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Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

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Re: Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

#202
post #36

regvex.py -- http://gist.github.com/641688 Regvex is a proof of concept timing attack against regex engines. To make a long story short, the timing characteristics of regex engines make it perfectly suited to timing attacks, allowing you to (locally or remotely) create data that matches a given regex, and potentially even reconstruct the actual regex you're matching against. The current version works locally against…

Fascinating, could you explain how this works?

I'm planning on writing up a blog post exploring the attack and possibilities, but from a high level:

When you pass data into a regex engine for matching, it works character-by-character. When it reaches a character that doesn't match, the matching is terminated. That means that if you have the regex /^foo$/, "f" will take slightly longer to parse than "b", since it'll move on to the next character for "f", but not "b".

Due to this, you can produce matching data for a regex in a fairly small number of samples. Interestingly, it takes fewer samples to reliably get characters further down the string -- however, this may be a result of my horrid statistics code. Not sure yet.

As far as I'm aware, no one has ever done this before.

Re: Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

#204
http://onlineqrlab.com This is the first iteration. Actually re-coding it to fit into Fat-Free. Will add a decoder, other functionalities, a sharing tool... I really have nothing specific about it and will see how it goes and will decide later.

Grabbing the QrCodes that get coded and seeing what people are looking for ;) this would help me later on deciding my QrCode product.

Re: Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

#205
This belongs more in a "Ask HN: Show us your 'dead on the vine' projects":

http://www.jooque.com/d_clay_smith/band_of_horses_everything...

You could play videos and keep searching while the video played, make and share playlists, etc. It stopped working when YouTube started muting copyright songs and then made some tweaks to their API and now there are dozens of similar sites so never had any real drive to fix it.

That was 3 years ago. It was one of my first php and ajaxy projects and is a bit dreadful code wise. It wouldn't have taken anytime to improve it and who knows, if I had kept it in running order it might have done something.

As it is, I think I made about ten bucks in Adwords and Amazon affiliate money...

Re: Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

#208
One of my first programming projects, a physics game done with Processing: http://www.ewjordan.com/RGBApplet/ (warning, that link is a Java applet, don't blame me if your browser crashes!)

Buggy as hell (won't work if you reload the page, I think the applet viewer doesn't reset statics?), and really rough. Probably one of the toughest control schemes imaginable.

Re: Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

#210
post #112

http://www.distobs.org/ Using the CCDs on Androids or iPhones to detect cosmic rays, and in the process making the world's largest cosmic ray telescope (see http://www.auger.org for the most similar big physics project). Unfortunately, this project has been dead for awhile now.

This is an absolutely fascinating idea. Why have you stopped working on it? I know that astronomy fans are a small subset of HN readers, but this is the most interesting project I've heard of in a while.
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