Showing posts with label hack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hack. Show all posts

Hacking My Way to My Own Blog: Anonymously

  January 31, 2009    

Well, I'm back...after 4 days of being kept from my own web site by my ISP, the increasingly notorious HughesNet, about which I have written before. In fact, I still can't surf to my blog, unless I use a proxy server and bypass the HughesNet DNS.

So I am running Anonymizer, a very clever program that lets you surf the web without revealing your IP address. The program does this by routing your browser's requests to visit a web site, like my blog, through its own DNS servers, thereby avoiding, in my case, the apparently foobar DNS at HughesNet. There are other ways of doing this, like surfing via anonymouse.org, but they tend to flash ads on the screen to pay for their service. Alternatively, you can buy a subscription. What I'm doing right now is use a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer.

Let me make this clear, I am using a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer so I can get to my own web site. I have not called HughesNet about this problem (calls to HughesNet support should be avoided by people with high blood pressure according to my reading of the Hughes forum on DSLReports). In a few days I am headed down the Monetate office in Conshohoken for a week. I know I can reach my blog from there. When I get back I will see if the problem as gone away.

p.s. So far I am liking Anonymizer. It has a simple interface for turning the service on and off and it manages to do this without disrupting browsers sessions.

   / / / / / /

  No Comments

Let's Hope Spammers and Criminals Don't Find This

  December 11, 2008    

I realize that yesterday's post about jpeggery only included one actual JPEG. So here's a couple more and they are quite disturbing.

You wouldn't think they were scary, looking at the first example, a pair of screenshots of the Eudora email program (yep, I'm really old school when it comes to email). The odd thing is that the upper shot, where the dark blue rectangle is just hovering on the page, is weird. It was just sitting there, even when I wasn't using the program. When you pull down the File menu in Eudora to select Check Mail it normally looks like the segment in the lower shot.  In other words, in the upper shot the screen seems to be retaining a piece of menu after the menu is closed. And Eudora is not the only place this happened, in fact the rectangle appeared over every application.

Consider the second pair of shots. This time the phantom rectangle has picked up the Save menu item from the Paint program, and below that a blog menu item called Details.

What appears to have happened is that after Windows Media Player crashed while playing a video, it left something in a graphics layer/frame/buffer which that program accesses. And that something persisted, across applications. It even stayed in place through a system stand-by and wake-up.

Do you begin to see what I see? There could be a way to inject persistent messaging that users can't remove without a reboot. Why would someone want to do that? Here's what Compter Security 101 teaches us. First there will be some people who do it "Because we can." Then some people will figure a way to exploit this to annoy/disrupt/market/infect/spam systems without system-owner consent. If doing this has perceived value, it will be done. And then the way to do this will have value and it will be sold. And so on.

Hopefully getting this phantom code entity into a system requires a hard-to-duplicate set of conditions (like you have to crash Windows Media just right).

   / / / /

  1 Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)