_________________________________________________________________ | Better homes and Bootstrapping 0.03b | | ____________________________________ | | | |by | | | |ME-tan *** April-May 2009 | | | |________________________________________________________________| *****************************Intro***************************** _____________________________________________ At this moment in time more and more countries are trying to implement firewalls, blacklists and seek to end "Net neutrality". In the past only countries such as China and Thailand have been implementing them which is not surprising considering these countries have massive issues with lack of free speech for the people. More recently, it appears that blacklists are being discussed and even tested in countries that are a little more "first world". Australia has been testing an extensive blacklist that was recently leaked. The UK is trying to put through law to force all ISPs to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation blacklist and both the US and EU have been discussing putting in place legal frameworks to allow the internet to be either tiered, with the different tiers sold as "access packages" by ISPs or areas being simply blocked. The reasoning for this is usually being sold to the press and public as a means to control such unwanted things as child pornography. Some are also adding less serious matters such as controlling intellectual property or for just plain commercialisation of the internet towards the majority of users we have now who only use the internet for their email, or social networking such as using Facebook, Myspace, Bebo et alumni, and some casual browsing. The problem comes that the cost of this is the internet becomes censored. The problem with censorship is it that historically there is a feature creep whereby the censorship ends up applying gradually to more and more things and the scope of it increases. Further down the line the situation may arise that someone's blog post about getting a good shoeing by the Metropolitan Police in London gets his website on the blacklist because it may be considered as inciting civil unrest/terrorism. Considering that in recent years in the UK we have had someone detailed under the prevention of terrorism act for heckling the PM, and just a couple of weeks ago a newspaper seller died of internal injuries after getting pushed to the ground by riot police after he walked through an area where there were anti capitalism protests that day; so this kind of thing is becoming more plausible. During a discussion on 4chan's technology board regarding writing to European Members of Parliament to petition them in support of net neutrality I suggested that if the internet does become censored then it would be wise to consider other forms of media to preserve free speech. The worldwide web used to me a much more rough and ready place 15 years ago. People used to trade porn and illegal software openly on websites without getting shut down, Shock sites such as Goatse.cx were considered almost an initiation to new users. Ever wondered what sex had to do with bicycle frames? Try searching for them on the internet before Google was invented and you'll find out. Before the internet was being used by regular people who were not academics, materials and conversations were performed using technology. Bulletin board systems using plain old telephone lines were very popular for many years. While dial-up is slow now and even slower then, the simple protocols used allow people to post on them efficiently such as people use internet forums now, and even send emails to each other internationally using systems such as FIDOnet and DOVEnet where BBSes would forward messages between each other, to allow messages to travel large distances. It may take several days but it would get there. Despite the internet being censored in several countries it is still being used however, as it is much less tracable. The phone calls are hard to tap, can be made from public phones and are doing such things as allowing people access to up to date medical techniques in North Korea for example. As well as using BBS software people were also trading data much too large to be carried over 2400 baud dialup. There is a saying: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. The act of carrying data in portable media such as CDs (formerly known as WORMs for "write once, read many"), hard drives, computers, even today with modern things such as USB pen drives and MP3 players is known as "sneakernet". People would share the data around schools, colleges, LAN parties and meets to allow it to get around. Often these were CDs with large collections of shareware and freeware on them as well as a good amount of cracked pirate software. Another communication method that has been used in the past and is still being used is radio. This falls into 2 main types: CB radio which is good for beginners, simple to use, very good for local and mobile communications. Amateur radio or Ham radio colloquially is for more advanced users. It requires an exam to become licenced at it but it allows you to use bands and transmission powers that allow you to communicate internationally, communicate in morse code and communicate in computer encoded written word or "Teletype" CB radio does allow some international communications by people bouncing signals off the atmosphere when the right atmospheric conditions are present. This is known as Skip or DXing. People are currently using radios which are often illegally modified to allow them to communicate like this in the space between CB bands as many countries use different standards for CB. The protocol is to call each other on 27.555MHz, then agree on a different frequency to use in a manner similar to that used by Ham operators. This is known as "Freebanding" Enough background, Here we will go into actually implementing these technologies