
FLIPPERSMACK 004

culturemag for a penguin generation
http://www.flippersmack.com



I suck at getting these out every week. However, with all the adventuring
going on, who has time to write? Send me stuff to review!

pinguino


tABLE oF cONTENTS

Belmont Tunnel Adventure........................Pinguino
Telus 4O3-31O-5555 Divertor Exploit............The Clone
Comic Book Reviews..............................Pinguino
                           -.x.x.x.-

Belmont Tunnel Adventure
by pinguino [pinguino@inker.com]

Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things. However, a penguin
does, and excitement is what last weekend was all about. To sum it up, I
went to Internet World (trade show), crawled through an abandoned subway
tunnel, and wandered Melrose.


INTERNET WORLD

    I didn't go last year, but everyone was saying that the show was only
a fourth the size of last years. A lot of dotcoms with really expensive
booths really had no visitors, and no energy. One company did stand out,
however. Radware. They do firewall stuff; at the show they had a guy
escape from a straightjacket while balancing on a 6 foot unicycle AND talk
about Radware with a Powerpoint presentation. He was amazing, and used
repetition and bribery to keep the audience and get them to repeat the
company name and key points of his lecture. He gave out bouncy balls that
made noise and lit up; the one Kilna got still works 5 days later, which
is amazing for tradeshow trash.

NIGHTTIME

    We split up; Kilna took off on the new Los Angeles subway for the
first time, to his friend Das's house. Slapayoda and I headed up to
Universal City to say hi to Skrike, and visited him at work. Afterwords, I
worked on a comic strip while Slappy got to nap. We dashed out to meet up
with Das, and got distracted in Koreatown, ending up at a random chinese
resteraunt. We hooked up with my friend Jay Tan, of Tan Dynasty
Productions, for dinner. We went back to his place and played with his
baseketball and did some ground grappling for a while. Meanwhile I got
super cracked out on some weird caffeine pill.

BELMONT TUNNEL

    Our destination was Das's house at the stroke of Midnight. Our party
consisted of Das, Kilna, Slapayoda, Secret Squirrel, Jay, and myself. We
used a Thomas Brothers map to find the general location of the tunnel
based on a very vague webpage. I had a feeling that I knew where the place
was going to be, and I was only a few blocks off. It took us about 15
minutes to find the tunnel, which was larger than expected. The dropoff
from the main road to the tunnel clearing was very steep, about 20 feet.

    Kilna took a shortcut down and when I tried to follow him, about 10
feral dogs came barking at me, and an orangeish brown dog started biting
at my braids. It was pretty scary; I didn't know if they'd go for my limbs
and tear my skin to shreds with my friends staring up the hill at me. I
crept over to the fence and dashed down the rope and eventually the
barking stopped.

    The clearing was as large as an average mall parking lot. The tunnel
was big enough for two subways to fit. The tracks were pulled up, and
every possible surface was painted with the most beautiful taggings I'd
ever seen. An intricate lacework of words and names crossing generations
of delinquints were the markings of age and timelessness. We went into the
tunnel, which was covered in mud and trash. There were no criminals hiding
in the darkness, or homeless people sleeping in the shadows. We were
slightly paranoid that we were being followed, but determined that the
weird noises came from water dripping down from above. Oil seeped from the
ground, and we gingerly avoided stepping in it. In some areas of the
tunnel, the water had been dripping for so long that stalagtites had
formed.

    At the end of the tunnel, we found a stripped down truck sitting in
decay. Our theory is that it was a stolen vehicle that was driven into the
tunnel, where it was stripped of parts and sold by gang members.

    The Belmont Tunnel was built 75 years ago as a subway route between
downtown LA and Hollywood. Two trains fit inside. The tunnel is about a
mile long; the train would've been above-ground the rest of the trip. For
some reason, this tunnel was shut down; part of the end was closed off to
put in a foundation for a hotel. The original tracks were pulled out. Los
Angeles has since, in the past 10 years, built a modern subway system that
reaches down to Long beach, and goes as north as Universal City.

THE NEXT DAY

    Wandering through tunnels can be exhausting. I ended up at the DMV all
day though, and crashed over at Slapayoda's at 4ish. We then proceeded to
do our hair. I bleached mine out and got it down to yellow. Slapayoda dyed
his black. Meanwhile, Skrike came back with our friend Junk, and his
girlfriend Jolie. They had travelled down from San Jose. After our hair
was ready, we all went to Jerry's Famous Deli in Westwood. Westwood is the
UCSD college area; also a really preppy/trendy shopping district. Jerry's
Deli is a Jewsish place that serves just about everything, including
Tounge. I ended up getting a tuna sandwich and a cherry soda, which was
realllly good. Nobody ordered tongue, but Junk seemed to be thinking about
it pretty hard, just on the principle of ordering it. The real question
would have been, "who would be tasting who?"

    Junk and Jolie split for San Diego, but Slapayoda and I weren't really
tired, so we randomly went to the old Muscle Beach in Santa Monica. I
showed Slappy the spitting dragon, and we swang for a while and played on
the random pieces of metal strewn across the sand. Muscle Beach is always
a lot of fun.

SUNDAY

    We ended up at the Getty on Sunday. I don't know why I've never gone
before. The architecture was incredible; modern design at its finest. We
looked at sculptures mostly.

    Afterwards, Slapayoda and I went to Melrose, where Slap found a cool
spikey watch at Redemption. We had to look at the weird spacesuits and
stuff at RedBalls, and bat skulls at this other weird store. We ended up
at Pinks, this crack hotdog stand, where we stood in line for 45 minutes
for a hotdog. The only reason a person would wait 45 minutes for a hotdog
is if there was a good amount of crack in it.

