Max's Blog

Hack Recovery 101

So, you have just been hacked, now what ?

Firstly, if the hackers have accessed your bank account, call your bank and get them to start sorting this out for you. They are very, very good at this, but it takes time. While you are waiting, lets secure everything we can.

Step 1 – Secure your e-mail account.

First of all, ensure that your e-mail provider supports ‘Multi-Factor Authentication’ or MFA for short.

I cannot stress how important this is, if you use your ISP’s ‘free’ e-mail, there is a very high likelihood that they do not support MFA, even if they do, there is more than a strong chance that in order to access your account from your phone, you are forced to use a static ‘application’ password.

This ‘static application password’ is the email equivalent of having ten deadbolts on your front door and your back door protected by a small, rusty, 99p padlock from Wilco. 

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Being a little different

I am autistic.

My brain is wired a little differently to the majority of the population, I hide it as much as I can and over the years I have got better and better at hiding it, but there is no getting away from it, my brain is wired a little oddly compare to a ‘regular’ person.

This is not a sympathy post. It is far from it – I do not want your sympathy, autism has given me a lot of advantages and has made me who I am today. I really quite like who I am too, so no sympathy please. I am happy.

What autism means in my case is a variety of things;

  • I can, and often do, retreat from everyone around me, disappear into ‘my own world’, which despite what people may think, is far from ‘little’ in order to work things through.
  • I lack empathy. Or perhaps more accurately, I lack intuitive empathy, I understand it and I use it, but it is not natural for me to use it or display it.
  • I am stupidly good at some tasks and laughably bad at others.
  • I have both infinite patience and zero patience. Very little in between.
  • I used to struggle to read people pretty much all the time. Now I can read them deliberately.
  • I can get incredibly emotional about some things and can be entirely cold about others.
  • Being the centre of attention is torture.
  • Big, Loud, Crowds disorient me.
  • I have had quite the career in the computing industry.
  • I can break exceptionally complex things into simple tasks in my head.
  • Explaining some of this stuff is very difficult.

…and quite a few things that are often inconsistent to a casual observer.

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The Thing

Many years ago I worked with an extremely sharp, but rather odd, systems analyst. He was a very, very intelligent person, but he drove me utterly crazy.

On numerous occasions, he would sit, silently in a meeting, listening and thinking and then, usually about five minutes from the end, when a general consensus was just about to be reached, he would say ‘Here’s the thing….’.

Every single time he did this, he would throw the meeting into chaos, because his ‘thing’ was nearly always something that we had not considered, or had considered and assumed it was not important and he would weigh in with ‘the thing’, which would mean that we invariably needed to have another meeting to discuss ‘the thing’, which meant that we had just wasted an hour or more of our lives.

He was a brilliant analyst, but I just hated working with him. Most of the time his ‘thing’ would be a seriously edgy edge-case that had no huge consequence, but delivered the way it was, with gravitas, it nearly always meant that the meeting would fail and we would have to consider his point in the next one before we could be productive.

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Four Years since my crash.

Four years ago a ‘driver’ crashed into me and my bicycle, rather than slow down marginally and avoid me. That decision slowed him down a great deal, he had to deal with a battered and bloody version of me for a while, then he had to deal with his insurance company and the courts and eventually the headache of a fine and points.

Which on the whole is not a lot compared to me.

In the last four years I’ve had…..

  • Three surgeries to fix my broken collarbone
  • Mostly recovered from many bruises and lacerations – although I have some scars
  • Gone through a lot of Physical Therapy
  • Not regained full use of my shoulder
  • Spent a lot of money on pain killers

Currently my shoulder is aching, I know that a nice hot shower and some ibuprofen will fix it, but that is not the point, my other shoulder does not hurt.

I have restricted mobility in my shoulder.

I went to see the medical examiner today, this should be my final visit.

We are in court in November, unless the drivers’ insurance company decided to try and settle it out of court and make us a really good offer.

It has been a very long road. The journey to compensation is probably nearing the end, but the pain and suffering will probably continue for a very long time.

Raleigh Record Sprint

Back in 1981, my mother and I persuaded my father that a brand new Raleigh Record Sprint would be a much better purchase at £161, than all of the other bicycles priced around the £80 mark in Roy Woods bicycle store.

£161 in 1981 was a lot of money, it is something like £450 in 2018.

For the money though I got a beautiful gloss black bicycle with exotic gold components and new-to-the market Reynolds 501 tubing. Compared to every other bicycle I had ever owned, it was fast and light and the ride quality was sublime.

The black and gold colour scheme echoed the JPS lotus cars of the previous decade, it oozed cool and Raleigh new it too.

Over the next few years despite being able to legally drive cars and ride motorbikes, I still managed to put a lot of miles on it. When I moved to my flat it became my primary transport for a while.

