Hey, where did that name come from anyway?

Citogenesis gone... right?

I remember his name for the first time and having ths probably intended "huh, that's odd" reaction a long time ago. If you look at the Wikipedia article for Pringles and search for "Julius", it should be relatively easy to not only find his name, but also validate this claim through a citation linking to an official document by Kellogg Company, the owners of the Pringles brand.

This should be the end of the story, an odd name for an odd character, on a product oddly compared to potato chips, that's just good marketting. It is not hard to confirm this name comes directly from the Kellogg company. But there is one small question, where did it come from?

A quick web search will show you many many many many many many (though one may wonder why the last article is so skeptical of the name) more reasons to assure yourself this is definitely real. There was even a Jeopardy question (answer?) concreting his name!

I know it might be more normal for me to write about my weird tech hacks, or at least something vaguely related to my area of expertise, but I found this just interesting enough and digging up weird things is always enticing to me.

I was browinsg a Bird Website™ briefly when I came across the weirdest claim I have perhaps ever seen in my life, it was what appeared at first to be some classic internet hyperbole, a claim along the lines of "The birds work for the bourgeoisie". This time, a user was claiming to be the author of Mr Pringles' first name, although entirely by accident, while trolling on Wikipedia. I almost dismissed it, but I at least wanted to deconfirm it first, so that in case this became a popular myth I could help dispel it. It appeared that this user had posted about this a few times, but why would I trust their tweet instead of the official Pringles Twitter helping bring us back to reality, and remind us that this claim is silly.

Meet "Playpus Man" (@Platypus222), the person apparently responsible for this name (and ludicrous explanation). According to this tweet and subsequent replies, they moderated Wikipedia articles with a great reputation, and then abused their trust to inject various made-up "facts". They expanded on this to also credit @therealwiseman as the "true" source of the name, both explaining that they worked together on this alleged hoax.

"Short version is that I made up a name for a mustached snack food mascot, added it to Wikipedia, and over time due to luck and a change of ownership it stuck and the company now claims ownership of it."

That's a lot to hear, but it should be pretty easy to confirm or deny, Wikipedia has an edit history after all. So I picked up a "blame" tool and found the exact edit responsible for introducing the word "Julius" in the Wikipedia edit diff - it was authored by a user named "Platypus222" in 2006, well there we go, we've confirmed it! Well, not quite. The mysterious "Platypus Man" himself also said "Some will claim that the company probably just used it before that but you'll never find proof of that.", so despite his suspious uncited insertation, this may have been an existing name, and the addition of "you'll never find proof of that" sounds like a challenge to me.

True, it appears very difficult to find any source of that name pre-dating that Wikipedia edit, but not impossible. Curiously, one of the few results I could find, was a drawing from Danbooru.

The date on the left clearly shows this was uploaded in 2005, seemingly disproving this asinine story, albeit in one of the weirdest ways possible. Although, after asking the Platypus about this image, and looking into it more myself, it appears the julius_pringles tag appeared around 2021, and the upload date is questionable given the uploader joined the site in 2007.

With that out of the way, it truly does seem as if the Wikipedia edit was the original source of this name (please contact me if I am wrong), but what the hell can we do about that? Wikipedia has such a concept as citogenesis, where an article copying from Wikipedia becomes a source on Wikipedia, concreting falsities, but what if it wasn't an article copying from Wikipedia, what if it was the primary source itself?

The name "Julius Pringles" appeared in reputable media extremely rarely up until his name became legitimized by the Pringles brand around 2013, which curiously aligns with the Kellogg Company aquisition of Pringles in 2012. Apparently, during their purchase of the brand and collection of all trademarks, they had mixed up a joke on the Wikipedia article as one of their assets, and continued using it.

How to use the internet for free* in "developing, low-income countries countries"

Librebasics is a small project of mine to get free internet on FreeBasics internet connections provided by FaceBook available primarily in India, Thailand, and developing African nations. It's currently in a very early stage, but I will constantly update this page with information I gather about their DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) as time goes on, along with my methods for evasion.

Why

When I wrote this, I was stuck in Thailand , where one of the primary mobile providers has FreeBasics by default if you run out of credit, so I naturally decided to find a way around that.

Current observations

Their DPI is very strict, appearing to possibly check HTTPS certificates, and check both the request headers and responses of all HTTP connections, other protocols will be strictly disallowed, and other ports other than 443/80 blocked (mostly?? TODO: investigate this)

I am not sure if this is to do with time or location, but previously when I have been limited to Facebook-only access on TrueMove, it has not taken me through FreeBasics, and during this time, Facebook chat and calling was not available. When audio/video calls is possible it would be a good idea to attempt tunneling data over the webrtc connection which is established, or perhaps even fool the DPI and start my own connection (I do not know much about webrtc, or how Facebook uses it).

