I called Bridge and asked them a number of questions they didn’t have posted on their Mark VIII Ultra E-meter site. It’s funny that the first “answer” on that page is “Many of your questions may be answered in your Mark Ultra VIII Owner’s Manual.” It’s typical of the “church” these days that they don’t actually answer your questions. In the case of the Mark Ultra VIII: they’re expecting you to buy it first, then get your questions answered. How else can you get your hands on an owner’s manual? Apparently this is a Miscavige-era application of the HCOB 18 June 1957 PEOPLE’S QUESTIONS, which used to say: A congress MUST An organization MUST Answer people’s questions. This is the primary public complaint — that Scientologists in the organization or out won’t answer directly questions asked about this or that. Understand it, answer it, make friends. Anyway, I asked Bridge how long I had to buy a Mark Ultra VIII meter, based on the experience I had when the Mark Super VII Quantum was released. When the Mark Super VII Quantum was released and the whole world had to upgrade from their Mark Super VII and get their meter “Quantumized”, there was a grace period of about three to six months before you wouldn’t be allowed to use a non Quantumized meter on course or in an org for auditing. Bridge said that every org in the world was requiring the use of only Mark Ultra VIII meters on an immediate basis. There was no “grace period” as before. This is what apparently makes Ideal Orgs so “Ideal”: it allows arbitrary draconian enforcement of rules that permit the suppression of training and field auditing to be enforced with a baseball bat. It’s not a bridge to freedom any longer, is it? I double-checked this point: so, you’re telling me that if I was on the Pro Metering course on November 16, I cannot go back into the courseroom without a Mark Ultra VIII meter? The Bridge representative hemmed and hawed and didn’t really answer the question, since he realized that I was asking if the church set up the Mark Ultra VIII release to facilitate arbitrarily kicking people out of courserooms for indefinite periods all around the world. So I changed the topic: I have friends at Flag who are telling me that I have to come up with cash to buy a Mark Ultra VIII meter; I cannot buy the meter off account. Is that true? Bridge answer: Yes. The orgs don’t have enough money to buy Mark Ultra VIIIs and keep them in stock, so the parishioner is required to pay the cash up front for their meter, so that Bridge can deliver it. Nothing is a clearer indicator of the “lack of expansion” than you release a new meter that the orgs can’t afford to stock. And nothing will be a bigger block on the future expansion of Scientology than requiring cash up-frontfor new materials when the person has already put that amount of money on account and can’t use it! I asked about the legal documents that must be signed. The Bridge rep told me that after I pay the money, only then do I get subjected to the “Okay to buy a meter” check required to obtain a Mark Ultra VIII meter. When I get “Okayed”, only then does Bridge send me the documents via surface mail in order to sign. This is pretty tricky, in my mind. I have to first pay, so I’m out $5400. Then I get “okayed”, which is a check to see if I’m in good standing. If I’m not “okayed”, do I get an immediate refund of my money without having to go through A-E steps in the future? The number of arbitraries added to the process of getting a Mark Ultra VIII meter is much more than any previous meter. If I’m “okayed”, then Bridge sends me the Mark Ultra VIII e-meter agreement to sign, which apparently I wouldn’t be allowed to read in advance of paying the money to the church. I had to pay the money, get okayed, then I get to see the documents. So I asked, “What if there’s something in the documents I can’t agree to? Like forcing my first-born male child to join the Sea Org?” The Bridge rep assured me it was all commonsense stuff, like not using my Mark Ultra VIII meter to squirrel with, and to keep my IAS membership current at all times. I asked if I could see the legal documents beforeforking over $5400, and the Bridge rep said “no”. But I made a mental note: what’s commonsense to me isnot what is commonsense to the church, or to David Miscavige. In fact, by this point in the conversation, I had already accumulated a half-dozen items that weredefinitely not commonsense. Like paying first, thensigning a legal contract, and only then taking delivery of a meter. I double-checked: there is no additional cost for the yearly internet re-activation. The basic way it works is that you hook your Mark Ultra VIII up to an internet-connected computer, log in to the Bridge Mark Ultra VIII re-activation site using the login you got when you bought the Mark Ultra VIII and your meter’s serial number, and the re-activation sequence and any needed software updates would be automatically beamed into your Mark Ultra VIII meter. The countdown timer in your Mark Ultra VIII would be re-set for a year’s worth of use. The digital display