with current equipment. If more people contribute to future revisions of this file then I will add more technologies and techniques to the list. *******************Bulletin Board Systems******************* ____________________________________________________________ Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS, were invented in the late 70s by computer hobbyists, and used throughout the 80s and 90s, waning in popularity in the late 90s but still being used and developed today by hobbyists. They originally used one or more telephone line to allow a user to connect to the system and later allowed people to use Telnet and SSH over the internet. Users can create and use a login, post messages, play games and send long distance electronic messages to each other. Many boards were specialised for specific topics such as boards for teenagers, boards for hackers, crackers and phreaks, boards for support groups such as lesbian, gay, and transgender issues, pretty much anything. They were similar to the internet forums we use now. They also allowed people to upload files to the board, or download files precategorised by the system operator of the BBS, known as the SysOp. As this guide is intended as a guide for emergency replacement of internet communication I will concentrate on setting up a system that will work for both internet communication such as Telnet and Plain Old Telephone System (known as POTS). Modems have changed over the years. In the past all of the conversion of the serial output of the computer to the modulated hiss that goes down the phone line were done by the modem itself. This is known as a hardware modem. They require very little computer power to operate and will allow anything that can output RS232 serial to communicate over a phone line. Any modem that is totally external, has a phone socket on one and an a serial port on the other it is a hardware modem. More recently Modems were designed to shift this processing to the computer itself. They are little more than glorified soundcards and require much more computing power to operate. These are known as software modems or winmodems. A hardware modem can run off a 2mhz Microcontroller but a winmodem needs at least a pII processor to run at full speed. This is an issue because the winmodems fake a serial port to the system which will require specific software to communicate with it. This software was usually written for Windows only and this will cause problems to Linux users, although inventive open source software developers have written linux drivers for many kinds of winmodem. The other problem is that this port may be on an odd number and the software may not be able to be configured to communicate with it: Older systems had com ports 1 to 4 found on specific addresses and interrupt request locations within the system that were standardised. This goes back to before operating systems supported plug and play and were able to reconfigure hardware on their own to resolve conflicts. Many pieces of software hard coded to look in these places, a software modem will unlikely be in the same IRQ and DMA as the standard hardware ones even though the com port number is set the same. All USB dial up modems are software modems but suprisingly many GSM modems, such as those in older Nokia business phones such as the 6310i are hardware modems as far as the system is concerned. This means that it is going to be relatively easy to configure a BBS to connect to the mobile phone network. Most commercial BBS software was written to work in old OSes. Old platforms such as Amiga and Atari ST are not much good to us. DOS based ones will be more useful, Windows 9x based ones may also be feasable. I'm not sure how usable Mac System based ones will work on a modern OSX Mac. In this guide I will be concentrating on Synchronet. This software is available for Windows and Linux, with older versions for Dos and Amiga. While I am a Linux user I am not familiar with how to get dialup working properly on it so do not have the knowledge to write a guide for how to implement Synchronet on Linux. This would be worthwhile however as the robustness of Linux plus it's ability to work well on older hardware can be useful for certain projects. While not encouraging it myself one of the speakers at last years' HOPE conference mentioned that he and his friends installed a BBS under the air conditioning at a supermarket, took power from it, and connected it to the credit card verification line that was only ever used to make outgoing calls during trading hours so it was not discovered for a very long time, if ever. If you are reading this from a heavily censored country it may be the kind of guerilla tactic needed in order to keep information free. I will be working with Windows XP here due to its compatibility with hardware. It has much better support for winmodems than 2000 or the 9x series does, will just about run well enough on a pII machine up with a hardware modem to support a BBS, will run on cheap hardware such as netbooks and is reasonably stable when installed straight off the windows CD(I have had issues with OEM provided ones that preload tons of crap with it) **Installing Synchronet** Go to www.synchro.net. Download the Win32 version of Synchronet, any text files you feel you need, and a copy of SEXPOTS (Synchronet EXternal Plain Old Telephone System). Unzip and run the setup.exe. Use the default installation directory and use the "normal" installation which installs all files. After the installation finishes the setup will run Synchronet for the first time and present you with the configuration wizard. You are requested to use internet for setting up but it is not necessary. You can cancel the wizard and set things up manually for dialup support or just feed it any old IP address to complete the wizard for ease. Setting up with Telnet support allowing the BBS to be accessed over internet is a good idea even