What does the blogger do for a job I wonder?
I would guess data recovery
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
141–150 of 176 posts
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#142What does the blogger do for a job I wonder?
maybe they reverse engineer or whitehat/grayhat/whateverhat for a living? hacking, ethical or otherwise, could explain looking through binaries with hex readers.
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#143The best part of this is that it is concrete evidence of Google Search result quality decay. The screenshot of the search in the article shows a result from a Blogspot blog called "Frankie's Joint". If you do today the exact same search that the OP does on his screenshot, that result does not show up. ALL the results I get are either a reference to this Hacker News post, or computer generated pages. A short 2 pages w…
Google gave up on search though right? Like, I assume they’ve just abandoned it, maybe as recently as 2 or 3 years ago. Can anyone prove that they haven’t?
I tried googling for evidence of that, but couldn't find anything. :)
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#144This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…
Hackintoshes did not necessarily steal MacOS, you could buy legit copies of MacOS.
It's just occurred to me that Apple's move away from the x86 platform has pretty much signed the death warrant of the Hackintosh.
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it ended up in the binary it probably wasn't a comment, in the true sense. I think you meant "in the source code sense" not "in the true sense." It could very well be a comment in installware.
In the true source code sense, I think it was well implied and understandable.
A comment existing in various binaries for the past 20 years is not the same as transient comments in source code that are removed prior to translation into a binary.
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a…
Ah, yes, I remember it well. The day I jumped to NSIS was a good day.
Is NSIS really that much better?
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#147Why not use a randomly generated (once and then fixed) string with 128 bits of entropy if you want to avoid accidental name collisions but need a well-known name?
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#148From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it probably will appear in many other products. > Found in a InstallShield sample that I was reversing to check if it's a malware. The line made me chuckle, and it's so heartwarming to see someone actually made a blog on it and the fact the line has been around sinc…
This got me thinking, why are installers still necessary on Windows? Why have they never adopted a packaged solution similar to .app on macOS?
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't. I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoIm…
13 years of installers.. That's some impressive digital pack-ratting! What's the idea? Just in case you ever need the installer again and it's no longer hosted online?
It's true that I don't trust the permanence of online resources, usually with good reason. But I can also be a bit of a digital hoarder. My IRC logs, for instance, go all the way back to 1999. It's funny because in meatspace I'm extremely tidy and don't keep any garbage. I have a single wardrobe with shelves of computer parts (mostly cables, wires and screws) and a few old CDs.
I have nothing from before April 26, 1999, the date when the Chernobyl virus destroyed my hard drive and wiped out all of kid me's QBasic programs (what a loss for humankind). Kid me could not afford the storage space for backups, nor did he have the discipline anyway.
Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
#150This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool) Or the "Don't Steal MacO…
I worked with someone, who previously worked at a hard drive manufacturer, whose initials are coincidentally valid hexadecimal digits. He told me a story how as a low-level firmware programmer, he was in the position to immortalize his initials as the two digit (one byte) magic number that starts some sort of internal control block used by that company's hard drives. Of course, he didn't tell them it was chosen because it was his initials...