Remember when I said I love public libraries and how nobody bothers you? Well, not in America. A few days ago Steve was trying to convince me that if you are a good citizen and do nothing bad the U.S. is a nice place. Having seen from a distance the abuses by law enforcement and police brutality I was of course very skeptic.

Eric Drooker Police Dog

Up until now nothing serious happened, beside my buddy a. being pulled over by the police for no reason at all, and then instigated to react on a non-existent crime just to take him to jail. It went something like this:

This is Caitlin Upton, the 18 year old Miss South Carolina Teen, answering a fairly simple question.

Miss Teen USA 2007 South Carolina

Q: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?

A: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

If you happen to be a voracious torrent user you may have found yourself in the situation where instead of a film your video player displays a still text inviting you to download their stupid trojan-horse infected video proprietary video player.

Basically the video file is there, but it's been encrypted so that only that particular crappy video player allows you to see it. Or is it? Apparently 3wplayer are not very bright, all they did was using standard exclusive or (XOR) with a short string, which makes sense. It's really easy to implement, saves space since the function for encoding and decoding is the same and most importantly it's fast, wich it has to be when dealing with video. What those morons who created that stupid player forgot, was that if you have a lot of the same bytes in the file you want to encrypt, the XOR key shines through. (hacking code below!)