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#81
General Discussion / Re: Godaigo's plea for help!
Last post by benthehutt - April 29, 2009, 10:31:56 PM
Nice! It's been a long time, man! I've just been finishing up school. I've got two days left then I'm out for good. I've also been working for a place in Chicago doing Flash/AJAX programming. As far as projects go I've recently been doing some physics engine development in AS3. I thought about posting some stuff here, but it doesn't seem like an HFX kinda thing.

What about you? And we need to get some collaboration going on some project.
#82
General Discussion / Re: Godaigo's plea for help!
Last post by godaigo - April 29, 2009, 08:45:28 PM
Sweet, I hooked that up for my Bloglines! Just got done with a boring little piece of Java code too... What have you been up to Ben?
#83
Neophyte Discussion / Re: One of a kind wargame
Last post by benthehutt - April 29, 2009, 05:22:10 PM
Ah, this is an interesting site. A few tips on this one:

First, view the source of the web-page (in Firefox, hit Ctrl+U). The author of the page hides some information in HTML comments (Between <!-- and --> tags).

This puzzle is about breaking the ciphertext found in the source of the page. Basically, this ciphertext was made by substituting letters. For instance, if we substitute T = M, H = A, and E = L, then THE = MAL. There are several ways of cracking this type of cipher. If we are dealing with a large amount of text, we can write a program to count the frequency of each letter. Then we'd replace the most common letters with the most common letters in English. For instance, in this case, L appears much more often than any other letter in the ciphertext. Then we can assume that L = E, since E is the most common letter in English. Using a table I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies, I wrote the following code to do this substitution for each letter(in Perl):

#!/bin/perl

my $_ = "MAL TIRRUEZF CR MAL RKZYIOL EX MAL OIY UAE RICF \"MAL ACWALRM DYEUPLFWL CR ME DYEU MAIM UL IZL RKZZEKYFLF GH OHRMLZH\"";

my @most_used_wikipedia = ("e","t","a","o","i","n","s","h","r","d","l","c","u","m","w","f","g","y","p","b","v","k","j","x","q","z");

my %letters = ("a",0,"b",0,"c",0,"d",0,"e",0,"f",0,"g",0,"h",0,"i",0,"j",0,"k",0,"l",0,"m",0,"n",0,"o",0,"p",0,"q",0,"r",0,"s",0,"t",0,"u",0,"v",0,"w",0,"x",0,"y",0,"z",0);

while( ($letter, $number) = each( %letters ) ){
	$letters{$letter} = () = $_ =~ m/$letter/gi;
}

print "Cipertext:\n$_\n\n";

# Print out frequency table
print "Frequency Table\n";
foreach my $letter (sort {$letters{$b} <=> $letters{$a}} keys %letters){
   print "$letter $letters{$letter}\t";
}

print "\n\n";

# Guess plaintext based on wikipedia stat attack
print "Wikipedia Statistical Attack\n";
print "=================================\n";
my $wikipedia_attack_plaintext = $_;
my $counter = 0;
foreach my $letter (sort {$letters{$b} <=> $letters{$a}} keys %letters){
	$letter = uc($letter);
	
	$wikipedia_attack_plaintext =~ s/$letter/$most_used_wikipedia[$counter]/g;
	++$counter;
}
print $wikipedia_attack_plaintext;


Unfortunately, since the ciphertext is such a small sentence, this statistical attack results in the phrase, "aoe pnttrisd lt aoe tcshnme ig aoe mnh roi tnld aoe olwoeta fhirbedwe lt ai fhir aona re nse tcssichded yu mutaesu," which is no help. So we move on and try to analyze each two and three letter word. MAL appears multiple times, so I'm going to assume that MAL = THE, since that's fairly common. Then I moved on to the two letter words, trying "IS", "IT", etc. I wrote a program to quickly make changes:
#!/bin/perl

my $ciphertext = "MAL TIRRUEZF CR MAL RKZYIOL EX MAL OIY UAE RICF \"MAL ACWALRM DYEUPLFWL CR ME DYEU MAIM UL IZL RKZZEKYFLF GH OHRMLZH\"";

print "Ciphertext:\n$ciphertext\n\n";
print "Replace what letter with what letter? (syntax: \"letter,replacement\", \"exit\" exits, CASE SENSITIVE)\n\n";

while( 1 ){
	$_ = <STDIN>;
	chomp;
	
	if( /exit/ ){
		exit;
	}
	
	# Check syntax
	if( /^[a-zA-Z],[a-zA-Z]$/ ){
		my ( $regex, $replacement ) = split( /,/ );
		$ciphertext =~ s/$regex/$replacement/g;
	}
	
	print "Ciphertext:\n$ciphertext\n\n";
}


With this program, you should use the syntax "A,z" if you want to replace A with z, i.e. replace uppercase letters with lowercase letters so you won't accidentally replace letters you already replaced. Working with this program for a few minutes, I found the hint for the password.

