'Please Contact Us': It's Been a Tough Week for the Nobel Prize's Twitter Feed
Tales of temporary rejection from an organization not used to being ignored.
WinRT (JS and
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.NET Only
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Normalize
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Equality
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Encode data for
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My second completed app for the Windows Store was Words with Hints a companion to Words with Friends or other Scrabble like games that gives you *ahem* hints. You provide your tiles and optionally letters placed in a line on the board and Words with Hints gives you word options.
I wrote this the first time by building a regular expression to check against my dictionary of words which made for a slow app on the Surface. In subsequent release of the app I now spawn four web workers (one for each of the Surface's cores) each with its own fourth of my dictionary. Each fourth of the dictionary is a trie which makes it easy for me to discard whole chunks of possible combinations of Scrabble letters as I walk the tree of possibilities.
The dictionaries are large and takes a noticeable amount of time to load on the Surface. The best performing mechanism I found to load them is as JavaScript source files that simply define their portion of the dictionary on the global object and synchronously (only on the worker so not blocking the UI thread). Putting them into .js files means they take advantage of bytecode caching making them load faster. However because the data is mostly strings and not code there is a dramatic size increase when the app is installed. The total size of the four dictionary .js files is about 44Mb. The bytecode cache for the dictionary files is about double that 88Mb meaning the dictionary plus the bytecode cache is 132Mb.
To handle the bother of postMessage communication and web workers this was the first app in which I used my promise MessagePort project which I'll discuss more in the future.
This is the first app in which I used the Microsoft Ad SDK. It was difficult to find the install for the SDK and difficult to use their website, but once setup, the Ad SDK was easy to import into VS and easy to use in my app.
My contribution in full to the #bartkira project. This was tons of fun to do.
Holy shit.
Everything’s coming up Milhouse
Hey its the high school band audition judge from Back to the Future.
Stripe's web security CTF's level 0 and level 3 had SQL injection solutions described below.
app.get('/*', function(req, res) {
var namespace = req.param('namespace');
if (namespace) {
var query = 'SELECT * FROM secrets WHERE key LIKE ? || ".%"';
db.all(query, namespace, function(err, secrets) {
There's no input validation on the namespace parameter and it is injected into the SQL query with no encoding applied. This means you can use the '%' character as the namespace which is the wildcard character matching all secrets.
Code review red flag was using strings to query the database. Additional levels made this harder to exploit by using an API with objects to construct a query rather than strings and by running a query that only returned a single row, only ran a single command, and didn't just dump out the results of the query to the caller.
@app.route('/login', methods=['POST'])
def login():
username = flask.request.form.get('username')
password = flask.request.form.get('password')
if not username:
return "Must provide username\n"
if not password:
return "Must provide password\n"
conn = sqlite3.connect(os.path.join(data_dir, 'users.db'))
cursor = conn.cursor()
query = """SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users
WHERE username = '{0}' LIMIT 1""".format(username)
cursor.execute(query)
res = cursor.fetchone()
if not res:
return "There's no such user {0}!\n".format(username)
user_id, password_hash, salt = res
calculated_hash = hashlib.sha256(password + salt)
if calculated_hash.hexdigest() != password_hash:
return "That's not the password for {0}!\n".format(username)
There's little input validation on username before it is used to constrcut a SQL query. There's no encoding applied when constructing the SQL query string which is used to, given a username, produce the hashed password and the associated salt. Accordingly one can make username a part of a SQL query command which ensures the original select returns nothing and provide a new SELECT via a UNION that returns some literal values for the hash and salt. For instance the following in blue is the query template and the red is the username injected SQL code:
SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users WHERE username = 'doesntexist' UNION SELECT id, ('5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8') AS password_hash, ('word') AS salt FROM users WHERE username = 'bob' LIMIT 1
In the above I've supplied my own salt and hash such that my salt (word) plus my password (pass) hashed produce the hash I provided above. Accordingly, by
providing the above long and interesting looking username and password as 'pass' I can login as any user.
Code review red flag is again using strings to query the database. Although this level was made more difficult by using an API that returns only a single row and by using the execute method which only runs one command. I was forced to (as a SQL noob) learn the syntax of SELECT in order to figure out UNION and how to return my own literal values.
BE EXCITED.Promo on IFC for the upcoming Comedy Bang Bang TV show!!!
I am excited Paul.
sequelguy posted a photo:
Jen's going away surprise for me was to add to my Diversity Inc cover artwork with my own photoshopped cover. Note the attention to detail in the headlines.