hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0723.txt

Episode: 723
Title: HPR0723: How to be a safe computerist
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0723/hpr0723.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:31:46

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Hi everyone, my name is Klaatu and this is Hacker Public Radio, Urban Camping Episode 8.
This is the final episode, I think I said there were going to be seven or eight or nine,
so this is it, eight, the final one.
I waited a little while to do this one because I was actually getting a lot of listener feedback.
Well actually to date I think probably more listener feedback on this series than I've ever had
on anything else aside maybe from a blender tutorial or something, but a lot of people it seems
kind of found this idea really either intriguing or really similar to something they were doing
or whatever. I as usual have done a horrible job of collecting all of the things that I was
supposed to collect about you know what they all said to me, so I'll just say that generally
speaking people have said that it's a really neat idea, something that they would really like to
try, something that they intend to try at some point, and two things off the top in my head
that people mentioned were one that hack spaces are really really good for an urban camping or
would be really good, and I think that is true. I've only been in real life to one hack space and
that was the one in New York, Rochester, New York area, and it was really cool and I can imagine if
I was really really close to a hack space and it was really convenient to get to it, I would probably
spend a lot of time in a hack space, probably pay the membership, do or whatever, get a key,
and just hang out there basically all the time because that would be fantastic. As I said in my last
episode episode 7, that can be also a little bit of a curse because there is that kind of, oh I'm
a geek, I don't have to go outside, I can just sit at my computer all alone and hack all day,
and while that's really really great for focus sometimes, sometimes it's not so good for kind of
getting your mind to be thinking out of the box and just meeting new people, which you know,
I mean we're human, it's pretty important to do that at some point. So, hack space could be
really cool, it could be good for collaboration if there are other people hanging out there a lot
as well, it could be good for social events as well if it's an active, you know, kind of busy
hack space. So that was a great suggestion from a listener. Another listener told me about something
that I'd honestly never heard of before it's called co-working, and it's kind of an interesting
thing, I don't really know much about it, but it sounds like it's a building that offers
something called co-working membership, meaning that you essentially, you rent I think like an office
or a space where you can work, do all kinds of things. You get 24-7 access, this, the guy who told
me about this, says that he found a place that was $300 a month, and that essentially gets you
internet connection, probably like telephone connection, I imagine I don't know, he didn't say
that explicitly, and a little space where you could of course, since it's 24-7 access, you could
actually even sleep there, and you get to meet more people again, it's not quite a hack space,
but it's basically a hack space because there are other people there doing whatever people do in
office environments or working environments. So it's, that sounds really cool, I would, I would
have loved to know about that a long time ago, and I'm going to actually start looking for these
things in my area, because that sounds exactly like what I've been looking for for a very long time.
So that's really good to know about, thank you very much, everyone who's commented, it's been
really great feedback, lots of cool ideas, great recommendations about different backpacks, coffee cups,
all kinds of things, so that's really, really neat. Another thing that I was actually talking to
the last known god about from, at the Indiana Linux class, which I just got back from recently,
we were speaking about finding food, you know, just outside, being self-reliant enough that you can
actually just feed yourself from things that you find in that strange thing called nature,
whether it's mushrooms or just plants or fruit, whatever. Mushrooms you should obviously probably
stay away from unless you've taken a class in it, but there are people who know a lot about it,
and they can't teach you that sort of thing. Plants, there's a really neat little book that
my friend Scarlett got me called the Illustrated Guide to Edible Wild Plants, which was put out by
the Department of the Army actually, but she found it at an anarchist bookstore, a nice little
breach of logic there, or not, not really, it's just an unlikely combination, I guess. And it was
put out by the Lions Press, you can find their site at lionspress.com, and it's a book with
pictures and everything about all the different kinds of plants that you might find just out there
in the world that you can actually chow down on. And it's a really fascinating book, and I think
that kind of survivalism sort of technique. Who doesn't need that? I mean, that's just really good
stuff to know. It's our planet we live on, we might as well know what we can eat and not eat. So,
so check either that book out or something similar to it. It's a pretty interesting study,
but in this episode we're going to talk very specifically about hacking as an urban camper.