The main rules I have found are...

• Request URL is relative, or a FreeBasics-permitted
• Host header is a FreeBasics-permitted URL
• Response is not longer than specified (this varies ??)
• 0.freebasics.com rules are
• • Path is /?ref=zerobalance
• • Requests following these rules are allowed
• All other site rules are
• • Unknown, requests following only previous rules are disallowed

Current method

God, I feel like a Javascript developer explaining his amazing stack of lossy databases and frontend frameworks right now but, here is how I am currently bypassing FreeBasics.

1. "slowngay™" tunnel, making requests into "Facebook friendly" requests, and converting back on the other end
2. HTTP tunnel, I am using Crowbar, as many use methods which do not play nice with either my tunnel or the DPI
3. SSH connection over the tunnel, opening a local socks proxy with -D
4. redsocks and iptables for routing traffic though the proxy

Phone usage

While this may sound unusually complicated, it is quite simple to make this work straight on a phone, without a any computer (you will need root, of course)

To make this work on my phone I used Termux, and ProxyDroid. Termux was really the main piece in making this setup so easy, it is a very useful tool. Crowbar as mentioned before can compile in an android shell with no configuration, in Termux just run apt install golang, then go get the repo.

To make this even easier and cooler to use after it has been set up, try installing Termux:Widget, so you can have a stop and start shortcut for the proxy tunnel components on your home screen, along with the proxy toggle widget available from ProxyDroid.

Where is your software m8?

Well, once I have an array of good bypass methods, I may package this and sell it. Of course I will not hold back information from any tech literate people who are interested, but I'm still not going to baby you by giving you my 30 line long Node.js script I used to replace the headers (PS. they don't filter "X-" headers), just write one yourself in a not so garbage language.

Using the Vive Pro controllers on Windows to run shortcuts for screenshots and screen recording

(or: tool assisted smugging)

When I got my HTC Vive Pro I was disappointed at the lack of script-ability when it came to automation or really any kind of programatic hook, and scouring Reddit only found me a tool for using the Oculus Rift through AHK, which seemed unfair especially given it's extreme inferiority. This greatly annoyed me, given how badly I needed to make a shortcut to start and stop recording in ShareX to assist me in smugging on people who make better financial choices than me, so I made this.

Searching around on Google eventually found me this, a script able to get HTC Vive controller inputs live, and print the events, so I quickly augmented this with the python win32api to emulate keypresses, and much to my surprise it worked perfectly, so far I've already completed my initial goal of taking screenshots and videos with ShareX entirely from VR, and will soon move on to making more smugging tools through controller shortcuts.

pressed = {}

def take_press(set_side, set_key, set_value, set_keycode, data):
    if data['side'] == set_side and data[set_key] == set_value and not pressed.get(hex(set_keycode)):
        pressed[hex(set_keycode)] = True
        win32api.keybd_event(set_keycode, 0, 0, 0)
    elif data['side'] == set_side and data[set_key] != set_value and pressed.get(hex(set_keycode)):
        pressed[hex(set_keycode)] = False
        win32api.keybd_event(set_keycode, 0 ,win32con.KEYEVENTF_KEYUP ,0)

def handle_input(data):
    take_press('left', 'grip_button', True, 0x88, data)
    take_press('right', 'grip_button', True, 0x89, data)
    take_press('left', 'trigger', 1, 0x8A, data)
    take_press('right', 'trigger', 1, 0x8B, data)
    take_press('left', 'menu_button', True, 0x8C, data)
    take_press('right', 'menu_button', True, 0x8D, data)
    take_press('left', 'trackpad_pressed', True, 0x8E, data)
    take_press('right', 'trackpad_pressed', True, 0x8F, data)
    take_press('left', 'trackpad_touched', True, 0x92, data)
    take_press('right', 'trackpad_touched', True, 0x93, data)

You can use the virtual keypresses in anything, besides a few applications that won't recognize it as a shortcut due to the keycodes not being registered to anything.

An example of usage would be this simple AutoHotKey script, which will activate if you press right menu, left grip, and right grip, and will run an awkwardly long key combination you might want to bind in ShareX.

~vk0x88 & ~vk0x89::
    If GetKeyState("vk0x8D") {
        Send, {Control down}
        Send, {Shift down}
        Send, {Alt down}
        Send, {LWin down}
        Send, {p down}
        Send, {p up}
        Send, {Control up}
        Send, {Shift up}
        Send, {Alt up}
        Send, {LWin up}
    }

If you're actually interested in my finished script, see this gist