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Cloud Share - New App

2014 May 23, 4:06

I've put a new app on the Windows Store: Cloud Share. It connects the web to your Windows 8 share charm.

I did the development on GitHub and quite enjoyed myself. I wasn't sure I liked the game-ification of development in GitHub's dashboard showing you your longest development streak in days. However I realized that it encourages me to do work on my personal project and anything that aids in holding my attention on and helping me finish these projects is a good thing.

PermalinkCommentsdevelopment github javascript JS technical windows

YouTube - June System Update Walkthrough for Xbox One OneGuide...

2014 May 21, 6:15


YouTube - June System Update Walkthrough for Xbox One

OneGuide on SmartGlass is coming in the June Xbox One update! The feature I’ve been missing since day one. I don’t think I’m an average Xbox One user.

PermalinkCommentsxbox video tv

YouTube - Dead Man’s Bones (Dance) Nathan Barnatt has...

2014 May 19, 3:21


YouTube - Dead Man’s Bones (Dance)

Nathan Barnatt has some great videos

PermalinkCommentsNathan-barnatt video dance

Bank robbers use KVM switch and 3G router to steal money

2014 Apr 28, 10:01

Using social engineering to install a remote-controlled keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch on bank PCs, the gang managed to transfer millions to outside accounts in two separate jobs in April and July of 2013. They were caught attempting to rob a third bank in September.

PermalinkCommentstechnical bank-robbery

(via...

2014 Apr 15, 1:30


(via http://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=-PW2Y0XIDbE&u=/watch?v=XG8qATRtNuU&feature=share)

PermalinkCommentsfilm movie trailer

weeping-who-girl: Matt & David on Chris Hardwick’s Comic...

2014 Apr 8, 7:04




















weeping-who-girl:

Matt & David on Chris Hardwick’s Comic Con Blunder (x)

requested by tennanttardistime

Bonus Chris Hardwick in costume:

image

PermalinkCommentshumor doctor-who chris-hardwick

Hijacking user sessions with the Heartbleed vulnerability · Matt's Life Bytes

2014 Apr 8, 6:36

Just a quick tutorial on exploiting heartbleed for session hijacking. Is it worse to use https than http today?

PermalinkCommentstechnical security ssl heartbleed session-hijack

Retweet of mattpodwysocki

2013 Oct 24, 1:00
OH: "take me down to concurrency city where green pretty is grass the girls the and are"
PermalinkComments

Pixel Perfect Timing Attacks with HTML5 - Context » Information Security

2013 Aug 7, 8:25PermalinkCommentssecurity html html5 svg javascript requestAnimationFrame iframe

Considerate MessagePort Usage

2013 Aug 7, 7:14
Sharing by leezie5. Two squirrels sharing food hanging from a bird feeder. Used under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.When writing a JavaScript library that uses postMessage and the message event, I must be considerate of other JS code that will be running along side my library. I shouldn't assume I'm the only sender and receiver on a caller provided MessagePort object. This means obviously I should use addEventListener("message" rather than the onmessage property (see related What if two programs did this?). But considering the actual messages traveling over the message channel I have the issue of accidentally processing another libraries messages and having another library accidentally process my own message. I have a few options for playing nice in this regard:
Require a caller provided unique MessagePort
This solves the problem but puts a lot of work on the caller who may not notice nor follow this requirement.
Uniquely mark my messages
To ensure I'm acting upon my own messages and not messages that happen to have similar properties as my own, I place a 'type' property on my postMessage data with a value of a URN unique to me and my JS library. Usually because its easy I use a UUID URN. There's no way someone will coincidentally produce this same URN. With this I can be sure I'm not processing someone else's messages. Of course there's no way to modify my postMessage data to prevent another library from accidentally processing my messages as their own. I can only hope they take similar steps as this and see that my messages are not their own.
Use caller provided MessagePort only to upgrade to new unique MessagePort
I can also make my own unique MessagePort for which only my library will have the end points. This does still require the caller to provide an initial message channel over which I can communicate my new unique MessagePort which means I still have the problems above. However it clearly reduces the surface area of the problem since I only need once message to communicate the new MessagePort.
The best solution is likely all of the above.
Photo is Sharing by leezie5. Two squirrels sharing food hanging from a bird feeder. Used under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.
PermalinkCommentsDOM html javascript messagechannel postMessage programming technical

C++ constructor member initializers run in member declaration order

2013 Jul 18, 3:29

TL;DR: Keep your C++ class member declaration order the same as your constructor member initializers order.

