My normal response to a cat chewed cable is to splice and solder the cable back together. Unfortunately, the enamel coated wire used in my pedal cord is extremely hard to splice. You have to strip the coating off each strand before connecting them, and the strands are absolutely tiny. So instead, I purchased a 6 ft male-to-male 1/8” audio cable, and a 1/8” audio jack. The idea was I could glue the jack onto the pedal, and have a cable removable at both ends. If the cat ate it again, I could simply buy another $3 cable and plug it in.

STEP ONE: Remove the foam pad under the pedal toe. There are two small screws that hold the piezo sensor in place. Remove these screws, and gently lift the sensor out of the pedal. Two wires are soldered onto the piezoelectric sensor, and covered in white goo to hold them in place. I removed the goo around the solder joints with a knife to take the picture below. Note that the large white area in the middle is actually a conductor — generate a voltage between that plate and the gold ring on the outside and your pedal will “fire.” Heating the now exposed solder with a soldering iron will allow you to easily remove the old wires.

STEP TWO: I soldered a pair of short jumper wires from a breadboard kit into the same spots I removed the old wires from. I then soldered the other end of the jumper wires to the audio jack, as shown in the pictures below.

STEP THREE: Test the repair. And, as one would expect, it didn’t work. I plugged my cable in, placed the sensor back inside the pedal, and not a peep when I kicked the pedal.

STEP FOUR: Troubleshoot, improvise, and overcome. I discovered that the audio jack shorted the cable when the plug was fully inserted. My guess is that the jack is defective, but I’m too lazy to unsolder it and return it to the store. I discovered that if the cable was just barely in the jack, it worked perfectly. Of course, if it was just barely in, it would fall out easily. This is a problem for something designed for a seven year old to stomp on. The solution was to tape the plug into the jack at the correct depth, and then tape the entire assembly onto the base of the pedal.

The end result works well. If it breaks again, I will probably get another jack and do it the way I originally meant to. In the meantime, it’s a quick easy $5 solution to a $50 problem that takes very little time or skill to perform. Good luck!

My first clue that something was wrong came when clicking my bookmark for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports came up with a DNS error. This is a good reason not to allow your browser to provide “Friendly errors” like IE does by default — it’s not enough to know a site isn’t available, you should want to know why a site isn’t available. After two days, I was curious why it hadn’t come back up, and a quick Google revealed nobody else was having the problem. This tells me it’s probably localized DNS issue, where my ISP has a bad DNS cache. Could this be a DNS attack in progress? Perhaps, but I’m not going to investigate that, I just want my Yahoo! back!

The first thing I did was to verify that indeed the site was functional. Using TOR, I verified that I could log into the site from England. That confirms it — it’s a localized problem. I could just use TOR to check my fantasy scores, but that’s slow and abusive of TOR’s limited bandwidth. I switched TOR off at this point, having verified that I just needed to correct my ISP’s faulty DNS servers.

Next I hopped over to DNS Tools, one of hundreds of free web sites that allow DNS queries to be entered via the web. By using a DNS server other than my ISP’s, I will get different, and hopefully correct, results. Sure enough, fantasysports.yahoo.com gave me an IP address while querying my ISP’s server gave me nothing. Success!

I then edited my hosts file (on Linux it’s /etc/hosts, older versions of Windows have it at /Windows/hosts, newer versions put it at /WINNT/system32/drivers/etc/hosts). All I need is one line telling my computer not to query a DNS server for this site, but to use a static IP address:

98.136.70.92 fantasysports.yahoo.com

Loaded my bookmark in Opera, and it works! Success! Except I click on the link to log in, and then it dies again. I notice that it’s trying for a different server, so I repeat the process twice more until I get this:

98.136.70.92 fantasysports.yahoo.com
98.136.70.92 football.fantasysports.yahoo.com
98.136.60.78 sports.yahoo.com

Now everything seems to be working fine. I can browse through all my fantasy pages without any hitches. But what about the Flash applet that tracks scores in real time? Can I get to it? I click the button, and no… Just a blank page. Not even an error. Now it’s getting more complicated. I turn to the web hacker’s favorite tool – “View Source”. What I find is a new server hosting the Flash applet:

embed src=“http://aud.sports.yahoo.com/nfl/nfl125.swf”

aud.sports.yahoo.com ? I look that one up in DNS Tools, and stick it into my hosts file. Click reload, and my applet loads up! I feel really proud of myself, until I notice that all my players are listed as having a bye week, and the score is zero-zero despite having played games on Thursday. Something is definately not right, and it’s time for a new tactic.

