hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0555.txt

Episode: 555
Title: HPR0555: Hack Radio Live 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0555/hpr0555.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:59:32

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This train is sort of inbound.
I'm from Sephiris.
My crime is that of outsmarting you.
If you have not yet submitted your identity to the Retinal Clearance System.
Communications, interface, online.
You're not dealing with AT&T.
Automatic medical systems engaged.
Welcome to the Internet, my friend.
How can I help you?
Defensive weapon selection system activated.
Have a very safe day.
Have a safe day.
Hello and welcome to Hack Radio Live.
This is our first show, so it is going to be a short show.
But if you like it, you can find more every week at HackRadioLive.org.
We encourage you to go there.
Representing San Diego, California, I'm Drake Anubis.
And representing Florida or the Interwebs.
As I'd like to know it, Anigma.
Okay, well, how's the evening treating you?
I know it's like three in the morning over there.
It's about 12.30.
It's not too bad.
It's been a long day.
So what have you been working on, Drake?
We haven't talked in forever.
Oh, I have a lot of things.
I'm working on building an opticon,
which is what emergency vehicles used to preempt traffic lights.
So you can change traffic lights from red to green,
which is more complicated than you think it should be.
And like illegal, isn't it?
In like 50 states?
Well, you know, there are only reasons I'm working on.
It's very illegal.
In fact, it's so illegal that I have moral qualms about using it
because it could actually kill someone
if an ambulance can't get through an intersection.
But now I'm just really upset that it wasn't as easy as I thought it was.
And now I have to do it at least once to be satisfied.
Yeah, and Drake can like so many laws in here.
Yeah, well, I'm going to an intersection that is a four-way intersection
but it only has one street going to it and it's actually a dead end.
So I don't think anyone cares if I test it down there.
No, are you sure you're going to want to air this on the internet
and have the feds like banging down here to work?
No, because I could be lying.
You could be lying.
Yeah.
And you probably are.
Yeah, I lie a lot.
We're going to assume where you're lying.
Yeah.
I know fatically.
There should be a disclaimer.
Yeah, hypothetically.
That's what I've been working on.
What have you been up to?
A lot of things.
Nothing really hacky related lately.
I guess the most recent thing is I build a myth box
that's sitting in my front room.
It's kind of loud.
I turned an old box into a myth TV box and just as an experiment
because I was using like Ubuntu as my media center
and just attaching it.
Not Mythbuntu or whatever it is?
No, I was using Ubuntu and just attaching it to my file server
because I have a lot of EVI files that I play on my TV.
And I just had a Linux box attached to my TV
and I was playing it through that.
And then I got annoyed with that because I couldn't watch regular TV.
So then I went to Mythbuntu and that's what I'm using now.
And basically it was just a crammed together box
that I had old spare parts laying around.
And it's loud and it's not very well done.
Let's put it that way.
Have you considered using like the Xbox 360 or Apple TV or something?
That's actually kind of funny because I was going to use an old Xbox.
I purchased an original Xbox and I was going to use XBMC on it.
And I blew that up.
It's kind of in parts in the middle of the room.
You let the magic smoke out?
Well, I was replacing the hard drive in it.
I wanted to put a bigger hard drive in it.
So I took it apart and I accidentally touched something I shouldn't have.
But apparently and I kind of blew up the motor.
It kind of made sparks and it was kind of cool.
Of the hard drive itself?
No, no, no.
Of the unit itself.
I guess I laid the metal against metal across the motor portion of it
and shorted something and it made pretty sparks.
There's a motor in the Xbox?
Yeah, there's a little tiny, well, it's the power supply.
Oh, the power supply fan motor.
Okay, I got you.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'm going to get another one but it's kind of low priority at this point.
I've been working a lot of hours and I haven't really had time to devote to play things.
Why do you hate the Apple TV so much?
Because it's Apple and it's expensive and like the box that I have using for the
Mythbox is like a low end.
It's a three gigahertz machine single core with maybe a gig of RAM in it.