I have memories of riding to see friends on it, taking my cat to the vets on it and riding many many miles for pleasure.

That bike was a very early one, it had Campagnolo gears, safety brake levers and toe straps, it was lovely.

I eventually sold it, but for many years, I have looked for one to replace it.

In the last three years or so I have bid on a great number of them on eBay, usually they are way worn and in need of a lot of TLC, which is good, because this is what I am good at.

I dreamed about getting an old one, preferably a mark1, just like my original and then undertaking a ‘restomod’ on it.

This is where you take an old bicycle and keep little more than the frame, replacing the forks with Carbon blades, the 12 speed with a 2×11 setup and the wheels with something super light. Obviously the brakes would be swapped with modern ones and the pedals would be clipless LOOK or SPD jobs.

The problem is that the old Mark1 frames are virtually all in terrible condition, yet they still command a premium price.

The Mark2 was introduced in 1984 (I believe), it stuck with the 501 tubing, but with a twist, the Mark2 had ‘aero’ tubing. The frame was also slightly lighter. The decals are different too.

Thinking about this, I decided that finding a decent Mark2 frame would give me a good base, I could restomod it to my hearts content an maybe backdate the frame decals.

A week ago a Mark2 ‘barn find’ popped up on eBay. The seller had mispelled many words, it was advertised as a ‘Rayleigh Rekkord’. The photos showed what looked like a nice condition Record Sprint that had apparently not been touched in 30 years. I popped in a cheeky bid.

Amazingly I won it – there was one other bidder, had there been no other bidder I would have paid £30. As it was, the shipping was almost 1/3 of the total cost. 

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Americans and their Guns…..

Most of the rest of the world has had already had the debate, guns in the wrong hands are lethal. Restricting ownership to well trained, responsible people is a good idea.

It is a done deal.

In the UK and for the majority of Europe, Asia and, well, pretty much everywhere in the world, the cultural shift has been such that declaring that you want to own a gun seems to lead people to the conclusion that you are precisely the sort of person that shouldn’t own a gun.

Its a little bit like the old Douglas Adams quote ‘It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

In the majority of the developed world ‘self defence’ is not considered a valid reason for wanting to own a gun.

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Fixing Virgin Media Wi-Fi and Routing…

Virgin Media network cable connections can be really rather good.

The real world issue is that they are let down by the quality and performance of their ‘SuperHubs’, hereafter referred to as their ‘Stupid Hubs‘.

There are several problems…

  • The Hub is a combination device that tries to be Cable modem, Router, Wireless Access Point and a Switch.
  • The device is heavily locked down so that only limited amounts of user-tweaks are possible.
  • Wi-Fi performance is poor, not just the range, but its ability to handle loads.
  • Routing performance can be poor under specific circumstances.
  • The lock-down can cause technical issues with some VPN connections.

In our home, literally the only practical place that the stupid-hub can live is right next to the TV.

Because the Stupid-Hub appears to have inadequate RF shielding, when the TV is switched on, the performance of the Stupid-Hub Wifi drops considerably. For reasons that are not entirely clear, even wired connections suffer horribly (but not when Wi-Fi is turned off, suspiciously). The Virgin engineer that tried to sort this out for us recommend that the hub is at least 2m away from TV’s, monitors, microwaves and any other electrical devices, like computers, phones and iPads !

This is pretty impractical in a small house. A quick survey with a 2m long bamboo cane gave me just a handful of highly impractical potential locations. The loft was a strong contender for a while, but apparently the hub does not like low or high temps. Under the bath was considered and mounted on a wall half way up the stairs was briefly discussed. Just the issues running coax and power cables to these crazy locations ruled them right out.

Something needed to be done.

In short, if you want half decent Wi-fi, you need to disable it on the Stupid-Hub and plug in a decent wireless Access Point.

The standard Stupid-Hub was incapable of getting a signal to about half the house. It reached upstairs, but barely and there was zero signal in the office and the bathroom.

There are multiple ways to solve this. We chose to use high performance products from Ubiquiti and Netgear, but I am very aware that you could do nearly all of this on a tight budget by getting a decent Wireless Router from Netgear or Linksys etc.

This entry is all about doing it really well and building a high performance network that is robust, and can be upgraded over time without relying on a specific Internet Service Provider.

For us, step one was just to fix the terrible Wi-Fi.

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The growing need for proof….

In this ever connected world, it is pretty easy for anyone to say anything or to be anybody.

In the real world, you can tell a lie and as long as the person that you told it to does not have the ability to easily debunk it, you can get away with it for a very long time.

‘Oh yeah, I met so-and-so at $vague-venue in vague-year’  is pretty much impossible to prove or disprove and in general the onus lies on the recipient to prove or disprove, or to just accept and wonder.

