Or: How Billy hacked Zombie Hooker Nightmare to get his name on TV during Adult Swim.
Awesome. I found a bunch of games that expose how they record the high score insecurely, but none that would get my name on TV. "Look mom! I made those zombie hookers my bitchez!"
Study: Antivirus Software Catches About Half Of Malware, Misses 15 Percent Altogether
Topic: Technology
10:22 am EST, Mar 3, 2009
Antivirus software immediately discovered only 53 percent of malware samples, according to data gathered by Damballa in a six-month study that used McAfee Scan Engine v5.3.00 to scan more than 200,000 malware samples. Another 32 percent were found later on, and 15 percent were not detected at all. The average delay in detection and remediation was 54 days. ... Failsafe 3.0 includes a management console and will ship this month, with pricing starting at $100,000 for 10,000 nodes. It's aimed at organizations that prefer to keep their botnet-detection "locally in the cloud," Guerry says. "This is sensitive information to these clients," he says.
Couldn't say in their LAN or intranet? Had to work "cloud" in there.
The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser - Microsoft Research
Topic: Technology
7:28 pm EST, Feb 22, 2009
Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site {\it principals}. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.
In this paper, we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle's Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions.
Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal OS that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility.
Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:16 pm EST, Feb 20, 2009
We consider the problem of DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text. Such duplicate URLs are prevalent in web sites, as web server software often uses aliases and redirections, and dynamically generates the same page from various different URL requests. We present a novel algorithm, DustBuster, for uncovering DUST; that is, for discovering rules that transform a given URL to others that are likely to have similar content. DustBuster mines DUST effectively from previous crawl logs or web server logs, without examining page contents. Verifying these rules via sampling requires fetching few actual web pages. Search engines can benefit from information about DUST to increase the effectiveness of crawling, reduce indexing overhead, and improve the quality of popularity statistics such as PageRank.
Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
Everyone should watch TED talks; especially this one.
Formula 1 has adopted the most sweeping changes in the sport's history in an effort to increase overtaking and bring down the astronomical costs involved in racing. As we told you a couple of weeks ago, the new rules have significantly changed how the cars look. The rules effect everything from aerodynamics to tires to the number of engines each team can use during the season, which spans 17 races over 9 months.
I'm excited about KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System).
I mainly want to write this down somewhere so I can refer back to it. HTTP never ceases to surprise me and I never know when I'll need this info again.
Yesterday I started looking into a bug with our Web Macro Recorder (WMR) tool. In the world of web scanners being able to record login macros and knowing when to replay them is essential to quality coverage during a scan.
The WMR would hang when attempting go through the login process on some sites, e.g. Yahoo.com. After receiving a 301 redirect to the HTTPS login page it would just quit, give up, throw in the proverbial towel. I watched this happen from WireShark, there was no RST there was nothing.
I decided to try and recreate this on a server I control so that I could mess around. After I noticed it was using HTTP/1.0 I tried using the headers() function in PHP to give responses as http proto ver 1.0. No luck... There is a bug with the headers() function in PHP that requires you to add some additional voodoo.
After implementing this I wasn't able to reproduce the bug in WMR that was occurring on Yahoo.com. The Apache server I was using was also configured to send additional headers that Yahoo wasn't including. The one that caught my suspicion was the Connection: Keep-Alive header.
Using interactive mode I tried removing the Connection header sent by my server and SUCCESS was able to reproduce the same behavior that occurs with Yahoo.com. So the one issue is that the WMR is not properly handling HTTP/1.0 redirects.
In other testing it was determined that WMR would work sometimes but not every time. e.g. We saw it work about 66% of the time on Citigroup.com. After the revelation with Yahoo.com I decided to go back and look at Citigroup's HTTP responses.
I noticed this:
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:11:20 GMT Server: Hitbox Gateway 9.3.6-rc1 P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP LAW NID PSA ADM OUR IND NAV COM" Set-Cookie: CTG=1234455080; path=/; domain=vendorweb.citibank.com; expires=Thu, 19-Feb-2009 16:11:20 GMT; max-age=604800 nnCoection: close Pragma: no-c... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]