if you plan to make this a dialup capable BBS unless you are a staunch conspiracy theorist and worry about getting data mined. The wizard will provide you with a working BBS with basic configuration, configured for people to access it over the internet or local network using Telnet. It is configured with access to DOVEnet which is an inter-BBS messaging system allowing different boards to share messages and have common areas. While it is interesting to leave this running for now it is not useful to someone who wishes to run the machine purely for dialup.If you run click in the synchronet control panel: BBS, Configure (note, not configuration wizard which is the next one down), in Message Areas you can remove the DOVEnet ones. From this configuration app you can also manage other areas of the BBS. This part is covered well by the text files that accompany the software SEXPOTS is an application that you can set to listen to incoming calls from your modem, then forward it on to a telnet port on the system, effectively turning any telnet BBS into one that supports dialup. Unzip it to a location on the C drive, then create a shortcut to it on the desktop. Edit the shortcut to read sexpots.exe -com 1, create another one ending in -com 2 and so on for every modem you have. You need to run a new instance of the application for each modem. You can monitor the status of each modem in the dos window that appears when you run the application. Stick all the shortcuts in startup in the start menu. SEXPOTS can also run as a service. NT based operating systems such as NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP and so on have the ability to run services which are the windows equivalent of daemons in unix. These are small applications that perform specific tasks within the system that you call on to do certain things. Most of this is pretty simple stuff that most people don't even think about. Dos based windows such as 3.1 and 9.x based windows up to Windows ME do not support this as they still have a lot of MS DOS in them hiding in the background. NT was a different development platform which was used in all the business operating systems up until XP. NT was adopted because it was much more stable and a better platform. The problem was up until Windows 2000 there was no DirectX for NT based systems so MS couldn't move the gamers, a core windows market, over to NT until then. If you install it as a service you will need to write a .ini file to go into the same directory as the executable file. Noone has bothered to put up an example of one so I can't advise what the correct formatting of this file should be without experimenting. I can't be bothered to do this as the ghetto method of shortcuts in startup works for me. **Connecting** Every copy of MS windows either comes with Hyperterminal or it is available off the install CD. If you don't have it, go into add/remove programs, go into windows components and you will usually find it in with communications options. It is a pretty good application for accessing BBSes as it has lots of features, particularly ANSI which allows it to display a colored character set often used to display colourful artwork in BBSes. If you have seen people pasting artwork into IRC it appears a lot like that. Some of it is very good and worth checking out. When you run the application it will ask you to set up a connection. You give the connection a name, chose an icon (many of which referring to long since departed companies that offered BBS services), then tell it how you want to connect. If you tell it to connect to TCP/IP you connect over Telnet (useful for testing locally on the BBS even if you are running dialup only) If you select a modem it will dial on that, if you tell it to connect to a com port it will communicate to that. If you have a modem on that com port you can still dial up but you will need to speak directly to the modem. I will cover this briefly later on. If you select a modem you will be prompted to feed it area codes, country, telephone number much like setting up a dial up internet connection. When you connect the modem will dial and you will be presented with the BBS login. You can enter "new" here to generate a new account. You will be prompted SY: the first time around which is the sysop password you set when configuring the BBS. This will set up the Sysop's login account. If you have already done this you can either log in if you have an account, or if you are a new user to someone elses BBS it will allow you to create an account. If you are connecting directly to a com port, you will either have another computer on the end of it on a null modem cable or a modem. If you are speaking to a modem there are some commonly used useful commands to type in to get it to do things: AT = Attention = go do something. The letters following it tell the modem what to do, see below. ATA = Answer. This will make the modem pick up the phone if someone is ringing it. You will see RING appearing in the console every 5 seconds if the phone is ringing. ATD1234567890 = Dial. ATD followed by the telephone number will make the modem dial that number. ATH = Hook, puts the phone on/off the hook and hangs up a connection AT&F = resets the modem back to normal if it has been doing stuff, gets it ready for making a new connection You will also see ATS0=1 in the SEXPOTS console which is the command to tell the modem to auto answer after 1 ring. The modem's manufacturer will be able to provide more comprehensive details of all the AT codes your modem will support. This is enough info on BBSes, it is enough to set up a simple one over a phone line or telnet and connect to it. You can find out more about customising the BBS and setting it up to play games and network in different ways from the BBS community. **************CB, Freebanding and Ham radio************** _________________________________________________________ Telephone