Mike Ritland

speaker

855 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Feb 2025

Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025 podcast

So what you do, you take little water blocks, basically, like a little piece of copper, strap it to the processor, the video card, and run water loops through it, kind of like a I don't know how to better explain that, but it's like a little maze that the water would take through the channels on this block, and it would pull the heat out, and you would dump it.

And at the time, God, it was a Chevy Chevelle heater core that was just like the perfect size, and you could use that as a radiator with a larger fan on it. So instead of using the small fans that you'd find on like laptops or even desktops that, you know, maybe is like that big, you just fan that big. And it keeps it quieter while dumping heat, and you can just run these things really hot.

And yeah, I had to learn how to make those things, right? So, you know, you get a pond pump from like a fish store, you get the Chevelle heater core, get all the tubing wire together, but I had to mill out... I didn't mill it, I drilled it. I used a drill press because I could not afford access to that. It was like a $100 drill press at the time.

You just do like cross drilling through all different directions, plug it up and get this cool spiral pattern where the water would go through it and pull heat out of all your devices. And you got to learn about things like corrosion, like you got copper and brass and aluminum and like, you know, these things are going to start to corrode.

So you learn, you know, the chemistry behind how to prevent that from happening because you don't want corrosion because then your computer is going to have water all over it when it leaks.

So I'm going to put that on Quake as well. So you're playing online games, right? And you learn you can do interesting things. You start controlling things in weird ways, and it kind of escalates. You're like, wait a second. At the time, there was no what we call client-side security or client-side integrity checking. The game files I had on my machine were unique to me.

You would download them from the author. At this time, we were actually installing it from CD drives. And you just expected to not mess with that, but... Nobody's stopping you. You can go and mess with the player models, for instance. And you can, like, add a really large cross that goes, like, 10 feet above, below, and all sides of this person, right?

So now you can see them running around a corner because, you know, this post is sticking out them, and you see them coming from the corner. They don't know that, but, you know, it was a good approach. Or a lot of dark spaces, right? You can't really see people in the dark. You're like, cool, I'm going to add a fluorescent color to their skin. And there they are. They're glowing in the dark, right?

See-through walls, right? Like, you've got these textures that would go on the walls. And, you know, they're opaque. But they don't have to be. You just set them to transparent. And suddenly you're seeing through the walls. And, you know, that type of stuff was... I had more fun figuring out how to do it than actually doing it.

But that kind of just opened the door of like, there's rules and there's expectations, but there's also not many people checking. Like, best way to kind of... God, I don't want to get into philosophy here, but there's this kind of beautiful, I think it's Jacques Ranciere, who defines like police politics, right? As like you got a road, right? And it's painted.

There's lines and everybody just obeys those, right? And he connects that back with politics of like, oh, you're told to vote and do all these things. It's like, okay, but like, What if you don't follow the paint on the road? What if you go off the road? What if you get really close to the edge?

Most people, they see those lines, they're going to get right in the center of the road because that's what you're supposed to do. It's like, what happens if you don't? That's interesting to me. That's where weird things start to show up, like unintended designs, unintended powers and capabilities. just unintended failures, unexpected failures.

It's really fascinating to play with that, play on the edges, see how close you can get. And I guess now that you make me kind of say this, that's probably a good descriptor for how I think about a lot of things, like art, everything across the board. Find the boundaries and what happens if you go on either side of it.

Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So, like, early, late 90s, more early 2000s, there's a lot of online communities. Some are big. I mean, I think the really big ones you would know of, that most people know of, rather, like 4chan and, like, something awful, right? Big places that had, like, the bigger names at the time. But there were also... much smaller, like, specific topics. Water cooling, right?

There was a water cooling. There was a bunch of them. But, you know, there would be water cooling communities where people just share their techniques and stuff so they could all just improve upon it. And, yeah, there were also, you know, hacking-themed ones. So Bryce and Digital Gangster was one of those. He was... That was one of the several communities I have, you know, known him from.

And, yeah, there's... This was also at the time where online space and meet space were very separate, right? Like online dating, for instance. That was like, what? Now it's like, that's all the kids do these days. It's really weird. But I met my wife from one of those online communities. But eventually those worlds start to blend together when you spend more time in there.

And you're spending most of your time in there and just talking to these people. Eventually, I mean, it depends on the community. Maybe not so much like Digital Gangster where it's like raw crime happening is maybe not the best idea to...

meet up uh for many reasons but you know certain lesser criminal communities uh yeah meet up with people and those worlds start to blur together and uh it's a little bit different than the you know 2024 is where it's just everything is just yeah yeah how'd you meet your wife Yeah, I mean, so we posted on one of the communities out there. I think it was from hardware overclocking.

Yeah, I can't remember exactly what it was, but I moved out to California. That's its own story we can go into. But when I moved out, I think it was like the first week, I'm just like, hey, anybody in this community around want to hang out, show me around the town? She was one of those people. I was like, yeah. And yeah, it just kind of grew from there.

Not a hacker per se. Gamer, photography, art. Cool.

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