Tag: hacking

How big is 5 Zettabyte?

2013-06-23 rolfje 3 Comments

Since the interview of Edward Snowden with the Guardian, the discussion about privacy and companies storing and sharing unencrypted private data is picking up. Particularly Americans are worried about what it does for their National security and their private data. But that’s actually a naive thought, given the NSA stores worldwide data.

In a recent coverage on theblaze.com (a rather tabloid-looking news station in the U.S.), the interviewers are shocked to see that the NSA spies on “every American”.

This is a limited view of the world and failing to see the importance of spying on people outside the U.S., but lets start with technical side of things first. What data are they storing and how big is their hard-disk?

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Uncategorized

Aeroccino Motor Replaced

2011-08-162025-10-17 rolfje 48 Comments

Months ago, I got this broken Aeroccino milk frother for free. This week I fiddled with it for a few hours, and got it to work:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNEqWH3ILDc]

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Hardware, Workshop

Why some App Store apps won’t install

2011-01-09 rolfje 2 Comments

I was happily playing around with the appstore, and came across this funny free game called “Hedgewars”. Originally a free Linux game, it apparently got ported to the Mac and put in the App Store, just as a slew of Flash-based games (yes, Steve has some ‘splainin’ to do).

I tried to install Hedgewars on my trusty Mac Mini and got this message saying “This Application can not be installed on this machine”:

Apple, Games, Hardware, Software

Move Time Machine data to a Drobo

2010-12-30 rolfje 20 Comments

If Santa treated you particularly well this season, or you have put some of your savings to good use, chances are that you have a brand-new Drobo looking at you right now. Meanwhile, your Mac is happily making Time Machine backups to that trusty old local USB disk. So you want to use that new Drobo for Time Machine backups, but don’t want to loose history? Here’s how (baby steps, no tools required, screenshots included):

Apple, Hardware

Anonimatron featured on Softpedia

2010-09-26 rolfje 1 Comment

As you may know I started working on a little tool to anonymize databases. Nothing fancy, just a Java tool that uses jdbc to replace live data with fake generated data which still looks representative enough to do testing and make believable screenshots. Oh and did I mention that it is 100% free of charge? You can get the latest version from SourceForge.net.

I recently received an email from Softpedia that Anonimatron has been added to their catalog. Their email states:

“anonimatron” has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components. We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future.

Anonimatron is written in Java and will ron on Linux, OSX and Windows machines. The current version is 1.3, and it should be considered “beta” at this point.

Let me know what you think!

Software

Sonar “Close Connection” warning workaround.

2009-10-06 rolfje 7 Comments

When you use Spring and Ibatis and SQLTemplates, you could have code in your project which looks somewhat like this:

Connection connection = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(getDataSource());
...<do connection stuff here>...
DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(connection, getDataSource());

Sonar will report that you did not close the connection, while in fact, Spring did that for you. You can not just add a “connection.close()” to the code because the whole point of calling “releaseConnection()” is to have Spring handle all the smart stuff on committing, closing, and returning the connection to the pool if needed.

Software

Block Luntbuild 1.5.1 Anonymous Access

2007-11-13 rolfje 4 Comments

If you are using luntbuild for your continuous integration builds at work, you probably want to remove anonymous user access. In stead of adding that feature to the administrator “Properties” page where I’d expect it, you have to hack the Spring configuration in the webapps directory of luntbuild. Sigh. Here we go:

Software

Phrack still in ASCII

2007-08-04 rolfje No Comments

It is a long time since I read this stuff, but I stumbled upon a paper discussing the non-executable stack on OSX (a trick to prevent buffer/stack overflow exploits). Ah, the good old days. And with all this markup, it’s good to see that Phrack magazine stuck to their format. It’s still the same as over 20 years ago… Well written articles, focussed on correctness and content, for the coders out there who are not afraid experimenting with some assembly. The amount of (nightly) hours that go into the research and proof of these articles are unbelievable, and it shows.

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Fun, Software

The Digital Revolution

2007-05-04 rolfje 1 Comment

Nice example of digital revolution and power to the people can be found at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-02-n67.html. Let’s hope manufacturers understand that people don’t want to pay for crippled content.

Digital copies where copyright is removed are actually better than their DRM protected originals, which makes good willing people move to pirated content, like I stated earlier. The important sentence here being “If I buy a DVD, I have to watch a few minutes of copyrights notices and commercials, without being able to skip them. If I rip it, and re-write it, these notices are gone…”.

Viva la Revolution!

Software

Lost Oracle SYS and SYSTEM password?

2007-01-16 rolfje 56 Comments

If your administration is as good as anybodies, you are bound to loose the not-so-frequently used password for the SYS and SYSTEM users of oracle. Here are a few ways I found to re-set those passwords:

Method 1: SQLPLUS (Tested on AIX Oracle 9.2.0.1.0)

Log into the database server as a user belonging to ‘dba’ [unix ] or ‘ora_dba’ [windows ] group , typically ‘oracle’, or an administrator on your windos machine. You are able to log into Oracle as SYS user, and change the SYSTEM password by doing the following:

$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on Mon Apr 5 15:32:09 2004

Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> show user

USER is "SYS"

SQL> passw system
Changing password for system
New password:
Retype new password:
Password changed
SQL> quit

Next, we need to change the password of SYS:

$ sqlplus "/ as system"
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on Mon Apr 5 15:36:45 2004

Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

SP2-0306: Invalid option.
Usage: CONN[ECT] [logon] [AS {SYSDBA|SYSOPER}]
where <logon>  ::= <username>[/<password>][@<connect_string>] | /
Enter user-name: system
Enter password:

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> passw sys
Changing password for sys
New password:
Retype new password:
Password changed
SQL> quit

You should now be able to log on the SYS and SYSTEM users, with the passwords you just typed in.

Method 2: Creating pwd file (Tested on Windows Oracle 8.1.7)

Stop the Oracle service of the instance you want to change the passwords of.
Find the PWD###.ora file for this instance, this is usuallly located atC:\oracle\ora81\database\, where ### is the SID of your database.
rename the PWD###.ora file to PWD###.ora.bak for obvious safety reasons.
Create a new pwd file by issuing the command: orapwdfile=C:\oracle\ora81\database\PWD###.ora password=XXXXX
where ### is the SID and XXXXX is the password you would like to use for the SYS and INTERNAL accounts.
Start the Oracle service for the instance you just fixed. You should be able to get in with the SYS user and change other passwords from there.

Software