FAQ 7 Part C: Technical Questions
FAQ version Beta 1.01

Some information here is repeated in other FAQs due to popular request.
Q-Question A-Answer N-Note
If A1 doesn't answer quesiton, try A2, etc...

Before you ask about anonymity, try this site: http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html. If you want to surf sites anonymously for whatever reason, try www.anonymizer.com. They have a long delay for non-subscribers, so I suggest it only when you feel insecure about surfing or posting to a site. Lastly, if you're looking for links to download programs, see FAQ 6.

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Q: How do I view/play .rm files?
A: .rm files can be played by RealPlayer. The current version is 5.0, and you can download a fully working version at http://www.realplayer.com or http://www.real.com (click on the "free" button at the top left corner of the starting page).

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Q: How do I view/play .qm files?
A: .qm files can be played by Quality Motion. The current version is 5.0, and you can download a fully working version here: http://w3-mcgav.lab.kdd.co.jp/qm/indexe.html. It is very important to note that Active Movie 1.0 is required in order to run Quality Motion. Many people seem to have trouble even after this (all with apparently the exact same problem). Jaeger-san has it working, but Casahobo does not. I think the problem is with Active Movie, but Casahobo and several others who have this problem all have Active Movie. Anyone have ideas?

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Q: What do I do with a .zip file?
A: Zips are the most common way to store and compress files. To open a zip file, you need either Winzip, pkunzip, or pkzip. I recommend getting a free version of Winzip at http://www.winzip.com

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Q: How do I unzip a passworded zip?
A: Try using winzip. Once you try to unzipping, it will ask you for the password. Passwords are case-sensitive (it always makes a difference whether you use upper or lower case).
N: Some .lzh files are passworded also. If you're using the dos version, just type lha /? and it should give you instructions on how to use a password to unzip.

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Q: What do I do with a .lzh file?
A: .lzh files are the Japanese equivalent of .zip files. You need a program or extension called lha. You can find it here: ftp://ftp.aebc.com/Utilities/Archiving/lha213.exe
N: As always, the most recent links will always be placed in FAQ 6.

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Q: What do I do with a .rar file?
A: .rar files are used instead of .zip for archiving files and splitting them up into 1.4 megabyte chunks (so that they can fit on floppy disks). You can open them using Winrar, Unrar, or Rar.
N: I prefer to use rar, but it must be run in DOS. If you are familiar with DOS, then use the command line "rar x -r -v -y filename.rar" to start unpacking the set of archives. Rar files usually come in series, like "file.rar", "file.r01", "file.r02", etc...

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Q: What about .arj files?
A: Arj is similar to .rar, .zip, and .lzh files. You can open them using WinArj, Arj, or Winzip.

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Q: How about .avi or .mpg files?
A: Those are video files, and modern computers by default can play them (just double-click on the file). If this is not the case, and you have Windows 95, you can download Active Movie 1.0 to play them: http://msvaus6.www.conxion.com/msdownload/ieinstall/amov4ie.exe

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Q: How about .mov files?
A: Those are also videos, and you can play them using Apple's Quicktime player. You can find this player by searching at http://www.download.com

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Q: Any good program to view images and so that I can practice my eyesight?
A: I personally suggest ACDSee (see FAQ 6 for url). Another viewer is Thumbs32. If you don't like them, try searching at www.download.com.

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Q: How do I purge my cache files?
A1: If you are using Netscape, go to Network Options. There is a button to purge cache files. To keep your computer from caching at all (if you want), set the cache size to 0.
A2: If you're using IE for Win95, cache files are by default located in c:/windows/Temporary Internet Files.

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Q: How do I purge my history file/s?
A1: Netscape keeps history stored in one big file. Delete it if you want. I heard it also stores it in the registry.
A2: If you're using IE for Win95, history files are by default located in c:/windows/History

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Q: How do I prevent cookies?
A1: Girl Scouts? Where?
A2: There should be an option that enables your computer ask for permission before a cookie is sent. Another way is to change the attribute of your cookie file so that it is read-only (thus preventing any cookies from being added to the file).

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Q: I click on a link to a file (zip, mp3, etc..), but it won't let me save it to my hard drive. Instead, the browser tries to view the file as a bunch of weird characters.
A: Without going into an explanation of why this happens, you can always save a file by holding down shift when you click on the link. This works for any link at all, even a link to a .htm file. Instead of viewing the file, you will always save it.

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Q: How do I download only a few specific files using SBNews?
A1: I prefer this way, though you might like the second way I suggest: Click on the newsgroup you're interested in. Be sure to connect to ther server and download the headers so that you can get a list of posts. Then click on the button labeled headers. A menu should pop up with a list of all posts. Highlight all posts you don't want to get and hit reject. You don't have to reject them one by one (to find out how to do multiple highlights, see next question).
A2: Find out the pointer number to the first post you want to download. It might be some number like 22543, for example. Click on the newsgroup in question and click on pointers. Set the current pointer to point to the message number you want to start downloading from.