networks and the internet are a good way of communicating but it always relies on companies and corporations to provide the medium for transmitting information. Since I am operating under the "what if" scenario of the internet becoming unavailable or becoming heavily censored. Radio provides a medium whereby you provide all the equipment yourself and rely on yourself for communication. There are methods of transmitting data over this medium but is is requires more advanced Ham radio licencing. Even then transmitting data over Ham is very slow compared to dialup. BBS was designed to work on extremely slow connections so it can be modified to work over packet radio bands. As I do not know much about this I will concentrate on voice communications. **CB radio** Most countries will allow people to use low power short range communications, usually in the 11 metre/27MHz band. This is known as Citizen's Band or CB. Different countries however have different standards. in the US people are commonly using AM and SSB, while in Europe people are primarily using FM. Different countries allow different bands to be used for their channels and it may be illegal to posess a radio capable of operating in a band intended for other countries. Most countries also limit output power to around 4 watts, and have made illegal people amplifying the signal to have more range, either by modifying the radio to output more power or by feeding the output of the radio into a linear amplifier, also known as "boots" or a "burner" before going out to the aerial. People are however doing this anyway. CB is intended for people to use in about a 10 or 20 mile range. It is commonly used by truckers to communicate with each other, discussing the location of traffic jams, government roadside checks (such as VOSA in the UK checking for illegal loads, using illegal fuel etc), location of food, truckstops and prostitutes. All the things a trucker needs. It is used by farmers to communicate to farmhands operating farm equipment. It is used by off-road enthusiasts to communicate and dig each other out of the mud and is it used by CB enthusiasts to communicate with each other recreationally. Each band usually has its allocation of frequencies divided into 40 "channels" making the radio easy to operate, only needing to specify which channel you wish to talk on, which band if your country allows more than one (In the UK you have the old 40 channels that were originally the only ones legally allowed to be used, known as the "muppets band" and the newly introduced centralised European band, called the CEPT band. You can now get "80 channel" CBs which have both bands) . Many of the channels are empty much of the time. Countries usually select channel 19, sometimes 10 to start talking with each other then move to another channel to keep 19 open, although what happens in reality is channel 19 fills up with idle chitchat. CB is good for local communications. While there are walkie talkie versions these are cumbersome compared to the small VHF ones that are built for doing that. They do get much more range however so may be worth considering. This is still what people used before everyone had mobile phones, and used it to save money on phone calls. It also allows you to easily conference with many people which is less easy to do with phones before technogy such as Skype came along. It is good for putting into cars so if you are driving in a convoy, say as part of a road trip or car club you can talk between cars without needing to get mobile phones out and annoy the police. They are also very good for talking with friends in your local community, there is no bill at the end of it, and so on. While anyone can listen in to the conversation , in the UK at least, OFCOM will only investigate you if you cause interference or do something to really piss them off. The band is otherwise unpoliced and is excellent fun for messing around on. You can use mobile rigs in cars, walk around with handheld radios and so on, but you get a bit better range by having a base station set up in a house. You can attach large aluminium antennas to the house which will give you much more range both because the aerial is higher up, and because longer ones have more gain, better making use of the broadcasting power you have. It is recommended to use base station setups for DXing which I will go into later **Antennas and SWR** All radios need an antenna or aerial. When you are recieving radio it doesn't really matter how long it is. When you are trying to transmit, things are not so simple. If you ever got to do the experiment in school where you stretch out a slinkie between two people or stretch out a rubber band between two points with an electric motor on one end and so on, then shake one end so you send waves down the line. When you shake it just right points of the wave appear to stand still. These are called "standing waves". The same thing happens with radio waves going into an antenna. If the total length of wire and antenna are just right a standing wave will happen. The problem is this tends to reflect your broadcasting power back into the radio, and fry things. Commercially bought antennas have adjustable lengths or adjustable coils in them to stop these standing waves. When setting up you also need to purchace a SWR (standing wave radio) meter which you connect in line with the antenna when setting it up. It will come with instructions on how to use it but basically, you set the switch on it to calibrate or forward, start broadcasting on channel 20 and turn the knob until the meter reads full. Set the switch to reverse or normal or whatever else it says then broadcast again. It needs to be less than 2. 