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Qemu codeswarm
Codeswarm visualizations seem to be in-vogue now. So I put one together for the Qemu project. The music is from Jamendo (Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky). The video is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
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Why Web Applications Firewalls don’t block
Jeremiah Grossman describes it much more concisely than I did. To implement default-deny Web Application Firewalls (WAF) must know everything about a website at all times, even when they change. That’s programmatically documenting every expected request method, URL, parameter name/value pair, cookie, process flow, etc making default-permit deployments the rule rather than the exception.
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I smell propaganda
Being in a post-communist (whatever that might mean) country has some advantages. For example it sensitives you to propaganda. You can smell it instinctively and immediately you start to raise questions: how true is this? what are the supporting facts? Wikipedia defines propaganda as: Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the…
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YATP – Yet An other Twitter Problem
Twitter isn’t the most reliable service out there. Today I signed up to follow a friend who is too lazy to type more than 140 characters at a time ;-), so doesn’t blog. While signing up, the CAPTCHA didn’t show up. After several page refreshes I took a look at the source and it is…
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Locking a script to a given user with Perl
From a security point of view it is useful if you lock sensitive scripts (for example things which download untrusted data from the Internet) to run with a low privileged user. However it is also a good idea to make sure programatically that they are run only with the given user. One possible solution (which…
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Get the IP of the local computer from Perl
Caveat: this is only documented on Windows and may or may not work on other OSs (it doesn’t work on Ubuntu 8.04). Also, if the computer has multiple IP addresses (like a LAN, WLAN and a VLAN IP), there is no telling which IP this will return. Just a little snippet of code: print join(‘.’,…
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Reboot Windows – the hard way
I was clicking around via an RDP session on a Windows server and managed to kill the LSASS process (note to myself: next time pause the view of ProcessExplorer before killing processes!). The one minute till reboot screen promptly appeared and my first reflex was to stop the countdown (this is a trick which came…
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Other bugs which are passe
After talking about a problem with older versions of Opera, here is a problem with version 5.8.4 of ActivePerl for Windows (but which isn’t present in 5.8.8, so the simple solution is to upgrade): If you use the POSIX module to print out the day of the week (Friday, Monday, etc) with a code like…
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Benchmark with care
I saw this site recently: PHPBench.com was constructed as a way to open people’s eyes to the fact that not every PHP code snippet will run at the same speed This is useless! Or let me reformulate: this is misleading! For one, it uses microtime to do the benchmark, which measures physical time as opposed…
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Things you can get for free
It is amazing what you (commercial) software you can get today for free: Delphi Visual Studio IDA if you are a student, you can get lifetime (!) access to all of Microsoft’s products, provided you don’t use them for commercial purposes I for one welcome our overlords prefer the open-source alternatives, because I know that…