computoman

Thinking back oh so many years ago when the internet was not universal yet and everyone used dial-up bulletin board systems to communicate with. There was a lot of messaging as there is today. When it came to file transfer, that was another story. At that time, the only way to download a binary file was to download a file full of hex data. The hex data ascii file was then converted to the binary file. There was no error checking so that if you have line noise and extraneous data  was captured, you usually had to recapture the file. Not fun especially with large files and slow download speeds. Eventually. There was a file transfer technique known as xmodem that would allow portions (known as packets) of the file to be downloaded and checked for integrity till the full file was downloaded.   But there laid a small problem, My commercial terminal program for the commodore 64 did not support xmodem.  Knew how to program the hardware to get get and send data, so then ...

Not many people are aware unless you are an old timer, but you could and still can access the world wide web from a DOS (freedos or etc) machine. Myself first access was with Mosaic and Netscape from MSWindows. To access the internet you had to have a network card. Everyone knew about a modem card, but the ethernet network card was something magical. But also back in those days to any anything up you had to deal with jumper switches (possible nightmare) until plug-n-play came along. Notice the coaxial cable connector. Yes the ethernet cables were not popular yet. You set up your network in a bus rather than the star configuration we use today, If one link of the bus network was not connected right the whole network would be down. Anyway, just like today you have to have special software aka drivers for your computer to talk to the network cards. The network drivers were sometimes known as packet drivers. You sent packets of data on the network is where that idea came from. One of t...

One of the issues I talked about in an earlier article ( http://www.meetdageeks.com/2012/05/is-your-network-firewall-backdoor-open.html ) was about making sure the network infrastructure was secure, That is all the cabling and networking equipment was secure. Look at the following picture and tell me if it is secure. Actually there is a passive network tap inside with a cable going off to a computer in another room. At that other computer someone is eavesdropping or what is known at packet sniffing. The network taps make it easy to record from what you type on the keyboard to recording voip conversations. They require no power and can be made dirt cheap. The only shortcoming is that you have to be nearby to take advantage of it. It would be very easy if someone rented or had access to the office next door to use this device. They might have to punch a hole in the wall to access it unless there is some kind of socket nearby. To record what is coming from the victims compute...