3 or higher and you have a short or are in danger of damaging the radio. If you then change to channel 40 take a reading, do the same on channel 1 if the meter reads higher on 40 make the antenna shorter, if it is higher on 1 make it longer until they are the same. It will probably end up being less than 2 and you will have a tuned antenna. Even if the antenna is sold to you as pretuned still run it through the SWR meter to make sure. Antennas also come in certain lengths. The length of a 27Mhz wave is around 11 metres. This is why it is called the 11 metre band. To get the best broadcasting patterns, antenna lengths are fractions of this length. A car may have a 1/4 wave antenna. This literally means the length of broadcasting element is 1/4 of the wavelength. Base antennas may be 1/2 wave or 5/8 wave. Usually the closer to full wave the better but this is impractical. I also gather that the particular fractions also give the antenna certain properties or broadcast in different patterns which may be useful for certain applications. This is something I don't know much about so will leave it there. **DXing** DXing is the term for long term radio communication. Communicating normally over CB is line of sight between antennas. The wave can follow the ground and allow it to pass over land features. The wave is also capable of bouncing off the ionosphere if it has been irradiated just right by the sun. This is known as "skip". It allows radio users to use the atmosphere as a communications sattelite, sometimes bouncing off it several times to broadcast around the world. The Ham radio users do this often and have bands and techniques accessible to them that regular CB users do not. Skip depends on the sunspot cycle as it is these that irradiate the atmosphere allowing skip to happen. The next time this peaks is in 2012, it will cause interference with the power grid and annoy people, but be fantastic for DX. Screw the power grid, get a honda generator or plug the kettle into your UPS until the power cut finishes and smoke a J. It'll all be cool. Skip does have a downside. People broadcasting on their local bands will unintentionally skip and end up bringing up the background noise of the radio. You might not be able to reach the guy at the end of the street with your CB but you'll be able to reach Germany fine. People who DX as a hobby also like to collect proof that they did it. They do this by arranging to send each other ornately designed 8x10" cards containing pictures and the callsign of the person who they spoke to. They call these QSL cards. They get their name from the Q codes used originally as short codes in morse for longer phrazes but are now adopted by Ham and other radio users. It just means "contact" in this case. They send these to PO boxes usually so they don't have to use their home addresses. They may also send these inside envelopes as some countries wanting to stop illegal DXing will look out for these being sent as postcards. The callsigns are based on the Ham system but are not official callsigns issued by the government. They are in the format 12AB123, where 12 is the country code, AB is the initials of the DX club that the broadcaster is a member of and the last digits are the number of that club member. For example, 26TM001 would be country code 26 = UK, TM = Tango Mike who are one of the large DXing clubs in the UK, and 001 is the member number. I am not a member of Tango Mike and have no idea who is at 001 so this is not me before people ask. DXers often use linear amplifiers and large antennas to assist them. I have learned that pretty much everyone involved in radio be it Ham or CB is breaking or bending the law somewhere... **Freebanding** I mentioned that different countries have different bands. Some people have decided to illegally use the space between the bands to broadcast on. As I mentioned, the band is very unpoliced so most of this is going under the radar, or is known about but not worth bothering with.. They are also kind of a gobetween for regular CB and Ham which is a much more complicated way of communicating, but has much better range and benefits. Freebanders are currently contacting each other using US style AM/SSB radios, modified to work on 27.555MHz Upper side band or USB. They are doing this intending to DX. They observe the techniques detailed above and that pretty much covers it. The freebanders however talk in terms of frequencies rather than channels. The radio I have for listening into this, a President Madison, still works in terms of channels and bands and I use a chart to work out what frequency that channel will be when trying to move to a particular frequency. There are not as many people doing this as are DXing on the regular channels at present. **Ham Radio** I do not know much about Ham radio right now so will give a brief descripton. Ham radio is the colloquial term for amateur radio. Like CB it allows people to broadcast with their own equipment. Unlike CB it requires people to take exams in order to operate the equipment, be issued with a callsign by a central authority and they must use that callsign when communicating. The upshot of which is that you then become legally allowed to use bands that most people are not allowed to use, and use them at much higher powers than CB users. Long distance communications are a hobby on CB by those with the skill to do it but communicating around the world is much easier on the ham bands. Ham radio also allows you to broadcast in encoded written words, known as teletype. It will also allow people to communicate in pure data known as packet radio. This last part may be useful to people reading this as I gather there are methods to incorporate BBS technology into it. *********Couriering, wardriving and sneakernet*********** _________________________________________________________ Before widespread internet was available in homes, we would share data between friends. The one guy with usenet access would download the warez compilation, copy it to a bunch of floppies then we would take it to another friend with access to a WORM drive (write once, read many, old name for the original 