in your Mark Ultra VIII flashes a message starting when you have 14 days or less on your current activation cycle, reminding you to re-activate your Mark Ultra VIII. Of course, if somebody conveniently false-reported you to OSA in the past year, you won’t be considered “in good standing”, and your meter won’t reactivate. Fuck your pcs, delivering what you promised, and not allowing a frequent change of auditors. I asked if I was training as an auditor, did I still have to buy two meters. The answer was “That’s what HCOB 4 December 1977R CHECKLIST FOR SETTING UP SESSIONS AND AN E-METER says to do.” I reminded the Bridge rep that when that bulletin was issued the only approved meter was the Mark V, which had a nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery in it. LRH said that NiCad batteries had the annoying habit of going flat without warning, so having two meters was the only way to keep a suddenly flat battery from interrupting a session. He repeated: “That’s what the bulletin says.” I pointed out that HCOB 24 October 1971 RA III FALSE TA says that “A cadmium-cell meter discharges very suddenly when it goes flat.” and asked what kind of battery was in a Mark Ultra VIII meter and he said “Lithium rechargeable”. I asked if the meter had a “remaining battery life” indicator on it, and he said yes, it counts down from 8 hours to 0 hours depending on how much charge was left (It requires 10 hours to fully charge a Mark Ultra VIII. It only required an hour to fully charge a Mark V.) I pointed out that with a remaining battery life indicator and a non-cadmium cell battery in the Mark Ultra VIII, the technical requirement for having two E-meters was gone. The Bridge rep stuck to the mantra of “that’s what the bulletin says”. I remembered that in the ’90s when the “new cans” came out for the Mark Super VII Quantum, that the briefing given at the event told us that the cans were made of a copper-beryllium alloy with a thin tin plating. “Yes” agreed the Bridge rep. Then I said that HCOB 21 January 1977RB FALSE TA CHECKLIST says “Cans, of course, should be steel with a thin tin plating”, and when I KR’d the fact that the cans had been changed from LRH’s specifications, nothing was done to fix it. So, I asked, is there LRH that says when LRH can be ignored in the face of a technological advance but when LRH must be enforced in the face of a technological advance? Obviously, the Bridge rep was in a bind and couldn’t give an honest or straightforward answer. The answer, of course, is there is no such LRH, and that the policy, all verbal from the COB, is that when you’re on staff you make decisions that will cost the parishioner the most and keep him from auditing as much as possible. So I veered off the topic since I knew the guy couldn’t answer it without getting face-shredded. I asked how the reads from the Mark Ultra VIII could be 50,000 times clearer than those of previous meters. The guy told me I should have seen the event. I told him I’d love to, but the word on the street is that the event was not recorded for orgs and missions, so I’ll never get a chance to see it now. So he read me a 2-page piece about how the awful old meters had circuitry that distorted reads by 50,000 times and that awful distorting circuitry had all been eliminated, allowing the carrier wave passing through the pc’s body to directly affect the needle. So the reads were clearer. I asked what the measurement instrumentation was that proved the reads were 50,000x clearer (which is a very specific number) and he said he didn’t know. I asked if there was documentation, like oscilloscope traces, showing the carrier wave and what the Mark Super VII Quantum displayed versus the carrier wave and what the Mark Ultra VIII displayed. He said “no”. He went on to explain that the computer in the Mark Ultra VIII sampled the carrier wave 240 times per second, and the computer compared those samples against the past 5 seconds worth of samples and the needle displayed the difference. (240 times per second is a way, way lower sampling rate than that used for CD audio, which is normally 44,100 samples per second.) He didn’t realize, of course, that he had just given me contradictory information: the needle directly reads the carrier signal and displays the difference on the needle, and what displays on the needle is the difference between 240 samples of the carrier wave and 5 previous 240-slice samples of the carrier wave. I don’t claim to fully understand this, but it sounds like “50,000x clearer reads” was achieved only in someone’s mind: by eliminating the bad old distorting circuitry and adding in new all-digital distorting circuitry. He went on to explain how the Mark Ultra VIII has an optical tone arm, eliminating the bad evil old wire-wound potentiometer that could get dirty and contributed to the 50,000x distortion. The tone arm on the meter’s face is connected to a clear disc divided into 600 slices by a black pattern printed on the disc. A laser beam, like in a CD player, shoots through the disk and the on-and-off sequences are