So logickills.org has been pretty slow lately. I honestly have a huge list of things I want to publish. I have several programs I need to finish and make as beautiful as possible (aka adding comments to my bit shifts :p ). I also have an awesome article I am working on that deals with lockpicking and alternative entry methods. When I say alternative, I mean it. Hotel room door hacks to small safe cracking techniques. So expect some pretty awesome stuff in the coming weeks! Oh yea and remember to send any questions/comments/nud3z to root([at])logickills[(dot)]org!
Check it out I got my first programming tutorial up with examples. Find it on the tutorial page
LHC signs of life
Nov 10
Very good news from over in Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider is showing some positive vitals signs. This is wonderful news for CERN, who have had a hard time getting the LHC to even relieve itself of quantum flatulence since its failure last year. The LHC propelled photons successfully around half the circumference of the accelerator. So if all goes well and the mysterious mishaps stay at a minimal we should see progress real soon!
I will keep you posted with quantum news and such. Make sure to check out CERN’s website also.
Tutorials section is alive
Oct 22
Well due to procrastination and such I have been stalling the transfer of a lot of my old content from my previous server. I have finally started recovering a lot of it. I am working on reformatting all my tutorials (about 50 of them so far) into readable formats. Most people don’t enjoy reading .txt files heh.
My first tutorial up and ready is an introduction to lock picking. Find it here.
Make sure to stay tuned and check up on the tutorials section!
The ghost of CERN’s future
Oct 18
Well it seems that some interesting things have been happening over at Large Hadron Collider. Now if you haven’t heard of the Large Hadron Collider or even CERN you need to forcibly remove your head from whatever hole it has been stuck in. If that doesn’t help check out this link.
Anyways back to the story. Apparently the LHC is supposed to start back up in December after many technical issues plagued the endeavor to try to produce an environment comparable to a few billionths of a second after the Big Bang. Some of the strange things that the LHC could find once started range anywhere from extra dimensions as narrated by String Theory – all the way to micro black holes that evaporate almost instantaneously. If you think that dimensions and microscopic black holes are crazy you haven’t heard anything yet. According to Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya , two renowned Physicists, all these events and technicalities that are halting LHC and further study are the result of the LHC being destroyed from the future. However this kind of destruction isn’t from a 6ft Govenater. They hypothesize that the destruction is the result of the the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is the prize Physicists are looking for over at CERN. This particle would explain how mass has been distributed in the Universe.I will write a detailed overview of the Higgs and it’s importance a little later.
For more information check out this article.
So lately I have been coming upon articles written by experienced creation scientists. I recently read that one of the miracles of our existence is how far our planet is from the sun. Apparently they think that the chance of an orbit being life supportive to be quite high. Is this true? No.
Let us first outline a neat little scientific finding called The Habitable Zone . What exactly is a habitable zone or HZ? Roughly speaking the HZ was originally conceived as a zone, or area in space, that would allow planets to support life. A more detailed explanation is that the HZ is the area in space that is far enough from the Sun so that water will not be boil off the surface and organic compounds will not be destroyed – however close enough to provide energy for all the reactions to create and maintain life.
Originally the HZ extended from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Venus. This is a substantial distance even when the elliptical orbits are at their closest. However their has been much dispute over the limitations of this zone. The new zone may expand to Jupiter and even to Jupiter’s Moons ( especially Europa ) .
Another fun little propaganda filled statistic is that the chance of a celestial body staying in orbit with our sun is phenomenal. Now to understand the basis of this presumption you may want to know a little bit about how a solar system is actually formed. It starts out with this colossal cloud of gas and dust. This gas and dust is usually the result of a supernova explosion. Thanks to gravitational attraction this huge cloud of dust and gas begins to rotate around a central point. Think of cookie dough being mixed with an egg beater. The cookie dough spins around that central point. During this mixing random masses of cookie dough ( or gas and dust) are scattered to random regions. Some regions have more dough than others. These areas with more mass achieve a sort of snowball effect, collecting more and more material. The areas with less mass eventually succumb to the larger areas. These larger areas are the early forms of Earth and Venus and all the other planets.
All these would-be planets eventually fall in line , or orbit, with the larger central point. This central point eventually gains enough mass which makes tons and tons of pressure. All this pressure gives way extremely high temperatures. This in turn provides an ideal environment for hydrogen fusion which means the formation of our Sun. Any material left after the formation of our solar system that isn’t traveling at just the right speed is either catapulted into deep space because it is traveling too fast, or collides with our Sun because it is traveling too slow.
Now what exactly is the chance of a celestial body achieving this ideal speed? Instead of what some think as a very small and rare chance, it is actually quite large. The different variations of orbital speed, distance, and mass are actually unlimited. We see millions of variations when we look out into space. You can look at some of Kepler’s equations to see this in math. Also no minimum mass exits for a star to be able to hold onto a satellite. Little Pluto has some satellites orbiting around it.
