category: hacking

April 1st is still a few months away, so here's an idea for a bit of fun mischief you can plan in advance, this could throretically be used for a DoS attack, so dont be a jerk and go damaging innocent people's syetems.

Background: A lot of email services are set up with autoresponders, ie, when you send an email to customer service you get an automated response back like 'Thank you for contacting Shady Crooks Sp4m service, we'll get back to you soon. In the meantime...' blah blah blah. Now because it's an autoresponder you can send it *any* email and it'll make that response for you, and send it to your 'reply' address. Note that the reply address on emails does not have to be the same address you send from.

Method: Suppose you were to sign up for a free Yahoo China email address (read why you might have beef) and set up the return address on your email to one of these autoresponsers. Then you send a taunting email to Sp4m Associates, and the replay address is customer service at KKK.org or some other vile outfit.

What would happen? The Sp4m autoresponder fires an email at KKK, who fires one back at Sp4m, who sends another to KKK and so on, with your original taunting message at the bottom of each. Inboxes get full.

Bonus: OK, so that was a fun way to get at those sleazy cons who fill your inbox with junk every day. Can we make it better? You Bet! Suppose we find a whole list of these autoresponders :-) We'll open a text file and start saving them up for April 1st, every time you come across unsavoury 'businesses' online (like these guys).

Then we'll set up a POP3/SMTP to webmail relay (I'm not going to explain this, if you dont know how then you probably wont be covering your tracks well enough and shouldn't be hacking) and a little script to connect them all together. If we consider each autoresponder as a vertex then every time we send en email we're creating an edge on the graph, till they're all connected. Send the emails with a random delay of 5 to 10 minutes, and be sure to get a few back to throw off the anti-spam of the webmail you're sending from (which might automatically close your account).

Voila! Chaos.

And *please* dont use your own IP.

Happy April Fools!

Notice: This post is superceded by this one.

If you've ever been to the iFriends 'adult entertainment' section you may have been disappointed that the pictures you most wanted to see were covered up by little cockblock 'censor' wrappers, like so:



And then, Hey!, iFriends comes to the rescue, they'll let you see the pictures if you sign up for a months free trial. Well not quite. I cancelled mine before the first month was up and got a nastyass �60.00 bill for my 'free' trial. I was ticked. *real ticked*

So I resolved to solve the problem of the little wrappers. By combining Firefox (1 or 1.5) and Greasemonkey they can be defeated with Javascript. If you dont have Firefox then I recommend it. Ditto Gresemonkey.

The result of my tinkering is iFriends Monkey v0.1 BETA (not affiliated with iFriends in any way), which takes the previous page and makes it look more like this:



Now what kind of sick internet pervert would want to see that, guess those censor things were there for a reason. What terrible sinner would watch pretty little teenage girls kissing on each other and getting their pink lipstick all smeary.. eww.. that's so degrading to... anyways,

To install the script, right click on this: iFriends Monkey v0.1 Beta (nothing to do with Web Power Inc)

And select 'Install User Script'. Next Check in your 'Manage User Scripts' console (it's under 'Tools') to see that it's there, like so:



The script is realeased un GNU licence, do whatever the heck you like with it, so long as that does not involve money.

Looks like the ad remover's broken again. This is about the fourth time in a month, Yahoo must be up to something to keep rearranging their systems like this. The first couple lockdowns shut out my stream ripper :-(, now they've got another new layout for their ASX files. Oh well. For those of you who don't care, here's some pictures of a squirrel on water-skis.

Everyone else: The original ASX were pretty cool, standard mms: streams together with comments that could be used to figure out what the streams were, then they went and replaced them with HTTP streams that have these big long cryptic querystrings, presumably to keep track of users and resources and to tip off the FBI that you're spanking it to JoJo, who's only 15.

In either case the ads were served as separate streams and were easily taken out. Now it looks like they might be combining the ads into the same stream as the content, but I'm not sure yet. I've tried to take the new setup apart a little, but I grow bored with fixing this over and over.

I think the answer may be to quit using their own playlists, which are full of ads and Jennifer Lopez, and make my own playlist generator that feeds off the 'simmilar artists' feature. Be good practice for the new generation of spiders and scrapers I'm designing, the interact an absolute minimum with other sites, for less disruption and a smaller footprint in the logs. But not today. It's a beautiful afternoon and I'm going outside for awhile. Bye.