Obviously the liar has to remember all of these lies and this requires either a brilliant recall of the lies that have been told to who, or it required that liar to simply not care.

In the real world a liar has just the stories to bolster their ego.

Of course there are some famous cases of people telling lies and getting away with it for year, but in general it is pretty easy to catch out a liar in real life.

The on-line world though makes it way more difficult and potentially a whole lot more dangerous, but I would like to propose a system that helps to catch people out.

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Yamaha MT10 – The new bike

I changed bikes a few weeks ago. I traded my much loved Triumph Tiger Sport 1050 for a Yamaha MT-10.

Last year I let my 16yo self interview me regarding the Tiger – it went about as well as you would imagine. So I thought it would be fun to do it again with the new bike.

16yos: ugly bike dude, what the hell is that ?

It is a Yamaha MT-10 .

16yos: I mean, what the hell is it ?

Technically it is called a Hyper or Super-Naked. It is something close to a Yamaha R1 with less plastic, less top-end rush and way more mid-range oomph. Think of it as a 1000cc sports bike that is road relevant.

16yos: So it is a streetfightered R1 – do you crash it, or is it supposed to be that ugly ?

It actually comes like that, it is much more comfortable than an R1, faster on real roads. Trust me on this, it is way more road-relevent than an R1, much more comfortable and it makes more sense at reasonably legal speeds.

16yos: How fast is it ?

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Pathological Lies

I have a friend that lives in a fantasy world, the lies have got ever more elaborate over the years and I worry that it is time for an intervention.

The following is a very abbreviated list of the lies and my internal reactions and a stab at some of the actual truths.

(Discussing a town that I hate, the last time I visited was with him, some time in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s)

‘Yeah, that was when I had the Evo 8’

  • Nope, you had a 1988-1992 Mitsubishi Galant/Lancer grandpa edition with an automatic gearbox. The Evo 8, which you never owned, came out in 2003.

‘Oh, must have been the Evo4’

  • Sigh, nope, you have never owned one. The original Evo came out in 1992 – The events that I am describing were 1990 or 1991 at the very latest. Additionally the original Evo was very, very hard to find outside of Japan. The EVO IV was produced from 1996 to 1998. I think you had a Cavalier at the time. I think it was a GL/GLS spec, also with an automatic gearbox, too.

(Discussing my disdain for vans and their drivers)

‘I thought about stuffing a V10 in (his van) like <redacted> did in his transit van

  • Nope <redacted> talked a lot about putting a Rover V8 in his rotten transit van, it was a reasonably well documented conversion, but despite finding a suitable Rover V8, he never got around to it as the MOT man showed him how rotten the thing was and he traded it for a newer Renault Traffic van if I remember correctly.

‘That thing was really quick’

  • no, it wasn’t, it never got built, had it been built, the 150-180hp (Rover V8) would not have made it ‘really quick. It would have been quicker than the worn to hell Ford 2.0, but not really ‘quick’ in any sense of the word.

‘I chipped the EVO 4/5/6/7/8/9 (depending on the conversation). It made so much power it broke the dyno – that was rated at over 1000hp.

  • There are a couple of ~1000hp EVO’s out there, they need way more than a chip, usually it includes massive turbo’s, huge intercoolers, big engine mods and a lot of money. You might have eaten a few chips in your Galant, but….

(Following a visit home, I mentioned that I had taken a couple of helicopter lessons)

To my dad after I had gone home – ‘I flew Max around Leicestershire in a helicopter’

  • Nope – I mentioned to you that I had a couple of helicopter lessons. Whereby you said…

‘Oh yeah, I got my licence in (varying year) and spend a fair bit of time teaching nowadays.

  • But then you looked confused when I mentioned that I was struggling with hover turns and getting my head to understand that more left pedal needs more throttle and vice-versa and you can actually have a situation where you turn right, but stay at the same height by rolling off the throttle slightly. I was looking for tips. I seriously doubt you have ever sat in a whirly bird.

‘Of course it is a bit different when you are used to a Chinook.’

  • Blink – I bet it is, the little Robinson R22/R44 that the flight school use are real rather than imaginary.

(Various times when money or the cost of things comes into play)

‘I won the lottery and bought an island near Richard Bransons’

  • Well, why are you still living in Burbage ?

‘We paid our mortgage off years ago mate, we are saving our pennies for our retirement.

  • Thats great – but your better half was telling me that you are looking to remortgage to build an extension. So I am not so sure you are being honest here.

I mentioned that I have re-connected with my daughter and that I am now a grand-dad !

‘My eldest daughter committed suicide.’

