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.