Dangerous Prototypes
Whilst Dee and Jules play videogames downstairs, I sit in a beanbag in my makerspace and contemplate the various hardware projects that I would like to complete over the next couple of years.
This weekend was a long weekend, and the (annual?) London FrightFest – lots of new and indy horror movies showing in Leicester Square over four days. It would’ve been fun but as we’re being cheap whilst on a single income we opted to stay home and watch horror movies instead.
I thought we could probably download something, so we gave it a go. Unfortunately one of the movies I downloaded – not even a horror, not even likely to be very good – was archived in an encrypted RAR file. Worse, whoever packaged it up wanted me to call a phone in the US to hear the password (at $100/min, no doubt).
So I’m not going to do that, of course. Instead I wrote a little Java application to brute-force the RAR password. That’ll show ’em, provided it ever finishes.
Of course, it takes a long time. Say I have 26 letters, in upper and lower case, 10 digits and 10 symbols – that’s 26 + 26 + 10 + 10 = 72 characters in the character pool, right?
If it’s a 6 character password, allowing repetition, that’s
726 = 139,314,069,504 possibilities.
I’ve scripted it to try all 6, 7 and 8 character passwords at the moment. Be cool if it works, however.
