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Celebrating Workarounds, Kludges, and Hacks
itwbennett writes: We all have some favorite workarounds that right a perceived wrong (like getting around the Wall Street Journal paywall) or make something work the way we think it ought to. From turning off annoying features in your Prius to getting around sanctions in Crimea and convincing your Android phone you're somewhere you're not, workarounds are a point of pride, showing off our ingenuity and resourcefulness. And sometimes artful workarounds can even keep businesses operating in times of crisis. Take, for example, the Sony employees, who, in the wake of the Great Hack of 2014 when the company's servers went down, dug out old company BlackBerrys that, while they had been abandoned, had never had their plans deactivated. Because BlackBerrys used RIM's email servers instead of Sony's, they could still communicate with one another, and employees with BlackBerrys became the company's lifeline as it slowly put itself back together.
What hacks and workarounds keep your life sane?
i'm kinda LOW tech.
Makes the web work the way it ought to.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1, of course!
This I heard from a ex-Quantum coworker; purportedly the drive firmware was suffering from a memory corruption problem (several consecutive bytes keep getting overwritten in RAM.) The engineer tasked with fixing the problem shifts the code by the said number of bytes and declares victory. After that I never looked at HDD the same way again.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
At an old job, we were given sudoer privileges, but there was a blacklist of dangerous commands that we couldn't sudo (such as bash, su, etc), so I wrote a one line script to get around that called hijack:
$@
Then I could type
$sudo hijack
and sudo any command I wanted.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
I wanted to play an old abandonware game, but the only copy I could find had been cracked to bypass the "copy protection" questions, and the crack had some unfortunate side effects. An old text file showed which two bytes to change in DEBUG to crack it, so I knew which two bytes had been changed in which file, but I didn't know what the original values were. Fortunately, SCUMMVM's source code shows the hash of the file it's looking for. So I wrote a shell script to create 2^16 copies of the copy with all possible values for those 2 bytes, and looked for the one with the right hash.
See title.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Black, to cover the obnoxious blue LEDs.
White, to let some light through.
Masking tape over the speakers in the kid's toys.
Duct, to keep the taillight on the truck.
Surgical, to keep the bandage on while I work.
decidedly low tech and it probably shows my age, but back the days of dialup my modem was ridiculously loud when dialling and was capable of waking up other people in the house when i would occasionally get disconnected at night. there was no switch for the speaker but there was a headphone jack. so i cut the 3.5mm jack off a useless pair of earphones and bam, silence.
Back when a 10 MB full-height 5-1/4" hard drive was still somewhat of a big deal, I acquired one that had boot sector damage. It could be low-level formatted just fine, but the first few cylinders were damaged so it couldn't be a bootable drive in a PC-XT clone.
It used an optical limit sensor to detect when the stepper motor moving the head in and out was at the outer end of travel. I epoxied a little bit of metal onto the end of the encoder to slightly extend the head inward. After a fresh low-level format, the new 'track zero' was defect free and the drive was bootable and could be deployed as the C: drive. I think I then put it to use as the C: drive in the PC-XT that I ran my BBS on (WWIV 3.2.1, 1200 baud, online 24/7)
I have the current version of MS Office. No choice in my profession.
But – WAY BACK in 2000, I created myriad keyboard shourtcuts and customized toolbar strips. The current version of Word is stupider than any predecessor — 15-year-old bugs have never been corrected, but they took away keyboard shortcuts everyone had adapted to using.
Well, with two hours of hacking, I banished the Ribbon, and made Word operate the exact same way as I've been used to for 15 years – same keystrokes, Styles, etc.. I did not have to re-learn how to do what I already knew how to do. Unless MS has some improvement on the level of Gutenberg's, they should please stop changing the way typical things are done!
This ability came from experience hex-editing EA games in the 1980's to make them actually playable.
I recommend any alternative: Mellel, OpenOffice, Corel WorPerfect, Nisus Writer Pro, LibreOffice, MachWrite, Pages, or any RTF or PT editor. I can even open & edit WordStar files from 1988!
With all the clever hacks and workarounds people are posting, I'm ashamed to say my best is using a steak knife as a screwdriver.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because reefer has become too expensive to burn it up inna joint.