turned into TA motion by the Mark Ultra VIII’s built-in computer. This gives you 1/1000 of a division of tone arm precision. (I decided not to challenge his arithmetic on this.) He said that the meter’s digital displays all report in 1/1000 division units of TA, like that will somehow improve auditing results. (“These go to eleven” — Spinal Tap) I immediately thought of auditing NED, where if the TA is higher you demand an earlier similar incident. Is that rule still applied with the 1/1000 division precision of the Mark Ultra VIII? How many NED pcs will overgrind on NED incidents because of that? (I also thought of the problem that optical devices have in dirty and dusty and smoky environments: after a few hundred or thousand hours’ use, DVD and CD readers and writers often need to have their lenses cleaned. Is there a way to clean your optical Tone Arm without sending it in to Hubbard Electrometer Manufacturing? Or do you have to run your HGC and metering course like a NASA cleanroom?) I asked if I could buy the highly-touted reads-recorder, and the answer was “no, that’s for orgs only”. I reminded myself that that was the same situation for the reads simulators in the ’90s: only orgs could have those too, restricting GAT drills and auditor correction to orgs, and removing the possibility of drilling and correcting field auditors and mission auditors without sending them to an org. I guess that’s more of what what an Ideal Org means: it’s the Ideal scene for the church getting more money and crushing the spirit and production of field auditors and mission auditors. It certainly translates into hobbled expansion for Scientology. The Bridge rep kept telling me how wonderful it was that the Mark Ultra VIII comes with five pairs of cans and a remote tone arm, so owning a Mark Ultra VIII was actually cheaper than owning a Mark Super VII Quantum. Every time he mentioned “five pairs of cans” I insisted on pointing out that the Quantum came with seven pairs of cans and Solo can dividers. So at one point I asked if the Quantum came with Solo can dividers and he said “No, you go to the AO bookstore officer, get fitted for a custom pair of Solo cans, and those come with a matching set of Solo dividers”. So those are free? “No, those cost $60.” I reminded him that LRH recommended the use of cans with Solo dividers for objective processes where one points out things and assists…whoops! Caught flat-footed again! He had no rational response for how to get Solo dividers in those circumstances. (Use of one-handed electrodes for non-Solo auditing is in the book E-meter Essentials and lecture 6503C30 ARC BREAKS AND GENERALITIES (SHSBC 419) and HCOB 21 July 1969 II ONE-HAND ELECTRODES). Anyway, I’ve decided to finish of my current field pcs with my Mark Super VII Quantums, let my IAS membership lapse, and move to using a virtual meter (like a Theta-meter) that doesn’t need an overarching suppressive church to grant me permission to use it. Source: http://possiblyhelpfuladvice.com/?p=15730
The Onus rule is very nice. And it is very nice to sit back and apply it. I would like to do the same. You don't want to spin your wheels for nothing, and neither do I. As I understand it, this thread (or whatever you want to call it) is aimed at evaluating the software / firmware that goes into the Mark 8. I can be of some help, in that I know something of what to expect and how to use the meter. I am not an expert, but I can probably get more info, if needed. All that being said, I am not trying to sell anyone on the meter. I am open to a critical evaluation of the meter. I was not involved in the design, or the evolution of the design, of the meter. The church says whatever it says about the meter, and expects parishioners to accept it. They are not interested in convincing you or anyone else, with logic. They are not interested in "Onus" rule. The net result of all this is that "we" have to do all the work ourselves, if we want to evaluate it properly. The church is simply not willing or interested in contributing to this effort. I suppose it is a bit like me saying that "At this moment I am facing south. You can believe me or not, I don't care, and I don't have to prove it. If you want to prove it, I also don't care." From a software tear-down, we may be able to determine if the meter works or not as it is expected to, and also if there is a brick or blocking effect to shut down the meter. I think that these are both interesting questions.
Can't you just do the pinch test to prove that the meter is picking up some change in resistance between the two cans, reflective of nervous activity? And by "nervous activity" I mean perhaps a change in how tightly a person is gripping the cans and/or some sweating or whatever the body does when you pinch it. So it's trivial to prove the e-meter is picking up some change in the body. The problem is the rest of it --what do those changes signify? Engrams in the reactive mind? Probably not. But you aren't going to settle that question by looking into the software or the hardware of the e-meter.