And like 300 gig of hard drive space?
I thought you had this massive file server that was so grand while I was hearing about it.
I do have a massive file server but it's sitting in the other room and it's got like a
terabyte of space on it.
You can't like have the Mythbox hit that stuff instead?
Yeah, but it would be really slow.
I wouldn't think.
I haven't tried it.
I mean, I guess I could.
No, it should be fast and in fact, it should do a little bit of buffering actually or
a type of buffering anyway.
Well, I guess.
But I only have the switch that I have everything plugged into is only 100 megabit
nick or 100 megabit switch.
Well, stop living in the past.
Would you say earlier that you're running Windows NT right now or something?
No, I'm running Windows Vista on the one laptop that I run Windows on
for work.
So it actually dole boots so for you.
So I don't get hate mail.
You run Windows.
What are you running?
I have.
Well, it's actually it's a hack and Tosh and then it boots into seven.
I need to do recording stuff for the ASIO drivers for the hardware stuff.
Yeah.
My main desktop is running a bunch of 9.04 I think at this moment.
So other than that, I think pretty lame.
When it comes to a hacker related stuff.
So anything else that you've been doing?
No, but I guess I can go into what will be the show's topic.
Okay.
Let's go into show.
Do we want to talk about the show a little bit first or do we want to?
I think it will become.
I think by this point, now that you've talked about how you have a Linux installed on your home
theater, I think it's become apparent.
Why is that apparent?
I think it's weird to buy an Apple TV.
I learned to have Linux running in your front room.
But it's not really that hard.
Do you pop in a disk and you install it?
The hardest thing is this is the stupid capture cards.
The capture cards are the freaking hardest.
And you got to read, you know, RTFM, the manual.
That was my problem.
Like I got everything installed and then I couldn't get the cable to go across my capture card.
And it's because I set it up wrong.
I set it up to the, they have like US cable and then US cable or US cable and then US cable broadcast.
And then the broadcast is the one that you would get you get through the like the cable company, like Time Warner or whatever.
The US cable is like if you were to get it over the air.
So there's two types of decoding and I had it set up to the wrong one and I was like, why am I not getting any cable?
Like I think I have it set up, right?
And it took me like half a day to figure out that I, oh, I'm a moron and I need to have it to broadcast.
Anyway, but what do you have running in your room?
You have an Apple TV or what?
I actually don't have a TV per se.
I do have a projector set up in a kind of a home theater sort of thing.
And that's, it was switched between the Wii and the Apple TV and the computer itself.
That's kind of cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, anyway, so are we talking about the show or are we not talking about the show or?
Um, I think we can skip talking about the show.
It's just a pile that I think you'll become apparent with the shows about anyway.
All right.
Either that or we'll talk about it on the back end if we need to fill in space.
So go ahead.
Okay. Well, I was going to talk about a thing for the Nintendo Wii called Wii R.D.
Do you have a Wii by any chance?
I do have a Wii.
How do you like it?
I like it a lot.
I'm a Mario Kart guy.
Are you?
Yes, very much so.
And I am a, my top three Wii games are Mario Kart, Star Wars Force Unleashed and just because
I like the lightsaber thing and punch out.
Punch out?
Yeah, punch out.
Mike Tyson's punch out.
Don't you remember it for the NES?
For the end of punch out.
No, I don't know this game at all.
Yes, it's called the Mike Tyson's punch out.
It was for the NES and it was, it was the best boxing game for the old Nintendo.
I mean, it was, yes, it was, it was great.
So they brought back all the characters, it's, it's reliving my youth.
Just like, I don't have the, the, the new Super Mario game, but that's my next one.
What you get is the, the redone Mario where you can play for a player on the, on the side
scroller, the side scroller Mario.
Oh, yeah, I kind of like to see that.
Yeah, I want, I want to do that just to relive my youth.
Well, have you ever been playing the Wii and thought, man, if only I could access the memory
right now?
Wouldn't that be great?