...poking holes and slits into an empty aluminum can
...rooting around in my toolbox and scoring a long 10mm socket
Serenity now, insanity later.
well the most fun hack was using a kodo beast and a raider to ensnare and devour a level 10 red dragon and suicide the kodo in an enemy base where the level 10 dragon proceeded to kill the enemy for me.
the best hack ever was using a boot floppy to take a user password which i knew and put it in the root password's shadow file which i had forgotten the root password for, and then rebooted and got into Debian as root, and proceeded to load x as root. it was my laptop though, i just was kinda trying to stop relying on windows 95 and use freebsd and debian linux.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He's been at it for years. Don't feed the troll.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't use foursquare, but a friend was bragging about being mayor at a couple places. I commented that I could be mayor in a month or two. He ended up betting me I couldn't. I warned him that it was super easy and he would be stupid for making that bet, but he still did it. That night, shortly after a few drunken minutes trying to type my password, the first cron job started running...
#!/usr/bin/perl
# call it from cron with:
# perl foursquare_checkin <location_id> <latitude> <longitude> <your_login_email> <password>
# Ex: perl foursquare_checkin 2021944 40.676141 -73.983452 foo@bar.baz 12345
my ($user,$pass) = @ARGV[3,4];
my $auth = MIME::Base64::encode("$user:$pass",'');
use MIME::Base64;
use IO::Socket;
sleep(rand()*600); # so checkins are slightly random
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
$ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005; # wobble location
$ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]";
print $sock "POST
my $res = <$sock>;
And yes, I know that's ugly, and there's easier and cleaner ways, but it got the job done well enough to get me mayor of a few places and really pissed off the gambler before I turned it off for good. I have no idea if this still works (ie. lack of any form of message authenticity or handshake etc), but it wouldn't surprise me if it did... feel free becoming mayor of anywhere you want (you can even checkin to places across the country and back on a regular basis and they didn't catch it). But if it no longer works, don't ask me.
I work with Cisco voice products - everything I do is a hack...
Many years ago when WiFi first came out and internet was still really slow I was active in a community based wireless FreeNet. We had set up multiple 10+ km links between our houses and had a full dynamically routed system spanning most of a city.
Problem was, WiFi is renowned for the "hidden node" problem, where clients cant hear each other and fail to successfully perform collision avoidance. Packetloss goes through the roof and throughput suffers terribly.
So, I wrote a perl script that interacted with IPtables QUEUE feature to keep the wireless packets a buffer, and they would only be released then that client received a token from a master server. It was a massive hack, but worked a treat and gave huge improvements to our throughput and stability.
Years later companies like Mitronik and Ubiquity introduced similar functionality in their wireless station firmware, but we were well ahead of the curve.
Being able to listen to music with your car doors open is great, if not for the dang "your keys are in the ignition. So I spend a couple hours ripping open my dash to get to the stupid thing and rip the connector loose. It was a vast improvement in the utility of my truck.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So there was a bug several years ago in ircd-ratbox that impacted the core code that wasn't a loadable module. There was a bug in cidr matching that really needed fixed. So..I wrote a loadable module that got the address of the C function that needed replaced. Then I used mprotect to set that page the function was in memory to be read/write.
Then..I scribbled over the start of the function with x86 opcodes to make it jump to a replacement function that was in the just loaded module.
Or in code.. match_cidr is the bad function, fixed_match_cidr is the replacement.
A few years ago, a coworker of mine wrote a tool to get around hotel WIFI restrictions. They found that usually everything outbound was blocked, except for DNS requests. They also found that they could use their own DNS server without issue.
They went home and wrote a small DNS server that served theirdomain.com. Requests would be encoded into base64 and submitted via a request for the subdomain of theirdomain.com, and responses were able to be sent back by offering different CNAME results.
They said it was fairly slow, and each "packet" could only be what fit into the subdomain of theirdomain.com, which also resulted in a lot of useless DNS records appearing on the server(s), but it was able to transmit at a few kilobytes per second - enough to get a basic web browsing session going over restricted hotel WIFI.
(Note: I may be forgetting some of the intricacies of how this worked. They showed the working code and the slow bitrate to me not long after writing it.)