Pinch test is no problem. I have done that in the past with a Mark 6. (If that is sufficient for a test, it shows as a pop to the right (small fall = increase of resistance) at a rate of about 1/2 second to 1 second. The needle generally returns to it's starting place, or close.) The E-meter itself should be able to respond about 20 times faster, to allow for faster changing patterns. I doubt that the analog meter movement itself would respond to much more than 20 Hz (due to it's own inertia). Since the mark 8 is a digital meter, sampling rate would have to be at least 200 Hz (guessing) to be able to track fast enough to replicate an analog signal. I believe someone said that the D to A chip is 8 bits (256 bits). it would be used to drive the needle movement, and it should be smooth enough to look good. There can be an algorithm to overcome digital jitter. The input A to D would have to be able to digitize the complete resistance range (lets say up to 1 Meg ohm, with enough resolution), and pass this data on to the CPU. The CPU would then zoom in on the 'window of interest' and pass this data to the D to A. The input hardware filtering would be in the order of DC to 20 Hz (again guessing). I would think that the hardware is sufficient to do the job. I would guess that the software for this could be imbedded in firmware, as it should not be needed to be changed. Then again, with the C of S, who knows? Any other software change would be curious indeed, unless they just wanted to play with the other control knobs, and make them automatic. And you are right. Any question of what the 'changes signify' would be needing a lot more objective vs subjective intensive testing. It would be a lot of work.
It's not work worth doing. Humans have had a lot of experience with these galvanic skin resistance type devices. They're too noisy. Too many extraneous things make the readings go up or down. Might as well just look at tea leaves for the answers.
I think to the extent these devices have any effect at all, it is in convincing the auditee that the device is effective and therefore eliciting results. To the extent any auditor creates any positive therapeutic effect, it is because of that auditor's actual care and concern for the recipient. As silly as it is, that ridiculous sticker that is supposed to be attached to every meter per the FDA (and sometimes isn't) is actually true. It is purely a religious artifact with absolutely no objective medical utility. It might as well be a dowsing rod or a crucifix.
In my experience, alt med practitionners are never interested in knowing if what they're doing actually works or not. They're too involved in what they are doing, emotionally and financially, to take that risk. Most of them don't even bother to maintain crude stats on people they supposedly help, which is extremely simple and straightforward, and cannot in good conscience be excused by ignorance of methodology or lack of time. You believe that it does what you say it does, fine. But if you're not willing to sit down and truly question what you're looking at on the basis of your beliefs, you cannot pretend that it is science. Science, when it comes to diagnostic devices, does not grant much weight to personal experience and subjective evidence, because of the notorious unreliability of human senses. You do not seem to understand what "response time" actually means in electronic devices, or what the effect of sampling and digitization will be on an analog signal. I will try to explain. First, the world, reality, on the scale we perceive it, is continuous related to time. Any macroscopic data you will measure in it will be continuous, and analog. Sampling means that at a given frequency, you take a single reading of a continuous signal and record it. The effect of this is that instead of your continuous signal (think of a continuous line on a graph), you'll get a series of points that correspond to values at discrete times. To see your recorded signal, you'll have to reconstruct it from these points (think of it as tracing lines between the points to redraw the initial signal). There is a constraint on the number of points you need to be able to reconstruct the signal. The faster your signal varies, the more points you need. The sampling frequency has nothing to do with response time, but with ability to reconstruct a signal that contains high frequencies (or high derivatives). An analog device does not have this problem, since you do not have to reconstruct the signal. It does not sample, but displays the totality of the signal, as it is measured. The only limit it would have in response time is the small delay imparted by the stabilization of the circuit from natural response to forced response, which is several orders of magnitude too small to be observable in this device (and would be similar on a digital device), and mechanical response of the needle (which is, again, the same whether your system is analog or digital). A digital measurement system involves in fact more delays than an analog one, because you have to sample, record, treat and reconstruct your signal before it is displayed. The reason we use digital systems despite this disadvantage is that digital data is less error-prone upon copy and that digitization allows a lot of exotic filtering and enhancement options which are hard or impossible to obtain with discrete circuitry.