    Afterwards, we went down to USC to hunt down the Stormriders. It took
forever to find the place; I got lost and couldn't remember where it was,
and then we got misguided directions practically in front of the building.
When we got in I got to see a ton of my raver friends who I missed bunches
and bunches. Yay! I went back home after that; an exciting and dramatic
weekend of adventure.
                           -.x.x.x.-

    +-	K-1ine "A 'zine for the 780 undergr0und scene" 
	  K-1ine offers the newest H/P and random misc 
	  articles from people all across Canada and the USA. -+ 
	  w w w . n e t t w e r k e d . n e t  
 
                           -.x.x.x.-

The Telus 4O3-31O-5555 Divertor Exploit
by The Clone [theclone@hackcanada.com]

notes: this article has been written to point out
       a small yet potentially hazardous vulnerability
       within the 'Band 1 INWATS' regional (403)-310-5555
       Telus customer care system in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

docs:

 For the last couple of months I've received several (approximately 20)
 annoying repeat calls from the Telus customer care line; (403)-310-5555,
 from slack-jawed marketing bastards who want me to sign up for their
 rip-off long-distance plans. Normally my reaction to such calls is always
 to pick up the receiver and slam it down as fast as I can in a hopeful
 attempt that they'll take a hint that I don't want their long-distance
 shit service (T-MAX calling cards all the way, bay-be!). 

 However today I felt a little bit of love in my heart for the capitalist
 pigs (or maybe it was the vodka doin' the thinkin'?), so I decided to
 actually pick up the phone and wait for a chipper Telus employee to
 coerce me into becoming a LD subscriber. To my surprise I wasn't greeted
 with a voice, but instead a total of 30 seconds of silence. 

 "What the hell is going on?" I thought to myself. Immediately after, a
 sweet enchanting female voice said aloud: "Hello, Telus communications?
 Hello, anybody there?" "Hi, you just called me from 310-5555, are you
 going to drown me out with your marketing crap or what?" I asked her.

 "Oh no! You must be another customer who got routed to our main office.
 See what Telus has done for all of Alberta is about a couple of months
 ago we upgraded our router software and since then around 50-75% of the
 calls me make out to customers gets automatically re-routed back to us."
 she responded.

 I then proceeded to ask "I see, well I have a question for you. I hope
 you don't mind answering it." 

 "sure... annyyything" she responded with such young cheerfulness it struck
 a thousand evil sexual ideas in me all involving whips, chains and butt
 plugs. 

 "Well, when my call got routed back to you what was displayed on your
  screens for ANI information?" I asked.

 "Excuse me, ANI?" she said with confusion.

 "Caller ID..." I responded.

 "Ohh... it says, hrm... 403-310-5555" she said again with confusion. 
 (musta been a blonde)

 "all right. That's all I wanted to know. Thanks a lot." I concluded.

 "No problem. Thanks for calling Telus Communications, have a WONDERFUL day!"
 she ended with more cheerful glee. Fuckin' bitch musta taken too much
 Prozac before her shift. Figures.

 -

 Wowwy, she didn't even see me as being in the same area code!

Now, what do you think one has the ability to do when they get re-routed
to the main line at Telus Communications with their ANI information displaying
"Telus Communications, 310-5555"? Social engineering of course! :)

http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=Social%20Engineering

Having such an obvious divertor is wonderful when social engineering a
Telus employee out of their bounties and bounties of useful information.

Imagine for a second that you have just found a map to the hidden cave
of fortune, but when you got there you were confronted by a big scary
ogre who wanted you to prove you were the true prince of riches that
he's been waiting for for 15 years. You've gotta use wit, charm and charisma
to get into that cave or else he's going to crush you like a little bug
and eat your dead carcass. The same goes for social engineering Telus employees.

So if sometime in the future you *DO* get that phone call from 403-310-5555
and just happen to get re-routed to a ditsy operator broad, you'll know
how to get whatever information you want outta them (ie. DATUs, routing 
codes, test #s, an outdial, etc) because *YOU* went to the url explaining
social engineering and *YOU* read my horrible analogy!

Now go get 'em my telco tigers! 

                           -.x.x.x.-
Shidima #1

PUBLISHER: Image/Dreamwave
WRITER: Adrian Tsang
PENCILS: Arnakin
INKER: Ramil Sunga

Shidima is a new Image acquisition, created by Pat Lee and Adrian Tsang of
Dreamwave Productions. A group of rebels known as the Shidima fight
against an evil emperor; this particular comic book introduces a handful
of characters and shows the interactions soon to come. The artwork
contains an inner energy and beauty not often found in comics. Lines move
across the pages to tell an anime-inspired samauri story of the hatred and
compassions in war. This is the first book of the Warlands series, with a
spinoff called Banished Knights soon to come. Eagerly we await our next
serving of Shidima.

The Names of Magic #1-3

PUBLISHER: DC/Vertigo
WRITER: DYLAN MORROCKS
ARTIST: RICHARD CASE

A new series from Vertigo follows the 10 year adventure known as the Books
of Magic. Tim is a teenage boy who has the potential to be one of the
greatest magicians in the history of the world.. if he can survive long
enough to learn control and precision. In Names, Timothy Hunter must learn
his true name, his magical name. Without it, he is vulnerable to attack
from Faerie and demons. As usual, great artwork and excellent writing make
the Magic series a highly enjoyable read.

                           -.x.x.x.- 


Flippersmack (c) 2001 Pinguino Kolb   All Rights Reserved.