Shell Scripting to detect "Dormant BTSs", the feature cost $50K in OMC-B 4.5 and was free in 5.5 (which was due in 1 year and had hardware upgrade and consulting costs associated). Script: $0, one afternoon.
DispMCR on a Siemens mobile switch of 100k subscribers. Fair enough. but how do you balance 3 of those running at the same time go get 24/7 MCRs? Without bringing down the switch? That takes skill, and steel nerves.
Now a day, not much hacking, but my chromecast thinks it is in japan, and happily uses WiFi Channel 14... ;-)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Yeah, no big deal I guess. Except that this bash script generated a keystroke file that was input to a DOS-based key injector program to automate some proprietary conversion software to convert thousands of files that were being done manually (keystroke, enter, enter filename, choose option, press go, wait for return, lather rinse repeat - you know the drill).
...In order to soften and re-set cracked solder, which is the main cause of the Yellow Light of Death (YLOD) issue.
PS3 worked well for another 6 months before YLOD'ing again. Luckily in that time I'd been making backups of my save data so I could transfer them to a new PS3 this time around.
There's Youtube videos for the entire process, but basically:
- Preheat Oven to 200C
- Void your warranty and take apart the PS3
- Keep unscrewing until you can take out the motherboard
- Clean off the thermal paste from the chips with an alcohol rub
- Prop motherboard up on a tray using scrunched balls of aluminum foil wrap
- Pop tray in the oven for 10 minutes
- Take out and let it cool down at room temp
- Put it back in the PS3 case and apply fresh thermal paste
- Plug/screw in/everything you removed before
- Power up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Our laws have got to be the most daring hack ever.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I introduced sardines to my daughters as desert, and only give it to them as a treat. Now they enjoy an inexpensive, healthy snack when other kids demand ice cream and chocolate. If that's not a hack, then I don't know what is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I saw some Java code on stackoverflow that used reflection to disable the strong encryption policy check. It's useful when you're running code in PAAS systems that may or may not have the policy files installed. I thought that was pretty clever.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Or set your User-Agent to Google's.... See what opens up for you...
I generally come into work at least 15 minutes late, but I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can't see me.
The fuck is this crap? Go litter somewhere else, jackass.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
In Washington, red light cameras and school zone speed cameras presume the owner of the vehicle is at fault. Under penalty of law someone can sign an affidavit saying that they were not driving the car at the time of the infraction to get out of it. Not wanting to lie, a cheap hack is to register your spouse's car in your name and vice versa. That way, the registered owner is usually never the driver and the $240 ticket goes away without ever breaking any law.
Dude...I got pwned by using your host file. Turns out some website changed providers and got a new IP address, while a malware site took the place of the original IP address from your hosts file...
In short, go fuck your hosts file.
Back in 91 or so we used the Cadre CASE tool. It's main claim to fame was "anyone can learn to use it in 30 minutes". They were right, you could. Problem was, you could because the editor was a weak PoS.
I wrote a script that would pull files out of the tool, we then ran vi/emacs on them and put them back into the tool as needed. In other words, we used this uber-expensive tool just like we used RCS.
Best part? After I left the company they ran an audit. Turned out every time you added the file to the tool it treated it like a brand new file, erasing all previous versions and history. whoops.
My favorite so far. Getting around the requirement of having a paid monitoring service for my alarm panel to get notifications of simple events such as arm / disarm.
Get alarm panel. Wire to Linksys voip adapter. Give it extension on asterisk voip server. Configure asterisk with AlarmReceiver so it will understand the Ademco codes via the voip adapter. Configure that to write to a tmp; and another script found online to parse that to decode events and send appropriate email.
I just found all the portions online, so not my hack at all; but just amusing steps to get an alarm panel I actually own to send email events.
I didn't work on this specifically, but this is my way of saying thanks to the people that did. A couple years ago, I got nostalgic and wanted to replay Thief 1 and 2. Turns out, the game looks like crap because the way shading/shadows are handled by graphics cards is completely different than the way it used to work. Correct me if I got this wrong, but some guy wrote a hack that redirected the graphics processing of the game through CPU cycles instead, bypassing the graphics card entirely. With newer hardware this was possible and made the games playable again. Rejoice!
