One blog to rule them all

So apparently I have been creating too many blogs while having no time to keep them updated and today I have decided to merge some of them together. As a result, you can see how my penguin taming business is going on here from now on.

Recently, I have successfully managed to install BackTract 5 R1 to my hard disk without having to burn the installer to DVD or USB (somehow my Lenovo laptop couldn't boot from USB even though I enabled all the relevant BIOS settings). Since BT is based on Ubuntu, I followed this guide with some necessary changes and boom! mission accomplished!

Here's a screenshot:

I even planned to install Solaris 11 on my comp, but in the end couldn't because there was some conflict with Linux swap partition which required changes to the entire partition table.

FreeRice updated

Do you still remember the FreeRice bot I wrote years ago?

I'm not sure if the bot is still working but recently I received an email from the United Nations World Food Programme saying that it "has been highly damaging to Freerice and has serious repercussions for the people we help". Below are the three reasons given:

- You overload our servers and crash the site, so that real people cannot play and learn. This means less people want to play, and we raise less rice.
- You damage our reputation and discourage sponsors from supporting Freerice, making it impossible for us to pay for the rice you raise. This means we cannot provide rice to those who need it most
- At times, the bots raise more rice than we can pay for!

Apparently, there have been many bots created since then and I wonder if my bot alone can damage the site that much but for now I have removed the bot from the downloads. If you are a bot author, maybe you should consider doing the same.

Statistically, about 40% of the visitors to my site are for the bot. Well, that gotta change now!

Chess

Just a quick update. I haven't been very active in challenge solving during the past few months. However, I just developed some interest in chess. I am doing pretty well on chess.com with a rating closing 1700.

This is one of my favourite games: http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=42014101

You know what, I found some of the geeks there too. Caesum the alien is playing more than 100 games at the same time, while TheHiveMind with his super chess bot has already reached a rating of 2200+.

I'm having a duel with Caesum atm, and the game is a bit on my side. Wish me luck!

Ubuntu Tweak

Finally got rid of the stupid pink login screen using Ubuntu Tweak. What a pain!

Hacker skills in action

Have you ever needed to use your 1337 hacker skills in real life as a non-security professional?

I was once given the task of writing a Windows library to connect to a Juniper VPN system. All I was given was just the web interface of the system. A task that cannot be completed without reverse-engineering skills.

Some experiments with the system showed me that the VPN system wasn't too complicated. After the user authorizes himself via the login page, an ActiveX or Java applet will be launched, which will subsequently download and run a Windows application that is responsible for the VPN connection.

Authenticating via the login page programmatically to retrieve the cookie for the session was a trivial task. For downloading and running the Windows VPN application, with my 1337 Java skills, I decided that reverse-engineering the Java applet was the way to go. After decompiling the applet with Jad, all I needed to do was modifying the code to make it run in a "simulated" applet environment, and everything went on smoothly.