That was a MASSIVE hint, but if you have problems, come on back. And if you don't have perl, download it! If you're using Windows, google search "ActivePerl". It's awesome.
#84
General Discussion / Re: Godaigo's plea for help!
Last post by benthehutt - April 29, 2009, 03:20:05 PM
One more thing: I've noticed a lot of us simply don't post because we don't know when new posts are on the forum. I don't know how many of you use RSS feeds, but after some researching at simplemachines.org, I found there is a default RSS feed activated at http://forum.hfactorx.org/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml . Now I'm updated via Google Reader.
#85
General Discussion / Re: need a good fake mailer wi...
Last post by benthehutt - April 29, 2009, 12:21:28 PM
Hey man, unfortunately for spammers, the DMCA (Digital Millenium Compyright Act) has made it illegal for people to email with fake headers. In addition, I believe it includes a provision against programs created to do this (and programs to remove DRM). That may be why it's not around.

And I don't need your ten dollars.
#86
General Discussion / Re: Godaigo's plea for help!
Last post by benthehutt - April 29, 2009, 12:13:14 PM
Hey guys! I ran into the same problem and supposed my account got deleted, but it's back up now. Sweet!

As far as projects go, give us more specs on that Anti-botnet project you're working on, Cobra. What specific things are you wanting this to do?
#87
Security / Re: wi-fi affects the security...
Last post by Tazinator - April 09, 2009, 02:43:25 AM
Sophisticated spam =(

Apparently people are being paid to register accounts and post seemingly legitimate posts with advertisement links in the sig or message body now.
#88
General Discussion / need a good fake mailer will p...
Last post by larata - March 24, 2009, 01:14:33 AM
hey ive been looking on the internet for the past 2 days, i used to own one but i cant find the cd i put it on. i found some fake mailers but they dont have the " respond to" . im looking for the following. a fake mailer that sends from anyones email, to anyones email , not in spam but in inbox. also so i can put a different email(mine) in the respond section, so theyre thinking they are sending to the " from" email that was sent to them. i willl pay 10 dollars for this if you want to give to me free, i will accept aswell :P, but if not ill pay the 10 dollars. pm or aim me at caracasbaseball . alright thanks :)
#89
Web Languages / i need some help on using i fr...
Last post by shashwat - March 08, 2009, 04:45:30 PM
hey buddies i m using 3 iframes in my web page that are loading pages from other web site . after full load in the iframe i need to save these iframe content in html files. cn u help me to do so..thanx in advance
#90
Web Languages / COPPA Turns One
Last post by ske123 - February 18, 2009, 11:23:06 PM
On April 21, 2000, the United States enacted a law called COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), to help protect children online. While this law primarily impacts sites that collect information about their readers, especially when their readers are under 13 years old, most sites should be aware of the law and other privacy tools in use on the Web.

Web Design Services that are directed towards children under 13 must: post their privacy policy, get parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information about a child, get new consent when the information collection practices change, allow parents to review the information collected about their child and allow parents to revoke their consent.

For example, the Web Design site is not specifically directed towards children under the age of 13, so technically, COPPA doesn't apply. But the children's channel on About does, and so there have been many changes to the About Kids channel. But even if your site doesn't have to comply with COPPA, it's a good idea to follow it. If you do, you'll improve consumer confidence in your site.

Basically, there are two ways of handling parental controls: review by an independent group of the Web site(s) in question, review by the Web developer herself of their own Web site and There are problems with each method.

The first method means that there needs to be a "governing body" that is trusted and respected by the consumers to find and block objectionable material. This can be questionable at times, especially if that body is using generic terms to block sites. For example, at one point NetNanny was blocking www.whitehouse.gov because it mentioned the word "couple" in reference to the President and First Lady. Other programs have blocked sites related to breast cancer because of the word "breast" in the title. The second method relies on honesty of the Web developers. Perhaps you can see where the problem with that might be. :) Also, many developers don't put up any type of rating system. I believe that IE handled this by not allowing access to any site without a rating (if parental controls were turned on). P3P and ICRA are just two different rating tools/codes that Web developers can use to rate their sites.
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