Obviously, the crowd listening to this series are most of them, I think, are probably interested
in computing, hacking, things like that. So, when you think about it, the idea of being an urban
camper, you suddenly, it's almost, again, an unlikely combination, because if you're in love with
your computer and you want to be on your computer all the time, you want to be on the network all the
time. How do you do that? How do you have power? How do you have access to networks all the time?
If you're just out and about. Well, of course, in today's world, it's not that big of a deal,
and I've covered some of the things about going out and finding a good network and a good
place with refillable coffee and just kind of camping out there, and that's definitely applicable,
and that was, you know, that's generally what I do. But let's talk specifically about what we're
doing on the computers while we're doing that, and how not to be hacked ourselves, I guess. Now,
I'm no security expert. I actually know nothing about security. I just kind of know what people
talk about, so I'm going to tell you what I do when I'm out on public Wi-Fi networks and things
like that to kind of give myself a layer of security, but you should come up with your own
methodologies, and you should probably do more research on this and be smart, you know, just kind of
use your best judgment when you're out doing things. So, first of all, I mean, if you're out on a
public network that automatically right there kind of restricts what you should and should not be
doing on that network. For instance, if you're checking your mail via some kind of antiquated,
unsecured logins and things like, or unencrypted logins and things like that, you're sending your
password and plain text, all that other good stuff. If you are doing that, you really shouldn't
be doing that at all. It's a bad idea on a public network. So, if you need to check your mail with
these protocols, I mean, sometimes the mail provider that you're using might just, they may not give
you another option. Then, save that for later, save it for your friend's house, save it for a
network that you feel like you can trust a little bit more. Online banking, same thing goes. If you're
doing online banking and you're on a public Wi-Fi, you probably shouldn't be doing it on that network
at all. Period. I would probably save that for a trusted network. Those are just two obvious
rules of thumb that nevertheless people kind of violate any way all the time. So, the solutions
there would be, well, twofold, mobile banking because of the mobile phones out there that don't
do flash and things like that. A lot of the mobile banking sites nowadays will have a mobile
accessible site. This is usually a much smaller and simpler version of their typical mobile banking
site and a lot of times it'll just be that little, you know, it'll be like an m.mygreatbank.com,
instead of just www.mygreatbank.com. So, if you direct your browser to m.mygreatbank.com,
then you'll be taken to your bank. I'm assuming we are all knowing that I mean that you need to
substitute the name of your, you know, the domain of your bank for mygreatbank. So, m., you know,
whatever your bank is.com, you go there and suddenly you're on a much lighter weight version of
your banking site, which of course does nothing for security, right? But the other thing that I'm
going to talk about right now is the part where your tunneling stuff through more secured means.
Couple of different ways to do this. You can set up an SSH tunnel to a server somewhere
and then use the version of your browser over on that server. That's what I typically do. That's
really the only way to be honest. I know how to do it. It's very simple to do this actually,
but you do have to have a server. So, the idea would be, of course, to set up the server in some
safe location and go ahead and install some kind of X environment. It doesn't have to be fancy.
It just has to be enough, essentially, to give you enough for a nice graphical browser, like Firefox.
Set that up. Of course, you won't be able to actually see any of it. And you don't even really
have to launch the desktop, but it needs to be installed. And then when you SSH into that server,
do the SSH with a dash X flag. SSH dash X will allow the X forwarding to occur. And then you can use
the Firefox over on your server and do your mobile banking through the SSH channel. And since the
SSH channel, of course, is going to be slower than a normal HTTP connection to your bank. Using the
mobile version of your bank's site will help you a lot. Better than that, of course, is not doing
your banking on public networks. I've heard that X forwarding via SSH isn't exactly the best idea
anyway. It's not like the most secure thing in the world. I don't know, but it's something to keep
in mind. So, that's how to do that, though. Now, that brings me to a really important point of
the fact that you probably need a server. If you're going to be doing urban camping and you're
going to be hanging out on unknown networks, having that server, your own private cloud, essentially,
or semi-private because you probably don't actually own the hardware that you are constructing
the cloud on, but having a server in some remote location where you can access that server from any
network via some kind of tunnel, probably an SSH channel, it's a really good idea. So, you know,
you can just use that server. I mean, for every day surfing, I'm not saying you need to be on your
little private server cloud, but four things like that for an emergency mobile banking session,
or checking your email when you know that your email may not be the most secure email service around.
