Retrieving Windows Server 2003 Passwords

So I had installed Windows Server 2003 awhile back, but had forgotten my administrator password. I tried all the random configurations I could think of, but nothing worked. So being distraught, I knew for Windows XP, you could download a boot diskette or CD which could reset your administrator password. However, at that time, it didn’t work for Windows Server 2003. There are claims now that it works, but I haven’t hit that situation again yet and don’t really plan on to.

There were many other suggestions on another site: How can I gain access to a Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 computer if I forgot the administrator’s password? How can I reset the administrator’s password if I forgot it? But at that time, they didn’t have any suggestions for Windows Server 2003. It was pretty hopeless.

But I searched online some more and ended up on this website: Windows XP Login Recovery. They claim: Login Recovery is a service to reveal user names and recover passwords for Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Longhorn. As long as you have physical access to the computer, your passwords can be recovered. By following three simple steps, over 98.5% of passwords can be recovered within less than ten minutes. This service does not overwrite passwords, it does not write anything to the hard drive, it does not alter the computer in any way. It simply reads the encrypted passwords for processing through our servers. I didn’t really believe them and if they could break it, I didn’t really want them to know my password either, but I had no choice because I didn’t want to reinstall the OS. I followed their directions and gave it a try.

There are 2 levels of service. My password was actually cracked within 5 minutes, but to get it that fast, I would have to pay £10. I opted for the free service which required waiting 48hours. And indeed it was able to crack my password within 5 minutes. I was shocked at how fast it could do it and could Windows Server 2003 security be that easy to break and when no other sites or software at that time were able to do it? Apparently, I had shifted my index finger one key to the left causing a typo on both the password and confirmation. But it’s fixed now and the password has changed, just in case.

So being curious, I sent a email to the Windows Server 2003 team asking them if they knew how this password retrieval worked and why is it so fast when it’s suppose to be secured. They directed me to this site: Project RainbowCrack. RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique. In short, the RainbowCrack tool is a hash cracker. A traditional brute force cracker try all possible plaintexts one by one in cracking time. It is time consuming to break complex password in this way. The idea of time-memory trade-off is to do all cracking time computation in advance and store the result in files so called “rainbow table”. It does take a long time to precompute the tables. But once the one time precomputation is finished, a time-memory trade-off cracker can be hundreds of times faster than a brute force cracker, with the help of precomputed tables. By having precomputed tables, they’re able to crack these passwords super fast just by making some simple comparisions to the user profile data you sent them.

I’m wondering if I should make a really obscure and long password and see if they could crack it.

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Just watched Wallace & Gromit – Curse of the Were-Rabbit. IMDB users give it a rating of 8.1. You can watch the trailer here. I thought the movie was rather fun and enjoyable, much more than I expected. I’ve never watched Wallace and Gromit before, yet I wonder if all of their works is this interesting.

wallace and gromit the curse of the were rabbit posterwallace and gromit the curse of the were rabbit posterwallace and gromit the curse of the were rabbit poster

Spoilers: (Show)

Database Problems

Sorry for the down time and several of you have notified me of the problem. Apparently, after a bit of debugging and troubleshooting, it turns out that my MySQL databases were linked through krunk007.com which is no longer registered. I had only gotten that domain because DreamHost provided a free domain registration. They’re currently holding a deal where you get $88 off your first year! Remember to use the coupon code: DREAM88. I told DreamHost that I didn’t want to continue the krunk007.com registration since it was only free the first year and I already had krunk4ever.com and krunk4ever.org under my belt. What I didn’t remember was both my blog and gallery pointed to the database in krunk007.com. The registration ended earlier this month, but took full effect sometime early this morning (before I slept), but it was going on and off. At first I thought it was just some server problems, but they responded to me that there’s nothing wrong with the server which my database is hosted on, I started debugging and noticed the domain issue. So now I’ve relinked the database using a current domain and things should be fine when the DNS starts to propagate.

So both my Blog and Gallery should be running in full power now. Please let me know if you do hit any more issues.

Fate/stay night Episodes 1-3

Saving one person means not being able to save another.

