Tag: Software

Solid and Ethereal. Reality and Imagination.

. Leaning on each other. Cutting through each other. Two towers are floating through empty space. Infinitely elongated bells. Delicate metal tubes. Tubular Bells. Forming rings. Ethereal, yet solid. . . I am crafting virtual sculptures: with code, I draw structures based on mathematical functions. I got to know these functions when I was learning…
$Stargate of Diffraction. Escaping the Labyrinth of Colorful Wires.$

Stargate of Diffraction. Escaping the Labyrinth of Colorful Wires.

This blog has been many things. Experimental poetry playground, notes from the field by a small business owner, popular science and tech blog, compilation of dry research reports, self-referential musing of a web developer. The only intersection between all of this has been me being interested & invested in it. I had tech-blogged myself into…
Infinity

New Year’s Eve 2019 seems infinitely far in the past. It was the first day news about this mysterious disease had been published in my country. Yet it seems infinitely far away at that time, somewhere in China. Today we see something glowing at the end of a weird long corridor. Despite horrible news, I…
Simple Ping Sweep, Port Scan, and Getting Output from Blind Remote Command Execution

Just dumping some quick and dirty one-liners! These are commands I had used to explore locked-down Windows and Linux machines, using bash or powershell when no other binaries were available or could be transferred to the boxes easily. Trying to ping all hosts in a subnet Linux for i in $(seq 1 254); do host=192.168.0.$i;…
Echo Unreadable Hex Characters in Windows: forfiles

How to transfer small files to a locked-down Windows machine? When there is no option to copy, ftp, or http GET a file. When powershell is blocked so that you can only use Windows cmd commands? My first choice would be to use certutil: certutil is a built-in tool for certificate and PKI management. It…
$Unintended 2nd Order SQL Injection$

Unintended 2nd Order SQL Injection

Why I am not afraid of the AI / Big Data / Cloud powered robot apocalypse. SQL order injection means to run custom SQL queries through web interfaces because the input to the intended query is not sanitized, like appending the infamous ‘ OR ‘1’=’1 to a user name or search term. It is 2nd…
A Color Box. Lost in Translation

It was that time again. The Chief Engineer had rebuilt the technical room from scratch. Each piece of heavy equipment had a new place, each pipe and wire was reborn in a new incarnation (German stories here.) The control system was turned upset down as well, and thus the Data Kraken was looking at its…
Hacking

I am joining the ranks of self-proclaimed productivity experts: Do you feel distracted by social media? Do you feel that too much scrolling feeds transforms your mind – in a bad way? Solution: Go find an online platform that will put your mind in a different state. Go hacking on hackthebox.eu. I have been hacking…
Cloudy Troubleshooting (2)

Unrelated to part 1 – but the same genre. Actors this time: There are no dialogues with human life-forms this time, only the elkement’s stream of consciousness, interacting with the others via looking at things at a screen. elkement: Time for a challenging Sunday hack! elkement connects to the The Dark Platform. Hardly notices anything in…
Where Are the Files? [Winsol – UVR16x2]

Recently somebody has asked me where the log files are stored. This question is more interesting then it seems. We are using the freely programmable controller UVR16x2 (and its predecessor) UVR1611) … .. and their Control and Monitoring Interface – CMI: The CMI is a data logger and runs a web server. It logs data…
Cloudy Troubleshooting

Actors: ~ Client: Cloud logs us off ever so often! We can’t work like this! elkement: Cloud, what timeouts do you use? Client was only idle for a short break and is logged off. Cloud: Must be something about your infrastructure – we set the timeout to 1 hour. Client: It’s becoming worse – Cloud…
Let Your Hyperlinks Live Forever!

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment. (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) Joel Spolsky did it: I’m bending over backwards not to create “linkrot” — all old links to Joel on Software…
Reverse Engineering Fun

Recently I read a lot about reverse engineering – in relation to malware research. I for one simply wanted to get ancient and hardly documented HVAC engineering software to work. The software in question should have shown a photo of the front panel of a device – knobs and displays – augmented with current system’s…
The Orphaned Internet Domain Risk

I have clicked on company websites of social media acquaintances, and something is not right: Slight errors in formatting, encoding errors for special German characters. Then I notice that some of the pages contain links to other websites that advertize products in a spammy way. However, the links to the spammy sites are embedded in…
Other People Have Lives – I Have Domains

These are just some boring update notifications from the elkemental Webiverse. The elkement blog has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, and the punktwissen blog will turn five in December. Time to celebrate this – with new domain names that says exactly what these sites are – the ‘elkement . blog’ and the ‘punktwissen . blog’ (Edit: which now –…
Ice Storage Hierarchy of Needs

Data Kraken – the tentacled tangled pieces of software for data analysis – has a secret theoretical sibling, an older one: Before we built our heat source from a cellar, I developed numerical simulations of the future heat pump system. Today this simulation tool comprises e.g. a model of our control system, real-live weather data,…
My Data Kraken – a Shapeshifter

I wonder if Data Kraken is only used by German speakers who translate our hackneyed Datenkrake – is it a word like eigenvector? Anyway, I need this animal metaphor, despite this post is not about facebook or Google. It’s about my personal Data Kraken – which is a true shapeshifter like all octopuses are. (Because…
My Flat-File Database

A brief update on my web programming project. I have preferred to create online text by editing simple text files; so I only need a text editor and an FTP client as management tool. My ‘old’ personal and business web pages are currently created dynamically in the following way: [Code for including a script (including…