Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
How I've decided to answer the "can you hack" question from here on in...
"Can you show me how to hack this account please?"
"Sure, you'll need a hammer, a blow torch, chloroform, some pliers and couple of bottles of really pure vodka!"
"What the hell?!"
"Oh, it's so much quicker to just extract a password from a person, than it is to break into a system, I'm not exactly trained in inflicting pain on the human body, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out through trial and error, good luck!"15 -
> finds awesome software
> finishes trial period
> looks at pricing
> looks at bank account
> cries in a corner19 -
*signs up for Skillshare*
> Sorry, your password is longer than our database's glory hole can handle.
> Please shorten your password cumload to only 64 characters at most, otherwise our database will be unhappy.
Motherf-...
Well, I've got a separate email address from my domain and a unique password for them. So shortening it and risking getting that account stolen by plaintext shit won't really matter, especially since I'm not adding payment details or anything.
*continues through the sign-up process for premium courses, with "no attachments, cancel anytime"*
> You need to provide a credit card to continue with our "free" premium trial.
Yeah fuck you too. I don't even have a credit card. It's quite uncommon in Europe, you know? We don't have magstripe shit that can go below 0 on ya.. well the former we still do but only for compatibility reasons. We mainly use chip technology (which leverages asymmetric cryptography, awesome!) that usually can't go much below 0 here nowadays. Debit cards, not credit cards.
Well, guess it's time to delete that account as well. So much for acquiring fucking knowledge from "experts". Guess I'll have to stick to reading wikis and doing my ducking-fu to select reliable sources, test them and acquire skills of my own. That's how I've done it for years, and that's how it's been working pretty fucking well for me. Unlike this deceptive security clusterfuck!14 -
There is this service that I want to use (wont name it for privacy/legal reasons) and I have created a trial account which gives me a limited access to their apis. However the usage is where things are interesting.
The api access is restricted to some 1000 calls per trial account. But also they have a explorer option which lets to have the functionality as a web app like a dashboard and the explorer usage has unlimited access.
Now since I didnt want to exhaust my api limit, I let my service call the explorer apis instead. Is this ethically wrong or it is the fault of the service providers that they have such a big gaping hole in their licensing?8 -
Yesterday someone from my class asked me if I could hack a netflix account for him because his one-month trial will be over soon.
I have nothing more to say.8 -
Disclaimer - Day in the life of a whitehat student.
Whitehat Whitehat Whitehat
What is this????
When I attended my first white hat jr online free trial class, I got to know that the teachers does not know the difference between java and javascript. Infact they were saying blockly as javascript. I was knowing the difference between the same. There were 3 types of courses -
***Note : - This information is taken from the whitehat official website***
1.) Introduction to Coding :-
Sequence, Fundamentals Coding Blocks, Loops
(Teach us to drag and drop blocks of code.org(blockly))
2.) App Developer Certificate:-
Events / UI,Conditionals, Complex Loop, Logic Structures, Turtle Coding
(Advanced drag and drop(blockly))
3.) Advance Coding with Space Tech -
Extended UI/UX, Rich GUI app, Space Tech simulation in Space Lab / Game Lab, Professional Game Design.
(GUI - with tkinter(python), Game Design - Blockly(code.org))
These things are rubbish ......making GUI's is simplest with tkinter and the students who make games (with code.org) submit their codes to the whitehat community (because the teacher says "they will compile it to an android app, then you can publish it to playstore" --- this is for 1% students who are able to design their own games).
The thing whitehat do with code given by 1% best students:-
Export to HTML from code.org
Download HTML to APK Convertor
Setup SDK
Successfully converted to APK!
Publish it to Whitehat Jr console account
Credits of the students
Income of the exporters
Rest all students will only think to be the CEO of google one day.
My Opinion - StackOverflow, Unity for Game Development, Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Kivy (using google colab for compiling the python code to an apk) for app development and Flask, HTML, CSS for web development.7 -
Fucking Amazon locked my account for "suspicious" activity, just before I would have cancelled the Prime trial I subscribed to last week. I knew I shouldn't have touched this garbage, and here I am, unable to log in, or contact any kind of chat-based support.
At least I blocked Amazon from using my card again, but my movie night is ruined.6 -
Ok, today's rant brought to you by Microsoft Visual Studio, once again. The updated version I downloaded yesterday now has a weird problem where upon the first run of the emulator, my changes show, but on subsequent runs, no matter how much I change, save, clear cache, restart the emulator, no changes will show in the emulator until I completely restart visual studio! Currently in the process of uninstalling the updated version to download the older version, but again I can't just refresh my PC, because I have to download a version from the developer account downloads. Because the trial version can't be upgraded. This is Microsoft's Flagship Development product running on their flagship OS on a machine with killer specs and the latest updates. GET IT TOGETHER. I would be fired if I released such buggy updates and had such an arduous user experience.1
-
After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.
This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]
As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."
A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.
Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.
Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.
The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.
The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).
I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.
I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.
I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.
I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.
Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.
I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.
The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...
If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!5 -
Is there any good trusty encrypted email service with free trial i should try, i am trying to get off social media world. And just delete all my account?9
-
Me: Yay! I’m getting more clients which means more income which means my accountant won’t look at me funny anymore when I say I’m still running a business and not a hobby! Go me!
Also me: I need $1400 worth of project management software subscription for 2 years (to get a discount) so I can manage the Agile workload among the developers and writers. I also need to recover $700 of accidental ad spend for that stupid Yelp account I forgot I had a “free trial” on. Guess I’m still running a hobby for a bit.1
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View