Barcodes That Aged Like Milk

Background

I've always wanted to take some old software and figure out how it works, and update it to work in the modern day with modern protocols and formats. I had wanted to before make a consulting company that would try to bid on software renovation projects to fix things like 40 year old COBOL unemployment systems. However I realized that these things are massive undertakings with not so great budgets, and very little eagerness on the part of younger programmers. And most importantly usually the call for bids makes it clear that the project would be to modernize rather than a full over-haul and remake due to cost considerations. Ultimately I would want to do some kind of retrofit project and get some old code working again, and so that leads to the premise of today's blog post.

I found the perfect crux of issues in a project on milk.com, which is owned by Dan Bornstein who was instrumental in the early days of Android for creating the Dalvik VM. There's a UPC/EAN barcode generator he made back in 1994 and when you try to run it you get the infamous broken image icon. He acknowledges that this occurs because it outputs using the XBM format, which no modern browser supports but is a very efficient B/W image encoding that is easy to output as a text stream. He includes the source code on his website, with a permissive license that just requires attribution back to his website and no commercial uses unless otherwise negotiated. He politely requested that people send him an email were they to do something cool with his code.

HackStetson Writeup

I recently attended my first hackathon called the Greater Central Florida Technology Fair or more better known as HackStetson. There was BSides Orlando and the Engineering Expo occurring at the same time, which meant that there was no one from my university heading to the event. I simply tried looking around for different groups to join and found a few students from UCF to join. They technically already had a full team and had divided up the tasks amongst themselves, but there was many other activities planned as well so it was not that much of a problem. There was one activity in particular I was interested in which was the Capture the Flag competition which was sponsored by Apple.

It started a few hours after the hackathon did, so I was working with the team to setup the development environment. The idea they had come up with was a web app that would provide people with a list of things to do in their city in all types of weather, that would be crowdsourced. They had decided to use Laravel which was great news to me as I personally really love the framework and have a lot of experience with PHP.

Spooky Linux Virus

For Halloween this year I will be telling a very chilling story of an old infected virtual machine that contracted something mysterious. The machine was a standard Virtual Box machine image that was given 20 GB of hard disk space and about 2 GB of RAM and was mainly set out for doing research into botnet malware and dark web protocols such as Tor. The Linux distribution in use was called CrunchBang (now defunct), and it was setup as a fully encrypted machine with some extra hardening of configuration files. Main parts of the study was to download botnet source code to reverse engineer, and access various hacker sites both on the clear net and dark web. However something huge was overlooked, the Tor Browser Bundle by default enabled JavaScript and so all the research to these hacking forums and other seedy sites was completely open to JavaScript attacks. However that shouldn't be much of a problem considering everything was kept up to date, and it was a Linux machine which are really hard to infect.

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