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.
How the 8.5” x 11” Piece of Paper Got Its Size
Why do we use a paper size that is so unfriendly for the basic task of reading? According to a very interesting post by Paul Stanley, the rough dimensions of office paper evolved to accommodate handwriting and typewriters with monospaced fonts, both of which rendered many fewer characters per line. “Typewriters,” he explains, “produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving … around 65 to 78 characters.” This, he says, is “pretty close to ideal.”
Read more. [Image: Picsfive/Shutterstock]
Level 4 and level 6 of the Stripe CTF had solutions around XSS.
> Registered Users
<%= user[:username] %>
(password: <%= user[:password] %>, last active <%= last_active %>)
The level 4 web application lets you transfer karma to another user and in doing so you are also forced to expose your password to that user. The main user page displays a list of users who have transfered karma to you along with their password. The password is not HTML encoded so we can inject HTML into that user's browser. For instance, we could create an account with the following HTML as the password which will result in XSS with that HTML:
Code review red flags in this case included lack of encoding when using user controlled content to create HTML content, storing passwords in plain text in the database, and displaying passwords generally. By design the web app shows users passwords which is a very bad idea.
...
def self.safe_insert(table, key_values)
key_values.each do |key, value|
# Just in case people try to exfiltrate
# level07-password-holder's password
if value.kind_of?(String) &&
(value.include?('"') || value.include?("'"))
raise "Value has unsafe characters"
end
end
conn[table].insert(key_values)
endThis web app does a much better job than the level 4 app with HTML injection. They use encoding whenever creating HTML using user controlled data, however they don't use encoding when injecting JSON data into script (see post_data initialization above). This JSON data is the last five most recent messages sent on the app so we get to inject script directly. However, the system also ensures that no strings we write contains single or double quotes so we can't get out of the string in the JSON data directly. As it turns out, HTML lets you jump out of a script block using no matter where you are in script. For instance, in the middle of a value in some JSON data we can jump out of script. But we still want to run script, so we can jump right back in. So the frame so far for the message we're going to post is the following:
When they went to the Moon, they received the same per diem compensation as they would have for being away from base in Bakersfield: eight dollars a day, before various deductions (like for accommodation, because the government was providing the bed in the spaceship).
Apollo 11’s Astronauts Received an $8 Per Diem for the Mission to the Moon
The astronauts of Apollo 11: Intrepid explorers. Inspirational heroes. Government employees.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
Stripe is running a web security capture the flag - a series of increasingly difficult web security exploit challenges. I've finished it and had a lot of fun. Working on a web browser I knew the theory of these various web based attacks, but this was my first chance to put theory into practice with:
Here's a blog post on the CTF behind the scenes setup which has many impressive features including phantom users that can be XSS/CSRF'ed.
I'll have another post on my difficulties and answers for the CTF levels after the contest is over on Wed, but if you're looking for hints, try out the CTF chatroom or the level specific CTF chatroom.
Seized shirt!
For the feds, it’s not enough to simply seize domain names without warning or due process—they want to make sure everyone knows the website operators were breaking the law, even if that has yet to be proven in court. That’s why every domain that gets seized ends up redirecting to one of these dramatic warning pages, replete with the eagle-emblazoned badges of the federal agencies involved.
Winterton, a senior entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, has seen a lot of bugs. But he hadn’t seen this species before.
There’s no off switch when you’re the senior entomologist. If you’re browsing the web you find your way to Flickr photos of insects or start correcting Wikipedia articles on insects.
“tl;dr I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to know how it works.”
JavaScript has some crazy implicit casts.
One persons quest to watch the Olympics online.
The location requirements (guessed at via IP address) are irritating. The requirement that you have a particular cable subscription to view video online seems like not network neutrality.
Also this related article:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/27/nbc-olympic-opening-ceremony/
By which is meant the following:
Essentially, each shareholder has decided to buy into Merrill ’s life and help him make better choices that will then hopefully up the stock price, allowing them to make money should they ever decide to cash out.
What? Oh, he lives in Portland.
Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
Such tips as: “don’t hand out cash to dinner guests” reveal what foreign tourists findsurprising about coming to America.
So this is another Stuxnet by Israel/US?
The analysis reinforces theories that researchers from Kaspersky Lab, CrySyS Lab, and Symantec published almost two weeks ago. Namely, Flame could only have been developed with the backing of a wealthy nation-state. … “It’s not a garden-variety collision attack, or just an implementation of previous MD5 collisions papers—which would be difficult enough,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars. “There were mathematicians doing new science to make Flame work.”
The conversation surrounding how to liberate HBO from its cable partners and create the entertainment utopia viewers have long desired has been fascinating.
The resulting analyses of the numbers has pretty much shown that the amount people are willing to pay is not nearly enough to…
Won’t someone think of the URIs?! At some point in the not too distant past, MSDN changed how you link to documentation and broke all existing links. This included some of links in documents on MSDN.
“From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
I keep seeing crowdsource projects with big names that I actually want to back:
Very interesting - both technically as well as looking into the moral justifications the botnet operator provides. But equally interesting is the discussion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960034. Especially the discussion on the Verified by Visa (3D Secure) system and how the goal is basically to move liability onto the consumer and off of the merchant or credit card company.
As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you’re going to replace writers with robots? “I just looked at him,” Hammond recalls, “and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That’s the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.” At least not yet.
In short, Marriott is injecting JavaScript into the HTML of every webpage its hotel customers view for the purpose of injecting ads (and in the meantime, breaking YouTube).
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