I Remember Modems

With the announcement this week that US Robotics is being purchased by a VC company, I began tripping down memory lane thinking about all the times that I have come across USR and used their products over the years. Having been left for the dead after 3Com had consumed them and then split them out, it is nice to see that USR is still hanging in there. USR has been around as long as I have been in this business. They were one of the early vendors at the dawn of the PC era, and helped to get the whole BBS industry moving along with their modem racks and deals with Compuserve (remember them). They began their corporate life making modems, taking their name from a company in Asimov’s robot SF stories. By the way, these are the very same stories that generated a flop of a movie starring Will Smith last year. I won’t make any further comments other than I was a big Asimov fan in my youth and read most if not all of his first 80 or so books.

Nowadays USR is more than just modems, and they sell a full line of access products including routers. We even use one of their print servers here in Tom’s HQ.

But modems? Aren’t they so, well, last century? You know, that empty jack on the back of your computer that looks like the plug you put your Ethernet cable in, only smaller? Who uses a modem these days, anyway?

I was trying to think of the last time I actually plugged in my modem and did something useful with it. It must be at least several years. I don’t currently have any Internet dial-up access accounts, but I can remember when I wouldn’t be out on the road without at least one or two of them. I don’t think I have even tried out the fax software on my current laptop, and I avoid all hotels with just dial-up when I travel. You could say that I am a broadband snob, but the truth be told, I just don’t want to deal with modems anymore.

I know, there are many places on the planet where modems are still in popular use, especially in those countries where broadband is expensive, inconvenient, or impossible to obtain. I feel sorry for you, believe me. The only sounds I hear from my computer these days are the annoying ones that come with Windows starting up, rather than those beeps and squeals as the modems synch up.

Back in the day, I was a modem maven. I still have (rooting around my ancient history files in my desk for a moment) a crib sheet that I put together back when I was working in IT support land that had the essential Hayes AT command set for dialing a 1200 bps modem. I could do all sorts of tricks with these, and it was always a challenge when I got ahold of a new modem to try to push its performance to the limit and get the maximum throughput from it. Sorta like overclocking your CPU, only a lot easier because all you needed was a couple of software commands and a cooperative phone line. If you want to get an idea of what these things looked like,here is one reference page.

Now, the word Hayes is from another modem company that was popular in those early days, named after a very flamboyant CEO who went down equally in style. Just to put things in perspective, I think those early modems went for around $500 in the mid 1980s. Now of course modems come in practically everything but cereal boxes, and you can’t buy a computer that doesn’t have one built-in, even if you don’t need it.

Now we see the word modem usually attached to DSL. This is interesting because the DSL modem doesn’t modulate or demodulate the signal, which is what the word modem actually means. But who wants to quibble over that?

I am happy for USR, really I am. I hope their new owners can try to polish the company and bring back some of the luster from the early days. Or maybe get Will Smith as their new spokesman. In the meantime, if you have some good modem stories that you want to share, drop me a line, I’d love to hear them.

Pure Pwnage guys Jeremy and Kyle

The Web is a great place. It can turn two twenty-something slackers from Toronto into underground heroes. All it takes is some videos and viral word-of-mouth marketing. Meet Jeremy and Kyle, the stage names (or whatever you call them) of the guys behind the PurePwnage.com video series on what the life of a “pro” gamer is really like.

The duo, who are RL (that’s real life for you noobs out there) roomies, got the idea a little more than a year ago when Kyle borrowed a camera for a film school class assignment and “was looking for stuff to film and wanted to try out some editing software.” He began shooting a “pilot” with some test footage following around Jeremy and a day in his life. The video was so well received (at least, according to the duo) that they went on to make seven episodes, and more are in the works. Each episode, which last about 10 minutes, are better and more sophisticated (at least, according to my taste) than the previous one.

Jeremy in his usual garb. Kyle doesn’t appear before the camera,

The shows have amazingly good production values for something done on the cheap. “We use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos, and it shows that you don’t need a lot of money to make short films on the Internet. Our startup costs are only a few thousand dollars, and most of that went to buying a camera,” says Kyle.  And that is dollars Canadian, which is even more impressive given what you can buy there.

I spoke to the two guys, or at least two people that sounded like the guys in the videos, last week. Unlike most of the interviews I have done, the guys didn’t give me their real names, phone numbers or other identifying information, but I had fun interviewing them none the less. Part of the fun was doing real-time translation of leetspeak (the gaming lingo that Jeremy uses both in the videos and for the most part in RL too) and trying to not appear like the old fart that I really am. But that is the wonder of the Internet: you can always appear to be something that you yearn to be.

