Captain X-Ploit: Put your hands together for Sara Boulder

The Adventures of Captain X-Ploit:
“Ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for Sara Rachel Boulder”
– Part 3 of the epic chronicle –
Strangers are just Enemies you haven’t met.

Sara Boulder awoke on that shimmering morning in the softest bed she had scammed her way into yet. She wandered over to her victim’s stereo system scanning the shelves for something good to listen to while she got ready for the day. Her eyes fell upon Seether’s new album “Holding Onto Stings Better Left to Fray”. Well at least this sucker has good taste in music, she thought to herself as she put it in and began to sing happily to “Country song” and…

What? <pause> What do you mean I can’t spend an entire post promoting Seether’s new album? <longer pause> Oh come on, IT ROCKS! <short pause> Ok, ok, fine… anyway.

AFTER getting ready she danced down the stairs and raided her victim’s fridge. The reader might be wondering where the proper owner of this house is. Well, at the very moment she was raiding his fridge he was prancing about the park telling everyone he could, to please visit the nearby pub and tell the bartender the keyword “relevant”. He was under the firm yet mistaken belief that if he could simply get 200 people to visit the pub and do this Sara would go out with him.

One might wonder what thoughts would run through the head of a man this pathetically lonely. Well, his thoughts were as follows. Hmm… I’m really hungry… But I only need to get 192 more people to go to the pub… Damn the park is FULL of balding men today I wonder what they are up to… no bother I’ve got to get this done and then I can win back the keys to my house and a chance with the girl of my dreams…

If he had been a brighter man, he would have noticed that the other balding men were doing the exact same thing with different words Sara had found on a motivational poster in the trash outside of the coffee shop. If he had been a brighter man still he would realize that this, in effect, made it so that none of them would be able to get 20 people to go to the pub let alone 200. If he had been a brighter man still he would not have given her the keys to his house as “collateral for this once in a lifetime chance”.

Sara left his house with a heart melting smile on her flawless face when, in a flash of light,

All time stopped.

She knew this because the people had stopped moving and the door had stopped flying shut in her wake. Hmm, I knew I was pretty but I’ve never broken time with a smile before. Damn… I am magical… hmm, no wait here comes an alien he must want to talk to me… but wait who is that wonderful beast he is dragging along with him, she thought.

“Greetings Miss Boulder, I bring with me…” the alien was in the middle of saying when the gorgeous man interrupted hastily “Wow! A world full of people who don’t move! Oh, I know, we must be in Canada! Yes that’s got to be it.” The alien looked pained by the handsome man’s obvious stupidity as he finished his thought “Maxwell Damian Higgens, perhaps the stupidest life form in existence.”

Note from the author: To my adoring fans I have two gifts. The first is a bit of advice and the second is a promise.

Firstly: Go buy Seether’s new album. It’s good.

Secondly: Since I missed last week due to an amazing and unparalleled bout of apathy I will have a Sunday special edition chronicling the past of one Maxwell Damian Higgens.

Now without further ado, I will leave it to our previously scheduled commenter to discuss this week’s episode of Captain X-Ploit.

If the unexpected back-story detour into the world of Sara Boulder hasn’t given you a severe case of WTF then you probably aren’t paying attention. And what’s up with this new Damian Higgens guy? Guess we’ll find out soon.

This episode’s exploit is a classic. It combines the best (worst) parts of 419 scams with multilevel marketing. Kind of like Nigerian Amway. Seriously though, who hasn’t seen those web sites that offer you something really cool – like say a free iPad – and all you have to do is get 10 friends in on it. In the final analysis nobody gets any free iPads and the spammer gets lots of juicy info from their unwitting down-line. Exactly like the poor balding schmucks trolling the park won’t ever get a date with Sara while she gets free use of their houses.

Captain X-Ploit: Strangers are just Enemies you haven’t met. Part 2

The Adventures of Captain X-Ploit:
The Amazing Adventure of Mr. Biscuits, Señor Sparkles and The Evil Dr. Whiskers
– Part 2 of the epic chronicle –
Strangers are just Enemies you haven’t met.