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Q: How do you highlight multiple files?
A: Click on the first file you want to highlight. Press and hold down shift. Go to the last file you want to highlight and click on it. This is very useful for highlighting a large number of files (so you can delete, move, or select them). It is the standard way to highlight multiple files in Windows.
N: You can always press shift later, but by pressing it right after highlighting the first file, you can quickly scroll down by either pressing the Pagedown button or the End button.

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Q: How do I crack the password for a zip?
A1: I use a program called fzc (fast zip cracker). As it currently stands, enough people have this program so that you can be assured that if a zip can be practically cracked, it will be. How do you use it? Type in fzc b filename 0 a. Instead of a, you can use "A" (upper case password) or "1" (number password) or "a1" (combination), etc...other options are explained in the program itself. Fzc should be in the same directory as the file you are trying to crack, unless you have paths set. To set paths, you would probably edit autoexec.bat. One more important thing is that you should edit fzc.cfg and set CrackMethod to 1, or else you will not be able to run fzc under a multi-tasking environment.
A2: Download fzc from:
ftp://ftp.bokler.com/bokler/fzc105.zip
ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/fzc105.zip
February 16, 1998 by Fernando Papa Budzyn
N: For all practical intents and purposes, a zip file can either be cracked or not. So, having a faster computer won't really help (Oh no, 2 seconds to crack instead of 1!). Above all else, using the right cracking method is the most important. If taken to severe extremes, cracking method can reduce the cracking time on a 8 character password by nearly 200 billion fold. The password length option makes almost no difference (in all realistic applications you would never notice). Unless you are absolutely sure of password length, always start at 0. Check the next question for more info.

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Q: Can you give me some more tips on cracking?
A: This answer is especially long, so skip it unless you're interested in reading. If you have no idea where to start, this is what I suggest. First try "fzc b filename 0 a". This will try guessing lower case passwords. Most passwords (not all) are plain lowercase words. Press the spacebar to see which password the program is currently guessing (if it says mlnaa, then it's halfway through the 5 character passwords). I usually run fzc like this until it runs through all 4 or 5 character passwords. If this doesn't work, I then press ESC and try "fzc b filename 0 1". This will try guessing numerical passwords. Even though numerical passwords aren't all that common, guessing at numerical passwords is incredibly fast (8 seconds guessing numbers is worth 30 minutes guessing letters), it gets second priority. The third thing I do is guess at uppercase passwords with "fzc b filename 0 A". If that doesn't work after five letters, I try lower case passwords once again, this time typing "fzc b filename 6 a" (note the 6) so that I can resume guessing at 6 character passwords. If I go through those, I'll try it with the upper case A's, and if that doesn't work, I'll try a mixture (the most common I've seen requires "fzc b filename 0 a1"). If you press ESC and want to resume cracking, just type "fzc r" and it will start exactly where you left off. If you want to save where you left off long-term, save the "resume.fzc" file somewhere for future use (it's located in a subdirectory called "data" of where fzc is found).
N: Most importantly, fzc will often generate incorrect passwords for a reason that I won't go into. Also, the time it takes to crack a password grows exponentially with password length. The password "modus" takes 26 times as long to crack as "mood". Let's take a look at the stats (part of which is provided by the author, Fernando Budzyn)
The Option is listed first, followed by the time to crack (assuming 200,000 tries a second for a typical computer).
1 - 5.0 seconds for 6 characters, 50 seconds for 7 characters
a or A - 25.7 minutes for 6 characters, 11.1 hours for 7
! - 1.8 hours for 6 characters
a1 or A1 - 3.0 hours for 6
aA - 27.5 hours for 6
aA1 - 42.5 days for 6
If you're curious, an 8 character number/lower case password takes up to 163.3 days to crack. So, momo1919 would take about 80 days to crack with a computer of this speed.

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Q: I see an image at a webpage being displayed. How do I save it for future admiration?
A: Right click on it, and it should give you the option to save it.

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Q: The goddess beckons me to augment my hard drive with more space. What do you suggest?
A: There are several options, depending on your preference. You can get a zip drive, another hard drive, or use a CD burner. Zip drives are cheap, rewriteable, and the disks are reasonably priced. An additional hard drive allows fast access and is rewriteable. CD burners are somewhat expensive CD blanks are dirt cheap but not rewriteable. The burner can be used to burn other useful stuff (like backup files), and the CDs hold 650 megs of data each.