The videos are entertaining slices of life, mostly following Jeremy around with a hand-held camera as he slacks off, “owns noobs” (that means trounces unsuspecting opponents) with his game of choice, Zero Hour, and his advanced “micro” (meaning keyboarding) skills. They are funny and sad at the same time. The last episode 7 sees Jeremy in some hospital ward as he tries to break out of a catatonic state, and is jump-cut with scenes from a game where his character is being interviewed by a nurse, mirroring the actual RL scene shot in the movie. Hollywood SF could do no better, and what is impressive is how these guys have accomplished some great storytelling on a less-than-shoestring budget. It helps if you are familiar with gaming lingo but you can still enjoy the flicks for what they are, a romp around a brave new world where gamers rule.

The duo has started a cottage industry to be sure. The first month they released episode 7 more than 300,000 people downloaded it, and the audience has been doubling from episode to episode. They are using a variety of technologies to distribute their videos, and are looking to get more sophisticated by using an RSS feed and other improvements. “We don’t know where it is going to saturate,” says Kyle. “No one has ever done this before and had a reality TV show that has been this viral and spread this quickly.” And unlike the more expensive reality shows that are on broadcast TV, it is done without script doctoring or any visible writers.

Does Jeremy talk leetspeak all the time? “What are you saying?,” he asked me. “If you watch the show, well, yeah. I own, and yeah. When I meet fans in RL they seem kinda shocked when they meet me – they thought the show might not be real and when they meet me and then they are in total awe of how much I own and its good.” You dig?

Kyle is certainly more used to talking regular English, even though in the videos you rarely hear from him. The concept is similar to that of Penn and Teller, for those of you geeks old enough to remember them before their TV shows.

The guys are actually big Tom’s Hardware readers. “It is something we read whenever we are buying new hardware pretty much,” says Kyle. “But not a regular thing we read. Jeremy was looking at Tom’s when he was looking to buy a new video card.” Jeremy then piped up “Well, Kyle that was a year ago so it isn’t exactly new, but I got my 5950 and lots of stuff thanks to Tom’s.”

Jeremy builds his own PCs “Because I don’t have a job and like, you can get a lot better performance for your dollar if you build your own PC. If you are not a complete noob it is completely easy.” He doesn’t overclock that much. “I just make sure my rig is good enough to run games at like decent resolution because you don’t want to be totally noobing at 800×600 or something. I keep most of my hardware kinda default.”

The guys get lots of fan letters. “Jeremy gets a lot of marriage proposals over email. It’s actually kinda interesting. Supposedly from women. Some women send their pictures but it probably the guy’s sister or whatever. But no one is emailing me with their pictures,” Kyle says a bit peevishly.

“Obviously I am going to get most of [the proposals] because of my sexiness,” says Jeremy modestly. Indeed, one of the more humorous bits is in one episode with a series of  interviews of some girls. The girls talk about their interests in guys who are gaming addicts and their reactions to some of the gaming lingo. Kyle actually has a steady girlfriend in RL, or so he says. “As for Jeremy, you have to watch the show to see what is going on.” Jeremy obviously doesn’t want to disappoint any of his potential suitors.

“Most of my time is actually spent playing games, because I don’t have a job,” says Jeremy, reinforcing the cinema verite of their ouvre. “Pure Pwnage is actually turning into a job,” says Kyle, where he spends his non-studying time answering reading inquiries, sending off swag and editing the videos. He actually is in his last year at film school and promises that more episodes are on the way when he can get the time to produce and finish them.

Where do they get the idea for the videos? “Kyle comes over and, like he says be real funny and I’ll film you,” says Jeremy. “And then he comes back later and we watch the show. My life is pretty interesting. Most people would be shocked at how close to our real lives the show is, really. Well, some of it is exaggerated a bit.”

What does Jeremy’s real parents think of these efforts? “At first my mom was kinda embarrassed,” says Jeremy. “I don’t think she liked the idea much that all these people were watching me own, she was never too proud of that. She always thought that school and like, good jobs were like, the way to go. She is kinda traditional. She would tell me to play sports and throw a football around and like. And I would try to explain to her that mom, you would rather have me owning games all day and that I get some skills that would be applicable. As times have gone on, and both of my parents have seen what has happened, they are very supportive and looking back they are glad that I didn’t play football and instead play e-sports.”

A big part of the gaming lifestyle is going for long stretches of time without sleeping or eating. “It was like 54 hours was my longest single session,” says Jeremy. “I ate once, a couple of bathroom breaks, playing Zero Hour. By the end I was kinda seeing stuff, I decided that I should probably sleep. But don’t tell my mom that because I told her it was only 36 hours and she was pretty mad. She thought I went to school that day, but I didn’t leave my room for like two days. It was good times”

Jeremy in RL plays more than Zero Hour, which is what he is known for in the video series. “To be honest, I own most games that I have played. But typically anytime I pick up a game, I seem to just own anybody at it. Enough to make a show I guess. Everyone takes a couple of losses here and there – you are tired, you had some drinks, I don’t know.” His confidence is both charming and cute, without being a big ego trip. I think that is part of why I enjoy watching the series so much.

