Monthly Archives: May 2007

taglist - Source code browser plugin for Vim

31 May, 2007 – 3:02 pm

Tili drew my attention to “taglist” — a source code browser plugin for Vim. Yes! It is a neat thing to have if you plow through large source files in Vim. The source code browser it makes available is pretty bland and a far cry from source code browsers available in full-feature [...]

By ayaz | Posted in Linux, Programming | Comments (0)

$16′000 bounty for holes in 6 major applications.

19 May, 2007 – 5:57 am

Woah. This zapped in like lightening.
iDefense is putting up the biggest bounty ever for individuals to detect critical holes in as many as six different major software systems that form the backbone of the Internet’s infrastructure. There are six bounties of $16′000 each for any remote hole detected in latest stable versions of the [...]

By ayaz | Posted in Security | Comments (1)

BSA’s crackdown on software piracy in PK: The 35-day grace period

19 May, 2007 – 5:31 am

The title of a brief column on the second page of Dawn’s Metropolitan section today caught my attention by surprise. It read “Deadline for installing illegal software”. That is certainly not what you get to read everyday in Dawn.
According to the column, the Business Software Alliance (which I’ve long known as a group [...]

By ayaz | Posted in General, Regrets | Comments (0)

Hex escape strings in Python: Shellcodes

18 May, 2007 – 4:41 pm

Those of you who write proof of concept exploit code in Python might have run into trouble trying to interpolate some hex value in between NOP sleds in Python. Consider the following code as an example:
code = “%X” % (130 + length(var), )
shellcode = ‘\x00\x00\x00\x00′ + ‘\x%s’ + ‘\x00\x00′ % (code, )
Python won’t let [...]

By ayaz | Posted in Programming, Security | Comments (0)

Unfathomable (Random Musings #22)

1 May, 2007 – 5:52 am

After all the pain, suffering and sorrow, after so much prayer, so much believing, it ends in an instant, reminiscent of the way one get rids of an addiction — in a jerk. In an instant — and that is it.

By ayaz | Posted in Random Musings, Regrets | Comments (8)

FreeBSD `ls’: Colour-coded directory/file listing(s)

1 May, 2007 – 5:46 am

I recently got access to a FreeBSD box online. It is hosted in one corner of Junaid’s small room. It is online and I access it remotely.
The default shell on FreeBSD isn’t BASH, but since I like BASH a lot, I have installed and configured it as the default shell. I have [...]

By ayaz | Posted in Linux, Unix | Comments (8)