Stuff like that. For a while, at the very beginning of my really serious urban camping thing,
which was last year, for really, practically, all of last year, I was using, at the very beginning,
I was using what I'd been using for a while, which was sdf.lonestar.org. And sdf.lonestar.org is
kind of cool because it's a secure shell account. If you pay your lifetime membership of $36, you get
a secure shell account, you can SSH in, you can use it as your primary or your secure email address
because now you're SSHing in, so you can check all your email there. So, it's a great little thing
to have. It's a server, it's a cloud that you can access quite securely and use for a lot of
different things. The only problem with it, I guess, is that I found it ever so slightly too slow,
a little bit slower than I would have preferred, I guess. And I also found it ever so slightly,
and I mean, ever so slightly unreliable. And I don't mean that sdf.lonestar.org is unreliable,
because it's a great service. I love it, and I still have my account, and we'll continue to have
my account and continue to enjoy it. But there would be just one or two times where I would try to
access them, and they were moving their server. There was a big server move last year, actually.
It wasn't a big deal, I mean, really, really wasn't. But I just, it kind of drove home for me,
that I felt like I needed something a little bit more, something I could really kind of point to
and call my own and be paying for and say, hey, I want that server to be right there and online
all the time, no matter where I was. So, doing that meant getting a VPS, a virtually, a virtual
private server. And doing that alone would have been a little bit costly, perhaps. But I managed
to find two, three other people who actually were interested in doing the same thing, having a
virtual private server. And so, we all kind of pitched in, and we all pay, you know, a quarter of
the server cost. And we now have our own little private-ish cloud. Again, we don't actually own
the hardware, but the server is there. So, I guess I don't really use this private cloud
so much for, you know, the sort of common use of it like, oh, here's my email and all my online
documents and all the things that are important to me that I need to have everywhere. And here's
all the things that are important to me and that I need to have everywhere. I don't really do
that. I quit the contrary. I keep the stuff that's important to me off of anybody's cloud. So,
I don't use it for that, but I do use it as a kind of a gateway out of whatever public Wi-Fi or
public network that I'm on and out into the rest of the internet. Setting up the SSH channel, of
course, is just as simple as I said. I mean, it's just literally just SSH with the dash x flag.
If you need the graphical stuff, although if you don't and quite often I don't, you can simply
SSH and use links for your web browsing, use mud or pine for your email and really whatever else
you want to do on the cloud. So, having that is a great idea. Finding a couple of people who you can
trust, who can go into a kind of roommate situation with you on this server, on the VPS,
each kind of chip in for paying the bills. It makes it really, really manageable and gets you
out of the public network that you'd otherwise just be kind of a sitting duck on and gives you
a little tunnel out into the rest of the world and gives you a little bit more security and also
kind of frees you from things sort of the more obvious alternatives to doing that. You know,
things like, well, I'm using Gmail. So, it's got an HTTPS connection. So, who cares? Well, no one
except the Gmail has all your email anyway. So, yeah, who does care? So, using the server for that
is not a bad idea. Disadvantage to that. So far, it's only been speed. In terms of connecting to
that server, I've not had a problem yet. I've not encountered a public network that blocks
SSH access. For instance, I just don't, I don't run into that so far. In terms of speed, yeah, I've
noticed, you know, every time I do it, practically, I notice that, yeah, I'm association to my server.
It is slow. If you want a really nice server, it's going to cost a lot of money and you still might
not even be getting that great of a connection. It just kind of depends on what network you're on.
This particular server that I'm paying part for really, really dirt cheap and it feels slow.
It doesn't have a whole lot of RAM, no matter what network I'm on, unless I'm just getting really
lucky and I guess none of my other, none of the other people actually on that physical box,
you know, not my, not my paying roommates and, and fellow users, but those other people out
on that server who have their own little VPS partitions, you know, if they're not on it,
then I'll, I'll, I'll feel like the speed is okay, but more often than not, I, I, I feel the,
the performance hit. So that's just something to be aware of. Also doing cool things online, of course,
always, there's Tor. Tor, as you probably already know, I've actually interviewed, I think, well,
I know, I've interviewed, I think it was for HPR Wendy, one of the people who is currently with
Tor or was with Tor and is now with EFF or vice versa or both, but she's a really smart lawyer,
hacker type and it's really cool. So we all know about Tor. It's, it's a great project.
