For all your curious hacking/phreaking desires, try reading http://www.phrack.org. Issue 49 is the one harboring "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit." That will guide you through stack-based buffer overflows. There's another article in a later Phrack release that details heap- and static-based overflows. Go to!
I hate to burst the bubbles of all those people complaining about Liu Die Yu releasing this exploit "now," worried about all those evil people that will use this horrible exploit against the world, but Liu released a "Six Step IE Remote Compromise Cache Attack" which was composed of most of these "new" exploits almost a month ago. Those people in the security world that really pay attention have known about this for quite some time already.
Liu was even kind enough to reiterate the fact that some of the bugs he was exploiting were quite old, the oldest being 2 years. Sounds to me like Liu's "careless" approach to releasing these exploits "without contacting MS" may actually make a difference. mmmm?
I've seen some very detailed explanations of why something should be or should not be in this thread and many other threads. There are some very inspirational people about. Many of you even hold very similar opinions. But...
All you people do is talk. You say how ridiculous or crazy this penalty is, but what are you doing about it? Nothing.
You people sit there trying to figure out how to properly word your comments and post rather insightful points of view, but it gets us, collectively, as a society or many societies, nowhere. For those of you in the US, it's great that you have free speech and are choosing to exercise it, but there are other freedoms you are not exercising. You people don't seem to really care about what's happening, because if you did, you would do something about it other than run your fingers on your keyboard.
"Corporations are getting out of hand!" "Judges need to get a clue!" "Such a penalty is ridiculous!" Great, and these things will continue to get worse until you get off your asses and do something about it. Why do you think things are the way they are? Why do you think humanity has progressed as slowly as it has throughout the past few hundred years? Yeah, we've done some neat things, but we could have done a lot more. Why? Because we're lazy and self-indulgent. Especially Americans. So many people sit around waiting for life to happen to them instead of making life happen. They sit around and piss and moan about something being a certain way but they do NOTHING! Maybe a select few of you actually put a little action behind your words, but most of you contribute to the massive blob of social routine.
Great words are spoken all the time, and for the moment that most of us read those great words we become inspired and think about all the things we want to change. A few hours later we've forgotten; we've returned to what we were before we read those words. Most of you will probably take note of what I've said and just forget it in a few hours. Hell, maybe you'll forget it in a few minutes as you move on to another story.
Try to be more than just another routine. It's okay to be part of something. It's okay to be somewhat dependent and function in a group. That's how things get done. This idea that complete independence and uniqueness is the way to be is bogus. You can be unique, but don't be it alone. That changes nothing.
You want to be special? Get up and change something!
This is not exactly a new idea, the idea of implementing fiber optics in computers, etc. But, the reason it hasn't been fully implemented even today is because of the stupid user. What exactly do I mean? Well, I'll provide an actual example of why fiber optics are not used in more places than they currently are. Fiber optics, at one point, were actually the mainstream sort of cable for business LANs and the like, I mean, hell, why wouldn't you want the sort of speeds that FO provides? But here's the real crux of the matter, the users and/or employees who operated/worked on the LANs to accomplish their work or other were curious, hearing roomers of data being transferred by some neat visible light shooting through a wire--ew, I wanna see--sparked their interest. So, in order to satiate their burning desire to see this neat light, often times they would pick up one end of an FO cable and peer into its core!! That's not a good idea. It burns a hole right through the retina, causing blindness in the observing eye--I bet that light would be cool to see for that split second before it burned a hole in the retina, though! Actually, quite a number of curious wanderers managed to do the same thing. This led to a number of lawsuits, and eventually FOs were not used as frequently anymore. Could you imagine FOs being in PCs? All those people who know just enough about a computer to open it up, but not enough to know better than "examining" their motherboards that are built on some fiber optic system? Perhaps I'm just being a bit weary about poor joe schmoe, but if there were people picking up the FO cables to watch the neat light, then think of all the possibilities when this technology exists in personal computers? Think about all those poor people that thought the CD-ROM tray was a cup holder....
