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Revision3 CEO on DOS and MediaDefender

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:42:50 +0000

The website and shows at Revision3 were not accessible through the Memorial Day Weekend due to a denial of service attack (DOS) against their servers. Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback wrote a well written detailed response in the company blog that explained the facts behind the attack on the servers.

The story goes like this. Media Defender, the company that is regularly hired by RIAA, MIAA and other entertainment companies was using a backdoor in the Revision3 torrent tracker for their own purposes. One has to understand that the torrent tracker is being used to spread the legit releases of the company to the public. Well the service was exploited and Jim unfortunately fails to mention what Media Defender has used the service for.

The problems began when Revision3 discovered the activity eventually and put a stop to its use. The Media Defender server however responded in a rather irregular fashion flooding the Revision3 servers with 8000 Syn requests per second which eventually brought the server and the rest of the infrastructure down for the weekend.

It’s hard to say if the Denial of Service attack on the server was an automatic reaction of the Media Defender servers and Jim Louderback chooses his words carefully. The FBI is investigating the incident, no word yet if Revision3 will sue Media Defender as well.

Find out your bios password

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:01:05 +0000

The bios can be protected with a password to prevent others from accessing its settings. You have to enter the password to be able to access it, if you can’t provide the correct one the access gets denied. The following method describes a way to recover the password if you forgot it or bought a used computer with a bios password.

CmosPwd is a free program that is able to display information about the bios once it is executed. You do need to create a bootable disk to be able to execute the program in dos mode. To create a bootable disk in windows right-click the disk drive and select format from the list of options. It is important that you enable the option Create an MS-DOS startup disk.

Once the disk is created copy the contents from the dos folder of cmospwd to the disk and restart the computer. You will have to remove all hard drives from the system if you do not automatically boot from disk drive. Type cmospwd.exe in the command line and the password should appear. Ignore the information about the other bios manufacturers and take a look at the one your computer is using.

Another possible method would be to start the computer in safe mode with command prompt which could work as well. You still need to access the files somewhere so make sure that the hard drive is accessible.

From Dos/Windows to Linux Howto

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:38:20 +0000

When I tried to switch for the first time from windows to Linux I felt left alone. The web was not what it now uses to be, tutorials and help documents were scarce and one had to have a friend who could help or try the trial and error way to get Linux installed and configured. Linux is becoming more user friendly and lots of tutorials and help sites pop up that help beginners and guide them through the basic installation and configuration process.

One of these websites that I can recommend is linux online. They´ve written an extensive tutorial that explains many Linux concepts and tries to answer the question if you should make the switch to Linux (or dual-boot).