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Q: I'm going to the bathroom/laundry room/supermarket and I don't want anyone snooping around my computer while I'm away. What can I do?
A: There are several possibilities. The simplest way is to run a screensaver with a password. You can make a shortcut to the screensaver so that you can double click on the icon. Before you turn the screensaver on, minimize everything so that when you come back and turn the screensaver off, all you'll see is the desktop (so that your boss leaning over your shoulder won't see that you were in the middle of solitaire). Keep in mind that people will often try to crack your password just for fun. Today someone did, and countless others have as well. The password is meant to keep away casual snoopers, but anyone really fanatic can crack it (I'm not going to explain how) or simply reset your computer (provided startup requires no password). So, don't make it easy to guess.

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Q: Howcome when I delete 5 megabytes of small files I end up freeing more than 5 megs of hard drive space?
A: Most IBM PCs allocate hard drive space in chunks of 32kb (known as a "cluster"). So, a 0kb file actually takes up 32kb on most (not all) computers.
N1: The size of these chunks are dependant (and only dependant) on the size of your hard drive. The following chart shows this relation for some typical drives:

Size of hard drive == Size of cluster
1.2 meg floppy-------->1 kilobyte
1.44 meg floppy------>512 bytes
0-15 megs-------------->4 kilobytes
16-127 megs---------->2 kilobytes
128-255 megs--------->4 kilobytes
256-512 megs--------->8 kilobytes
512-1024 megs------->16 kilobytes
1024-2048 megs------>32 kilobytes
2048-4096 megs------>64 kilobytes
Compressed drive---->8 kilobytes
N2: The numbers listed are the cluster size for each type of drive. Once again, a cluster is the minimum amount of space that a file must take up.

Note that Windows Explorer will tell you that a 0kb file takes up 0 kb of space. It lies. After all, it's made by Microsoft. ;)

For example, if you have 10 two-kilobyte files, Windows Explorer will tell you they are taking up 20kb of space in all (10 files x 2kb each = 20kb). In reality, they are probably taking up 320kb (10 files x 32kb each = 320kb). In this case, zipping up the 10 files would save space. If those 10 two-kilobyte files were put into a single zip, they would make a file 20kb in size (more or less). This 20kb file would take up 32kb of your hard drive's space, which is a 90% reduction on the original 320kb that it would have taken up as 10 separate files.

Likewise, 1000 little files will take up roughly 32 megabytes (1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte). If you want to keep these files but don't plan on using them anytime in the near future, zipping them would save a large amount of space. It would also significantly speed up defragmentation time, and similar procedures would be sped up as well (such as a filesearch). The only real disadvantage is the hassle of unzipping.

One real example that I've encountered was a time when I had about 1000 files in a directory. This resulted from Newsbin (there's an option in newsbin to disable this). Each file was roughly 50-60 bytes (which is a fraction of a kilobyte). My explorer claimed that the 1000 files took up 80kb in all. However, when I deleted them completely (they didn't go to recycle bin), my free space increased by over 30 megabytes, instead of only 80 kilobytes. Whip out a calculator and you'll see that these files took up 375 times as much space as Windows Explorer claimed. This is usually the case with all small files (files well below 32kb in size).

File allocation like a wall of lockers. Normally if a person wants to store something, they rent a locker that no one else is using. When your computer wants to store a file, it looks for a "locker" that no other file is using. Two distinct files are never supposed to share the same locker. If two files did share the same locker, you get a "File Allocation Error", which is minor but very common.

Now a person is always free to rent more than one locker if they have a lot of stuff. Likewise, a file is always free to take up more than one "locker" if it is very large. On the other hand, an individual is also free to put as much or as little as he wants into a single locker (as long as the locker can fit it). Likewise, when a file is given 32kb of space on the hard drive, it might actually use anywhere from 0kb to the full 32kb. If the file uses 10kb out of the total 32kb of space, the other 22kb of space is wasted.

Zipping up files allows several files to share the same locker, because technically all the files are packed together and considered to be only one file.

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Q: My IP address is sensitive. How do I e-mail you anonymously?
A1: Use a remailer. http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html
A2: Another way is to use the anonymizer to post at a bulletin board.
N: If you're curious, e-mail yourself using the remailer and see how it works. For any e-mail sent using this remailer, you will see the following message at the top of each message sent:
X-Comment1: This message did not originate from the
X-Comment2: above address. It was automatically remailed
X-Comment3: by an anonymous mail service. Please report
X-Comment4: problems or inappropriate use to
X-Comment5:

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Q: How anonymous are you when downloading from newsgroups?
A: Many news servers keep logs on who accesses news (by IP address and time). Despite this, news is generally more anonymous than surfing html. After all, news servers have a natural incentive to maintain anonymity, especially if they are carrying the groups you access. Also, usenet traffic is often at such volumes that your access is obscured by the accesses of others. Lastly, legal action has been attempted against ISPs who carry particular groups, without any success so far. Even people who are dumb enough to post their real address on usenet can usually expect no problems (though of course I advise otherwise ;).