This goes back to my late teens, in the EARLY 1980's. I created a gizmo using various parts and pieces, where I could use it to play any radio station I wanted through someone else's radio. It was most often used at a local 24 hour donut shop, where I hung around with a group of guys until the wee hours. The owner of that store had a radio in a locked box in the back, that piped a local "elevator music" station through the store's speakers. Since it was locked, nobody could change it... until I came along. :)
The idea was simple... I took apart an old "FM converter" (remember those? To listen to FM on an AM-only car radio) and fed the audio output into a homebrew FM transmitter. It was powered by a 7AH 12V gel cell, so it had plenty of power for all-nighters. The guys would really get a big kick out of the fact that I could adjust everything... volume, bass, treble, and what station we heard, from a booth in the lobby. Naturally, the local rock station was the music of choice.
In later years, I adapted that transmitter to work with a "walkman" cassette player, and if a restaurant was playing a radio, I could put my tape onto their speakers for the duration I was there. :)
Now, I'm a Broadcast Engineer, and also a ham radio operator. Hacks are a part of everyday life... but not like this, anymore. I could get away with it when I was a teen, not as a 50-something.
Willie...
Once upon a time I was part of a company acquired by a parent company. Sometime thereafter, parent company's product started displaying an error message and then exiting on all of their customers' computers at the same time. Apparently the (hard-coded) license key for some 3rd party component had expired and as a result hundreds if not thousands of people couldn't do their jobs. The affected product Team Leader's fix was to get a new license key, replace it in the source, compile and then get everyone on that new version as soon as possible. The problem was that good ol' parent company didn't have great source control procedures nor a build server prior to acquiring some real developers (us) so there was a huge variety of versions of the product across all of their customers, some of which were known to contain custom one-off features and changes that potentially never made it into source control in the first place... Also the product couldn't be upgraded without also upgrading some or all of the server pieces too. It was a big mess with potentially days of downtime to clean it up and their customers were losing money by the minute and rightfully PISSED.
My solution was to create a little utility that looked for copies of the product in the usual places and replace the expired license key (stored in UTF-16 in the .exe) with the new one. Since the keys were the same length, it worked perfectly and the support team was able to deploy that to all of their customers in the matter of hours.
Don't let this AC's post fool you. Booze is for every day, not just today.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
No, APK, these are not karma-farming or sockpuppet accounts, these are actual people asking you to piss off and leave us all alone.
The people modding you down are not morons; instead they are normal people living in hope that one day you will understand that modding you down is not a call to action for you to step up your antisocial behaviour.
The people who respond to you with annoyance do so because they're trying to have a discussion but have found themselves interrupted by a childish and off-topic rant. After a while people learn who tends to add to a discussion and who does not. Theirs is a genuine expression of disgust at the actions of a person who lowers the signal:noise ratio on this site.
Don't respond to people with the arguments of a 12-year old ("It's better than anything you've ever done"). Consider that their annoyance at your behaviour may be entirely reasonable.
If you don't like that, either go away - please - or join the discussion. Don't spam us, don't crap-flood us, join the discussion! Look at how other people tend to post and you'll get an idea of what is expected if you are to join in. Go look at your carefully-curated list of up-mods and figure out what is common about them, then drop any post about the hosts file right on the floor. Show us you're more than a one-trick pony. Don't tell us how impressed with yourself you are, nobody wants to hear it.
TL;DR: Don't have any expectations of being shown respect if you behave like a troll.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Popping the capslock key loose from the keyboard.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You're a broken record, APK.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Oh, here we go again, 'anonymous people' that pop up out of the woodwork who definitely surely completely aren't APK, no, not at all.
Funny how these 'people' only seem to support you when you're being told off for acting like a jerk. They always seem to be conspicuously absent in every other circumstance.
You must really have a screw loose to continue such obviously childish behaviour.. yet you still somehow believe you've gotten one over us. Clever APK!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
P.S.=> "Pats self on back"... apk
What a surprise to see this! Well, not really, self-congratulation is one thing we all agree you excel at. Bwahahhaha!
See how stalking people's posts adds to the conversation? See how it makes everything better?
Yeah, that's right - it doesn't. So put a bloody sock in it you antisocial bastard, I'm sick of seeing your childish shit scrawled all over the place.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?