Live data from Hacker News

Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 70 posts

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#61
I wanted to use a certain drawing program (better than xfig but proprietary) for some of my studies. Since I was too cheap to pay the $10 registration fee I decided to try and crack it. It took an afternoon with OllyDbg to crack the program (from its trail version). This is significant because I haven’t looked at x86 assembly in 10 years.

I don’t know if I should be ashamed or proud.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#62
post #34

// we don't even pretend to work on anything but i386 and LE arm const unsigned char c[] = { 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12 }; assert(sizeof(int) == 4 && *((int*)c) == 0x12345678);

Could you explain what this does to those of us who're C/C++ challenged ? :)

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#63
post #62
post #34

// we don't even pretend to work on anything but i386 and LE arm const unsigned char c[] = { 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12 }; assert(sizeof(int) == 4 && *((int*)c) == 0x12345678);

Could you explain what this does to those of us who're C/C++ challenged ? :)

The software will assert out (bomb, hard) if it's running on a platform which isn't 32-bit (that's the sizeof), and little endian (checked by putting the individual bytes of 0x12345678 into memory in little-endian order, and making sure that when read as an integer, the value is correct).

Except it doesn't even do that well. Traditionally the C "int" type was the largest word size a machine could comfortably work with. But most 64-bit platforms have adopted the "LP64" and "LLP64" conventions - where "int" remains a 32-bit type. One reason to do this is that most values fit comfortably into 32 bits, so a 64-bit "int" wastes memory. Another reason is to keep shoddy code like this running!

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#65
post #43

This is not a very impressive hack compared to the other submissions here. But still here is my 'hack', if you want to call it that way. When I was doing my graduate course in Computer Engineering, we had to submit loads of assignments each semester for each paper. "Assignment" means something that we should write by hand (print-outs not allowed) on any arbitrary topic provided by the lecturers. There was no problem…

That sounds like me. I'm still at the 'get girls to write your assignment' stage.

Tell me you're from TN (India)

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#66
my ISP sent me a mail, offering an exclusive deal to get a credit card that was without extra charges for life, plus a huge number of freebies, cash backs, discounts and stuff. i clicked the link to the sign up form. i clicked on the sign up button. nothing happened.

i checked the source code. apparently the submit button was supposed to call a javascript function, but the function name was misspelled. so i entered javascript:doFormSubmit or whatever the function was called, in the address bar.

the application was accepted.

i checked the day before the offer expired. the form code still had the typo.

i'd like to believe i'm the only guy who got the 40% discount on a new microwave over and a new tv and 2 years of 25% discount on movie tickets :)

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#67
post #43

This is not a very impressive hack compared to the other submissions here. But still here is my 'hack', if you want to call it that way. When I was doing my graduate course in Computer Engineering, we had to submit loads of assignments each semester for each paper. "Assignment" means something that we should write by hand (print-outs not allowed) on any arbitrary topic provided by the lecturers. There was no problem…

That sounds like me. I'm still at the 'get girls to write your assignment' stage. Tell me you're from TN (India)

I am. And I did that too :-)

(Man, girls really like to write, for whatever reason)

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#68
post #17

...:: Hacking World Cup Tickets for Germany 06 ::... Australia was a late qualifier for the tournament. The ticket submission was via email. Tickets were allocated on a first email received basis after 09:00. There was a countdown webpage which advertised the time. --- Preparation * I telneted to port 25 of the destination and saw via EHLO that the mail server clock was 1 minute faster than advertised on the webpage,…

> the server connection pool was exhausted

Why ? Did you TCP-flooded SMTP server after you connected ?

Have you considered that it might be very simple to track you down since you'd be one of few people who got the tickets that day through this channel ?

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#70
post #17

...:: Hacking World Cup Tickets for Germany 06 ::... Australia was a late qualifier for the tournament. The ticket submission was via email. Tickets were allocated on a first email received basis after 09:00. There was a countdown webpage which advertised the time. --- Preparation * I telneted to port 25 of the destination and saw via EHLO that the mail server clock was 1 minute faster than advertised on the webpage,…

> the server connection pool was exhausted Why ? Did you TCP-flooded SMTP server after you connected ? Have you considered that it might be very simple to track you down since you'd be one of few people who got the tickets that day through this channel ?

The flood was of all of the other Oz applicants hitting SEND on their email clients. That was why I allocated myself two channels before. There were many more than 2 channels available.

I could have DDOSed the server to ensure only I got tickets, but that sounds like an ugly thing to do.

Post reply on HN