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Q: How anonymous are you when visiting websites?
A: As it currently stands, if you surf only Japanese sites, you are very safe. If you are unsure about a site, you can always access it using the anonymizer (www.anonymizer.com). They offer complete anonymity to my knowledge. You don't need to worry about most sites, but it can't hurt to be cautious.

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Q: How useful is an IP address in determining a person's identity?
A: It depends on several factors; it ranges from easy to practically impossible. For example, some IP addresses are unique; in some cases, it is pretty much associated with only one computer in the world. On the opposite end some IP addresses aren't useful even if the exact time of use is provided. One case study is on someone who uses a particular ISP to connect. Out of all the people that person shares their IP address with, their website accesses take up far less than .0001% of all hits (I personally did the calculations based on accurate data within one magnitude of accuracy; he/she accounts for less than one millionth of all website accesses under any given IP they use). Every single second well over 1000 hits are made under that IP address, and only with a warrant could someone even begin this determination (and would still fail). So, the anonymity of IP addresses vary from end to end.

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Q: How do I use PGP?
A: First I will describe how you encrypt a message. First make a key for yourself. Choose any key length you wish.

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Q: Is PGP secure?
A: The weakest link in PGP is your passphrase. Choose a relatively long one with numbers in it, and don't use words that can be found in a dictionary. For example, "12ratz8de2katz456" ("Twelve rats ate the two cats 456") would be extremely safe. But don't choose that one, because it's mine (just kidding!). ;) The reason why you shouldn't choose words found in a dictionary is that a PGP cracker would often try using words from a dictionary to crack password. Despite what such crackers may boast, even the best ones aren't very effective; they're more for a good laugh, since they would never be useful in a realistic situation. The worst crackers can't even crack a password like "cheese76345" within a century, though some of the best ones might. Note that checking for misspellings (like chiese76345) increases the cracking time by an insane factor (because the word is followed by a number). This is all assuming that anyone gives a damn anyways. You don't want to spend months to crack a PGP code only to find out that the encrypted message was "This is a test." =)
N: The most important thing is to make a dictionary crack impossible. If that is done, then not even all the current computers in the world working together for trillions of years would crack it. Don't believe me? PGP uses 128 bit encryption (key length is not relevant in brute-force cracking, only the bits used for encryption). Normally even 64 bit encryption is considered safe, simply because no one would waste the resources to try cracking it (even if the bank was using it to store sensitive information, the money spent cracking wouldn't be worth it at the current levels of technology). It took thousands of computers working together for one year to crack a 56 bit password as a game (my friend actually participated). Now you might say, 56 bit and 128 bit aren't that different, right? Well, whipping out my calculator, a 128 bit password takes four sextillion times as long to crack (that's a 4 followed by 21 zeros). The reason is exponents. Even assuming that the current rate of computer growth will continue (for the past 40 years it has consistently doubled every 18 months), you would have to wait until the 22nd century to find a single computer that can crack a PGP password in a year. By that time, you'd either be dead or people wouldn't care about what you encrypted as a kid. ;)

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Q: What is a proxy?
A1: "Casahobo" suggested I explain this. A proxy server is an alternative way to connect to the internet. Some major proxy servers include the Anonymizer and AOL. In some countries, proxy servers are the only way to connect to the internet (often due to censorship). Instead of connecting to websites/servers to get data, you ask the proxy server to do this for you and then pick it up off their server. Your IP address will be the IP of the proxy server, which is shared by other users. Hence only the proxy can know who you really are, so this offers some amount of anonymity. The downside is that depending on the proxy you are using, your actions may be logged. The anonymizer mentions that while they do keep logs, their logs are utterly worthless. Not all proxies are like the anonymizer, mind you.
If you are not using something along these lines, you will either have an IP address unique to you or an IP that is selected from a pool of dynamically allocated IPS when you connect. If this IP address is unique to you, your anonymity may be compromised if your IP is ever recorded (particularly with the exact time). On the Professor's board at the very bottom of the page, your current IP is shown. If you e-mail yourself and read the header to the e-mail (technical info), it will usually give an indication of your IP as well. To see what information you can get on yourself, you can try one of several tracers. Many anti-spam sites have something similar. One such tracer is at http://pedowatch.org. There are programs out there that supposedly hide your IP, though I've never tried them before (my own ISP has a very hard time figuring who's who).

A2: For a formal definition of a proxy, see
http://whatis.com/proxy.htm

Here are some questions that I am not qualified to answer, so I shall only vaguely point you in the right direction.

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Q: Tell me what program to use to hide my IP.

A: If you want to hide your IP address, don't ask me. I'm not qualified to help you with that. If all else fails, try finding such information using a search engine.