So in conclusion is it so amazing that our planet is where it is? No it isn’t. The HZ shows us that our proximity to the Sun isn’t that miraculous. Kepler and a little information on gravity showed us that the Sun and other stars are not too picky when it comes to orbiting bodies. I hope this straightened some information out for some.
Not to long ago water was found on the Moon. This discovery has prompted space agencies around the world to figure out a way to get back to the lunar surface before the other guys. NASA is just excited as the rest and they are hoping for some backing. In a world going through economic depression the validity of such an lunar adventure is coming under fire. Much controversy surrounds whether we should concentrate on the Moon or shoot for Mars and the outer reaches of space.
If we do chose to go to the Moon what would we seem to gain from it? What we can do on the Moon will directly correlate to how much water is actually there. If a fairly substantial amount exists we could use the Moon as a launch base for deeper space missions. We could colonize and learn much about what it would take to live on other space bodies besides Earth.
Regardless of what goes down, this is an exciting time in history. One thing is certain. We won’t get anywhere if we are all selfish with out findings and our ideas. It will take a global effort to get anywhere. Lets hope we work together in such a way.
Moore’s Law has been telling us for years that integrated circuits are rapidly being produced smaller and smaller. This is no doubt good news for consumers. The price to produce these micro-components is going down, and the advancements in technology are going up. However at some point in time these components are going to become so minuscule that they will be molecule sized. As soon as this happens these chips will no longer be governed by Newtonian Physics.
What will happen when these tiny electrical components surpass the realm of macroscopic and tumble into the world of molecules and other atomic structures? When this happens they will be controlled by the quantum world. A realm in which quantum tunneling allows particles to show up in places where they most certainly shouldn’t be. A realm in which the quantum version of bits, or quibits can exists as both 0 and 1. This is a spooky realm that is governed unlike anything you have ever heard of.
So I am sure many are interested in what kind of advancements will be capable with this new quantum computing revolution. With quantum computing computers would have incredible calculating capabilities. However in order to see any difference in the efficiency of solving problems, special quantum algorithms would need to be produced. These algorithms would need to find a way to utilize the stranger aspects of quantum theory to formulate results.
Many, many tasks and technologies could be made better by quantum computing. Everything from Quantum Encryption to Quantum Artificial Intelligence. Once we reach the point at which we can utilize this quantum behavior the results will be tremendous.
The keyword in the above statement is when. At this point in time we have not been able to produce such a quantum computer. Completing this is not as simple as many may think. The quantum principal says that when a quantum system is affected by it’s surroundings it collapses.
Hope is high however. We are constantly coming up with new finds. I think quantum computing will be propelled forward by the cooperation of many different professionals around all parts of the world. Until our toasters have an intelligence ideally named Skynet 1.0 we must wait and watch the progress of the quantum revolution.
Not to recently I found several websites consecutively that utilized a very silly “Forgot My Password” routine. I will not use the actual website, nor any of the actual code for legal reasons.
Here is a script that is similar to what I am speaking of. However just imagine this on a very large corporate website. Maybe even a popular headline news website. http://moronicphp.pastebin.com/f5fce07c8
This snippet checks the database for the username. Once the username is found it generates a random password. This random password is then substituted for the supposed forgotten password. After all this an email is sent to the email address associated with the username stating that the password has been changed to: -insert random password-. Now this is an easy solution to a common problem. Let me state however it is not a smart solution.
So you may be thinking, “Well what is wrong with this?”. First of all it doesn’t even try to verify if the actual user is wanting to reset their password. It is just assuming. Now you may say, “Well they would have to know their username, right?”. Yes, that is in fact correct. Usernames are extremely easy to find out however. I could publish numerous articles laying out some of the fundamental ways of figuring this out. So figuring out a username would not be hard.
So you find someones username, now what? Well their are a few scenarios. First off you could keep them from logging in. By repeatedly resetting their password (automation is trivial at best) you could deny them the service. This service could be for publishers to a popular news headline account, or it could be employees at a corporate headquarters. What purpose does this have besides being annoying?
Alright, so here is where this actually comes in handy. Say you have already infiltrated someone’s account. You change the password as soon as you get in, right? Alright but what is stopping the victim from logging in and denying you access if they can reset their password simply by email. Nothing really. So don’t give them the chance. Write a simple script to keep resetting the password. If this script uses POST to accomplish this you can easily write a small Python or Perl script to constantly send POST requests. Sending several of these per minute will insure that the victim can actually not have the ability to get the new password and reauthenticate. So you can have time to get what you want and get out.
So what is the lesson learned? I beg you PHP programmers out there not to do something so stupid as this. Implement some kind of security feature. A capcha, a secret question, etc.
Hopefully those highly paid PHP programmers that I am making this article for learned something about security.
Hoped someone got something out of this.
Thanks,
LogicKills~