C++ guarantees that the member initializers in a constructor are called in order. However the order in which they are called is the order in which the associated members are declared in the class, not the order in which they appear in the member initializer list. For instance, take the following code. I would have thought it would print "three, one, two", but in fact it prints, "one, two, three".

   
#include "stdafx.h"
#include

class PrintSomething {
public:
PrintSomething(const wchar_t *name) { std::wcout << name << std::endl; }
};

class NoteOrder {
public:
// This order doesn't matter.
NoteOrder() : three(L"three"), one(L"one"), two(L"two") { }

PrintSomething one;
PrintSomething two;
PrintSomething three;
};

int wmain(const int argc, const wchar_t* argv[])
{
NoteOrder note; // Prints one, two, three, not three, one, two!
return 0;
}
PermalinkCommentsc++ development programming technical

Shout Text Windows 8 App Development Notes

2013 Jun 27, 1:00

My first app for Windows 8 was Shout Text. You type into Shout Text, and your text is scaled up as large as possible while still fitting on the screen, as you type. It is the closest thing to a Hello World app as you'll find on the Windows Store that doesn't contain that phrase (by default) and I approached it as the simplest app I could make to learn about Windows modern app development and Windows Store app submission.

I rely on WinJS's default layout to use CSS transforms to scale up the user's text as they type. And they are typing into a simple content editable div.

The app was too simple for me to even consider using ads or charging for it which I learned more about in future apps.

The first interesting issue I ran into was that copying from and then pasting into the content editable div resulted in duplicates of the containing div with copied CSS appearing recursively inside of the content editable div. To fix this I had to catch the paste operation and remove the HTML data from the clipboard to ensure only the plain text data is pasted:

        function onPaste() {
var text;

if (window.clipboardData) {
text = window.clipboardData.getData("Text").toString();
window.clipboardData.clearData("Html");
window.clipboardData.setData("Text", util.normalizeContentEditableText(text));
}
}
shoutText.addEventListener("beforepaste", function () { return false; }, false);
shoutText.addEventListener("paste", onPaste, false);

I additionally found an issue in IE in which applying a CSS transform to a content editable div that has focus doesn't move the screen position of the user input caret - the text is scaled up or down but the caret remains the same size and in the same place on the screen. To fix this I made the following hack to reapply the current cursor position and text selection which resets the screen position of the user input caret.

        function resetCaret() {
setTimeout(function () {
var cursorPos = document.selection.createRange().duplicate();
cursorPos.select();
}, 200);
}

shoutText.attachEvent("onresize", function () { resetCaret(); }, true);
PermalinkCommentsdevelopment html javascript shout-text technical windows windows-store

In Depth Review: New NSA Documents Expose How Americans Can Be Spied on Without A Warrant

2013 Jun 21, 10:43

What It All Means: All Your Communications are Belong to U.S. In sum, if you use encryption they’ll keep your data forever. If you use Tor, they’ll keep your data for at least five years. If an American talks with someone outside the US, they’ll keep your data for five years. If you’re talking to your attorney, you don’t have any sense of privacy. And the NSA can hand over you information to the FBI for evidence of any crime, not just terrorism. All without a warrant or even a specific FISA order.

Not sure if this is saying all Tor data is collected or saying if someone uses Tor then start collecting that someone’s communication.

PermalinkCommentstechnical legal tor nsa eff spying security privacy

laughingsquid: ‘Veronica Mars’ TV Show Attempts to Make a Film...

2013 Mar 13, 11:38


laughingsquid:

‘Veronica Mars’ TV Show Attempts to Make a Film Via Crowdfunding

PermalinkCommentsveronica-mars movie kickstarter

Stripe CTF - Level 8

2012 Dec 7, 2:07
Level 8 of the Stripe CTF is a password server that returns success: true if and only if the password provided matches the password stored directly via a RESTful API and optionally indirectly via a callback URI. The solution is side channel attack like a timing attack but with ports instead of time.

(I found this in my drafts folder and had intended to post a while ago.)