I’ve got to say, this has to be one of the best new animes released in awhile, probably on the scale of Bleach. You can visit the Fate/stay night official anime homepage or visit the original game site. Fate/stay night was originally an H-Game (click on link for definition). Like the other Type-Moon game, TsukiHime (月姫) was made into an anime. The animes themselves have no adult materia, but it was because the popularity of these games which gave a reason for these to be converted into anime series.

Check out this intro video: Fate/stay night Curtain Raiser.

Images from the game:

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Fate/stay night Episode 1 – The day of the beginning

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Fate/stay night Episode 2 – The Fateful Night

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Fate/stay night Episode 3 – Curtains Up

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Spoilers: (Show)

Did I mention how cute Saber is?

King of Fighters – Another Day Episode 2

King of Fighters – Another Day Episode 2 – Chapter 02: Accede

Another short episode. Not really sure what this series is trying to accomplish. It had no connection with the 1st episode either. Though it did consist of characters from King of Fighters.

king of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fightersking of fighters

Spoilers: (Show)

Bleach Episode 64

Bleach 64

Trying to finish as much anime entries. I have like 20 episodes worth of material backlogged. I’ll start off with Bleach 64.

bleachbleachbleachbleachbleachbleachbleachbleachbleach

Spoilers: (Show)

Guess we’ll have to wait till next episode to find out!

Show/Hide functionality

I’ve added a new functionality to my website, and that’s something I’ve been meaning to add since I had Spoilers. For example:

Spoilers: (Show)

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be going back and editing every spoiler to insert that functionality.

I did also add it to the links on the side so I can hide a bunch of stuff by default. Enjoy!

Here’s how to do it if you’re interested:

First, you’ll need the javascript code that’ll show and hide the blocks:

<script type="text/javascript">
function toggle(blockID)
{
  var block = document.getElementById(blockID);
  var displayProperty = block.style.display;
  var text = document.getElementById(blockID + "Tog");
  
  if (displayProperty == 'none')
  {
    block.style.display = 'block';
    text.innerHTML = "Hide";
  }
  else
  {
    block.style.display = 'none';
    text.innerHTML = "Show";
  }
}
</script>

What this chunk of code does is it’ll either hide or unhide the element that it finds by the ID you pass in by checking to see if it’s currently hidden or not. If it’s hidden, it’ll unhide it. If it’s being shown, it’ll hide it. There’s also different section of code where it finds the element which has a specific ID based on the ID you passed in, which I’ll explain later. What it does is change the text to “Show” or “Hide” depending on if it’s hidden anymore.

For any element you want to hide with this toggle function, you just need to give it a UID (unique ID). For example:

<p id="toggleTest">this is a toggle test</p>

Afterwards, you’ll just need to construction a link to do the toggle. You’ll also need to give this link a UID based on the UID of the block you want to toggle. Here’s the code:

<a id="toggleTestTog" href="javascript:toggle('toggleTest');">Hide</a>

Notice how the link id is toggleTestTog and the block id is toggleTest. For my code you need to append the Tog to the UID of the block id for it to be able to know what text to change.

Here’s the above example in running:

this is a toggle test

Hide

If you want to have the item hidden by default, you just need to update code of the item to have a style attribute of display:none:

<p id="toggleTest2" style="display:none">this is a toggle test 2</p>

Here’s the corresponding link code:

<a id="toggleTest2Tog" href="javascript:toggle('toggleTest2');">Show</a>

Here’s the example of the code already hidden. I changed the id to toggleTest2 since it needs to be unique. I also changed the link text from Hide to Show since it’s hidden by default:

Show

I did try to find if I knew the elementID of the object that called me, but I wasn’t able to find much info. If you know how a javascript function can figure out the object/element that called it, please do let me know. Just leave me a short message in the comments section.

Comcast Game Invasion

Comcast.net Game Invasion (from AnandTech Hot Deals) – pretty sweet deal for those who have the 8Mbps plan on Comcast! Guess what! I got bumped up to 8Mbps for FREE! Yes! I didn’t even know that. All 4Mbps customers got bumped to 6Mbps and all 6Mbps got bumped to 8Mbps. Pretty sweet for only $35/mo.

