IE Bug – Pretty Scary

During my daily visit to Richard Bejtlich’ blog, I came information about this flaw in IE which can be exploited to make people believe that they are viewing/visting one site (URL) when in fact they are located on another website. To quote from the “Zap The Dingbat” (who actually discovered the bug)

Vulnerability
There is a flaw in the way that Internet Explorer displays URLs in the address bar.
By opening a specially crafted URL an attacker can open a page that appears to be from a different domain from the current location.Exploit
By opening a window using the http://user@domain nomenclature an attacker can hide the real location of the page by including a non printing character (%01) before the “@”.
Internet Explorer doesn’t display the rest of the URL making the page appear to be at a different domain.

For example, if you click on this button, you will see the URL http://www.microsoft.com in the address bar if you are using IE. But the full address of the URL is http://www.microsoft.com%[email protected]/security/ex01/vun2.htm.

Pretty scary eh.. Just imagine how much this can be abused. People can be tricked into entering their credit card information, usernames/passwords etc.. by mimicking valid sites. And as if though this is not bad enough, Micro$oft hasn’t even released a patch for this yet. So for now, either you type in all addresses manually in the address bar or use trusted saved bookmarks. I would recommend scrapping IE and to start using Mozilla Firebird as your default browser. It is fast, small, adheres to standards and is FREE [as in beer].

January 18, 2004 by Networking Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Swimming – Lessons

Day 1 – [1/10/2004]
Instructor – Tiger
. Check out our capabilities by asking us swim for a short distance (half lap). I managed to churn up the whole pool with my thrashing :).
. Grab kickboard with hands and learn to kick legs properly.
. Grab floating handlebars with hands and learn to kick legs properly and use one hand at a time to thrust forward.

Thank God, we were not asked to put our head under water 🙂

Day 2 – [1/17/2004]
Instructor – Seth
. Grab kickboard and swim (kick) all the way till the end of the pool !!! (freaked me out)
. Grab kickboard and swim (kick and push with one hand alternatively) all the way till the end of the pool.
. Throw away kickboard, put your head under the water and swim half a lap. (Drank half the pool during this exercise. I tell you, chlorinated water makes you pretty nauseous)
. Swim (kick, push with hands, head under water – AKA real swimming) the whole length of the pool.
. Backstroke – This was real hard for me. I could not relax enough to believe that you could float in the water on your back.
. Scissor Kick – Grab kickboard, put it under your head and grab it with your arm as if though you are holding a violin. Lay on your side in water and kick your legs as in a scissor action. Again, was pretty difficult for me to lay on my side. Kept slipping onto stomach or back.

It was a pretty intense second class. I thought that the instructor was pushing us too far, too soon. Have to work on my kick. I am bending my knees, keeping my fingers apart and thrashing wildly. The key is to move your whole leg. Will keep practising in the pool at home.

January 18, 2004 by Fun Sports Uncategorized 0

6 miles = 9.656064 kilometers

30 days to go for the Great Aloha Run and I am 2.15 miles short of the goal. I am planning on increasing 0.25 miles every day, that will take me to 8.15 miles in ~9 days. I should confess that I take a couple of breaks (walking instead of running) in the middle. I guess, if I roughly calculated my running distance, it would come up to ~5.8 miles. I believe running is all about self control. I realized that if I could persuade my mind, I can actually run longer. But the mind is such a devil :). It constantly keeps nagging “You are out of breath, your legs cannot carry you further, you’r pushing the limit, you are going to collapse”. If you can tell it to shut the hell up, you are golden :).

January 15, 2004 by Sports Uncategorized 0

Zaurus – More Pictures

More from the previous post. I collected some more pictures from the Zaurus migration. Didn’t want to post all of them to conserve bandwidth. For the interested, here are the links

http://www.kudithipudi.org/pics/1_14_2004/applications.png
http://www.kudithipudi.org/pics/1_14_2004/internet.png
http://www.kudithipudi.org/pics/1_14_2004/multimedia.png
http://www.kudithipudi.org/pics/1_14_2004/pim.png
http://www.kudithipudi.org/pics/1_14_2004/settings.png

