Before I get started here let me say that I have to post this. That I need to share what I've found. It's the same feeling you get when you drive by a car crash and have to look in horror at the mangled bodies of metal and flesh. I have to show you, you have to see, you need to see. I've only begun to sort through all the files but I'll put them up...I have to. I like to fix computers in my free time, kinda like adult Legos. I've built quite a few of them for myself and friends and whenever something goes wrong I am the first person they call. Now most of the time it's just user error or a bad antivirus letting some worm or other nefarious program munch on root files. Nothing I couldn't handle and nothing really strange. That is until Brad brought me this laptop he bought at a flea market. It was some old world Dell, the monolith sized ones and just looking at it made me feel like an archaeologist finding some ancient relic.
He told me that he hadn't had a chance to play around with it yet but the old guy had sold it to him for 15 bucks so he wasn't expecting a miracle. He just wanted me to clean it out, do what I could to speed it up and load up some programs his daughter could use for school. If it was a wash oh well but he had complete faith in me. Now I told him I was a computer god but some things are beyond my powers, I promised to do what I could. As soon as I turned it on I knew I was in for hell. Just the load time to boot was snail slow. Once there I made an odd discovery, the computer wasn't running Windows. It was using some home-brewed Linux OS called AsmoDos, I figured that this would actually save me some time, just wipe the drive and do a fresh install from one of the Windows 7 jump drives I had laying around. But I was pretty curious.
Making your own flavor of Linux was something I had tried to play around with but I was garbage at coding and working with kernels and all those sudo edits made my head hurt. Here this guy made his own, seemingly, working OS and it was running on this artifact from another time. I was impressed and wanted to see how the whole thing ran.There wasn't a password on the home screen just a black and red tinted background with an enter icon. That was pretty odd but I clicked it and was immediately disappointed.
There wasn't anything fancy about the UI at all, looked like a carbon copy of Ubuntu from way back in the day. Browsing around I found the normal saved pages, obligatory funny photos, a few tax papers (I resisted the urge to swipe the SSN...those days are over). Found out the guy who owned this heap of junk before was named David Osa. David wasn't a very adventures guy, even his porn was pretty generic stuff, and also I found it in a folder labeled P0rnz. I couldn't help but laugh at that. Then I ran into some odd stuff.
The first thing that I found was a program called S.N.I.P.E.R. It turned out to be a file over-writer, like a super trash can. However where a computer would normally write over a deleted file once, this program wrote over it 47 times. That's more than the CIA. That is what you run when you want something GONE. Why on earth would he have something as heavy duty as that? I went back over the image files again, won't lie I figured he must have some CP on here to warrant such a program but there was nothing, zip, nada. I did find the next unsettling thing however and boy did it lead to some unnerving shit.
It was a password protected folder called FYG, hidden inside a folder for Celtic soundscapes. Now bear in mind this is the first password protected anything I had come across. P0rnz, tax papers, hell the system itself, wide open but not this one folder. What was he hiding? I tried to crack it the normal way, guessing. Last name didn't work, password didn't work, neither did password spelled backward, David was at least smarter than that. I looked through some of my own programs but none of them could help me crack something on a Linux OS, they just weren't set up for it.
On a hunch I got in touch with a buddy of mine who had been an avid Linux fan since I first met him. It didn't take long to convince him that I was thinking about making the switch and was in need of his help with a pesky password problem. He sent me something he said should help and stressed to me that I was making the right choice, that windows was doomed, open source was the best yadda yadda yadda. Whatever he sent me opened up the terminal and apparently had super cow powers. I still don't understand but it worked and I was able to open the folder. It held dozens of text files, chat logs, AVIs but nothing seemed that out there. Until I started reading.
