As the daylight hours waned, deep shadows made the cabin dark and menacing. Jet looked out her small porthole window. Where am I? In all the confusion, she’d forgotten to ask. She thought about her parents. My absence must be worrying them, Jet thought. A pang of regret stabbed at her heart. She pushed these thoughts away to focus on the immediate tasks at hand. Dr. Randy poked his head into her cabin.
“Do you have everything you need? What progress have you made?” Dr. Randy said.
Jet was busy typing away. She blanked her screen when Dr. Randy appeared.
“I’m fine, Doctor. I’m only just getting set up here.”
“I know you want to be with your family. The sooner you satisfy the Sultan’s hacking needs, the sooner you will be home,” Dr. Randy said.
She only nodded in response. The doctor left.
Jet continued the software verification process. All the tool versions were wrong. I told that moron to get Hally 3.3.1, not 4.4.3! Jet thought. Oh well. Better get to work!
Jet felt a wave of tiredness wash over her. She opened one of the Bolt cola drinks that the caveman had brought and downed it in two giant gulps.
She tried going to some trusted mirror sites she often visited when she needed a new build.
Blocked! They must use a proxy, Jet thought.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
She pulled up a terminal window and ran the commands to bring up the network interface settings. Jet received the following error: Administrative or superuser privileges required. Jet frowned. How in the hell do they expect me to get any hacking done when I can’t control my system? Jet’s face lit up. The lookup cache should be accessible.
Jet typed in a few more commands, and the content of the machine’s address resolution protocol (ARP) interface was accessible. From here, she could determine how her machine could access the internet. From there, she ran additional commands to interrogate the services running on the gateway. The service she was looking for, proxyd, was running. It even listed the version: FriendlyProx 8.0.1. Jet smiled, knowing from experience that this version of FriendlyProxy could be beaten with a few simple tricks. Jet pulled up Banshee, the default browser program that shipped with Hally.
Time for my bypass, Jet thought.
She typed in the IP address for the gateway followed by a colon and the number 8080. The browser rendered a crude picture of a banshee holding a globe. Jet clicked on the URL search bar again and then typed in the mirror site it had blocked earlier. I’m in!
“Thank you, FriendlyProxy’s weak-sauce security,” Jet said.
Jet spent the rest of the evening reloading the operating system from an archive build site. The creators of Hally only kept the latest versions of the bootable code on their website. Archived versions were only available from mirror sites. She pulled the relevant pages that contained the correct hash values from the internet archive sites. If she got owned, it would not be due to her lack of diligence.
Jet’s eyes were getting heavy; she dozed off several times while completing her configuration. She looked at the bed. It had been a long time since she’d slept without restraints.
Sleep—maybe for a short while.
She lay down.
Several hours later, Jet awoke to a rocking boat. She shot upright, and a sharp burst of pain coursed through her arms. Several thoughts entered her mind at the same time.
Are we moving? Where is the Sultan sailing to? This was not part of the plan.