Congratulations on giving yourself the competitive edge with Comcast 8Mbps High-Speed Internet with Game Invasion

There’s just one more step you need to take to activate your IGN Founders’ Club Membership, included FREE with your Comcast High-Speed Internet subscription.

This IGN Founder’s Club Membership will give you premium access to fileplanet, gamespy, and IGN. You can disable ads, get instant access to private servers for downloads, and no more restrictions on how much you can download! Pretty sweet deal for those who already have Comcast or live in the Comcast serviced area.

ign founders club

Enjoy!

Butterfly = Symbol of Death?

I was rewatching the first few mintues of the Corpse Bride and noticed how the beginning and ending matched with butterflies. It also got me thinking if butteryfly was a symbolism of death and reincarnation since Bleach uses butterflies to symbolize a soul leaving the living world and entering Soul Society.

From Butterfly and Moth Symbolism:

Death, Omen of Death

Death is symbolized by many aspects of lepidoptera. In Maryland, if a white butterfly enters your house and flies around you, it foretells death. In some parts of the country, if a moth lands on the mother of a newborn child, that child will soon die. Italian-Americans view the appearance of a moth in their home as a sign of the impending death of someone they know.

There is a moth in Europe called the Death’s Head Sphinx Moth. It represents death to many Europeans because of the clear outline of a skull on its back. Salvador Dali made use of this symbol in an interpretation of a Currier and Ives print, “The Life of a Fireman.”

There are numerous other examples of lepidoptera symbolizing death. It is said if a caterpillar measures your entire length or girth you will die. Samoans felt if they captured a butterfly it meant they would be struck dead. In Brunswick, if the first butterfly spotted in spring is a white one, it was an omen of death. The Celts believed that seeing a butterfly flying at night meant death. The chrysalis or pupal stage symbolizes death in Christian art.

It also shocked me to find out that Johnny Depp played Victor Van Dort. For the longest time I thought it was Adrien Brody (the guy from The Pianist). I mean I even thought it was pretty clever to have him play the piano in this animation! How wrong I was.


Random Crap:

New doodle today. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually scanned a doodle, though I have collections of them in my notepads at work. I present to you:

soda can
Soda Can!

Well, it wasn’t really modeled after a soda can, but more of the juice cans we have at work.

Marriage builds wealth more than being single?Staying married has its benefits, especially financial, as a new U.S.-wide study shows the wealth of a married person is almost double that of somebody who is single. No duh? When you divorce, half your savings goes to your wife. And if you’re wife works, that’s 2x the income. But I guess marriage has its perks where you no longer have to buy “as many” gifts to pamper your wife.

Deadlock was trying to explain to me how the splitting body magic trick I posted yesterday worked. He first showed me David Copperfield: Laser illusion which was basically the same trick. Apparently, both the shirt and the pants are in rigid structure which I’ve figured, but I didn’t realize that his the shirt and the pants were connected at least on one side no matther when. We searched for an free online whiteboard and found: Imagination Cubed. This thing is crazy cool! Allows of mutliple people to connect and draw simultaneously. With this, he showed Deadlock showed me the internal body structure was while he was doing the act.

Not sure if I showed you this video before: Nintendo Revolution controller. Interesting ways to use the Revolution controller, but I wonder how well it’d be liked.