I love theory............. It always works on paper. Aside from your evaluation of me, your theory is almost correct. (There is delays in everything, even light, and analog devices.) You have to allow for the real world. What would be an acceptable delay? By this, I mean what delay could there be which would not be noticed? For instance, if there was a 10 mS delay (from the cause of the change of resistance all the way to the meter movement), would you notice it? What is your limit of detection? Now, lets look at the specs of the A to D, the CPU, and the DAC. Is it possible to pass the signal inside this time frame? If so, then it is not a problem. BTW, it may be the reason that you use digital systems, but most times it is because it is more cost effective.
The e-meter might tell you when someone had a sudden increase in activity of their sympathetic nervous system --the "fight/flight" system. But that happens due to many things. It's a big mistake to think you can guess what those many things are without knowing someone intimately. Even then, you probably need to be the person hooked up to the meter to make a reasonable guess. Even then, you will only be right part of the time because nobody is fully conscious of everything their brain is doing. Auditing with an e-meter is like being sent on a wild goose chase. Don't bother. There are better ways to do psychotherapy that make more sense. Like, for example, examining your own beliefs about things.
Perceptions of delay for humans depends of the sense they use to detect it. Delays on the order of the millisecond are detectable by ears for instance, because ears depend on that delay to locate the direction of sound (brain sound processing system is quite close to ears to make this possible). That's why millisecond delays in voice-mouth coordination are noticeable and annoying. With eyes alone, that sensitivity is much lower because of image persistence on the retinas, and because signal has to be partially processed in eyes, be sent along the optical nerve all the way to the vision system in the back of the brain to be further processed before you can make sense of an image. This is what makes it possible to watch movies with > 24 images/s, because we cannot detect transition from one image to another. That would make minimum delay perception with eyes on the order of 40 milliseconds. The response time (transition from natural response to forced response) of a circuit that I mentioned earlier can be observed on an oscilloscope with an appropriate trigger, but certainly not with a human eye alone. It is orders of magnitude too small to be detected with eyes or ears. Delay in digital systems depends on the quality of the parts you use and the processing you do before you reconstruct the signal. A cheap DAC or ADC for instance can impart a significant delay that might be noticeable by ear. Processing can also add an important delay in a system, especially in imaging systems (because you have to process a two-dimensional array of values rather than a single one per frame). Building imaging systems that can do intensive processing in real-time (with a delay that is not noticeable by humans) is an important challenge that many electronics and computer engineers are working on these days. Digital systems might be cheaper today, but that is because a concerted, colossal investment in R&D was made to develop them in the past, despite the fact that it was known that they add delay in processing and error from quantization. That investment was made because of the error-correcting and enhancements that were theorized possible (yep, it was all nice math theory on paper, which turned out to work in real life) on digitized systems that was not possible on initially cheaper analog ones.
I think that we are victims of a derail. There is no legitimate science behind the e-meters. As was mentioned earlier on this very thread, the scilons draw whatever conclusions from it that they feel like. Scientology has had 60 years to prove the "science" behind them, and they have failed. Furthermore, no other items with any similar purpose exist. Why, because the "e-meter" does nothing. It is simply a fraud box used to defraud people out of their money. There is NO science behind it. NONE. Anyone that claims that there might be has NO understanding of electronics. When we attempt to find out what it reads, all we see is noise. I think that all the auditor does is "calibrate" the stupid thing so that whenever someone talks, the needle moves. This is not very hard to do, you can do this with the older, very sensitive, true rms voltmeters. On another note, Has anyone ever compared the insides of the "hubbard fraud box"(what i shalt refer to emeters from now on) to the insides of an O-scope? I know from playing around with o-scopes that when you hold the probe in your hands, you will get some funny readings, the noise that i saw on an earlier post here reminded me of what i saw on the o-scope when i did that.
OH FFS! Can we get back to unwrapping the crunchy goodness that is the program? I couldn't understand a word of it, but I was like Now thread is engaged in a long pointless debate about whether the e-meter works which is gonna end as bad as any discussion of whether sci is a religion. and I am Perhaps teh debate on whether or not holding tin cans in your sweaty palms does anything should have it's own fail troll thread.
Well you can see the needle move if you pinch someone or startle them with a loud sound. So the body does something that changes skin resistance briefly and the meter picks that up. I think it is important to admit that because people see the needle move with the pinch and it convinces them the damn thing is useful. If you then seem to deny what people witness with their own eyes, you'll come off like someone on an anti-Scientology mission rather than a pro-truth mission. Personally, I'm pro-truth. If Hubbard was right I want to understand that. But so far, the evidence doesn't look good for the Hubbardites.
