Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

Okay, *deep breath*. Yesterday, I was playing around with my newly discovered soft hyphen. It’s a small little dash that’s not rendered on most browsers. I’ll cut the discovery anecdote crap, after a small set of contests with Iluvatar on our local institute phpbb forum, I discovered I could do this.

All phpbb and most other php authentication systems take up a string while signing up. All characters are gonna be visible (like spaces, underscores, etc), so I made a login with 4 soft hyphens. And sure enough it looked like there was no name at all.

Now this is where it got interesting. I took people’s ids who already existed, registered with that name and added a few soft hyphens after them. And after changing my avatar and sig, I was virtually indistinguishable from the actual poster.

Well this isn’t actually a “security” threat, it’s a threat to trust. Though the names look different to php, they look absolutely the same to the end user. And with a little trouble, a lot of pranksters can make use of this. I thought digg would break and I’d make a profile identical to DigitalGopher to prove my point while submitting this(noone diggs my submissions ).

After a lot of experimenting, I found almost all php registration systems had a problem with this. (Digg was safe by accepting only alphanumeric characters) I haven’t had the time to try if this works with gmail or explore this problem further courtesy my exams.

With a little more research I found that this technique applies to practically *ANY* field where you can’t enter a null value but you want it displayed as a null value. Any site that accepts an underscore will have a problem with this. I was able to fool ubuntu forums, several login ids, and masqueraded as an administrator of my local forums.

I concluded this: This hack can use to make two different pieces of text absolutely indistinguishable to humans.

I’m not specifying how to do this, I don’t want to be responsible for any problems. But anyone with basic knowledge of ascii can work it out. I don’t know if it’ll display that way on a mac or through other rendering engines apart from gecko and ie7.

Also, after a little coding, I found that mysql treats both differently, so I can have two names which look identical to humans but different to machines, and spammers can endlessly exploit this system.

More on this later. Now playing: Children of Bodom: Trashed Lost and Strungout

The midsems approach!! For those of you who are unfamiliar with what they are, it’s the exam that you never thought would ever come and you didn’t notice it coming, and thus, you aren’t quite prepared for what they have in store. [more on this later]. But, I decided that I have to come up with some clever way to battle the biggest demon ever: sleep. Now most of my college never sleeps during this ten days, and many mock me for allowing myself my five luxurious hours of sleep. But this time I was determined to come up with a way to sleep more and still try to accomplish the same amount. Here are some of my findings:

What many and I used to believe was that the best thing that you should be doing is to push yourself on overdrive and let the pressure take over and control you. This led to things like extreme stress, acidity and severe tiredness for me. Also people are cranky and most people will refuse to sleep hoping they’ll get a few more words crammed in. I find that ridiculous now.

Now however, things are different. I have started sleeping at 8 in the evening and waking up at 2. A good plentiful six hour sleep that is practically unheard of. Then I have the whole morning ahead of me. When I wake up, the serenity and quiet helps me do more without any distraction. Then at 5:30 in the morning, I go for my usual 9 km run. While I used to go in the evening, going in the morning is real great fun. The suckass weather of Kharagpur actually is bearable. I have an amazing breakfast. I couldn’t ask for more. And then around the afternoon take a small nap of about two hours (eight hours of sleep… gosh) and then I’m back in the game. OK. maybe it doesen’t work quite as well, but it is great for kicks.

Well, none of this implies I’m getting any studying done. For starters, I have a midsem in a few hours and I’m writing a blog post with funky graphics depicting stereotyped iit routines(though those looked real funky they were breaking the layout. you can still view them here and here). Ok. I really should go now.

I tested out the livecd of the latest version of kateos[3.2], something that I’d heard about but not had the time to go test it out. So I downloaded the iso [took 3 days continuous download ). It was 700mb so I thought it would be filled with the same old kde livecd. Heck they’re called kateos, and kate is one of the coolest kde applications around. And what’s with the ‘K’ That’s a dead KDE giveaway anyday if you ask me.

First Impressions:

Okay, when the cd booted up rather quickly for a livecd and for my test machine that had 256 mb ram[tried it on a friend’s computer. I have 1 gb]. I was greeted by a pleasant skinned GDM login, for which the login and pass was specified on the right. Imagine my surprise when I see a weakly skinned xfce desktop. I mean there was a wallpaper but *There wasn’t even a gtk theme* I mean clearlooks was absent, the menu hardly fitted in properly and it came with firefox and thunderbird. Both which looked annoying with no gtk

Right out of the box

This is a distro that’ll make purists gleam with glee. I mean there’s a shortcut for xterm on the desktop, there’s not even a decent good looking terminal. Then it struck me: KateOS is the kind of distro to run if you still live in the vacuum tubes era. Take this: there’s 700 mb of packages and with what? Xterm, xmms, xine, and other basic gtk1 and xorg based applications. It’s perfect for slow sluggish computers everywhere. The system was lightning fast even from the livecd. All applications chosen, except for firefox maybe was chosen for maximum usability and minimal resource consumption. It is pretty cool.