What do you mean by access the memory?
I mean that it's actually possible to access and manipulate the memory of the Nintendo
Wii while it's running so in real time.
So what would you do with this type of application?
Like, like, why would you?
Oh, I will tell you.
Okay.
You know how like the memory holds things like the executable and game data, texture maps,
but most importantly, it has a variable, which would be things like position coordinates, event timers,
health speed, counters of any kind.
Right.
If you think about memory, like a giant spreadsheet with every cell holding some particular piece
of information about the game, like this cell might be the XYZ coordinates of your player
and that cell might be how many lives you have in such.
If you can change any part of the memory that you want at any time, you could say, oh, you
know, if you only, you can find the cell that says how many shots you have left if you need
more ammo.
And if it says 12, you can just punch in 1200 and then you have 1200 shots left.
Yummy.
Yeah, I got it.
And this is actually possible.
And on top of that, it's actually really easy with a device called the USB Gecko.
Have you ever heard of this?
Yes, I've heard of it.
I've never had any experience with this.
Really?
What do you know about this?
I haven't heard about this until just like a couple months ago.
I've heard the name, but I really don't know what it does or is.
So please.
Oh, then my friend, let me enlighten you.
Oh, enlighten me.
It's a little adapter thing.
And it plugs into the Wii through one of the old GameCube memory cards slots.
Actually, it's starting to erupt, but I think I think I heard about it with one of the hacks
for the Wii.
Like the one where you can install like a homebrew applications on it.
I'm thinking that's what I went.
It's related to that.
It's because one of the things you need to do is that it communicates with a code handler
that essentially instead of the game just running in its own little loop,
it puts the game inside another loop so that every time the game loops,
it can perform some kind of manipulation.
Okay.
In order to have the code handler there, you have to somehow launch the game from something
other than the actual disk itself.
So you could have the disk, but the code handler has to launch the game.
You can't just launch the game from the Wii menu.
Okay.
So you might have heard it in conjunction with that.
Yeah, probably.
Because the only thing the only experience I have with like Wii hacking is I looked into like the homebrew applications
for like installing emulators on the Wii.
So you could play, well, one, so you could play DVDs on your Wii.
And two, so you could play like the ROMs, the old NES ROMs, and things on your Wii.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I actually, well, I have my Wii hacked with the homebrew channel and such.
And I wanted to play Metal Slug on the Wii because it's a fun game.
But it's the emulator's not so fantastic, especially not in multiplayer mode.
So if you haven't been able to have the time to do it, don't cry over it.
Yeah, I haven't had it really had time to do it.
I wanted to see how the DVDs played on the Wii.
I have no idea because I actually have that disk from Netflix where you put it in and you can watch any movie streaming from Netflix.
Oh, okay.
I know what you're talking about.
Anyway, I was talking about code handler.
Yeah, so what the code handler does is it runs and the way the game usually works is it runs inside of a loop.
And every loop it does things like it checks variables and sees it.
It looks for buttons to be pressed and it renders the new frame and such.
Well, the code handler puts the game loop inside of another loop.
So every time the game runs once the code handler has a chance to say,
oh, hey, Gecko, do you need me to do anything?
And Gecko can say, oh, yeah, do this or do that or what have you.
But essentially, the cool thing about the Gecko is that it gives your computer access to the entire contents of a Wii system memory
so you can upload and execute files, dump RAM, write to it, freeze games, take screenshots.
I actually perform debugging, which is what we're going to talk about.
And incidentally, you can use this to back up games.
And I've never actually done this because I don't actually care.
But Nintendo made a big stink about this and the USB Gecko project was discontinued a while ago.
So the units aren't being manufactured, but you can still find them kicking around for about 50 bucks or so.
And actually, I'm looking at the website where I bought mine and they're out of stock,
but they're floating around for about 50 bucks. It's not that hard to find one.
Although, I believe if you're electrically inclined, you can build your own USB Gecko.