Code

    def nextServerCallback(self, data):
parsed_data = json.loads(data)
# Chunk was wrong!
if not parsed_data['success']:
# Defend against timing attacks
remaining_time = self.expectedRemainingTime()
self.log_info('Going to wait %s seconds before responding' %
remaining_time)
reactor.callLater(remaining_time, self.sendResult, False)
return

self.checkNext()

Issue

The password server breaks the target password into four pieces and stores each on a different server. When a password request is sent to the main server it makes requests to the sub-servers for each part of the password request. It does this in series and if any part fails, then it stops midway through. Password requests may also be made with corresponding URI callbacks and after the server decides on the password makes an HTTP request on the provided URI callbacks saying if the password was success: true or false.
A timing attack looks at how long it took for a password to be rejected and longer times could mean a longer prefix of the password was correct allowing for a directed brute force attack. Timing attacks are prevented in this case by code on the password server that attempts to wait the same amount of time, even if the first sub-server responds with false. However, the server uses sequential outgoing port numbers shared between the requests to the sub-servers and the callback URIs. Accordingly, we can examine the port numbers on our callback URIs to direct a brute force attack.
If the password provided is totally incorrect then the password server will contact one sub-server and then your callback URI. So if you see the remote server's port number go up by two when requesting your callback URI, you know the password is totally incorrect. If by three then you know the first fourth of the password is correct and the rest is incorrect. If by four then two fourths of the password is correct. If by five then four sub-servers were contacted so you need to rely on the actual content of the callback URI request of 'success: true' or 'false' since you can't tell from the port change if the password was totally correct or not.
The trick in the real world is false positives. The port numbers are sequential over the system, so if the password server is the only thing making outgoing requests then its port numbers will also be sequential, however other things on the system can interrupt this. This means that the password server could contact three sub-servers and normally you'd see the port number increase by four, but really it could increase by four or more because of other things running on the system. To counteract this I ran in cycles: brute forcing the first fourth of the password and removing any entry that gets a two port increase and keeping all others. Eventually I could remove all but the correct first fourth of the password. And so on for the next parts of the password.
I wrote my app to brute force this in Python. This was my first time writing Python code so it is not pretty.
PermalinkCommentsbrute-force password python side-channel technical web

(via Comedy: Great Job, Internet!: Here’s Patton...

2012 Oct 31, 6:47


(via Comedy: Great Job, Internet!: Here’s Patton Oswalt’s Halloween costume)

PermalinkCommentsadam-savage patton-oswalt spider-man Halloween

DSL modem hack used to infect millions with banking fraud malware | Ars Technica

2012 Oct 1, 6:33

According to the links within this article, although the root URI of the router requires authentication, the /password.cgi URI doesn’t and the resulting returned HTML contains (but does not display) the plaintext of the password, as well as an HTML FORM to modify the password that is exploitable by CSRF.

The attack… infected more than 4.5 million DSL modems… The CSRF (cross-site request forgery) vulnerability allowed attackers to use a simple script to steal passwords required to remotely log in to and control the devices. The attackers then configured the modems to use malicious domain name system servers that caused users trying to visit popular websites to instead connect to booby-trapped imposter sites.

PermalinkCommentstechnical security html router web dns csrf

Attention:!!!, Behold, you are reading a letter from your President Barack Obama.

2012 Sep 26, 2:43

Eric gets the most entertaining mail.

You have failed to comply with them after all the warning and instructions given to you, but since you are also among the terrorist we are facing in the country, I will personal make sure that I wipe away the crime in the state and I promise you that you will definitely pay with your life because I am here to protect the interest of my people and not to put them in shame, you suppose to support this government and not to spoil it.

PermalinkCommentshumor spam scam email eric-law

Nathan Barnatt makes awesome videos. This is a playlist of my...

2012 Sep 26, 2:21


Nathan Barnatt makes awesome videos. This is a playlist of my favorites of his. (via http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIjrVnNvXzb8N5tjV3fowJqYwuDM__WVf)

PermalinkCommentsNathan-barnatt video music dance humor

Patent Office tries “Stack Overflow for patents” to find prior art | Ars Technica

2012 Sep 20, 2:27

Welcome news. Glad to hear they’re looking for improvements.

… the USPTO has also worked with Stack Exchange, … to create a new site called Ask Patents. … Examiners or others looking for prior art can post questions about a specific application, and members of the general public can respond with evidence that an applicant was not the first to invent the subject matter of the application.

PermalinkCommentsip law patent stack-exchange technical uspto
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