A generous dose of apps:

This distro is designed mainly for beginners who want a no fuss system. There are a few games, lots of other bundled applications. There are many network oriented softwares including clients for the gadu protocol , the seriously-oldskool browser, dillo, xine with plugins to play videos, etc. Xpaint, clocks, etc, etc.

It keeps getting weirder and weirder.

I tried to see if I could install any other applications. Apt get didn’t work. Nor did yum, yast or ark. Then I saw there was no package manager. Absolutely none.
The funny thing was I downloaded the iso without knowing anything about the distro, so I put in proxy and network details and opened kateos.org in firefox. And I found out some…well… interesting facts:

1. IT used to be based on slackware now it’s an independent os (do those exist anymore).
2. Software installation can be done in tgzex format, supposedly free of dependency.
3. The core KateOS installation is rather small [2GB. What computer has 32 mb of ram and 2GB++ space to spare]
4. Smallest possible requirements and maximum security are what they’re aiming at.
5. It’s designed for experienced users.

Final Thoughts

Well, I found kateos annoying, hate me if you must but I’m a sucker for eye candy, and heavy bloated software with amazing package management and KDE for heaven’s sakes. But this is a good project with a better selection of packages unlike say, puppy linux or damn small linux. This is linux for the experienced, and …ahem…ill equipped(?)… user.

Current music: Dream Theater, "Stream Of Consciousness"

[EDIT: The Version is 7.04 and not 7.10]

For those who want it: >>>Screenshots Tour(Flickr)<<<
UPDATE: THE SCREENSHOTS ARE DOWN FOR A WHILE

Review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd Release 3:
Downloading the iso was a little difficult to find the right download links. But then I checked out distrowatch who had a link to the iso directly. Ten hours later, it was done. I didn’t see anything different after booting from the cd. It gave the same old options, and there was no kernel trace output or anything, just that the bar filled up while the cd booted up and unpacked the squashfs filesystem, and booted up the livecd.

First impressions:
The moment I booted up, there was a crash report for the synaptic update notifier, because I need a proxy to access the Internet. I sent the crash report back to their server. The hardware recognition worked fine, though there is still no native support for my nvidia 7600GT. There was the install option [which I later tested and worked fine] And the artwork is more or less the same as the one in Edgy. It runs gnome 2.18. There is nothing that’s really noticeable the first time you see it. I also noticed only two virtual desktops by default and some minor changes in artwork. The default applications are the same (openoffice, firefox, gaim) with the eikga smartphone that comes with a gnome default install. Gimp is there, and nautilus is in the “Web browser” display by default. (Nautilus looks so fking cool that way. I wonder why a gnome default install features a minimalistic filebrowser. If it wasn’t minimalistic enough already).

Dude! Where’s my system Menu?
One of the biggest changes is an oversimplified system menu. But there’s one option here called the “Control Center” which really impressed me when I opened it up. It’s like a control panel, just simpler and better. It’s divided up into 4 categories: Hardware, Look and Feel, System and Other. The names are self explanatory and you can configure almost all major functions of your computer with ease. It’s like a much more simpler and better thought out version of openSuse’s Yast (yet another system tool). All the icons are part of the lovely ubuntu mod of tango iconset called tangerine. There’s also a very useful and very intuitive search filter which you can use to quickly find the setting you’re looking for.

The Ubuntu Help Center:
I knew kde had a help center with some stuff like how to change your wallpaper, etc. But This was very nice. A simple and useful help center has been included in ubuntu. This has loads of useful articles on how to install multimedia codecs, help for server systems, and almost everything you may need. To top it all off, a very useful search that found articles on nvidia drivers, mp3 codec installation, and an entire section dedicated towards ubuntu propaganda like “the desktop”, “The difference” etc. But real good stuff indeed.

Endnote:
I have a love/hate relationship with ubuntu. I’m primarily a debian user, and I feel ubuntu oversimplifies things a bit. But after reviewing Feisty, I’m convinced that this just isn’t any other debian wrapper. While older distros love their elitism and sadomasochistic installation techniques, and newer ones are just a different collection of packages with a clever name and some artwork. I was a little annoyed because the upgrade from dapper to edgy was practically nothing but init and a new version of gnome, but ubuntu’s gone ahead leaps and bounds with feisty. With the support and commitment to making the best distro out there and to make it user friendly is commendable. The alpha version of Feisty looks great, can’t wait to see the release candidates.