Author Archives: thesamet
Another Way to Stop Bot Registrations
Reported by Boris. Back in December I’ve posted about the technique I use to stop spam on phpBB forums. The following enhancement of this idea appeared today on xkcd webcomic blog: But it would not work, because even spambots cry … Continue reading
Are You Paying For “Protection” On Your Blog?
It is very common to hear stories in which criminals ask restaurant or shop owners to pay them money for the criminal’s “protection services”. Those who dare not to pay them, usually sorry for that few days after, when they … Continue reading
Girlfriend Discovers a DoS Vulnerability in Gaim
It will probably be hard for you to believe, but my girlfriend discovered a DoS vulnerability in Gaim. No, don’t worry. She is not a computer geek (One in a relationship is certainly enough). The story of my girlfriend’s important … Continue reading
Making a Flickr Killer With TurboGears – Part 2: A Flickr Clone in 37 Minutes Flat
This is the second installment of the lecture I gave at the Israeli Pythoneers Meeting. In case that you missed it, it is recommended that you read the first part of it. At this point, I closed OpenOffice Impress and … Continue reading
How to Gain Root Access on SunOS (a 1-day exploit)
If you happen to find a Sun Solaris server with a telnet daemon running, it is very likely that you can get superuser access on it by just typing: $ telnet -l “-froot” server where server is the server name. … Continue reading
Making a Flickr Killer With TurboGears – Part 1: Introduction To TurboGears
One month ago, I gave an introductory speech about TurboGears at the Israeli Pythoneers Meeting. The discussion consisted of two parts. The first part introduced TurboGears, and the second part included live coding of a Flickr clone. I hereby give … Continue reading
Pumping Up Your Applications with Xapian Full-Text Search
What good is an application—not matter how much information it contains—if the inability to easily search it renders it useless? Xapian to the Rescue Xapian is an excellent open source (GPL) search engine library. It is written in C++ and … Continue reading
Prepare for Attack!—Making Your Web Applications More Secure
Arm yourself and prepare for battle! This post is intended as a reminder about the possible security attacks your Web application may be vulnerable to. While it is not meant as a comprehensive guide to Web-application security, it can give … Continue reading
Strangest Hanukkah present from Google
Sometimes Google does strange things. I was told today that this blog shows up on the first page of search results for the term “בלוג” (which is blog spelled in Hebrew). Here is a screenshot for the lazy disbelievers (taken … Continue reading
How to Stop Spam On phpBB Forums
February 2009 Update: it seems that this page got very popular, and it’s not surprising: the method described here is simple and really works. Unfortunately due to the large number of help requests I am getting, I can’t provide you … Continue reading