“I have been playing games my whole life, it is all I have really done as a hobby. Pong was my first game, I picked it up when I was about two years old, all the adults were laughing at me,” said Jeremy. He got his first Atari when he was 4 or 5.  What about Kyle? “Some of it has rubbed off on me. I like Civilization, played a lot of that, but don’t have the passion that Jeremy has for games.”

I asked Jeremy what the stupidest thing a noob has ever done to him, and he was quick to reply, “Besides entertaining the notion that he has a chance [at winning]?” Many of you might think that his braggadocio is bigger than his actual RL scores, but Jeremy maintains that he has real skills. “I never hacked myself in the game to make the world think you have skills that help you in the game. If you got the skills, you don’t need the hacks. That is what noobs do, they can’t accept the fact that they don’t have skills.”

Of course, trying to prove that he does deliver the goods may not be easy, even for this reporter. Jeremy doesn’t use the same identity in each of his games, even though he goes by the tag the_pwner in the videos. “I never used the_pwner tag in an actual game. Don’t want to break any hearts. I usually switch my names, if you get crazy stats people don’t want to play you when they see your record.”

Any suggestions for the noobs out there who are just getting started with RTS games? “Focus on your micro – make sure you use the keyboard shortcuts, don’t use your mouse,” says the pro gamer. And also watch plenty of replays of other pro’s sessions too.

Better yet, download the videos from their site.

Cisco behaving badly

We’ve had our own journalistic fracas here at Tom’s Hardware this week, and no, it didn’t involve Karl Rove or any leaks about covert ops. At least, not yet. But when we arranged to send one of our reporters to the Black Hat and Defcon shows in Vegas last week, we stepped into a messy situation involving Cisco, ISS, and divulging information about Cisco’s IOS router operating system.

For those of you that haven’t been following the issue, a security researcher by the name of Mike Lynn was scheduled to give a talk at the hacker conference about how he could gain ownership of a random Cisco router by exploiting a buffer overflow condition. Lynn figured this out several months ago, and tried but failed to gain the support of both his now-former employer ISS and also within Cisco. He quit ISS moments before going on stage and presenting how he did it, to a packed audience that included our reporter, along with reporters of several other sites and news organizations.

We posted a story on our sister Tom’s Networking site on Thursday, the day after Lynn gave his talk. The story included photographs of Lynn giving his talk along with photos we took during the talk of several of his presentation slides. In the meantime, down in Vegas the printed copies of his presentation were removed from the show proceedings and new CDs were pressed that didn’t include the electronic copy. Lynn also negotiated an agreement with Cisco and ISS to no longer disseminate this information. And a day after Lynn gave his talk, Cisco announced a patch to work around the exploit.

We received over the weekend a letter from a lawyer representing ISS that asked us to remove the article. Based on the advice of our own counsel, we left the article on our site, and removed the photos from the article and from our web servers.

This is clearly a case of shutting the barn doors after the horses have left, and while I agreed to remove our content (the first time in my journalist career that I have done so), I am not happy about it. Especially since copies of Lynn’s presentation (and our photos too) can be found at many places around the Internet, with just a few minutes of searching. I guess the ISS lawyers will be working overtime to try to get rid of these copies as well.

The whole episode recalls a situation when I was in high school and our public school began using a new health textbook. Someone objected to a couple of chapters in the book regarding sex ed, and before you could say X-acto the school board had approved cutting the offending chapters out of the books and blacking out the table of contents referring to these chapters. Any kid with a modicum of research talent (and this is way before Google) could stop at the local library and read the excised chapters at will. The action was noteworthy enough to make it to the New York Times’ editorial pages.

Removing this content (the Cisco content, not our sex chapters) doesn’t make the Internet safer, doesn’t make our routers more secure, doesn’t encourage IT managers to upgrade their routers and doesn’t make it more difficult to figure out the ultimate exploit. It just makes us, and ISS and Cisco spend more money on lawyering around the problem. All this time and energy and money could be better spent educating the right people. These are the people who should be making their routers more secure and understanding how and why they are vulnerable.

Most certainly, people can figure out what Lynn did and reproduce his attack, without his slides. His talk wasn’t all that prescriptive, and pointedly so. Lynn wasn’t interested in spawning a new series of attacks. At Defcon, a room full of hackers were trying their best to replicate it over the weekend, but didn’t succeed not for lack of trying but for lack of time.

It is only a matter of time before someone else figures this out and posts the steps or writes some code. So take some time, if you are running a Cisco shop, and make sure you have upgraded your IOS as instructed here and understand the exploit. And check this page often, it has already been revised several times in the past week. About time Cisco acknowledged this flaw, and it is unfortunate that it took the circumstances at Black Hat to bring it to light. I realize that the security researchers (the legit ones, such as those who still work at ISS and elsewhere) have a tough dance to do with the vendors they research, but the events of last week and this aren’t the best way to go about business. And cutting pages out of books and trimming images off Web sites is just plain stupid, as much now as when I was in high school health class.