Car Jacked

Thieves have been breaking into and stealing cars as long as cars have been around. But now there is a new twist on the robbery. Most cars these days have keyless remotes, power locks, and security systems. Some high tech crooks are now using some strange device to remotely open your car doors. They sneak in without any fanfare. And they get away with your ride. Police are stumped as to what this device is. Fail.

Teenager Build a Sub

Justin Beckerman has just built a submarine. It cost him two grand. Took him six months to build. The sub goes 30 feet under water. It can stay submerged for over two hours. It is self propelled.

Justin had built subs before. They were not as advanced as this one. His last sub could only go down to a depth of 5 feet. The latest is a new and improved version. Now here is an engineer in the making. Dude is still in high school.

Reminds me of a guy I went to high school with. This guy built a robot. Then he upgraded it with rocket launchers. That thing was definitely not legal. LOL. The best part was that he controlled the robot with an Atari computer. Sweet.

Phone Charger Attack Vector

A couple of guys are gong to present a way to install malware on an iPhone at BlackHat 2013. Apparently Apple can install secret software using their charger. Now these guys can too. They built a cheap prototype that does just that. I can see how this would make it easy to infect an iPhone or iPad. People ask to use my iPhone charger all the time. I could just say, "No problem." Then I laugh as they get the payload.

I guess it just goes to show you that you can't trust anything these days. As a side note, there seem to be a number of talks addressing how to hack into mobile devices. It is not just limited to Apple products. This is probably due to mobile being hot right now.

Creating Your Own Cola

I just finished reading directions on how to make your own cola. This is called OpenCola. The ingredients are somewhat hard to find. There are dangers mixing and storing the ingredients. There are also hazards from choosing the wrong kind of ingredients. And it is difficult to get that fizzy carbonation. But it is possible to brew your own cola.

I know I spend a fortune on cola. That would be Coca Cola to be exact. I buy it frequently at fast food joints. And I get 12 packs of 12 ounce cans like it is water. I do try to buy that darn stuff when it is on sale. It would be nice to mass produce the stuff at a seriously wholesale price.

Might be time to set up my lab.

Get Cracking

I found an interesting puzzle posted by the FBI recently. It is a challenge to decipher some code. The code is a bunch of symbols. Heopfully each symbol is just a reference to a certain letter or character. The FBI was nice enough to show us where the spaces are in the words.

My interest is to see if I could maybe write a program to do the cracking for me. The symbols look like they each have nine positions. Those positions are sometimes occupied by a circle. When the circle is present, it is filled in with one of a few different colors.

Well I could scan in the picture with my software. Divide up the words by the spaces between them. Then identify where the circles are and what colors they contain. I could definitely represent this as something better that symbology with circles. In fact, assuming this is a simple substitution cipher, I would just want to represent each distinct symbol with a number.

Then I could perhaps do some sort of brute force deciphering. The software should know which letters occur most frequently in normal text. Then it could choose a mapping based on how often the letters show up in the encoded message. Then it could take each word using the current mapping, and see whether the words are in a dictionary.

The software, if fast enough, could iterate through all possible combinations of mappings. Then it could generate a score for each mapping based on how many words are spelled correctly accoring to a dictionary. The software would then present the translation for the highest scoring mappings to the user, who could make the final determination as to what makes sense.

Screen Scraping to the Rescue

I play this online game these days. It is a casual turn based game. Nothing heavy. It is a bit addicting. Occasionally I look to compare my progress against other players. There is a ratings board on the web site. But here is the problem. Every so often, I get a message stating that I visited the ratings board too often. Then I cannot see my rank. WTF?

This is a free game. So it is not like I am losing money. But this should not be that hard. There are around 1000 total players. At any given time, only 10 of them are online. How hard can it be to support a rankings page? Yeah they are probably querying a database, and sorting my character level and experience.

What? Are they running an Excel database LOL? I bet it is MySQL. And hello? Can you cache the data please? Performance problem solved. No charge. Time to take matters into my own hands. I hear the source code for the site is available. No need for me to whine. I should just implement the cache idea and demonstrate an elegant solution.

My first step was to get a snapshot of all the ratings screens. Next I am going to code up a parser to grab the raw data out of the HTML. Then I think I will import this stuff into my own database. Might not even need to do the caching if I tune the SQL correctly. For now I may just use a free Oracle database. I could just as easily use MySQL. I think I already have an instance running on my machine right now.

This is going fun. In the end, might even need to host the game on my own site. Pwned.

Errors Give me the Log

I was trying to read an article or a blog entry. Took a while for me to get to that tab in my browser. When I did, saw the following stack trace in the browser:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/_webapp25.py", line 714, in __call__
    handler.get(*groups)
  File "/base/data/home/apps/s~combemmu-hrd/1.366712374553545399/main.py", line 432, in get
    if self.blog(self.request.path[1:]):
  File "/base/data/home/apps/s~combemmu-hrd/1.366712374553545399/main.py", line 230, in blog
    posts = [BlogPost.get_by_key_name('p' + slug)]
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 1275, in get_by_key_name
    return get(keys[0], **kwargs)
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 1533, in get
    return get_async(keys, **kwargs).get_result()
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/apiproxy_stub_map.py", line 604, in get_result
    return self.__get_result_hook(self)
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/datastore/datastore_rpc.py", line 1450, in __get_hook
    self.check_rpc_success(rpc)
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/datastore/datastore_rpc.py", line 1222, in check_rpc_success
    rpc.check_success()
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/apiproxy_stub_map.py", line 570, in check_success
    self.__rpc.CheckSuccess()
  File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/apiproxy_rpc.py", line 133, in CheckSuccess
    raise self.exception
OverQuotaError: The API call datastore_v3.Get() required more quota than is available.

Yum. What is all this good stuff? Guess maybe too many people were viewing the blog entry? I got a good view of some of their directory structure. Obviously they are using Python, and also Google App Engine. I wonder if they meant for me to see all this?

More importantly, is there anything I can do with all this information? Maybe I just got some insight that could come in handy. Just tried to refresh the page again. Still spitting out the stack trace. Something is hosed.