Setting it up is surprisingly easy and I'm talking about setting it up for the more common,
the most common use, which is, oh, I'm going to browse. I want to be anonymous about where I'm
coming from or what my, you know, who and what I am tap into Tor for that. This isn't really
something that I think you're going to need so much from a public network since public networks
by their nature are, are fairly anonymous. If I'm wrong on that, you know, I mean, don't quote me,
first of all, but if I'm wrong on that and if Tor anonymizes you even more than, than, than what
I'm aware of, then don't listen to me. But otherwise, I don't know, I don't tend to use it from
public networks so much as I do from networks that I, you know, my friends network or the work
network. That kind of thing where I, I'm there frequently, someone else owns the network. I don't
want either myself or them necessarily being on the record as having gone to certain places. So
you do it with Tor. Tor used to kind of confound me a little bit in terms of setting it up because
you'd see all this crazy stuff about how, how many options you've got for this setup and how to,
um, how to configure your browser to use it automatically and all these different buttons and
plugins and Vidalia and all these other things that frankly, I can't be bothered to even figure
all that stuff out. So I'm going to tell you exactly how Tor is done on my computer. So my computer
runs Slackware. So this is going to be biased toward that. But I mean, in theory, you know, if you
listen to all the all the cliches, Slackware is really, really hard to use. So if I can do it on
Slackware, you should be able to listen to how I do it and emulate it with great simplicity and ease
on whether whatever distribution you're running. So on Slackware, this is actually straight out of
the Slack build that I use in order to get all this stuff done. So it's not anything that I've
actually figured out as much as it is something that I just am copying from the instructions. So it's,
it's very, very easy. The first thing that I do is install LibEvent because it's the direct
dependent, the Tor requires LibEvent. So if you install LibEvent on your computer, you'll have
the dependency for Tor. And then you do a group add space, g space 220 and you call that group Tor.
And we're using 220 because it's quote unquote recommended. I don't know why it's recommended
to be that except that it's, you know, a low number. So it's kind of a system kind of user.
I understand that part. I don't know why else it's recommended. Then you add a user.
User add dash u 220 dash g meaning assign them primarily to this group 220 which of course is the
Tor group we just created. Dash c you can comment, you know, make a comment like this is the Tor user
or, you know, the onion router, whatever. It's just a human readable comment for yourself. Dash d
slash dev slash null slash s slash bin slash false and then name that user Tor. So basically you're
creating a fairly powerless user in terms of logging into your system. The default shell would
not be a shell. It would be slash bin slash false. So that wouldn't do anyone much good if they
were able to somehow get into your computer with the username Tor. But Tor can use this username.
And you do that and you run the Slack build and it installs Tor. Really as simple as that.
The newest version I think is like, I don't know, 1.2.30 or 2.1.30 something with a 2.1 and a 30 in it.
It works great. It's easy to use. Once it's installed, you simply drop down to a command line
and you type in the word Tor TOR. If you look, if you open another terminal after you've done that
and then look at the the the config file which at least on Slackware is slash edc slash Tor slash
Tor RC. If you look at that, it tells you exactly what ports Tor is running on as the thing that you
will interact with. And the default on that right now is Sox port 9050. And the address for that
since it's running on your computer that you're about to use for the connections, it would be Sox
listen address 1 2 7 dot 0 dot 0 dot 1. And that's almost all you need. There might be some other
stuff, but I'm actually fairly sure that that's really all you need in your config file for this
to work. So we know that the port that it's using is 9050 and you know that the the the IP address
that you should be looking for your little Tor server essentially is your local host 1 2 7 dot 0 dot
1 dot 1. So just to test all of this out, the first thing to do and no, it's not finished yet,
don't panic. The first thing that we want to do is just for kicks go to what's my IP dot com or
dot org rather. What's my IP dot org of course will show you what your broadcasting as your address
is. So in my case right now it's 8 9 dot 2 3 3 dot 8 2 dot 7 1. Now you've established that now open
up your preferences in Firefox edit preferences go to the network tab in the advanced section
and right at the top it says connection and figure out how Firefox connects to the internet. And
if you go into the settings of the connection settings, you have four four choices. No proxy,
auto detect proxy, use system proxy or manual proxy. I use the manual proxy and I simply type in
down at the socks host because that's what kind of that's the kind of port or proxy tour is,
it's a socks proxy. So type in for socks host list 1 2 7 dot 0 dot 0 dot 1 and where it asks you
what port to look at type in 9050. Click OK. Now Firefox for this for right now until you change it
is using a socks proxy that is pointing at the 9050 port which is tour which is running on your
computer. So the IP address of that is 1 2 7 dot 0 dot 0 dot 1. Now if you go to what's my IP dot org,
it's going to take a while because you're going probably all over the world. And there it is.