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For all your curious hacking/phreaking desires, try reading http://www.phrack.org. Issue 49 is the one harboring "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit." That will guide you through stack-based buffer overflows. There's another article in a later Phrack release that details heap- and static-based overflows. Go to!
I hate to burst the bubbles of all those people complaining about Liu Die Yu releasing this exploit "now," worried about all those evil people that will use this horrible exploit against the world, but Liu released a "Six Step IE Remote Compromise Cache Attack" which was composed of most of these "new" exploits almost a month ago. Those people in the security world that really pay attention have known about this for quite some time already.
Liu was even kind enough to reiterate the fact that some of the bugs he was exploiting were quite old, the oldest being 2 years. Sounds to me like Liu's "careless" approach to releasing these exploits "without contacting MS" may actually make a difference. mmmm?
I've seen some very detailed explanations of why something should be or should not be in this thread and many other threads. There are some very inspirational people about. Many of you even hold very similar opinions. But...
All you people do is talk. You say how ridiculous or crazy this penalty is, but what are you doing about it? Nothing.
You people sit there trying to figure out how to properly word your comments and post rather insightful points of view, but it gets us, collectively, as a society or many societies, nowhere. For those of you in the US, it's great that you have free speech and are choosing to exercise it, but there are other freedoms you are not exercising. You people don't seem to really care about what's happening, because if you did, you would do something about it other than run your fingers on your keyboard.
"Corporations are getting out of hand!"
"Judges need to get a clue!"
"Such a penalty is ridiculous!"
Great, and these things will continue to get worse until you get off your asses and do something about it. Why do you think things are the way they are? Why do you think humanity has progressed as slowly as it has throughout the past few hundred years? Yeah, we've done some neat things, but we could have done a lot more. Why? Because we're lazy and self-indulgent. Especially Americans. So many people sit around waiting for life to happen to them instead of making life happen. They sit around and piss and moan about something being a certain way but they do NOTHING! Maybe a select few of you actually put a little action behind your words, but most of you contribute to the massive blob of social routine.
Great words are spoken all the time, and for the moment that most of us read those great words we become inspired and think about all the things we want to change. A few hours later we've forgotten; we've returned to what we were before we read those words. Most of you will probably take note of what I've said and just forget it in a few hours. Hell, maybe you'll forget it in a few minutes as you move on to another story.
Try to be more than just another routine. It's okay to be part of something. It's okay to be somewhat dependent and function in a group. That's how things get done. This idea that complete independence and uniqueness is the way to be is bogus. You can be unique, but don't be it alone. That changes nothing.
You want to be special? Get up and change something!
This is not exactly a new idea, the idea of implementing fiber optics in computers, etc. But, the reason it hasn't been fully implemented even today is because of the stupid user. What exactly do I mean? Well, I'll provide an actual example of why fiber optics are not used in more places than they currently are. Fiber optics, at one point, were actually the mainstream sort of cable for business LANs and the like, I mean, hell, why wouldn't you want the sort of speeds that FO provides? But here's the real crux of the matter, the users and/or employees who operated/worked on the LANs to accomplish their work or other were curious, hearing roomers of data being transferred by some neat visible light shooting through a wire--ew, I wanna see--sparked their interest. So, in order to satiate their burning desire to see this neat light, often times they would pick up one end of an FO cable and peer into its core!! That's not a good idea. It burns a hole right through the retina, causing blindness in the observing eye--I bet that light would be cool to see for that split second before it burned a hole in the retina, though! Actually, quite a number of curious wanderers managed to do the same thing. This led to a number of lawsuits, and eventually FOs were not used as frequently anymore. Could you imagine FOs being in PCs? All those people who know just enough about a computer to open it up, but not enough to know better than "examining" their motherboards that are built on some fiber optic system? Perhaps I'm just being a bit weary about poor joe schmoe, but if there were people picking up the FO cables to watch the neat light, then think of all the possibilities when this technology exists in personal computers? Think about all those poor people that thought the CD-ROM tray was a cup holder....