The Gecko is just kind of a serial to USB converter and then a couple of components that actually talk to the code handler.
So I guess it's not that hard to make your own.
Although, I've never actually really tried it.
And I guess when the project was closed, the schematics and such were released.
And I had the schematics and I'll put them in the show notes because apparently they're hard to find.
So if you want to, you can build your own Gecko.
I'm not that electrically inclined as you heard my Xbox story.
Oh, that's right. Okay, well then let's say you buy one.
So you bought one and now you have one and you're happy with it.
And unless you're really leading, I'm not.
You'll be working entirely with a gooey program called WeRD.
And I had this problem where I say WeRD for some strange reason, but it's WeRD.
It stands for We Remote Debugger.
And it's a third party memory modification program designed just to work with the Gecko.
But the main thing is that it's this application that it looks like it was designed by hackers
because there's buttons flying all over the place and such.
It's separated into kind of multiple tabs with each tab doing some kind of specific purpose
as a tab for if you want to grab screenshots and a tab for calculating pointers and such a memory.
But the main, the really cool thing about it is that it centers around a type of code manager
for managing what are called WeRD codes, which are if you remember GameShark codes, they're a lot like that.
Yeah, I remember GameShark.
Yeah, I remember.
No, I wonder what happened to GameShark.
There was also one from Nintendo.
I can't remember what it was called.
Oh, that's right.
There was.
Yeah, it was.
Oh, you have one in the other room.
And I can't remember.
Anyway, go ahead.
There's the codes are essentially a list of hexadecimal instructions that perform certain operations.
And the code manager lets you store all these instruction sets and activate them at will.
So a good example would be there's a level in Super Smash Brothers where that's the fighting game
where you're, there's a level where you're fighting on a pirate ship and it's surrounded by water.
And if you fall in the water, that's fine.
You just need to get back out.
Let's just say in there for everything around.
Okay, if nobody, if they don't know what Super Smash Brothers melee is or Super Smash Brothers is,
then they just don't deserve to be listening to this show.
Well, you were going on about like your top favorite games and you didn't mention it.
So I'm like, well, maybe it's not as popular as I thought it was.
No, it's popular.
It's just not my top three.
It's, it's up there.
It's up there.
Okay, well, if you think back to my what I call a spreadsheet analogy earlier with each cell representing a particular location memory,
there's actually one location that specifies the water level.
And if you have a little bit of code, you can actually modify that.
So when we're playing a game, if someone lands in the water, I can quickly hit apply in the VRD control window thing.
It will tell the gecko to execute that code.
And the water level will instantly fall to some low off screen value, which is far below the kill zone.
So if anyone lands in the water, they're just instantly dead because it's not over there.
And you can do this kind of stuff on the fly.
You can actually go in there and say you can change what item someone's holding or the size of a particular character and add all kinds of crazy things.
But it's just it's so you're basically you're basically doing a.
For backup lack of better term code injection to.
Alive.
Alive game.
It's a lot like that.
Let's say someone throws like a pokeball right at you can specify which Pokemon will be in there.
And the way it works is you tell the gecko if you see this pokeball make sure it has this value Pokemon in it.
So it's this ring goes, Pokemon, and it just keeps checking for this pokeball.
And then when it sees one goes, Oh, switch.
And then it has the right Pokemon.
And so it's just constantly sitting there going, you know, check, check, check, check, check, check.
And then finds it and switch.
Interesting.
Yeah, it occasionally crashes the Wii, but very not as often as you would imagine for changing memory on the flywalk the games run.
Yeah, that's kind of interesting how they keep, you know, the game running when you're flipping out code.
That's what that's the job of the code handler occasionally.
You see things like if you inject just a ton of code.
That's not the right word, but if you activate a ton of code that we will actually pause for just a small second.
You can't even see it, but you can hear it because it has to render the same little wave segment over and over until it starts going again.
But usually it's just, it's seamless, which is pretty cool.
The really neat thing about the, we are decode manager is that it's very helpful at letting you create your own codes.