January 14, 2004 by Fun Technology Uncategorized 0

Zaurus – English ROM

I bought a Sharp Zaurus 760 from Japan through one of my friends a couple of months back. This model is not sold in the US and I have been wanting to get my hands on it for a long time. I was well aware of the fact that the interface was all in Japanese, but since it runs Linux, I was confident of being able to hack it and change the locale settings. And there are a lot of enthusiast sites on the Internet which have information about this. Well, I got the PDA or rather Personal Mobile Tool (as Sharp likes to call it) and changed the locale settings by following the instructions in the following links
http://members.rogers.com/e46m3/zaurus/
http://downloads.conics.net/pda/zaurus-sl-c700/eng-inst/
http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php

Although I got most of the settings and menu options converted into English, I was still not satisfied. I wanted to modify the ROM to a complete english setting. Unfortunately, I am not such a Linux Guru (aspire to become one 🙂 ). Months passed by and as happens with such toys, it started piling dust until I came upon this site. They claimed to have a completely customized ROM with english. It was 11:00 PM in the night and the battery on the Zaurus was completely drained. Well, such goodies shouldn’t be kept waiting :). So I charged the batteries for ~ 15 minutes and got to work. Here is what I did

1) Download the ROM image from Cacko.biz.
2) Follow instructions found here.
3) Reboot the Zaurus and presto… you have an English ROM

Note: Apparently you cannot start up the Zaurus if your battery is completely dead although it is connected to an AC power source. You will have to wait at least 15-20 minutes for the batteries to charge up partially. Weird..

Here is a screenshot of the Zaurus running Netfront. It is connected to the Internet with a prism wireless card.
Zaurus :: Netfront :: BBC

That is the original screen size (640X480 pixels!!). Isn’t that impressive. I just cannot understand why Sharp doesn’t release these great PDAs in the US. They do have the Zaurus 5xxx series for sale over here.

Thanks to the Cacko Group, I now have an english version of the ROM. The same group has a X11 based distribution for the Zaurus. I will try that sometime next week. If you are having trouble getting to the main site (it is damn slow!!!), try this mirror site.

January 14, 2004 by Fun Technology Uncategorized 0

How many kilometers in a mile??

Ever wondered about such questions? How about “How many liters in 20 gallons?”. Well, the almighty Google is right there to help you. One of the little knows features of Google is it’ calculator functionality. Type in “20 gallons in liters” in the google search box and see what you get. Hope you understand why Google is my homepage 🙂 now.

UPDATED (3/28/2006) :
Looks like a lot of people are getting to this post by searching for the number of kilometers per mile in Yahoo. Just so that you don’t have to go somewhere else :), here’s the data

1 MILE = 1.609344 KILOMETERS
1 KILOMETER = 0.621371192 MILES

1 KILO = 2.20462262 POUNDS
1 POUND = 0.45359237 KILOS

January 13, 2004 by Fun Uncategorized 0

Larry the lobster – Ocean to Kitchen

Brian is an avid scuba diver. His typical routine is Work – Home – Dive – Work – Home – Dive … He is even working on getting a rescue diver license. He usually finds interesting stuff during his diving trips, so when he tells me that he found something “special”, I was expecting a shell or something like that. Little did I know that I was in for a treat today :). So without further audue, here we go

Brian - Diver - Fisherman!!
[Brian with his catch of the day.]
Vinay - Poser - Uneasy with Lobster
[Me, taking the chance to pose with a lobster.]
Larry - The Lobster
[Larry – The Lobster]
Larry' Death Bed (tub)
[Colorful food.]
Larry - Goodbye!!
[In he goes :)]
Larry - ready for the table
[Out he comes]
Presentation..Presentation..Presentation
[And right onto the table]

Yummy… To quote Brian “Hey man, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time” :). Sorry Larry.

January 12, 2004 by Food Fun Uncategorized 0

Inuyasha

I am big anime fan. Blame Cartoon Network for that. Although Cartoon Network shows some good anime, there are a lot of undiscovered gems out there. And people with phat pipes need not look far. Check out this great site. I am nearly done getting Inuyasha. Now have to figure out how to play the OGM files. But that is a story for another post.

January 11, 2004 by Anime Uncategorized 0

head

I was asked by one of my friends, how he could get the top 10 processes in a Unix system. I knew of the usual commands “top”and “ps” and never thought of how you could just get the top 10. Interestingly there is a command called “head“. So if you wanted the top 10 processes you would use “ps -auxw | head“. “man head” returns the following

NAME
head – output the first part of files

SYNOPSIS
head [OPTION]… [FILE]…

DESCRIPTION
Print first 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than
one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no
FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

January 10, 2004 by Linux Technology Uncategorized 0