HR Geeks

I am sure many of you have heard of the thought experiment relating monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare, to the concept of entropy. Monkeys Typewriters Shakespeare you say!? How much cooler can things get? Well, this creative thought experiment goes as follows:

“The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare” [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem].

I am not going to go into the history of that study, or much more. The wiki link above should do you justice. So what do monkeys and typewriters have to do with the 757ers? Well I’ll let you take a look for yourself, as I should not impose any bias:

That’s right, nerds, computers, and text generation. So I had the idea, well if there is a potential for monkeys to produce such a marvelous work as Shakespeare, surely my fellow Homo Sapiens should be able to generate something of equivalent brilliance. Thus, the birth of Project GorillaSpeare. The idea was to gather a log in #proto on the 757 IRC server, and eventually compare the log to Hamlet. Thanks to Project Guttenberg, I obtained a pure text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from which I parsed out the lines that represented who was to say what in the play, yep Hamlet is written as a play, and I also removed newlines, and some of the play-actions following a similar form to: [Ham. exits]. Once parsed, I wrote some code that compared each character of Hamlet to the first instance in the IRC log file of that character. Also captured was the user who constructed that character (spaces included). The processing job ended when the IRC log ran out. Now I must say, my parsing job was not perfect, nor can I credit the findings as being anything of scientific worth. But enough with the wordy-foreplay and on to the results:

• Parsed Hamlet Text: 164642 characters
• Parsed IRC Log: 32365 characters from January 11, 2008 till April 5, 2008. (log gathering only when I was logged in).
• We banged out about 19.657% of Hamlet
• About every 5.087 characters we plopped out 1 character of Hamlet.

The rest of the results can be obtained here.

So what does this “study” tell us about our entropy? Well, for one, I would think that a 1/5 ratio of Hamlet to Nerds is pretty efficient, but that’s my opinion. The results do not tell us too much, I just figured it would be interesting to see how efficient the IRC room is at generating a novel, without the premise of doing such. Granted, we are not communicating a novel per’se, rather what our blabberings have generated is still somewhat ordered, in comparison to a text that is not our goal of generating. In the thought experiment, the monkeys are typing pseudo-randomly. The next phase (GorillaSpeare 2.0) is to compare our writings to monkeys and measure, what I assume the original intent of the monkeys was, and that is a fairly good quality of pseudo randomness. My conclusion is that monkeys, our brethren, are awesome, and we as homo sapiens are no higher. If we were asked to bang on some keyboards without a premise, I’m sure we could do just a good of job.

-Matt (enferex)

NORFOLK: In what appears to be breaking new, er news, Ethan mounts his Segway again after being tossed and battered (deep fried salad?) only months ago. Is the leg ready to travel? Does his insurance know about this? Looks like its charged and ready to go and Ethan is poised to take on Norfolk Police again Segway style.

This morning oreo and I were looking into a SSH issue with one of our cpanel servers (yes, yes I know) when we discovered a hacked web hosting account running a ventrillo server. When we went to kill the users’ other processes we noticed something else running that was a little more interesting…

/home/<removed>/public_html/drivers/CVC/src/ircd

Our hosting box was also running an IRC daemon optimized for controlling botnets. Neato!

After fiddling for a bit we now had the IRC connection password and the IRC OP login. When we logged in we were quite surprised to find 800 exploited computers happily connected and awaiting orders. We tried a few commands but couldn’t figure out exactly how to control the botnet.

That was until we discovered the brilliant botnet operator had turned on debug logging. All that work setting up a server designed to hide who was connected and what was going on, only to turn on debugging. Whoops!

Not only did we now have full logs of how to control the bots, we were able to lock the operator out of his network by changing all his passwords.

As you might expect, the botnet owner was pretty upset. We contacted him via IRC and received a friendly response…

if you not give me back my bots i’ll destorys you
remmber that
i got your computer and your box
and alot more
i known you

I’m sure the stress of losing all the nodes he worked so hard to exploit had him a little upset