Like if you want to, if you want to change how many lives you have, right?
There's this incredibly useful recursive search feature that is just it blew my mind how useful it was the first time I saw it.
Like so, let's say you, you want to change, you want to be able to change how many lives you have in a particular game and no one else has this code out.
So it's all on you basically.
Well, if you start out with five lives, you can tell that we are, we already to search for everything in memory that has the number five.
So it goes three, it looks for number five, the entire memory, it comes back with like 10,000, you know, matches.
And you say, okay, well, that's great.
But then you kill yourself, so you only have four.
And you say, okay, now all of the things you just found, check to see which ones are now represented by four instead of five.
And you can keep doing this.
And then once you get down to like two or one lives remaining, there's only one cell that used to be five, then was four, then was three.
And now, you know, it's just two than one.
So that you can like almost hone in on things and there are all kinds of useful operations that you can say find any cells that are increasing.
So if you want to find counters, it will identify cells that have been consistently going up and such.
So like, so for example, your score in a game.
Yeah, if you enter, if you let's say you have like a hundred points, you need a thousand, if you enter in a hundred, it will look for every instance of a hundred.
And then you do something so that you get like a hundred and five.
And then you say, everything you just found, see if it's now a hundred and five and it keeps narrowing it down.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
And then when you, once you end up with this list of cells that usually only end up with like two or three that are probable locations, you can do what's called a poke, which is where you click on a particular location and you, you can change the value lives.
So like if you think you found one that represents your lives, you can enter a 99 and hit poke and it will change that to be 99.
Occasionally, that will just crash the game because you change some random value that just happened to correspond with how many lives you have.
But usually it will actually, you know, alter how many lives you have and then it will just change instantly.
And it will just, you know, you have whatever that value is, which is pretty awesome.
It's a, it's a, it's a very, it's a surge of power the first time you do it.
Like, oh my god, I'm like, God.
That's basically out.
Yeah.
God of the, of the Wii game.
Yeah, it's, it's a very small domain, but it's a very important domain to a lot of people.
Okay.
Whatever floats your boat.
You know, it's, it's, it's, it's just very fun.
And there's a, there's even a part where you can actually view limited windows of the memory in real time.
And this cuts the game speed in half because every time the game cycles, the gecko is pulling out, is pulling every location you're trying to view.
So it can refresh the display, but it's really useful if you want to say like, if you want to find a weird variable that you can't find with the recursive search and such.
Usually these variables are kind of clumped like all the variables for your particular character, probably all in one kind of location.
So you can just look at that location and actually watch stuff update in real time.
So like if you're, if you're driving a tank or something, you can actually watch the XYZ coordinates move and such.
It's very, very cool.
Hmm.
But once you find all this information, you can actually write your own code in the language, which is incredibly difficult.
And there's no documentation of that's a real one of some documentation, but it's all written by hackers.
So it's, it's, you almost need documentation for the documentation.
But if you can figure it out, you can write these like if and then statements and this is all done in hex Desmos.
So when you get it working, you feel really cool about it and such.
But if you have a Wii, I encourage you to check this out because it's phenomenally great.
And you can reinvent old games and make them fun again.
I'll have to check it out because I never really, I'd recommend it.
There is actually a way you can do this kind of all in software.
If you launch the game with any kind of code handler, like for example, I launch games off of an external hard drive.
Not because I don't own the actual game, but just because it loads so much faster off of the external hard drive.
There's actually a thing in there where what it would do is if you turn the feature on it, we'll check the SD card looking for those weak Wii R decodes.
So instead of having to inject them with the gecko in real time, you can have them always apply, which is actually really useful.
Because some codes you don't want on all the time, like you don't always want your character to be five times bigger than it should be.
It's really kind of awkward and it gets the novelty wears off.
But there are ways you can specify like program default so that the game automatically loads and is set up exact the way you want with the preferences you want.
But if you just have the oops, I just smacked the microphone.
See, and you pick on my microphone and I don't I didn't smack my microphone.
