C Program to Plot the Gamma Function in the Terminal

In this post I want to talk about a C program I wrote just recently that plots a mathematical function - specifically the gamma function. I think it's worth looking at, because this program demonstrates how to handle the various aspects of graphing and plotting using just ASCII characters in the terminal. The program draws …

Reverse-Engineering a Linux Process with strace

The pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location. And just like that, we can trace signals as they bounce around the Matrix, whether it's the Matrix that simulates Earth in 1999 or the Matrix that generates pretty pictures on …

C Program to Generate a Blank MS-DOS Floppy Image in Linux

How do you do, fellow old-timers? Today's post is going to be a bit of a crossover, because I'm going to get into some programming stuff, some Linux stuff, and some DOS stuff all at the same time. I'm going to show you a program that I wrote a while back that uses POSIX API …

NMap Experiment: Using a Banner Grabbing Attack to Bypass a Load Balancer

Disclaimer: This article talks about port scanning and banner grabbing in NMap, which can be used as precursors to an online attack. This information is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not to be used for illegal hacking purposes. Disclosing vulnerabilities and exploits is protected by free speech laws, but using such information …

My (Revised) Step-by-Step Process for Starting Arch Linux Live

In this post I talked about my process for setting up my Arch Linux live system. I still use a live distro (mostly because I don't want to overwrite any files currently on the hard drive), but in the last few months I've made quite a few revisions to my startup process for Arch Linux …

Exploring Borland Turbo Pascal for DOS

I've been having some more adventures in VirtualBox, messing around with DOS software. This time I thought I'd explore Borland Turbo Pascal. I have an affinity for ancient programming languages - Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, Lisp, etc. I like them for basically the same reason I like vintage computers and old operating systems. It's like exploring …

Generalized Password Cracking, Part 2: Starting with Some Stock Password Attacks

Disclaimer: The present series of posts contains information on how to exploit security vulnerabilities in passwords. It is intended for educational and research purposes only. Neither the password cracking tools described in this series nor any of the exploits developed with these tools are to be used for gaining unauthorized access to accounts or other …

Generalized Password Cracking, Part 1: A Description of the PCL Password Cracking Language

Disclaimer: The present series of posts contains information on how to exploit security vulnerabilities in passwords. It is intended for educational and research purposes only. Neither the password cracking tools described in this series nor any of the exploits developed with these tools are to be used for gaining unauthorized access to accounts or other …

Running a VirtualBox VM in Bridged Networking Mode

I've been playing around with bridged mode in VirtualBox, trying to see how I can get it to work. Turns out it's fairly easy to do, so this article will be somewhat shorter than what I usually write. I just want to look at what I did to enable bridged networking in my VirtualBox VMs …

Doing Statistics in awk

One exercise that offers a lot of interesting challenges in coding is to use a programming language for an application that it's not intended to be used for. Writing a Fortran compiler in TECO and solving the Towers of Hanoi problem in the troff text formatter are two examples from the legendary Hacker Purity Test. …