Your IP address 1 9 dot 1 3 1 dot 6 2 dot 1 3 3. Completely different from what your other IP
address was. And so now as long as you're using Firefox, you're now browsing the web completely,
well very anonymously. Of course, tour will tell you that it's not completely anonymous quite
probably and you should be very careful. So again, if you're doing this and it's the life-threatening
situation, don't listen to this show for all the advice. But that's that's the simple way to get
tour up and running. It's really, really that easy. And next thing you know, you're you're going
all over the place to get to, you know, whatever site you're really trying to get to. And it's
quite quite a cool experience. And quite a bit slower. So keep that in mind. But it's a good
thing to know about. The only other real tip I have I guess is a very, very simple command called
TCP dump. This is one of those commands that people really could. And you know, someone really
should, especially on a network called hacker public radio. But yeah, someone could and should do
an entire series on TCP dump and how to use it. I barely know anything about it except that if
you sit in a cafe and you've got a notebook computer that you can put the Wi-Fi card in monitor
mode. And you can use the IWU config command to put it in monitor mode or for miscus mode,
some people call it. You can use TCP dump to then monitor the all the traffic that is flying
through the air anyway. All you're doing is instead of sending your own signals out, you're
just getting everything. You're looking at everything as it passes. It's really cool. And the the
command for that would be TCP dump dash in in V capital X capital S small S one five one four.
That should that should get you started anyway. There's a couple of other things you could do
either more or less than that. But that basically turns on a lot of verbosity and it captures all kinds
of packets, I guess. And it also sets how in what bite sizes you're capturing it in. That's the
one five one four part. It's it's a neat command. You'll see amazing things on the in the far
right hand column. You'll just see amazing things. You got to try it in a busy cafe where lots of
people have their iPhones and their computers out do that. And that'll just fascinate you for for
days really. Obviously there's all kinds of places you can go from there. That's like the really
most basic thing. And that's I'm only giving you the most basics because that's as much as I know.
You know, no, as much about TCP dump as I do. People will tell you, oh, you've got to try
wire shark or T shark instead of TCP dump and all these other things. And I totally agree,
but I don't know how to. So I can't really talk a whole lot about that. But it is it is fun. I mean,
there's there's cool things like you know, you can TCP dump dash S one five one four port 80 dash
W, you know, TCP 80 dot dump whatever point being that you can you can tell TCP dump to just
capture stuff on port 80, which obviously is going to be all the internet stuff. And it'll ignore
all the all the other extraneous what what we would probably consider noise. I'm sure someone
who was really smart and knew what all that noise meant wouldn't call it noise, but but there you go.
So it's yeah, it's it's a lot of fun. And there's a lot of filtering that you can do in TCP dump alone.