The difference is that my microphones on this microphone is taking away too much desk real estate.
It's actually on a it's it's a high LPR 20, which is it reproduces some of the sound of the high LPR 40, which some people say is the only microphone worth a damn.
And a lot of people don't like the house stuff.
The PR 20 is such a great microphone, but it's just it requires so much requires the preamp and the pop filter and the microphone stand.
And it's just it's menacing.
Is it bad that I did not know I did not understand a word you just said of the microphone always said was that the high LPR 20 is a very good microphone.
It's only a hundred bucks and it's made by Bob Hyal and it just it sounds so great.
Okay, I understood that.
Well, that's the only reason I sound anything that you know, I actually sound like that guy from family guy.
A more goldman is always always talking about his psoriasis and oh my god.
That's how I always sound.
But with this microphone, you can't tell.
Maybe a little bit.
No, damn, the better microphone.
But what I was getting at there is I had no idea what you were talking about terminology wise.
It's just there's a microphone and there's a microphone stand and you know,
you know, one of these days you can educate me like maybe we can make a show about just microphone technology and sound technology.
And you can be the expert.
I'm hardly an expert.
I mean, what's that?
Where everyone's blind to the one-eyed man is king, that kind of thing?
Okay, well, you can be the one-eyed man and I'll be blind.
There you go.
Okay.
Well, I expected this to be a short show and I think our audience would probably appreciate short shows over long shows anyway.
But do you have anything else you want to touch on?
Not really.
I think we're good for today.
It's been like 40 minutes.
Oh, no, because 10 minutes at least was that where was blah was when we were talking about the iron key earlier.
Ah, well, dude, do you want to rephrase the iron key or did you want to just place it in on the end?
Um, it was just me making fun of the iron key.
I don't really want to include it because everyone, a lot of hackers love the iron key and it's just going to be a bad move politically for me.
Well, that's fine.
You can be the villain in this show.
I'll be the voice of light.
I was just saying, okay, the iron key, the small background is that it's a flash drive,
but it has built in hardware encryption and it's encased in this epoxy and it's in this metal container.
So you can't actually access the chips and then even if you could, the data is encrypted.
So it's, you know, it's a very secure flash drive and it's great for personal use.
Because you can put your, you know, bank documents or journal whatever on the flash drive and that's fantastic.
But apparently one of their biggest sources of income is enterprises that buy like 1000 or 10,000 of these things.
What do you need 10,000 iron keys for?
What company says, man, you know, all that really, really, really sensitive stuff we have.
If only we could put that on a flash drive.
Wouldn't that be great if only there was a flash drive that could handle it?
Why would you do that?
Personally, I wouldn't let the sensitive documents out of the building, but that's just me.
Yeah, no, no, but you could with the iron key.
You could put all of your company secrets on one of these devices and then you're good to go.
Okay, well, you know, hey, I don't understand the point of that either.
But I think the iron key is a bit to the realm of, I know, I'm going to get a hate mail for this, but to the realm of paranoia.
I wonder how many iron keys iron geek has.
He must have like four.
Yeah, well, whatever floats your boat, but I mean, really if you really have stuff that does that sensitive,
that requires like a special USB device that you can't just get through regular or like encryption.
Yeah, but this is a waterproof up to the maximum depths possibly measurable.
Okay, do you plan on chucking it into the ocean?
Um, you know, if it sinks, it could sink down to the ocean floor and then you can go back and get it and your data will still be okay.
I can't be encrypted.
Again, why?
Well, I'm just, that's what I was saying before the show. I just thought it was kind of dumb.
It's, it's cool for personal use.
It's like a bragging right, a defcon or something, but I don't see why a company would buy these things.
These aren't cheap. It's the, the really big one is the 300 bucks, which is unfair. The cheap one's 100 bucks.
All right, okay.
Well, from San Diego, California, I'm Tracanabus.
And I'm enigma and have a good evening, I guess.
Yes, indeed.
Thank you.