUR ACTIONS AS CRIMINAL AND RESPOND IN KIND.

*Beats head against table*

I'm not even going to give a first name on this one, because even I don't have that ruthless a streak, but suffice to say the above is unedited and his kung-fu is strong.

Since the hard drive died last night, the all-caps almost pushed me over the edge of leaving an outline of an Apple with my shiny new paperweight, but we must remember the ham story.

While this was the most... extreme... of the three I got wanting to know how I'd gotten into their machines, there were three emails, which means it's worth spelling this out so, you know, no one looks sillier than they already do while investigating via google.

Anywho, I'd sent Will and app called Audio Recorder (By Ben Shanfelder) for something completely unrelated to any of this, and because Audio Recorder is so kick-ass and simple, Will ended up using it to do his podcast thingy. Will ended up with an AAC-compressed .mov file of his gargantuan ~1.5 hour talk, but wanted a straight audio file so people could put it on their iPods and stuffins.

Since we were already talking about some things, and he was about to crash, it was just easier for me to take it and pass the audio out as a straight AAC file via QuickTime so nothing was lost and forward it back to him for when he woke up.

While I was there, I figured it should have some tags, so I gave it a silly album name that reminded me of stuff we'd talked about earlier, set the genre to 'Religious', and threw my name in the comments because that's the kind of thing that happens when I'm fiddling with things that late at night.

I figured:

• Will would either look at the tags the next day, see my digi-graffiti and laugh, or...

• He'd not bother, because Will is almost beyond such things now (If you run into him, pop-quiz him on the current cost of a gallon of milk without letting him query his manservant and you'll see what I mean), and the small percentage who would actually look at the tags would be confused. If I was really lucky, they'd have heard of my name and they'd get a laugh.

Another of the two, who was extremely amusing (at first) in an unintentional way, basically thought that since he reads my site I must have a bit of code that was exploiting Safari to pull off my prank. And if I did, would I be so kind as to give it to him.

My reply was a javascript file that did hello world, and when he responded back that he couldn't see how the exploit worked in the file -- and could I please spell out the instructions -- I was at a loss and just left it because the next step could only be 'inviso-text' and the amusement factor had been tapped and sapped.

*rubs temples*

Never in my wildest would I guess someone would think their computer has been hacked because of the ID3 tags of an audio file they downloaded, but again we're back to the ham story, and at this moment the ham story is about all that is keeping me from swinging my shiny new Powerbook paperweight.

So no, google investigators, your computer has not been hacked, and I do hope this post alleviates your concern before you email me, where you run the very real risk of perhaps catching me on a bad day when the ham story has slipped my mind, and I say things from a less than polite and understanding frame of mind.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    July 12, 2005, at 02:49 PM