I know that there are other programs that filter all this information a lot more effectively
and dynamically, but it's it's kind of cool because you can just see all kinds of traffic
flying by your computer. And even if you don't know what it all means, it starts to give you a
little bit of a better idea of what exactly all that traffic really is. All kinds of interesting
things to just look at. And for for what you're doing just for fun, I don't really tend to I don't
pretend that this is like anything evil or subversive at all. It's because it's not. It's just
it's really just monitoring traffic. And happily most people are are most sites important sites
encrypt their their traffic. So you're not even going to see stuff unless you really really know
what you're doing and and and really really try to see it. But you will see interesting stuff
nevertheless. You know idle conversations on on G chat sometimes, but not really any passwords
or anything. I mean, unless you're really looking for it. I'm not really looking for it. I miss all
that stuff. I think it's just cool to look at these little packet headers and all the and really
what makes all this data that's flying through the air to get reconstructed, you know, to get
routed and then reconstructed. It's very cool study. So you should definitely do that. I mean,
if you're going to be sitting outside on a public network, you kind of owe it to yourself and,
you know, to the network to monitor it. It's it's just cool. Now on that subject, there is a cool
little device that you can get from a place called Meda Geek. That's NETA GEK and it's called
the Y Spy and that name sounds a lot more subversive again than it really is. The Y Spy is a little
antenna and that really is all it is. It's an antenna that you plug into your USB port and the
device monitors the level of traffic on different frequencies. It is not a full spectrum analyzer. It's
not analyzing all possible spectrum, you know, all possible frequencies on that frequency chart,
you know, the FCC kind of runs. It's just monitoring Wi-Fi traffic range and it does this with two
different tools. There's an in-curses interface and there's a GUI interface and both of them are
fairly easy to install on Linux. You have to kind of do it from source code. Well, actually,
I think it might be available for Debian or something but I generally just do it from the source that's
included on the on the disk that you get with the antenna or if you don't get a disk or you don't
have a disk, you can download it from the project's website which is a source for project. It wouldn't
do you any good without the device so it's a front-end, you know, it's a soft interface for this little
piece of hardware. So you plug the USB antenna into your USB connection. It becomes just a monitor
of frequency traffic and you can then find out where in the frequency spectrum you might find
more or less stuff to either monitor or compete with depending on your goal. So if it's a setup where
you've got lots of choices of which public network you're going to join or whatever, then you can
choose your channel accordingly. Or if you just want to find out where most of the traffic is,
that's a really quick and easy way to monitor where all the action is happening. It's a really
fairly quick and drastic noticeable thing. I mean, it gives you a little chart and the stuff that's
really, really busy just peaks up really quick. You'll see it right away and you can jump onto that
channel if you want or you can avoid that channel if your goal is to stay off the noisy networks
and enjoy a little bit of peace and quiet. So that's MetaGeek and the product is called Why Spy.
Of course having little antenna popping out of your notebook could be a little bit suspicious
looking, don't you think? Well, interestingly you'd think so and actually a lot of people don't
ever, ever seem to notice it at all and those who do assume that it's a cellular modem. So it's
actually not that suspicious. However, that is one thing that you'd want to keep in mind.
As I've said in previous episodes, keeping up an appearance of some kind of normalcy is actually
really important to an urban camper. You don't want to arise suspicion or disapproval or
anything like that. If your goal is to find peace and quiet and places to hang around and potentially
get free food or really cheap food or just a place to stay out of the heat or the cold, whatever.
So having a little USB antenna popping out of your laptop might be fine. In some areas it might
not be in other areas. Having your computer on while you're just sitting in your car outside
of a residential house, you might not be doing anything at all suspicious. You might be sharing
their network. You might not be. It just depends. Point being that kind of thing tends to draw
attention to you. So be smart about it. I guess is what I'm really trying to get to here. Don't
the goal here is not to look like a cool superhero evil hacker. The goal is to be a good
computerist, to be a good hacker, to sit down and get your work done. Be smart about it. Be safe
about it. Protect your data on the way out to the network and back and learn about it and study it
and that's it. So that's what I tend to like to do and I tend to be very mindful of, for
instance, how glowy my laptop screen is when I'm out at night in places that would raise some
suspicion if I'm seeing just kind of hanging out for hours at a time outside of someplace
with a glowing laptop screen or sitting in some place where maybe they're a little bit sensitive
about the security of their network and here you are scanning it with an antenna poking out of
your laptop, kind of asking for trouble. So you shouldn't ask for trouble. Overall, I think that
urban camping and kind of hanging around places, exploring different networks, exploring different
ways to protect yourself from people who are smarter than you on that same network and how to
just kind of be smart about the way that you are transmitting your data since all the hackers are
supposedly so computer savvy and we all want to protect data and all this other good stuff. If
you're unfamiliar with these basic tools like SSH tunneling and I guess tour and how to set up a
proxy, just little things like that, I don't know, it seems like there's a breach of what you're
saying and what you're doing there. So being an urban camper and actually being able to explore
how do I implement these things, it's really powerful stuff and I think of all the things of urban
camping in terms of learning stuff, having a lot of time to really explore all the different things
that the hacker culture is always talking about, the community is always talking about like the
security and and all the cool things that you can do on a network and all these things and servers
and all that good stuff. A lot of it happened during urban camping for me because I could sit down
and I could focus and I had a real, I had a different environment every day if I wanted, you know,
I had all kinds of different things going on. I'd have different problems pop up quite unexpectedly,
all when all I'm trying to do is find onto my server to check an email, you know, there'd be some
weird issue, some random cookie that someone wants to give me that maybe I don't want to accept.
