I've seen octal and character substitution tricks in URLs before, but I didn't know you could use hexadecimal for the IP in a URL. Sure enough, this: http://0xd390cc87/ is exactly equivalent to this: http://211.144.204.135/ (D3 = 211, 90 = 144, CC = 204, and 87 = 135) Just found out now in a piece of stupid flippin' phishing email that was sent to me. Danged Shanghai-based swindlers...

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Some have wondered why Vista took so long to get to us. What's the big deal about it anyway? Well, it's much more than a pretty face and the fancy new communication features of WCF. Okay, so that was all it was going to be originally. A marginal upgrade. A hop between Whistler and Blackcomb, and its code-name told it all: Longhorn is just a small bar nestled between those two giant mountains. But when Blaster and other embarassing attacks surfaced in the 2003 timeframe, the original plans to make...

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How I miss the days when printer drivers consumed an unobtrusive 300k or so... I actually went out to HP's website in search of the leanest driver possible for this printer, and this was it. Atrocious that it requires MORE DISK SPACE THAN THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM!!! Stupid bloatware. During installation there are four steps, and fortunately the first two are actually installing the driver, and the last two are putting on all the extra useless crap. So if you end task on the installer after step...

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Earlier this week an Irish company called Steorn claims to have found a way to generate free energy. But don't cancel your order for solar cells and wind turbines just yet! Steorn's marketing approach smacks of being an all-out publicity stunt. It seems like every few years some crackpot comes along claiming that magnets can create energy, or that some magic green pill can turn water into gasoline. (How in the world could a little pill hold all that carbon, plus have enough energy to break all those...

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For those curious about the "Second Chance" eBay scam, here's the developments from today: Subject: here is a copy of the invoice formeBay Buying new items, brand names, and collectibles on eBay is simple. Here's how it works... Congratulations, eBay transaction started! • Current status: Payment pending. Purchase protection granted. Dear lorinth, After verifying the trustworthiness of the seller rockincbh and the availability of the merchandise for immediate shipping, we have approved your...

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Yesterday I had bid on a nice SXGA projector, but didn't win the item, being outbid by two people. I thought it quite strange that less than 24 hours later I got a “Second Chance” email to buy the item. After a little communication, it has become very obvious that this is by no means the real seller, as they're claiming to be in Orlando, whereas the real seller lives in Escondido, CA. The most obvious element of fakery is that nestled in the HTML part of the spoofed eBay email is the...

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Had this question posed from a friend in my last London post: What do you think of AJAX? Do you know of security concerns? Since you asked... Security concerns with AJAXAJAX is a very straightforward way to increase the dynamic feel of any site. But we're talking about Javascript calling almost directly into server-side code, so there are some big security concerns to be worried about with this architecture. What was once one door into the server, a URL to retrieve the web page, is now accompanied...

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Yesterday at the Shmoocon conference in Washington DC self-described hacker Mark Loveless reminded us that it's risky to leave the WiFi enabled on an XP laptop. But note that if you've got SP2 with the firewall enabled you're at very low risk. While I don't think this news item will garner nearly as much attention as Mark Russinovich's discovery the Sony rootkit, it is still good to know. What I find particularly annoying is that someone could do a drive-by with a high-powered WAP set with the same...

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Here's a video of what it looks like to be infected with the WMF zero-day exploit. NOTE: Microsoft has now released a patch for this vulnerability! (Link leads to the WinXP version. Install it ASAP!) Previously this blog post had recommended unregistering the Microsoft Picture and Fax viewer via this command: regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll Now that the patch is available, if you had taken the above approach as a precautionary measure then you can re-enable this functionality with this command: regsvr32...

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