Hostel

Went to watch Hostel last night with CMDCC. I’ve got to say this was one of the grossest, most disgusting and disturbing movie I’ve seen in awhile. It wasn’t exactly horrifying, but there were some parts that were so disturbing I hit behind my icee cup and bag of popcorn. IMDb users give it a rating of 6.3. You can watch the trailer here. I would only recommend that you ever see this movie only if you have the guts. I almost couldn’t stomach it myself. The movie is really consisted of 2 parts. The first 30 minutes or so was like a porno. Tons of sex and nudity. The remaning hour was filled with sick demented things which I’m not even sure I can describe in my spoilers.

hostelhostelhostelhostelhostelhostel

Spoilers:

The story starts out with 3 guys, 2 American college students who are backpacking in Europe and a Icelandic man they met in London or Paris which joined their journey. F*CK! Just thinking about think is creeping me out. It also doesn’t help that I saw a bunch of screenshots when I was searching for the poster images. Anyway, these 3 guys arrive in Amsterdam and you know Amsterdam, pot is legal and a popular red light district. These guys smoked pot all morning and afternoon and then ends up clubbing at night. When they get thrown out, they wanted some girls and ended up at the red light district. Don’t worry, nothing happens in Amsterdam. There was a secondary goal for this trip. Josh, one of the guys, just got dumped by his girlfriend, and they were here to help him get her out of his mind. They end up hiring a prostitute, but Josh ended up not doing it.

So they’re all tired so they head back to the hostel. Apparently, there’s a curfew. It wasn’t clear if it was a curfew for that hostel or if it was a curfew for Amsterdam, but they were locked out in the cold. After awakening up almost everyone by their awful singing and having people throw glass bottles at them, some guy in a different hostel offers them his place if they climb up from the fire escape. So they chat there while a stoned guy and stone girl are having sex. The conversation got to the point where they were talking about girls and how they thought European girls would be easier to get. This was when the guy comes out and tells them about thsi special place in Slovokia where there so many hot chicks just waiting for Americans. At first the 3 were hesitant about, but after the guys showed them the pictures he took with his digital camera, the 3 decided they’d take a side journey to this little town.

Story continues fine. They arrive at the city. There’s a ton of hot chicks just as described and their roomates were these 2 hot chicks that were undressing when they entered and even invited them to the spa. They clubbed and they had sex and everything was going great until the next morning when their Icelandic friend disappeared. The clerk in the front desk says he checked out, but he wasn’t answering his cell phone or anything. They went searching for him the entire day, but couldn’t find him. They were pretty freaked out, but there wasn’t realy much they could do. They decided to go clubbing one last time since this was going to be their last night here. Somehow both of them got really sick and ended up falling asleep with a massive headache. Paxton (the other guy) fell asleep in the storage room while Josh fell asleep back at the hotel. The next morning, Josh wakes up chained to a chair. Ugh, this is going to be so gross. A surgeon looking like guy walks in and takes a drill and drills 2 holes, one in each leg. He unmasks himself and it turns out to be the man they met on the train and at the bar. He tells how he always wanted to be a surgeon, but the board would never pass him because of his non-stoppable shaking hands (reminded me of Mechy). Josh begged him to let him go and he started talking some more and took a knife and sliced 2 areas rather quickly. He then unlocked the chains and walks away. Josh sees this as an opportunity and tries to escape. But no good, the 2 places where he sliced were the tendons behind the ankle and you see his feet rip open the wound. He tries to crawl his way out, but when he reaches the door, the man was already standing there. That was basically the end of Josh.

Back to Paxton. He wakes up the next morning in the storage room and returns to the hostel. Apparently someone had already checked him out. He argues with the clerk which then gives him another room. He tries calling Josh, but no one answers. He enters his new room and there’s 2 females there undressing. They invite him to the spa. He’s starting to get even more scared. Could it just be a coincidence? He goes to the police to file a report, but they said there really wasn’t much they could do. He walks around and bumps into the 2 female roommates and asks if they know where Josh is. At first they were reluctant to talk, but finally ended up telling him he was at an art exhibition. Paxton demands that she take him there and she obliges. When he arrived at the building, he sees a man walking out. Paxton asks him how was it. This man replies, “If you’re not too careful, you might spend all your money on it.” They continue and walk in and Paxton suddenly sees the horror. I believe he actually sees Josh cut open right down the middle. He starts throwing up.

