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Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#381

Post by mprime1 »

mprime1 wrote: post #377
qot wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you use a brainwallet (ie, the hash of the password as the private key)? It looks like the funds were drained within an hour of you loading the bounty. People have made giant lookup tables of brainwallet passwords and monitor the corresponding addresses for transactions. Reddit user u/btcrobinhood is known for doing this and returning the funds.

Interesting! I suspected the attack vector was my poor use of BTC rather than someone cracking AES so quickly, I'll look into this. I created the wallet using a popular opensource wallet app, and just moved some funds there. Don't know more than that... Thank you for the pointers!

Update: funds were not stolen. PortableSecret wasn't cracked (yet)!

What happened is: the wallet app I'm using automatically performs CoinJoin[1] when funds are received (In fact, this is their business model! They take 0.3% of the amount to automatically anonymize all inbound coin).

CoinJoin is a protocol that breaks up the sum received in tiny pieces and scatters them across a large number of "sub-wallets".

So my wallet still has the funds. Bt the 'receive' address I used looks drained, that's because it was only a temporary address to share with the sender. Funds were soon after scrambled/tumbled/anonymized.

This was an interesting experience. I spent all day thinking about what could have happened, researched and learned a bunch of stuff in the process.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/Privacy#CoinJoin

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#383

Post by pkphilip »

nickcoury wrote: post #94

When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for yea…

I did something similar as well

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#384

Post by ishvanl »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #349

I automated math education for my 9 year-old. It's a Unity application where a student required to solve basic (currently) math examples. For 10 examples you're getting a 25-cent coin from a coin dispenser. You can keep it or you can use this money to buy Internet access. My OpenWrt router is connected straight to coin acceptor. For one coin you're getting 30 minutes of Internet on all devices (iPad and PC). Since it…

This is outstanding.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#385

Post by alhirzel »

Fethbita wrote: post #355
alhirzel wrote: post #86

One time I accidentally overwrote my hard drive with dd while making an installation thumbdrive. While unfortunate, it was only the first 8GB or so. This nuked the partition table, bootloader, and start of the Windows partition, but fortunately my daily-driver, still-running Linux system partition was unaffected. I kept my cool and figured it was recoverable. I ended up recovering the partition table from RAM and wri…

That’s great, I had the same problem but didn’t hack it like you did unfortunately. I overwrote the first 30 GB of my 6 TB HDD and am trying out GetDataBack Pro to get my files back, no luck so far. I had some tens of thousands of photos that I can’t replace.

I'm sorry that happened! What filesystem was it?

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#386

Post by Viliam1234 »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #226
nemo1618 wrote: post #109

After playing a lot of Tetris Friends, I started getting deja vu. Sometimes, after starting a new game and placing maybe 10-20 pieces, I would think, "Haven't I seen this exact board before?" Eventually I tested my theory through brute force: I would start a fresh game, write down the first 10 pieces, then restart. Over and over and over, until finally, I found it -- a duplicate! Apparently, Tetris Friends only seede…

i wrote a script that played Facebook bejeweled for me. took screenshot and then pick out the pixel colors from a grid since they're all different and mostly static. then simulated some clicks. it was a bad player but stupid fast so it racked up the score nonetheless.

I once scripted Farmville, and quickly overtook all my friends who played it. Then somewhere at level 60 or 80 the game became so extremely slow that I gave up. The game could only handle a certain number of clicks per second, and the script would have to run for dozens of hours to gain yet another level.

EDIT: That's because gaining levels required XP, and there was literally 1 XP for each click, regardless of what you did. You could figure out a strategy to get more gold, but I already had way more gold than I could spend. But there was no strategy to get more XP other than "click more". Up to certain level it was manageable, I just let the script run when I was away from the computer, and it took a few minutes to gain another level. Up to certain point, the required XP per level grew quadratically; behind that point it started growing exponentially, so I knew that I could never make more than 5 or 10 more levels past that point.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#387

Post by ogn3rd »

Had a job in a NOC at an almost empty datacenter doing nothing for 12 hours at a time without the ability to watch YouTube (streaming video wasn't yet a thing) to pass the time. Upon noticing embedded YouTube videos had no issue getting past the corporate firewall I realized I could make a simple html file with the embedded links to the YouTube videos I wanted to watch and I could sit there entertained for the 12 hours. I found the ID's by searching google adding the embedded prefix to the ID in the html file. Not much of a hack, but 12 hours is too long to sit there without video. The second "hack" I performed in this role was adding the default route 0.0.0.0 back to a Checkpoint firewall after an MBA genius deleted it thinking it was erroneous. Look, the datacenter is back online!

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#388

Post by solardev »

jonah-archive wrote: post #379
jonah-archive wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much -- IIRC connecting the pad bypasses the internal EEPROM and loads a default configuration, and from there you can read/write the EEPROM as well.

ah, found it! Page 88 of this PDF: https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/3c5x9b_Technical_Reference.p... ---------------------------------------- It is the user’s responsibility (with help from the configuration program) to avoid configuring the boot PROM on the adapter in such a way that the system is not able to boot. If this does occur, you can manually jump the Test Via using a #2 pencil. The Test Via forces the adapte…

This is amazing and hilarious at the same time. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#389

Post by paphillips »

matthewmcg wrote: post #342
paphillips wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noyce! This is 21st century if I ever saw it, and I tip my hat to thee.

I know you’re probably intending to say “nice” with an accent. But given the context I can’t help but also think of Bob Noyce, an engineer’s engineer. See https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12149389/robert-noyce...

It was intended as both actually: a sloppy imitation Australian accent, as well as a nod to Mr. Noyce. There are very few occasions where the two intersect so nicely.
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