Hak5 ep 408 - Building Packets

Chris Gerling breaks down IP and TCP headers with Wireshark and building blocks. Shannon Morse shows us DosBox, a free IBM PC DOS emulator. Christine Bourquin talks about Alice, a teaching programming language for beginners. Darren Kitchen summarizes his experience at Day-Con and answers some questions about Fon batteries.

Chris Gerling dives into the structure of IP and TCP headers in part two of his three part series on packet sniffing. He covers everything from source ports to checksums and everything in between offering insight into TCP packets in plain English. Then in part three he covers basic Wireshark usage and advanced techniques. Read more on packet sniffing on his blog at ChrisGerling.com

Shannon Morse shares with us DosBox, the free and open source IBM PC emulator that allows you to break out those old floppies and play your DOS games once again. While we wait for DNF, anyone for a Duke Nukem 3D deathmatch?

Christine Bourquin demos Alice, an innovative 3D programming language that makes it easy to teach programming using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Perfect for the next generation of computer scientists.

Darren Kitchen brings us his review of Day-Con with photos courtesy of the security twits. He also talks about Jasager batteries both big and small.

And on a production note: We’ve switched over from a standard-def composite based video mixing solution to a high-def HDMI based system. We’re not ready to release the full 720p quite yet as we’re ironing out (read: developing on the fly) the post production process but in the mean time we’ve got damn good looking 480p and we’re looking for your feedback. Thanks a million to everyone who has donated and helped make this happen!

On my segment, I chatted with ya’ll about Dosbox. The first time we shot the segment, we had such bad audio quality that I had to go back and shoot the segment again late into the night… /sigh. Such things happen when you work on a show.

Dosbox is a totally nifty creation that emulates an IBM pc compatible computer running MSDOS. Although dosbox is basically intended to run old school video games from the late 80’s and early 90’s, it can take on other tasks.

One of the key features about Dosbox is it’s ability to run peer-to-peer and internet/intranet video games. It simulates an entire modem, so you and your friends can play those old TCP/IP or IPX network multiplayer games easily with each other.

You can also take simple photos of your gameplay or video footage which is created with the ease of the click of a button. Hit CTRL+F5 for your photo, or CTRL+ALT+F5 to begin a video then again to end it. This makes for easy tutorial building, as well as nice video clips to share. The video is recorded into a folder called captures.

I found lots of good information about Dosbox at this wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox, as well as their main site: http://www.dosbox.com/. Here, you can find a HUGE list of games that are supported by Dosbox as well as FAQ’s, their own wiki, and forums.

Oh, and did I mention it’s open source and free? Yup

Episode 407 - Toorcon 2008: Robin Wood, Dan Griffin, and Jacob Appelbaum

Episode 406 - Packet Sniffing 101, Social Media with Boxee, and multiple Gordon Freemans with Synergy

Episode 405 - Windows USB Booting, Fon Hacking Illustrated, DimDim, DeskSpace and Portals