Natasha (the female) starts laughing and some big buff guy comes and takes Paxton away and chains him into a chair. The guy tells him to say something and Paxton responds asking what he wanted him to say. He goes, American and walks away. Some other guy walks in, in a butcher suit takes a scissor and starts snipping in front of his face. He starts begging the guy to stop and the guy actually seemed hesitant and accidentally speaks a line. Paxton knew that language and started begging in that language for him to stop. The guy gets frustrated and starts the chainsaw which he accidentally slices off the ring finger and pinky of Paxton. Paxton is screaming in pain and the man was in a hurry to stop him from screaming because I’m guessing was distracting him, but he slips on the blood and the chainsaw chops off his leg. Paxton saw and opportunity and because his hand was now smaller due to 2 missing fingers, he was able to get out of the cuffs and started yanking the chair until it got loose. The man on the other hand was trying to get back up. Paxton reaches for the gun and shoots to kill. He collects his fingers and sits back down and waits for the big buff guy to come in. He eventually comes in and Paxton turns around and shoots him. If you’re wondering why there was a gun, the tables were lined with tons of tools which allows you to inflict pain on the human body.

The rest of the movie consisted of him trying to escape. He gets to see what they do with the body parts. Apparently some butcher chops up the body parts and burns them.

MAJOR TWIST PLOT AHEAD. SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON’T WANT IT RUINED. So he finds a locker room and changes into some clothing. Some guy enters. Apparently, he’s a “paying” customer. All this time, I thought they were paying to see people get tortured and killed. But it turns out that they are actually paying to torture and kill these people themselves. Apparently, you can identify someone from this group by a tattoo on the inner part of your elbow. Also there’s different costs for different types of people. 3 costs were shown. That included Americans, Europeans, and Locals with Americans being the most costly at $25,000.

This following scene is where I had to almost cover my eyes. There’s another character I haven’t introduced you yet. There were these 2 Japanese girls also visiting this area and Josh and Paxton had met one of them back in the Hostel. While Paxton was escaping, he heard her scream, so he went back to help. He barges in the room and finds a man torching her face with a butane torch or something similar. Her eyeball was hanging out of her socket. Paxton shot the guy and Kana, the girl continued screaming. Paxton didn’t know what to do, so he took a scissor and cut the dangling eye ball off from the socket. *shivers*

He takes the girl and continues their escape. He finds a car and luckily there were keys in the ignition already. People had already started searching for them both. He drives off and the people chase after him. I’m guessing the police were also in on this since they set up road blocks, but it could’ve been for something else too. My intuition tells me it’s not.

[MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] One of the coolest scenes is in the next few minutes where he sees Natasha and the other girl along with… THE BOY FROM AMSTERDAM that recommended them to come here. In a fit of anger he rams over them killing 2. Natasha was the only one that survived that crash, but nonetheless, the car suddenly comes out of nowhere and runs over her a second time.

One of the interesting group of characters were the children that demanded bubblegum or they beat the crap out of you or even kill you.

Paxton and Kana make it to the train station, but the bad men were already there looking out. While they were hiding, Kana saw her face [MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] and couldn’t believe how ugly she had become. She couldn’t deal with this and jumps into an on coming train and kills herself. Pretty gross.

Paxton manages to escape during this diversion. He then hears the voice of that man they bumped into on the previous train ride. Paxton follows him and ends up killing him, but torturing him by cutting finger after finger off his hand. That’s the end of the movie. One thing CDMCC and I couldn’t figure out was how Paxton figured the man was part of this society? He did show his tattoo once, but it was to Josh during the bar and Paxton was nowhere near him then. It could’ve been when Paxton saw Josh’s body and he saw the man, but I guess I’ll have to rewatch.. scratch that… I’m not going to rewatch it and just assume it is so…

Film causes wrong kind of horror in Slovakia“It’s so sad,” said Alzbeta Melicharova, marketing head at Slovakia’s state tourist board. “The events in the film are so absurd. They have nothing to do with reality. We are actually one of central Europe’s safest places. It’s one of our selling points.” Scenes of teens locked in a dungeon, tortured with chainsaws and blowtorches and sold to sadists have shocked this tiny, mainly Catholic, nation that is trying to lure tourists away from the beaten paths that lead to Prague, Budapest and Vienna.