  • Nope. You were are not old enough. When this first surfaced, I think that you would have had to become a father at twelve. As far as I remember, you never had a relationship at the right sort of times to have a teenage daughter than nobody had ever met.

(I had many heard several versions of this before, but it was not ‘my daughter’ it was a friends daughter, or a customer, or some other female at random, usually the victim is found in a bath with their wrists cut, I am sure that there is an old episode of Taggart that sparked his imagination.)

(When the subject comes around to old friends. Specifically after seeing an old friend for the first time in years)

‘Remember {insert random girl from school} ?

  • Nope, I barely remember anyone.
  • Or, yes, she was pretty horrible to me as far as I remember.

‘Well I saw her in town the other day/week/month/last year, she wanted me to fix her electrics, shag her, shag her and her younger sister or even shag her while her husband filmed it’ – Well it would be a shame not to huh ???

  • I would bet serious money that you didn’t do any of the above.

‘Do you remember {insert random boys name here} from School. He got arrested, his father was done for handling stolen cars, he is living on an island, he died (yet is still on Facebook), he is a customer now, he is doing really well and wants me to setup a company for him, he is retired and wants me to setup a company with him etc….’

  • Barely, I have pretty much blanked out much of that time. Oddly the ‘wants me to setup a business with him lie seems to be very common. Usually it is robotics or alarms or similar.

(talking about some tech that I worked on in the late 1980’s, that is still pie in the sky.

‘Yeah, I got a camless engine working for Lamborghini back in (time five years before I was working on the project), but we struggled with it over 200mph for $nonsense_reason’

  • Back in the day, we had one running but struggled with all sort of issues beyond about 4k rpm, when we finally got past that, it was fantastically unreliable. It was only by having a low compression, non-interference design that we were able to lower the costs enough to test the theory. The best of the best was a V6 that had a wonderfully drivable bottom end, but we ran out of processor ability just as we got into the meat of the power (about 140hp if memory serves). We simply struggled with everything you can imagine. To manage 200mph in a Lamborghini needs at least 500+ hp, so, yeah, bullshit. Camless Tech

(Current jobs and projects –  I am a product manager and love the job)

Not sure I told you, but BMW paid me £20,000 (later £30,000) for a nights work redesigning a robot for them. It took just 6 (later 8) hours, (flashes picture of random car assembly robot on google) and they paid me £20,000 (or £30,000 a few hours later) in cash for the work I did. I did it all by hand too, it is all about understanding such things.

  • Sure……

Yeah, I made about £270,000 in the last year, I put most of it into trust accounts for the kids to avoid paying tax.

  • OK….

But this year, due to my {insert disease of the day}, I’ve been on disability all year and apart from the BMW contract and a couple of undercover missions ( ! ), I’ve barely done anything, it has been great to pick the kids up from school though. Oh I did one other job, but I’m not allowed to tell you about that one, but it did pay well.

  • What the actual ????

(discussing shoulder injuries and how we are healing)

‘I had experimental shoulder surgery that needed a 3D printed part. ‘

  • Wow, beats my plate and six screws, impressively small scars too !
  • (reads up on it). Erm, no, just no. https://3dprint.com/11086/3d-printed-shoulder-replica/ not with such tiny scars.

(To my partners’ BIL)

‘I was in the SAS / Army / Para’s / Airforce’

  • Exactly when was this ?
  • I mean I may have not seen you for a while at various times, but I keep tabs on you.
  • I just cannot figure out when this was. Seriously I cannot figure it out.

(Common boast some time back)

‘I was one of the pilots taxiing Concorde at Coventry airport’

  • Oh Really ?

(When Alexandra got her Karate brown belt)

‘I gave up with Karate as there is nobody to teach me anything, I did my black belt twice already.’

  • There may be a grain of truth here, some karate students do turn around and redo. But ‘nobody to teach me’ feels a tad far fetched at best.

(Talking about a trip to Singapore and how hard I was finding to learn even tiny bits of Mandarin)

‘Oh yeah, when I spent a year in {insert country} I learned a fair bit of $language.

  • Which year was that ? I mean exactly, you lived at home with your parents until you were in your late twenties, then you bought a house with your partner. Every time I visited my father or my brother when I was stuck down south, I heard stories of you book packing, or attending tech college etc. There was no big gaps.

(I had a really bumpy flight out of the UK four years ago, I thought we were going to die)

‘I remember flying out of the {war zone} with six dead and nineteen injured, I had to fly one handed and one legged due to {injury}. That was a rough flight I can tell you.

  • Flying a helicopter with one hand is pretty much limited to the movies, they are actors, they are not flying, they are sitting in the seat while the helicopter is flown by an actual pilot.

(back to people, while walking to pier)

‘You will never guess who I saw, in $city, recently.

  • The Queen perhaps ?