I can’t easily view the source of a Flash applet, so I decide to do the next best thing. I fire up WireShark, a protocol analyzer/packet sniffer. I start capturing all the traffic on my network, press reload, then stop the capture, grabbing only 129 packets. That’s a small enough sample that it’s really easy to look through… Especially since I’m only looking for DNS queries. It turns out there are eight DNS queries, all sent in rapid succession, and all for the same server — aud1.sports.mud.yahoo.com. Okay, so that’s easy to fix, right? One more entry into the hosts file.

If you were curious, the eight queries all got responses from my DNS server. The server responded back with a response that had no error codes, yet the IP field in the packet was blank. Go figure. Does this mean it’s an attack or a misconfiguration? I don’t know.

So I click reload, and … no dice. I still see all my players as having a bye week. Undeterred, I turn Wireshark back on, and do another capture. As I suspected, this time it went to aud4.sports.yahoo.com. A little trial and error with DNS Tools confirmed that aud1 through aud10 were valid domain names, and they went to sequential IP addresses. I put all ten into my hosts file, and … it works! Like magic, everything is working flawlessly.

In case you got here through a Google attempt to fix Yahoo! sports, here’s the end result in my hosts file:

98.136.70.92 fantasysports.yahoo.com
98.136.70.92 football.fantasysports.yahoo.com
98.136.60.78 sports.yahoo.com
209.191.123.12 aud.sports.yahoo.com
64.215.156.33 us.i1.yimg.com
209.191.123.227 aud1.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.228 aud2.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.229 aud3.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.230 aud4.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.231 aud5.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.232 aud6.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.233 aud7.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.234 aud8.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.235 aud9.sports.mud.yahoo.com
209.191.123.236 aud10.sports.mud.yahoo.com

This all took a lot longer to explain than to do. Total time to fix this problem was about five minutes, and now you can do the same if you find your ISP’s domain servers are broke. If your ISP’s domain server is REALLY hosed, add 74.52.112.155 in as dnstools.com, so you can do your queries off their servers. Simple, right?

His article describes those “Single? www.foosingles.com” signs that are popping up around the country. Depending where you live, you may or may not have seen them — but if you live anywhere near one of the areas that has them, you’re probably sick of them. They’re everywhere.

His interest was piqued when he saw a sign for HaddonHeightsDating.com, which he knew was a small town. Using Wikipedia he discovered Haddon Heights had 7,000 residents, 56% of whom were married, and 25% of whom were under the age of 18… Leaving about 1,330 potential customers, assuming all unmarried people over 18 in the town were seeking partners. Since no dating company could possibly survive with such a small customer base, he decided to decode the business model for this company.

Using DomainTools.com, he was able to find 8,870 domains that fit the formula town plus a dating keyword, such as “putzvillesingles.com” or “schittsvilledating.com”. But the 8,870 domains all resolved to three IP addresses at three different hosting companies. Next he wrote a small script to pull the town names out of the domain names, and compare it to a list of towns in America. Obviously, a lot of towns exist in multiple states, but with a little fine-tuning he discovered that these signs are all over the country — but a few states like Texas and Wiscosin were very heavily hit.

Not having any luck deciphering the business model, he tried to figure out who was behind the scourge of signs. Not surprisingly, the thousands of websites were virtually identical — and contained no contact information. Using whois didn’t seem to help, as all the websites were registered via either a web development company in Panama or a marketing company in India. So he did something sneaky — historical whois, which often reveals who is behind a company before they get smart enough to hide behind proxies.

Before long, he found one domain originally registered with a name and a new company — therightone.com. A dating service. With 500 employees in 80 satellite offices around the country, which roughly match where the signs are found.

WIth a company name, real digging can occur. RipOff Report had claims the company made $3,000 to $15,000 off each customer. By massmarketing to zillions of Americans with pseudo-localized content, weeding out the smarter, er, normal customers and focusing on the gullible and rich, the company can rake in $54 million a year. Wow.

What’s my point? Without breaking any laws, without even leaving his computer, this man was able to track down the size and scope of a company that’s intentionally tried to cover its tracks. He was able to get a name and identity behind a scam that’s undoubtedly bordering on illegal, if only for littering. His resourcefulness is an inspiration.

And if you’re going to try some Internet research, make sure you hit The Wayback Machine, which combined with Google, is a great way to really dig up dirt on your friends. Or just read the original article here.

The root source of the exploit? While WPA2 requires AES, WPA doesn’t require it… meaning DES is still in the standard. Whoops.