1 speed CD burner), make CDs, and share the CDs around. This is still going on today with people sharing data using USB pen drives, DVD-Rs etc among students and work colleagues and so on. It is colloqually known as "sneakernet" as you are physically taking the data and walking to other places rather than using an infrastructure to do it on. This is also being used in Cuba where internet is restricted and heavily censored. Visitors to the country are getting USB drives from trade shows and so on and these have ended up in black markets to allow people to traffic data around. If it works there it can work anywhere, and just requires a little organisation. Sneakernet also covers people sharing data during LAN parties. I have known people purchase new drives solely for filling while attending large lan parties as most people are sharing while playing despite it not necessarily being official. Couriering is the act of deliberately moving data between distribution points. Lets say you have a BBS without internet connectivity, and you wish to get some data to it do distribute to your users. What happened in the past is a courier was appointed to make the long distance calls required or to travel to another location, get the data and bring it back to the other users. They would in return get status within the community and also have best pick of the cracks and applications before anyone else. These days people only usually donate bandwidth to provide services to others. It is also worth considering if you need to move large amounts of data within a particular community by driving around with mass storage devices. Wardriving is the act of using a car containing a laptop, using scanning software such as kismet and Netstumbler to find open wireless access points and use them for surfing someone elses internet, and downloading from their network shares. It also includes people using cracking software to break the WEP keys and WPA passwords to gain access to otherwise secure networks although for the most part people don't do this, preferring to look for easier networks. They do this because most people who buy wireless access points do not read the manual and leave them in default configuration. Older units default to having no encryption on them at all. I see no reason why people cannot run a dedicated open access point to allow people to drive by and communicate with it. It would let members of the community have access to a BBS over telnet, a webserver with a forum, shares of files and so on. It may be something worth considering and I may run such a system with my spare access point. ********************Tor and Darknets********************** _________________________________________________________ People have long predicted the eventual control of the internet. One solution has been to set up nodes on it with encrypted traffic running between it in order to prevent people monitoring the traffic. This system is called TOR and is being endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Another method is to set up a virtual private network only between a small network of people you trust. This is called a Darknet. **Darknets** A Darknet is simply a small group of people who are connected using a VPN in the same way that people connect to a corporation in order to keep company information private. This small group of people are going it to allow them to share content over the internet without being monitored. The downside being that members of the network have to be trusted as any one of them can monitor traffic from within the network, so it would be easy for a mole to try and expose the contents if someone had a vested interest, such as the police covertly gaining membership to a darknet containing illegal information pertaining to organised crime. This can only work if all members of the network are trusted not to rat out the other members. VPN is a complicated thing to set up so I will not go into it in this file **Tor** Tor is a more complicated system that allows for anonymised browsing of the internet. The network has a number of nodes. You connect to a random node with headers stating what destination you require. It then encrypts the traffic, sends it to another node via a random number of other nodes with random routes, assembles your traffic and then sends it unencrypted to and from the target website. This pattern traffic creates concentric rings within the network known as "onion layering". The website only sees the address of the Tor node and the traffic is extremely difficult to monitor within the nodes. Anyone can use it but it is slow, and many websites such as internet forums are blocking Tor nodes because people are using it to troll the forum without being traced. The upshot is it is very private. Anyone can also run a node as the software for it is open source. You can also have tor protected websites with a .onion address, which provides it with a hidden location in order to protect the server from people trying to trace its location. I do not have information on how to set up a tor node and only know the basics of using Tor, so will leave that to other people to write files on. Please see http://www.torproject.org/ for more information. *********************Finishing up************************ _________________________________________________________ This concludes Better homes and Bootstrapping. If I write one with more up to date information I will release it with a new version number. If someone else wishes to add more detail or more chapters please add yourself to the credits and send me a copy of it. I will upload it with a new version number. As a disclaimer please do not do anything dumb which I may have suggested in this file: If you get busted it is not my fault. Please email comments to me on me-tan (at) wtfux.org I will provide email details for things like fidonet mail if I get myself on that system in the future. EOF