An SSL search check that I'm not doing what I'm checking my mutt mail that maybe I should be
checking the SSL, maybe I should learn how to download that SSL search and actually utilize it so
that I'm finding into the same server every time. Little tiny details like that, you can start really
concentrating on them because no longer are you kind of complacent in your own home where hey,
you're wired straight to Comcast or Verizon or whatever big evil corporation you're
hooking into for your internet. You're not, you're not there anymore, you're doing cool,
different things, you're doing with different network setups, you're, you're looking at,
at the way, once this admin or, you know, the guy who knows how to make the internet work at one
cafe set up their network versus the corporate setup that some franchise has. It's really interesting
study and it's just as interesting as the people that you'll meet when you're at urban camping and
the different experiences you'll have when you're urban camping. The computing side of it,
it gets really interesting really fast if you let yourself go along that path and study it and
think about it and learn more about it. So that's yet one more recommendation on why you might
want to urban camp because the computing becomes a lot more fun. So look into all of those things,
look into a VPS or a server that you can use, look into configuring your, your mail so that you're
actually not sending plain text passwords or whatever or even user names, look into getting
someplace that you can SSH into, set up tours, start using TCP dump and email me, let me know how
it's all going, email me tips, email me stuff that you've learned, whatever. And most of all,
I just remember that urban camping is exactly what I didn't realize, but I think all of this
actually do realize that we, I think the hacker community, at least HPR listeners who I've heard
from have been really, really open to the idea, really, really excited about the idea. And I think it's,
it's for lack of a better description, it is, it's hacking society, it's hacking the status quo.
You're, you're, you're taking exactly what people want you to live your life in in a certain way
and you're taking that and, and you're not going with it at all or you're doing what you want to
on your own terms. And that's really exciting stuff because that's how things get done. We do it
ourselves, right? We, we change our own lives. We change the way that we do things. We learn stuff
on our own and then we do whatever we want to. And that, that's freedom, I guess. So enjoy
that freedom. And thanks again for listening to this mini series, The Hacker Followed Radio
mini series on urban camping. Talk to you next time.
One evening as the sun went down and the young blue fire was burning. Now the track came a
little hiking and he said, boys, I'm not turning. I'm headed for a land that's far away
beside the crystal fountain. So come with me, we'll go and see the big rock candy mountains
in the big rock candy mountains. There's a land that's fair and bright where the handouts grow
on bushes and you sleep out every night where the box cards all are empty and the sun shines
every day on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees. The lemonade springs where the
blue bird sings in the big rock candy mountains. In the big rock candy mountains all the cops
have wooden legs and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs.
The harmless trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay. Oh I'm bound to go where
there ain't no snow where the rain don't fall. The wind don't blow in the big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains you never change your socks and the little streams of alcohol
come a trickling down the rocks. The breakmen have to tip their hats and the railroad bowls are
playing. There's a lake and stew and a whiskey too. You can paddle all around them in a big canoe
in the big rock candy mountains. In the big rock candy mountains the jails are made of tin
and you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. There ain't no short handle shovels,
no access, saws or fix. I'm going to stay where you sleep all day where the hunglicer
that invented work in the big rock candy mountains.
I'll see you all is coming fall in the big rock candy mountain.
Thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio.
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