David’s adventure:

“That damn Sara, who does she think she is trying to take my place as rightful hacker god of this town? I’ll show her,” David thought to himself as he strode into the local pet store named “PuppyStation”. He sauntered up to the counter and said “I need a…. Wait! Is that sign for real?” The clerk’s eyes followed David’s gaze to a sign that read ‘NOTE TO EVERYONE: You will no longer be able to walk your dogs. We regret to inform you that we will be shooting any dogs being walked.’

Before David could exclaim about how terrible this was and use his hacking skill to right this horrible wrong a strange group of men wearing paper bags on their heads walked in. They hastily sped to a door labeled “Totally Secure room” one of them reached for the handle. It fell off in his hand and the door swung open.

As the men were running away with fists full of dog callers and cash the man behind the counter said “Hey! You can’t do that!!!!” In a flash he was in hot pursuit. “HEY!” yelled David. “I was gonna do that…” he trailed off quietly and anticlimactically in an empty store. “Nuts to this,” David thought as he pocketed “trained mice” who, according to the sign on the enclosure, come when called by name.

Back out on the street corner he pulled the mice out and bestowed upon each a name to be inscribed in eternity with shimmering golden letters. “You shall be known as ‘Mr. Biscuits‘!” with a stone serious look etched onto his face he liberated the second mouse from its pocket prison. “The Gods of fate bestow upon you the title ‘Señor Sparkles‘. With equal eloquence he produced the third and proclaimed “The bowels of eternity will forever echo the name ‘Dr. Whiskers‘”.

A flash of lightning on a clear sunny day sealed the ceremony with the severity only a god can grant.  Or maybe it was a backfiring car. Either way, David hurriedly made his way to the high-end retail district.

He entered the first store he saw and loosed his little friends, waited about twenty seconds for the screams, then wandered over to the counter demanding to speak with the owner. Upon the flustered store owner’s arrival, David explained that he was the health inspector and would have to ‘shut down his establishment lest he get rid of this horrific infestation immediately’.

“But where will I get one on such short notice?” the owner asked.

“Well… I am also an exterminator.” David replied

After departing from the store $1000 richer he repeated this procedure until the sun was about to set.

End note by author:

Really, Sony, Really?
Well, Mr. Joe Webster I think I’ll let you have at them.

End note by regularly scheduled commentator:

Okay, Mr. Nicholas Webster maybe I will. First let me say how nice it is to have the good Captain back with us after his semester long hiatus.

For those non-gamer readers among us, the seemingly gratuitous digression (all right obviously gratuitous digression) into illegal dog walking – something that was previously not only legal but encouraged and a popular feature of dog ownership – was a shot at the recent and still unfolding massive data breach of the Sony Playstation Network. This attack against PSN evolved from an attempt by some hackers (perhaps modders would be a better term) to figure out how to get their modded Linux powered PS3’s to work with PSN after Sony decided that in spite of advertising it as a feature, the Linux capability should be disallowed and unceremoniously forced an “upgrade” on all PS3 owners to do just that. Needless to say many of the PS3 hacker community were not amused.
Then when it turned out that Sony was really attempting to take complete control of every PS3 unit to make their PSN “security” much easier, not only did that further incense the hacker community, but it went pear shaped in a big way. A really, really big way. A 77 million PSN users and counting data exposure way. “So what’s the beef with Sony?”, you might ask if you are not a PSN user. Let me put it as delicately as I can, since your gamer friends and children will be significantly more brutal in their explanation.

1. When you sell an item to a customer, they own that item. You have no right to alter that item without the customer’s – i.e. the owner’s – express consent.
2. When the security of a client/server based system depends on you having control of both the client and the server and you do not have actual physical control over the client, you have no security.

I won’t even get into the attempted cover-up, the blame-shifting and other dubious behavior by Sony. Those are topics for another full blog entry. Suffice it to say – Sony = EPIC FAIL.

As for the actual parable in this episode, David – with the help of his trusty trained rodent companions Mr. Biscuits, Señor Sparkles and Dr. Whiskers implement a classic “fake malware removal” scam. You know what I’m talking about here – those “Your computer is infected with a virus” pop-ups you get online that then offer to sell you malware protection that will fix the problem. Of course you will have the same experience as the luckless store owners had with David and Co.’s “rodent mitigation” if you fall for it.

Welcome back Mr. Stone! We missed you.