Will get some free time after the rush in the next few days so I may try it. I suspect I won't see much beyond an ACK and a SYN, and where it connects, without using a valid product key and a meter connected though.
Based on how messy the sloppy install package is, I would be surprised if the underlying web service transactions would be so clean. So you never know, it might not check that a device is attached and/or be smart enough to validate responses on the client side in order to avoid unnecessary web post/fetch actions.
I don't think there's any change in skin resistance as such. That huge handheld electrode cannot be trusted to have a constant surface of contact with skin no matter what, and there's no logical reason to use it rather than a less noisy one to measure something that's supposed to be internal changes. Besides, some of the second-gen exes have reported being able to fool the device, which tends to confirm this hypothesis.
What's funny is however you pronounce the word "minute," it still refers to David Miscavige. If you call him a "minute man," it's completely true either way.
OK, you call it "unconscious tightening". Next part of the pinch test - recall the pinch. (I suppose that you call this another unconscious tightening, that looks the same.) Next, recall it again (same result) Keep going {same result but eventually the "unconscious tightening" fades away) So it has nothing to do with the mind, but is unconscious. OK. Now, can we get back to the original thread, or do you want to throw a scope on it and continue to compare apples to oranges?
You think all the movements we do are voluntary and consciously decided ? Unconscious / involuntary physiological reactions are the basis of modern lie detectors. Ok then. Wireshark the program, Mr. I-has-worked-on-DSP. We R waiting.
No. Because electronic nerds took over this thread, rather than starting their own for their useless faggotry discussion, and derailed it so far into left field the point has been lost in all the noise and the only real development on the software investigation side of things ended up in it's own thread: https://whyweprotest.net/community/...ii-e-meter-has-an-interesting-feature.115580/
If anybody is looking at software, I wonder if this has any hidden features? https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/truth-about-drugs-online-education/id477643395
This is worth a laugh while we wait: https://scientologycelebrity.wordpr...-or-what-like-totally-kewlio-kachink-kachink/
Ok, started sniffing it with wireshark. So far I found out that it connects to 184.29.113.121 (akamai). I followed the TCP stream, and got a list of scilon addresses followed by what I think is application data. Perhaps the hex dump might signify something to the people who are tinkering with the firmware. This is what is readable as ASCII: Code: www.hubbarde-meter.org..course.volunteerministers.org..secure.bridgepub.com..secure.newerapublications.com..secure.scientology.org..store.scientology.org..www.bridgepub.com..www.dianetics.org..www.flag.org..www.freedommag.org..www.lronhubbard.org..www.newerapublications.com..www.rtc.org..www.scientology.org..www.scientologynews.org..www.volunteerministers.org..secure1.scientology.org..secure2.scientology.org..secure3.scientology.org..secure4.scientology.org..secure5.scientology.org..secure6.scientology.org..secure7.scientology.org..secure8.scientology.org..secure9.scientology.org..secure10.scientology.org..secure11.scientology.org..secure12.scientology.org..secure13.scientology.org..secure14.scientology.org..secure15.scientology.org..secure16.scientology.org..secure17.scientology.org..secure18.scientology.org..secure19.scientology.org..secure20.scientology.org..secure21.scientology.org..www.scientologycourses.org..secure.scientology.net0=..U...60402.0...,http://gtssl-crl.geotrust.com/crls/gtssl.crl0...U.........'.S........W#b\..0...U.......0.0o..+........c0a0*..+.....0...http://gtssl-ocsp.geotrust.com03..+.....0..'http://gtssl-aia.geotrust.com/gtssl.crt0L..U. .E0C0A. `.H...E..60301..+........%http://www.geotrust.com/resources/cps0
Although it's not directly related, I thought some of more technical people here might find the article in this post interesting: https://whyweprotest.net/community/...stic-surveillance.111435/page-61#post-2405160
Seems like I'm late to the party but I'll dissect what I can. Anyone currently working on this want to group up? I'll start sandboxing and then log all traffic on the machine.
I'm watching this thread but I don't have the expertise for anything beyond hex dumps of viewable packages. Haven't yet figured out how to apply Wireshark but I'm working on it. I say - have at it, because I'm not the only Anon watching this thread.
Gotcha. I'm currently downloading Oracle's VirtualBox so after that is done I'll start doing some digging.
